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Sunday, October 12, 2014

Sunday, October 12, 2014 12:09 pm by M. in , , , , ,    No comments
The Toledo Blade interviews the author, illustrator and film director Marjane Satrapi:
“I read a lot and nothing was forbidden. I read a book about Che Guevara when I was 9 and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights when I was 10. I read Jean Paul Sartre when I was 11 or 12; I didn’t understand all of it.” (Tahree Lane)
Reuters interviews another author, Jessie Burton:
Q; Who are your three favourite authors?
A: Of all time, Charlotte Brontë, Hilary Mantel, and Margaret Atwood. (Verity Watkins)
The Independent remembers the figure of Brigid Brophy:
In 1967, she flung a pot of ink in the public’s face with Fifty Works of English Literature We Could Do Without, a bracing argument in favour of dumping everything from Hamlet to Jane Eyre, that is smashing fun now that shock and outrage have subsided. (Christopher Fowler)
Not only Jane Eyre (which the author, and co-authors Michael Levey and Charles Osborne, describe 'like gobbling a jar-full of schoolgirl stick-jaw') but also Wuthering Heights (which 'will wash as a psychological-historical curio or as high old rumbustious nonsense, but not as a great novel').

The Boston Globe has an article about literary reworkings. Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea is a standard example:
We’d broken this ground before, though, when Jean Rhys published her 1966 masterpiece “Wide Sargasso Sea” (Norton, 1982). It’s another upending, redemptive story, this time about Bertha Antoinetta Mason Rochester, the “madwoman in the attic” from “Jane Eyre.”
Charlotte Brontë herself felt remiss about Bertha. In an 1848 letter, she wrote she should’ve had more “profound pity” for her, but “I have erred in making horror too predominant.” Rhys grew up in the Caribbean, just like Bertha Mason, and her prose seems to swoon with insight and intensity; it took her 20 years to write the novel. And just as Brontë boldly embraced the topic of passion, Rhys tackles feminism, post-colonialism, and racism: Brontë often cited Mrs. Rochester’s dark skin and hair, unintentionally linking madness to miscegenation.
Rhys divides her book into three sections, with the first and last belonging to Bertha, the middle to Mr. Rochester. He doesn’t fare well: As one of Bertha’s friends says, “It is in your mind to pretend she is mad. I know it.” But Bertha is not so much genetically mad as traumatized. After the British outlawed slavery, when she was a little girl, freed slaves burned down her property and lives were lost. Now I’ll never be able to read the flaming climax of “Jane Eyre” without the double vision of Rhys’s heartbreaking retelling. The arson was inadvertent: As Bertha sees the fiery sky she says, “It was red and all my life was in it.” (Katharine Whittemore)
The Sunday Times publishes an article by John Carder Bush where he discusses the evolution of his sister Kate Bush from her childhood until the Wuthering Heights eclosion.  Kulturalna rzeczywistość (in Polish) reviews the Polish edition of Unfinished Novels. Billy Goes to School posts a couple of Wuthering Heights-inspired photographs. Finally, good news from the Brontë Bell Chapel Facebook Group:
Really great news , we have been given a grant from Community first . This is to create a visitor centre in St James church . This will incorporate the work of the Bell chapel action group and the Brontë artefacts. All this will enhance the visitor experience to Thornton.

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