Floored by Wuthering Heights

Hoover Sun features the names that will headline the 2022 Southern Voices Festival.

Rachel Hawkins

[...] Her first adult novel “The Wife Upstairs,” is a reimagining of Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre” set in modern-day Birmingham and was an Amazon.com Editor’s pick and recently named a finalist for the 2021 Goodreads Choice Award for best mystery and thriller.

The Southern Review of Books places “The Wife Upstairs” “definitively within the contemporary female-centered domestic noir thrillers such as Liane Moriarty, Gillian Flynn, Paula Hawkins and A. J. Finn” while also evoking “gothic tales like Daphne du Maurier’s ‘Rebecca.’” (Jon Anderson)

This CNN columnist discusses everyday romance:

The truth is that I fell for someone who prefers a blue toilet bowl to, oh, I don't know, let's say "Wuthering Heights. (Lisa Kogan)

Clash interviews Deep Throat Choir and one of its members says,

The first book I properly read and fell in love with was Wuthering Heights, it floored me at 13.

The Outer Banks Voice recommends watching 1939 adaptation of the novel.

Producer Samuel Goldwyn considered this the favorite of all his productions. It’s a sound choice; it has everything, from Laurence Olivier, Merle Oberon and David Niven to a gothic black and white palette, and, of course, that story! Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur (The Front Page) and an uncredited John Huston wrote the screenplay from the first 17 chapters of Emily Brontë’s 1847 best-seller about the obsessive but doomed romance between a rich girl and the gypsy stablehand adopted by her father, and its untimely interruption by a neighbor.

Oberon plays the imperious Cathy to Olivier’s Heathcliff, a lad with a huge chip on his shoulder. Smart but foul-tempered, Heathcliff was practically a feral child in Liverpool when he had been taken in by Cathy’s father. The present story opens as a new neighbor staggers into the mansion at Wuthering Heights, lost, from the snow, and is given a room for the night by the surly, middle-aged Heathcliff, now the master of the house. That night a banging shutter disturbs the visitor’s rest, and he dreams of a figure, crying, “Help! Let me in! It’s Cathy!” at the window. When he tells his host, Heathcliff throws him out of the room and runs out into the dark, snowy night without so much as a cloak. A servant tells the visitor that Cathy was “a girl … who died…”

The visitor interrupts, saying “Oh, no, I don’t believe in ghosts,” but the servant counters, “Maybe if I told you her story, you’d change your mind about the dead coming back. Maybe you’d know, as I do, that there is a force that brings them back if their hearts were wild enough in life,” and begins a flashback that comprises the story. “It began 40 years ago, when I was young, in the service of Mr. Earnshaw, Cathy’s father.”

And quite a story it is! The children, adopted Heathcliff, and Cathy, seem soul-mates, but Heathcliff comes to blows with Cathy’s entitled brother, sneaks into a party at the neighbors’ with Cathy, who is injured by a guard dog, and resents Cathy’s attraction to the son of the household when she recovers at the neighbors’. She finally marries scion Edgar (David Niven); Heathcliff curses her and her family and takes off, only to return years later with enough money to buy Wuthering Heights from Cathy’s now dissolute brother, who had inherited it from his father, Heathcliff’s original benefactor.

Goldwyn, along with director William Wyler and cinematographer Gregg Toland (Citizen Kane) pulled out all the stops, earning many accolades–in 1939, generally considered Hollywood’s greatest year, in which such films as Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Jesse James, etc., etc. were released. Frank S. Nugent of The New York Times compared it favorably to the book, calling it “a strong and somber film, poetically written as the novel not always was, sinister and wild as it was meant to be, far more compact dramatically than Miss Brontë had made it … It is, unquestionably, one of the most distinguished pictures of the year, one of the finest ever produced by Mr. Goldwyn, and one you should decide to see.” (Peter Hummers)

Mob Magazine (Italy) interviews poet Eliana Stendardo.

Se dovessi consigliare ai nostri lettori tre film da vedere quali consiglieresti e perché?

[...] Jane Eyre è un film di Cary Joji Fukunaga del 2011 tratto dal romanzo di Charlotte Brontë, pubblicato nel 1847, un grande classico della letteratura inglese. La tormentata storia d’amore narrata nel libro, e poi nel film, evidenzia le contraddizioni della società vittoriana con elegante e drammatica efficacia. È un film che potrei rivedere cento volte senza stancarmi mai. [...]

E tre libri da leggere assolutamente nei prossimi mesi? Quali e perché proprio quelli?

[...] Con un salto spazio-temporale, e a testimoniare la mia passione sfegatata per le sorelle Brontë, la mia seconda proposta è un capolavoro della letteratura inglese, Cime tempestose (Wuthering Heights), l’imperdibile romanzo di Emily Brontë, uscito nel 1847 sotto lo pseudonimo di Ellis Bell. Uno dei romanzi più coinvolgenti della letteratura inglese ci trasporta nella selvaggia e affascinante brughiera dello Yorkshire, testimone della drammatica storia d’amore di Heathcliff e Catherine e delle vicende che intorno a essa si snodano. (Translation)