The Girl With The Plain Face

The Herald (Scotland) discusses the current abundance of 'girls' in book titles.

Mostly, of course, this is a marketing fad, and one can’t help feeling that if many of the classics of previous eras were published now, they might be forced to give themselves a girl title. We might have had DH Lawrence’s Girls In Love, Wilkie Collins’s The Girl In White, and, even, Louisa M Alcott’s Big Girls, rather than Little Women. Instead of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca, we might have had Drowned Girl. Jane Eyre could have been The Girl With The Plain Face. Even Wonder Woman would probably have had to be cut down in stature and maturity to Wonder Girl. (Vicky Allan)

India Today has author Ruskin Bond tell about the novels he read and loved as a young boy.

I was in better company with Heathcliff, the obsessed, lovecrazed monster of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, which I had picked up along with the set of Dickens. It had been raining heavily all day, and by evening my room was leaking in several places. I set out mugs, basins and buckets in various spots, but I knew I would be awake all night all night unless the rain stopped.
The storm helped to create the right atmosphere, but even without it I would have been up all night, such was the hold that Wuthering Heights exerted over me. I read through the night, finishing the book only towards dawn, even as the wind and rain subsided and early morning light crept over the Sivalik hills. That was nearly seventy years ago.
Would this book cast the same spell on me today? One evening last month I came home with a copy in a new edition. And once again I was up all night, roaming those bleak Yorkshire moors, buffeted by the passions and anguish of those souls in torment.

The following comment is not as encouraging. The Star asked readers for advice on 'avoidance of speaking to strangers' and one of them replied.

“When I first arrived in Boston, I was truly alarmed by how easily strangers would speak to me on public transit. Reading a book on my daily subway ride, I would often be asked what I was reading by the person sitting next to me. This happened frequently enough that I had a fake answer (‘Wuthering Heights’), which I hoped would discourage further discussion,” she writes. (Edward Keenan)

Finaly, 'Anne Brontë’s Lesson To The Robinsons – And Us' is discussed on AnneBrontë.org.