Brontë Sisters Syndrome

It's a bad few days for Jane Eyre marrying Rochester. The Irish Times interviews writer Louise Kennedy and:

Trespasses is also a wonderfully believable love story, tender and erotic. How did you approach this aspect of your story? And again, which are your favourite love stories?

[...] My favourite love stories are Thérèse Racquin by Emile Zola, although it is arguably about lust rather than love, and Jane Eyre, up to the point she says, ‘Reader, I married him’; I went off it after that. (Martin Doyle)

Actress Lili Taylor really likes the novel, though. As she says on Talkhouse it is one of her Three Great Things:

Charlotte Brontë

For the past year and a half, I’ve listened to Jane Eyre every day. I’ve been doing some intense writing recently and when I take a break, I put on Jane Eyre. It’s a way for me to not go so far away from either my thoughts or feelings or where I’m at, to stay in the living world, but to take a break also. I listen to an audiobook of Jane Eyre on Libro.fm, an independent audiobook company which gives money to your favorite bookstore. (Mine goes to Books are Magic in Cobble Hill.) I have bookmarked my favorite scenes, so I can listen to them whenever I feel like it.

I identify with Charlotte Brontë; I feel like I have a friend in her. Almost every sentence of Jane Eyre is perfect. Charlotte combines her imagination with truth; she feels her way through what she writes, and yet she’s also a really good writer. So, Jane Eyre is both a wild ride and also something that intellectually takes me where I need to go. Charlotte sees the world as a friendly place, as a place that she’s welcome in. I don’t always feel like that, so I use her as a power of example. She wrote about how the stars she looks at are her friends, because they were there when she was a child and so they know her and she knows them. It’s so nice to feel connected and have that kind of connection. The book has also impacted me because it’s so in touch with passion. I think with any great writer – like some other favorites, such as George Eliot or Shakespeare – they capture the whole human experience. It’s like that great prayer by Kalidasa: “Look to this day, for it is life, the very life of life.” And, of course, like all the realities and verities of existence, by listening to Jane Eyre every day, I’m able to look to the day.

The Sunday Post says of writer Sally Gardner that she

The first book she devoured was the Emily Brontë classic Wuthering Heights. She has not looked back. (Sally McDonald)

Esquire selects 'The 22 Best Horror Books of 2022' and one of them is Reluctant Immortals by Gwendolyn Kiste.

In the dying embers of the 1960s, the two “forgotten women of Gothic fiction”—Jane Eyre’s Bertha Mason and Dracula’s Lucy Westenra—live an immortal life, fearing that one day their respective adversaries will return. Of course, they do! Rochester is a particularly vile creature—a Ted Bundy/Harvey Weinstein concoction who runs a harem of bewitched slaves from his sleek LA mansion. (Neil McRobert)

Today quotes Jenna Bush Hager's words after reading Katy Hays's The Cloisters.

And you can’t forget about Leo, the gardener at the Cloisters. “He reminds me of Heathcliff in ‘Wuthering Heights.’ Everyone needs a Leo phase, and I don’t think I had one,” Jenna said jokingly. (Taylor Herzlich)

We love that in Corriere della Sera (Italy) the Izzo sisters seem to have invented the Brontë Sisters Syndrome.

Simona: «Io. Per dire che le mie sorelle sono tutte molto accudenti e allo stesso tempo manager coi tacchi a spillo. È un insegnamento di mamma, che è sempre curata, elegante. Ha farcito papà di musica, letteratura, cinema e gli ha permesso di avere una grande famiglia. E voglio aggiungere che abbiamo la sindrome delle sorelle Brontë: insieme, creiamo sempre qualcosa e ci siamo sempre aiutate. Il bello è che tra fratelli e sorelle si può dire qualunque cosa, perché il legame è così forte che puoi sempre tornare indietro. La forza dei fratelli è che, se non arrivano a uccidersi, saranno uniti per sempre». (Candida Morvillo) (Translation)

Yesterday marked the centenary of the death of Marcel Proust and so The Guardian had an article on where to begin reading his works.

In volume six, La Prisonnière (The Captive), one of the flowering girls, Albertine, has become the focus for the narrator’s passion, a passion founded in possessive jealousy, hence the title. He keeps Albertine – we don’t really know how – a virtual prisoner in the Paris apartment he shares with his parents and housekeeper, Françoise. Since we see things entirely from his point of view, Albertine remains a shadowy figure, which has prompted other writers to intervene. Like Jean Rhys telling the first Mrs Rochester’s story via Wide Sargasso Sea, the writer Jacqueline Rose has told Albertine’s, and she is not the only one; the director Chantal Akerman has done it too, in her film The Captive. (Lucy Raitz)

CinePop (Brazil) features the film Emily while BussumsNieuws (Netherlands) and Dagens Nyheter (Sweden) both announce screenings in local film festivals (Filmhuis Bussum and .Stockholms Filmfestival).