The Spectator discusses 'Why today’s classic books may not be tomorrow’s'.
The problem is that classics have traditionally been associated with the concept of a canon. In 1909, the outgoing president of Harvard University, Charles W. Eliot, launched a 50-volume set of Harvard Classics under the title Dr Eliot’s Five-Foot Shelf of Books. This was a grand attempt to supply ‘such knowledge of ancient and modern literature as seemed essential to the 20th-century idea of a cultivated man’. But across the 23,000 pages, the 300 authors represented are exclusively white and overwhelmingly male. He omitted novelists like Jane Austen, Mary Shelley and Charlotte Brontë; campaigners like Mary Wollstonecraft, Frederick Douglass and W.E.B Du Bois; poets like Rumi and Hafez. What seemed ‘essential’ in 1909 no longer seems fit for purpose today. (Henry Eliot)
Broadway World interviews Nelle Lee on her adaptation of
Christmas Carol for shake & stir.
VIRAG: How does the process of choosing the moments from the story to put in the play and to explore look like for you? With every story there are key moments that stick out but there are little moments experienced by each character that might not feel as important in the grand scheme of things that I feel are often overlooked...
NELLE: I start the process when I'm reading the work, which is when in my head I start to pinpoint those moments. And then you choose a storyline that's connecting all those moments together that take you on a journey. Someone like Scrooge is the character that's connecting us through the story and you piece it together from there.
A Christmas Carol is quite a thin book whereas Jane Eyre is quite big. There were moments in Jane Eyre that I read and thought those were my favourite but it does not translate to the stage at all and there were some moments that we didn't need to tell the story. Michael and I made sure that in A Christmas Carol, all of the key moments from the book and the things that clung to you are in there. (Virag Dombay)
Times of India has included a
Jane Eyre retelling on a list of 'Books set on islands you must read'.
'The Flight of Gemma Hardy' by Margot Livesey
In this retelling of Jane Eyre, a young girl is sent to Scotland after the death of her father. Following a similar path as Jane, Gemma is sent to boarding school and then gets a job as a household helper for a rich and intriguing man on the Orkney Islands.
7. Marion Bridge (2002)
Movie: 7/10
Elliot: 6/10
Total: 6.5/10
Molly Parker is so good in our next lowkey Canadian indie about very serious things. (This is written by Daniel MacIvor, the writer/director of Wilby Wonderful.) Elliot’s character is introduced in all denim smoking a cigarette. He’s reading Jane Eyre. He runs away from home. There’s lots and lots of trauma. The whole thing is about returning to estranged family. Trans trans trans trans. (Drew Gregory)
El País (Spain) discusses the emerging character of the posh woke person as embodied by
Succession's Kendall Roy and finds Mr. Brocklehurst from
Jane Eyre to have been an early specimen of the species.
¿A qué se debe semejante superpoblación de pijos woke en las series? Hay varias hipótesis de respuesta. Por un lado, la hipocresía es un elemento intrínseco a todo villano de ficción: nadie cae peor al público que alguien que hace una cosa y predica la contraria. Son hipócritas el Otelo de Shakespeare, el Tartufo de Molière y el señor Brocklehurst de Jane Eyre, un woke anticipado, que trata con crueldad a las huérfanas de internado que dirige y vive con su familia rodeado de lujos mientras aparenta ser un miembro pío y virtuoso de la comunidad. (Begoña Gómez Urzaiz) (Translation)
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