Stringer Bell loved Jane Eyre (Not really)

AA Gill reviews for The Times a restaurant in Surrey and he delivers a lesson on history:

It meant, for instance, that Stamford, which was once a horse-drawn regional hub, is now the set for Austen/Brontë costume dramas and cousin marriage and is playing in the Unibond First Division South. While the nearby potless village of Peterborough makes bricks, is vast, has one of the largest Italian communities in Britain and this season was in the Championship. All because the Earl of Essex didn’t want the railway near his house.

Also in The Times, Ruth Wilson recalls her Jane Eyre 2006 experience while presenting Through A Glass Darkly, now at the Almeida Theatre:

Ruth Wilson doesn’t half catch the eye, from her Jane Eyre to a scary psycho in Luther.(...)
I had, in fact, been suggesting that Ruth Wilson is becoming something of a specialist at playing nutjobs. (...)Some would argue there is even an element of madness in Jane Eyre, Wilson’s breakthrough television role four years ago. (...)
“I’ve done a lot of characters who go through trauma and emotional pain and anguish, whether it’s Queenie [in Small Island] or Jane Eyre,” she says. (...)
Wilson first met [Idris] Elba at the read-through late last year. “One of the first things he said to me was, ‘Really loved Jane Eyre.’ I said, ‘You didn’t watch it.’ I completely caught him out! He hadn’t seen it. I said ‘What are you doing watching Jane Eyre?’ He said, ‘Okay, I haven’t seen it, but I love your work.’ So we got on instantly.” (Benji Wilson)

More Times. Rebecca Nicholson reviews the imminent The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister (May 31, 9 pm on BBC2):

For me, the love story between Anne and Mariana leapt from the pages. She meets Mariana at a hotel for illicit sex, in 1819. I was thinking, hang on, two women, meeting in a hotel, in the era of Jane Austen and they completely got away with it. [Mariana’s] husband hurried her off: ‘Have a nice time.’ And then Anne walks 10 miles across the moors to intercept her stagecoach because she’s so excited about seeing Mariana, and when she gets there, Mariana’s like, ‘Oh my God, what are you doing?’ To me, that incident could have been lifted from a Brontë novel. It’s the mad, passionate love that’s irrational, and a lot of people can identify with it. ‘Oh, why did I rush 10 miles across the moors?’ It’s the drunken text, times 100.

The Times also mentions the Brontës in a review of two new BBC series set in the 80s.

Elaine Showalter reviews Martin Stannard's biography of Muriel Spark in the Washington Post mentioning her work on the Brontës:

In the 1950s, Spark had educated herself in the lives and work of Victorian women writers, editing the letters of the Brontës and those of Mary Shelley with her lover Derek Stanford, and proposing a book on "the intellectual and social emancipation of women during the 19th century."

St Peterburg Times presents the novel Anthropology of an American Girl by Hilary Thayer Hamann:

It's been compared to everything from Jane Eyre to Catcher in the Rye, but Anthropology of an American Girl seems likely to make its own mark as a coming-of-age novel. (Colette Bancroft)

MysteriousBookshop has uploaded a video to YouTube where Laura Joh Rowland can be seen presenting her latest book Bedlam: The Further Secret Adventures of Charlotte Brontë.

Categories: Books, Fiction, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, References