Tangled up indeed

This article from the Otago Daily Times concerning the upcoming (April 10) opening of a Wuthering Heights (Jane Thornton's adaptation) production in Dunedin, New Zealand is somewhat shocking to say the least:

They say every artist gives something of themselves to one of their creations, but Peter King has a different connection with his latest work.
As head of design at Dunedin's Fortune Theatre, Mr King was charged with making the set for Wuthering Heights.
What made the experience special for him was his family link to the novel's author, Emily Bronte.
He is understood to be Bronte's great-great-great-grandson.
Emma Branwell, his great-great-grandmother, was thought to be an illegitimate Bronte child.
She married Thomas King and moved from England to New Zealand.
A fragment of a story by Charlotte Bronte, Emma, was about an illegitimate child and referred to people who settled far from their land of birth, and the Bronte Society of England acknowledged an illegitimate daughter was born to one of the Bronte siblings.
This "strange enigma" was discovered by Mr King's cousin about 20 years ago while she was putting together a family tree and relationships "got a bit tangled up".
He thought it was "quite cool" and "interesting" to be connected to such a well-known literary family.
While "none of us can write for nuts", many of his family shared Bronte ailments, including asthma. (Ellie Constantine)

Step by step and not taking very seriously the asthma thing, the Brontë Society acknowledged an illegitimate daughter born from a Brontë sibling? Excuse me? The only thing here is the claim that Branwell Brontë may have fathered a daughter when he was tutor in the Lake District, which Juliet Barker dismisses in her biography The Brontës and then there's Phyllis Cheney, who claims that her great grandmother, Mary Ann Judson (b 1839) was the illegitimate child of Branwell Brontë and Martha Judson, from Haworth.

Precisely, tomorrow April 1, the Dunedin City Library will host a reading from the play:

A sneak preview from the Fortune Theatre.
The classic tortured love story of Heathcliff and Cathy adapted for stage with an ensemble cast.
Breathless, modern and sexy.
Join us afterward for light refreshments and an opportunity to mix with the cast.

* Thursday 1 April 12.30pm
* Ground Floor, City Library
* Free (Saucy Reading)

This Santa Rosa Press-Democrat article mentions afternoon tea and Emily Brontë:

The roots of this meal, accurately known as afternoon tea, are in England, of course. I was, at the time, a graduate student of literature, reading Emily Bronte, D. H. Lawrence and Thomas Hardy and I am certain that our afternoons mirrored a desire I had to merge into those well-loved books. (Michele Anna Jordan)

The Bookseller announces a new edition of Wuthering Heights by White's Books that will be published next August:

White’s Books is publishing pocket-sized hardbacks of classic titles including Wuthering Heights and Treasure Island, featuring introductions from the likes of Ian Rankin and Jacqueline Wilson.
The publisher will release three Pocket Classics a month from August. The first books, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë and Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, are out on 4th August priced £6.99.
The books’ covers have been designed by Joe McLaren with embossed illustrations on the front and back. The titles feature coloured endpapers, decorated title pages, marker ribbons and new typsetting.
Each book will have a 2,000-word introduction by a contemporary author. The books will also contain a reader’s guide, providing background information about the book and its author, suggested discussion questions for book groups, recommended websites and further reading including titles that have been influenced by the classic. The reader’s guide has been created by Susan Osborne, book review editor of Waterstone’s Book Quarterly and author of Bloomsbury’s Essential Guide for Reading Groups.
Jon Jackson, publisher of White’s Books, said he selected contemporary authors to write introductions who were either influenced by the classic in question or loved the book. (Graeme Neill)

We don't know if the new edition will have a new cover but the previous one was designed by Celia Birtwell, not by Joe McLaren. The Boston Bibliophile has a post about different Jane Eyre editions including White's Book's.

San Diego News Network has visited Claude Monet's garden and looks back on other visits to famous artistic/literary houses:

I had visited homes of famous writers, and found that exciting and rewarding — to step on the floorboards in Dickens’ house, and know he probably heard the same squeak — or to gaze out the upstairs nursery window in the Bronte parsonage, and see the moors as Charlotte, Emily, and Anne did. But the idea of visiting the great Claude Monet’s garden and home — actually seeing his inspiration and creation — seemed overwhelming. (Karen Kenyon)

Hollywood Life uses Heathcliff and Wuthering Heights to spice up headlines:

R-Patz — You Look Hotter Than Heathcliff Filming Your New Movie ‘Bel Ami’!
Forget Wuthering Heights! R-Patz’s sexiness is going to make his new movie Bel Ami hotter than hot! (Bonnie Fuller)

The Christian Science Monitor quotes Anne Brontë's poem The Narrow Way (April 1848) in an article about roses:

For instance, Anne Bronte wrote: “He that dares not grasp the thorn should never crave the rose.” (Lynn Hunt)

The actual stanza says:

On all her breezes borne
Earth yields no scents like those;
But he, that dares not grasp the thorn
Should never crave the rose.

To this journalist of The New Straits (Malaysia) the Twilight saga is not very interesting:

Go watch the film. Twilight by Stephenie Meyer (544 pages, Little, Brown Books for Young Readers) So bad that it might have even ruined Wuthering Heights. Boring girl meets boring boy who turns out to be just a boring vampire.

On the blogosphere. Posts about Wuthering Heights: on christinapomoni, The List! and Conspiração das Letras (in Portuguese). About Jane Eyre: My Literary Cannon Adventure, Feminist Mom in Montreal (who concentrates on the Lowood School). Finally, Hubpages has added a Haworth one.

