British Funds as a Satanic Gothic Story

The Telegraph has an article about the possible downgrading by Standard & Poor's of the British government debt. Talking about the history of the British Funds a Brontë references slips on:

The bonds issued by British governments are called gilts by investors not because they were once printed on gilt-edged paper – that is a myth – but because they have a reputation for being secure and trustworthy. Gilts were originally called Consolidated Funds, or consols. They paid a coupon of 3 or 5 per cent and you will find references to them throughout Victorian literature. In Vanity Fair, for instance, Becky Sharpe is envious of the £50,000 the “great, rich Miss Crawley” has in the funds. In Jane Eyre, when the heroine finally inherits her fortune from her uncle, her cousin reassures her that “your money is invested in the English funds”. (George Trefgarne)

The Times publishes a brief review of the latest CD by Kate Royal: Midsummer Night which includes a track from Bernard Herrmann's Wuthering Heights opera:

The fast-rising British soprano makes adventurous choices for her second EMI album. (...) Solos from Britten’s Paul Bunyan, Peter Grimes and The Turn of the Screw are dotted among extracts from Alwyn’s Miss Julie, Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah, Walton’s Troilus and Bernard Herrmann’s Wuthering Heights. If Royal’s voice sounds squeezed at the top of her range, she revels in this lush music. (Hugh Canning)

A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx by Elaine Showalter is also reviewed in The Times.

Authorial insecurity was ­reinforced by comparisons with British cousins such as Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot, who benefited from working in a nation that did not so greatly favour “outdoor” male virtues. In fact, so great was Eliot’s sway over American female writers that several saw her death “as the exorcism of an oppressive ghost”. (Stephen Amidon)

The Boston Globe reviews The Family Man by Elinor Lipman. The presence of an orphan girl in the story is a perfect excuse to mention Jane Eyre:

And like Jane Eyre or any other favorite orphan, our girl seems both intact and self created, so this story is actually that of Henry charting his transformation from solitaire to bustling family man. (Jane Vandenburgh)

A couple of reviews mention Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea. Obviously, The Washington Post's on The Blue Hour: A Life of Jean Rhys by Lilian Pizzichini but also The Chronicle Herald on Diana Athill's Somewhere Towards the End:

Athill quickly disabuses any reader of the notion that the memoir might be a sympathy saga. Authors Jean Rhys (Wide Sargasso Sea), and Nobel laureate, Elias Canetti (Auto-da-Fé ), both of whom Athill knew for a number of years, were models "demonstrating how not to think about getting old." (Mary Jo Anderson)

The high-school graduation season is just started and The Goldsboro News-Argus quotes a part of the commencement speech at the Wayne Country Day School:

"Reading makes you smarter -- you have more brain cells right now than before taking that journey with Jane Eyre or running along the fence with Benji," she said. "Reading increases the capacity of the brain. Think of all the characters you have met in books." (Diane Price, quoted by Phyllis Moore)

AnoisNI has uploaded a couple of videos to YouTube with two of their song adaptations of Emily Brontë's poems included in their new CD 'Emily Brontë': The Wanderer, How Clear She Shines, Song and Stars.

And old 'book friends' rediscovered in The Star (Malaysia), Bonaca reviews Wuthering Heights 1992 (in Slovenian), The Fiction Circus reviews Wuthering Heights, the Role Playing Game by Philippe Tromeur, Welcome to Sara's Organized Chaos has some problems with Joseph's Yorkshire dialect in Wuthering Heights and Tonårsboken posts about Jane Eyre in Swedish.

Finally, Ludic Despair posts about Lord Satan (cover on the right) by Louisa Bronte (one of the pseudonyms of Janet Louise Roberts), a satanic gothic retelling of Jane Eyre published in 1972:

Published by Avon press in 1972, Lord Satan does little to disguise its relationship to Jane Eyre, even attributing the manuscript to a "Louisa Bronte," who one assumes the reader is supposed to take as a distant relative of some kind, perhaps even a long-lost fourth sister. All the elements are here for the titillation that comes with fantasizing about courting a mysteriously threatening (and possibily half-goat) man: the 17-year-old Adrienne, "Lord Satan" himself, and the apparent ghost of Lord Satan's mother wandering the halls of "Castle Caudill." As in the original, much of the book would appear to involve Adrienne attempting to understand the mysterious personal and domestic relationships around her. Despite her marriage to a man known as LORD SATAN, Adrienne is unsure if her vivid memories of satanic rituals and black masses are real or only dreams. Eventually she begins to suspect her husband (again, LORD SATAN) might be a witch. Plucky Jane she is not, it would seem. (Jeffrey Sconce)

Categories: Books, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, Music, Poetry, References, Sequels, Weirdo, Wide Sargasso Sea, Wuthering Heights