Decorating the red room

Film director Andrea Arnold is interviewed by Independent:

“Every film feels like a massive adventure,” she continues. “Like I’m starting again each time. Sometimes I’ll get an email saying, ‘Do you want to come lead a masterclass?’ I just think, ‘Why are they asking me?’”

Anyone who’s watched Arnold’s films will know exactly why they’re asking her. Over the past two decades, she’s been responsible for some of the finest features to come out of our country: the knotty, sexually transgressive Red Road; the heartbreaking Fish Tank, about a young wannabe dancer who is preyed upon by an older man; the sparse, gritty Bronte adaptation Wuthering Heights; (Louis Chilton)

Percival Everett’s James has made it onto the list of Best fiction books of 2024 compiled by Independent:

Done well, a literary retelling can shine fresh light on a story we think we know inside out: just look at Jean Rhys’s Jane Eyre prequel Wide Sargasso Sea, or, more recently, Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, which moves Dickens’ David Copperfield to contemporary opiod crisis America. Percival Everett’s James does exactly that, retreading the events of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, the runaway slave. (Katie Rosseinsky and Jessie Thompson)

Decorating with red in House & Garden:

If you're scared of decorating with red paint, you're not alone. Paint psychologists report that red rooms ‘increase the heart rate’ and create an unsettling atmosphere, a feeling borne out by several haunted red rooms in literature. Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre was terrorised as a child in the red room where her uncle died, and H.G. Wells' 1894 ghost story The Red Room features a horror-struck narrator spending the night in an eponymous haunted room at Lorraine Castle. But, as Farrow & Ball's grande dame of colour Joa Studholme says, “there's red…and then there's red.” And we couldn't agree more. (Evie Delaney)

Cinemanía (Spain) mentions Jane Eyre 1934 among one of the best-known productions of the golden-age Hollywood studio Monogram. A post on 'The Brontë Sisters And Bonfire Night' on AnneBrontë.org.