'I felt that Heathcliff was me, you know?'

Los Angeles Review of Books features Dave Eggers’s The Every.

Eggers sets his fiction in a “near future” when computers analyze massive amounts of information about how people read ebooks, with software finding patterns that precisely reveal what these readers find satisfying or unpleasant. Take the literary classic Jane Eyre. According to the algorithms Eggers conjures up, many people stop reading it “around p. 177.” Given what’s happening at that part of the story, one of Eggers’s typical techie characters concludes readers find the character Grace Poole “scary and depressing” and wish Charlotte Brontë devoted more pages to the “romance with Mr. Rochester.” The techie laments Brontë didn’t live long enough to “learn from the data” and “fix” her flawed story.

Fortunately for the authors living in Eggers’s imaginary world, they can outperform Brontë even if they lack her talent. For starters, they can use software to help them craft pleasurable plots and characters. [...]

Eggers is, in fact, horrified by the prospect of computationally coached crowd-pleasers replacing the likes of Brontë and Beckett. (Evan Selinger)

The Times remembers Gordon Brown's Heathcliffgate:

A public sick of sophistry was at first glad of Brown’s dull, chewy speeches, his saltiness refreshing after the saccharine Tony. But then, inevitably, we tired of it. Voters yearned for a bit of razzmatazz. Towards the end, there was a cringe-making phase where the dour old Heathcliff had been advised to smile more; a steward masquerading as a star. He tried but it wasn’t him. (Clare Foges)

Il Libraio (Italy) features author Shirley Jackson.

Regna il male invece a Bly, in Giro di Vite; e nonostante diverse vicissitudini la portino di qua e di là, è impossibile pensare a Jane Eyre senza pensare ai segreti racchiusi in Thornfield Hall. E c’è lei, Shirley Jackson, che ci insegna che tutte le case sono case infestate. (Anna Maniscalco) (Translation)

DoppioZero (Italy) quotes the recently-deceased bell hooks's words on Wuthering Heights during a chat in 1998 with Maya Angelou. Here's the actual quote in English

bell hooks: When I read Wuthering Heights as a working class girl struggling to find herself, an outsider, I felt that Heathcliff was me, you know? He was symbolic to me of a kind of black race: he was outcast, he was not allowed into the center of things. I transposed my own drama of living in the apartheid south onto this world of Wuthering Heights and felt myself in harmony with those characters.

Maya Angelou: Absolutely.

Melvin McLeod: It strikes me you are suggesting that reading is a more powerful way to develop empathy with people of different races or classes or times than even our normal day to day relationships.

bell hooks: Well, this is so because reading requires that you have to use your imagination. When I'm reading Wuthering Heights I have to imagine what Heathcliff looks like, I have to imagine what Katherine (sic) is like. I have to imagine and so my mind has to be working.

Finally, a tribute to Emily Brontë on AnneBrontë.org.