'Jane's slow making of a self out of the most unlikely materials'

Daily Mail asks bookish questions to writer Sue Miller, who's a fan of Jane Eyre but not Wuthering Heights,

. . . first gave you the reading bug?

Jane Eyre when I was 12. I took it down from my parents' bookshelf at random. From the first sentence, I was lost in it. 

Charlotte Brontë has much to answer for by proposing the outwardly cruel, inwardly sensitive and passionate model of what a man should be.

But Jane's slow making of a self out of the most unlikely materials is wonderful.

. . . left you cold?

Wuthering Heights. Emily Brontë is considered by some to be a truer poet than Charlotte; but somehow the book seems nearly parodic in its intensity. 

Like a grotesque version of her sister's work. Unfair, no doubt.

Vogue Australia considers Wuthering Heights 2011 a 'sweeping period drams that gives us total Downton Abbey vibes'. Well, that's not how we would describe it.

Wuthering Heights (2011)

Elemental and erotic, Andrea Arnold’s reimagining of Emily Brontë’s 19th-century novel drips with longing. It casts Solomon Glave and James Howson as younger and older incarnations of Heathcliff—the first time the Byronic hero has been played by black actors—and Shannon Beer and Kaya Scodelario as the wild and wayward Cathy. As childhood friends, they run through misty marshes and windswept hilltops together but as adults, their love soon proves to be mutually destructive. (Radhika Seth)

Brisbane Times reviews the socially distanced production of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own at Belvoir St Theatre, Sydney.

Woolf's primary contention was that, in order to write, women required two assets denied them from the dawn of time until her own day: financial independence and a room of their own. She marvels at such 19th-century pioneers as Jane Austen and the Brontës generating high art while obliged to write amid the distractions of their homes' living rooms. (John Shand)

A contributor to The Independent Florida Alligator claims to have

caught myself gazing out my window this past summer like a heroine in a Brontë novel, longing for something more than the humdrum of everyday life. It'd be easy enough to hose myself down in antiseptics and skulk around Turlington Plaza searching for food, water, atmosphere or all of the above — but if there’s one thing I’ve learned throughout 2020, it’s how to manage my expectations. (Lonnie Numa)

Finally, an alert for later today: an online event which is part of Culture Night Offaly (via Offaly Express).

The Irish Legacy of the Brontë Family in 15 Objects

Link: drmaebhoregan@gmail.com

Time: 7pm

Charlotte Brontë married Banagher-man, Arthur Bell Nicholls. In 1861 he brought all the remaining Brontë belongings back to Banagher. This online talk will provide an insight into the Brontë family through 15 items in this collection. Branwell’s Pillar Portrait is one of the objects under discussion.