Categories: Books, Brontëana, Haworth, Jane Eyre, References, Theatre, Wuthering Heights

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155 years ago

Very sad day at the Haworth Parsonage today 155 years ago. Charlotte Brontë passed away in the early morning hours leaving a disconsolate husband and father behind, not to mention servants, friends and, eventually, admirers such as all of us through the years.

Those who knew Charlotte Brontë personally mourned undoubtedly first and foremost the loss of a remarkable woman. Those of us who weren't quite so lucky are perhaps closer to mourning the death of Currer Bell ('Currer Bell is dead!'), the author, though we might also be nearer to knowing her 'secret soul' than many contemporaries who shook her hand.

So, let those who knew her personally mourn her death and let us who admire her celebrate her life.

Categories: Charlotte Brontë, Reminder

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Filming in Froggatt and Fox House (Sheffield)

The South Yorkshire Star discusses another adaptation closer to our raison d'être: the latest Jane Eyre:

SEEMS you can hardly walk down a Derbyshire country lane these days without falling over a new film or TV production of Jane Eyre.
There's great excitement over at Fox House (Sheffield) and Froggatt with the filming of Cary Fukunaga's version starring Mia Wasikowska (she was Alice in Wonderland) and Michael Fassbender as Jane and Mr Rochester.
Seems like only yesterday (2006) that Ruth Wilson and Toby Stephens were filming it in these parts and then there was Zeffirelli version with Charlotte Gainsbourg in 1994.
This will be the 23rd film or TV version of the novel since 1914.
Judi Dench will pop up as Mr Rochester's housekeeper.
When the actors were first seen in costume one subscriber to the Sheffield Forum website wondered whether they were filming Lark Rise to Grindleford! (Martin Dawes)

Froggatt is a village in Derbyshire and better pictures of Fox House can be found here.

Not too far from that, the Yorkshire Post comments on the recent grant given to the South Pennines:

More than a million people live in or around the South Pennines yet the uplands feel remote and have inspired artists and writers over generations from the Brontës to Ted Hughes, from Henry Moore to Barbara Hepworth. (Fiona Evans)

The Daily Mail complains that heroes and heroines aren't what they used to be:

Something's gone wrong with romance writing.
Where once manly Rhett Butler battled the flames of Atlanta to rescue Scarlett O’Hara or a rugged Heathcliff tore the earth from Catherine Earnshaw’s grave, readers now find New Men so wet you could wring them out and about as heart-thumpingly sexy as socks. [...]
Would you catch Lizzie Bennet turning to selfhelp books like Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus for help with Mr Darcy? Or Jane Eyre moaning over cocktails about Mr Rochester’s mad wife? I don’t think so. (Danuta Kean)

We would hazard, as usual, that what's wrong is the genre label given to Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. The fact that they may be Romantic novels is not the same as being 'romance writing'.

Speaking of heroes, Gather picks a few memorable quotes from Twilight's Eclipse that should make it into the film script. One of them is:

8. Besides… the more time I spend with you, the more human emotions seem comprehensible to me. I’m discovering that I can sympathize with Heathcliff in ways I didn’t think possible before. Edward Cullen, page 265. (Jaimie M.)

Nicola Beauman of Persephone Books, who was recently in Haworth, briefly comments on her trip in the Persephone Books fornightly letter:

Last week I went to the Bronte Parsonage to give a talk. It was great fun and I loved having the chance to see over the house again (I had small children with me before so it was not the same). When I got back to King’s Cross I met Miriam Margolyes, who read Cheerful Weather for the Wedding for us but is actually (or perhaps I should say ‘and is also’) an incredibly famous actress. As you can see from the following exchange: ‘Where have you been Miriam?” To the Lincolnshire WI. ‘Oh, rather like me going to the Bronte Museum. I had 25 people, how many did you?’ ‘Seven hundred’ she said before walking briskly off towards the tube! I ambled off imagining what it must be like to talk to 700 people…

Female First takes a look at Ralph Fiennes' filmography:

But it was 1992 when he appeared on the big screen as he teamed up with Juliette Binoche for Wuthering Heights.
His performance as Heathcliff was a catalyst for the actor as it brought him to the attention of audiences as well as studios. (Helen Earnshaw)

The Salford Advertiser mourns the death of Bill Dean, an 'ex-RAF pilot [who] was a survivor of Stalag Luft III, the camp that was the inspiration for the classic film The Great Escape'. His daughter talks about the funeral and says,

"My father was an atheist so we had a humanist service.
"We had music by Gluck, Saint-Saens, and Elgar, and poems by Joyce Grenfell and Charlotte Bronte." (Ailsa Cranna)

On the blogosphere, The Squeee reviews Jane Eyre 1947 (a radio adaptation with Joseph Conrad and Peggy Webber) and At the Lighthouse reviews Jane Eyre 1983, Our Mutual Read posts about Wuthering Heights, Michelle's Masterful Musings writes about Agnes Grey, and a couple of blogs join and/or discuss the Brontë-Along: Sarah Louisa Whittle and Sonnet of the Moon.

Finally, an alert for today:

DAKOTA DISCUSSIONS GROUP
STARTS IN POWERS LAKE

Readers: Dakota Discussions, a ND Humanities reading program sponsored by the Powers Lake Civic Club, will be reading the Jane Eyre series for their spring session.

The Jane Eyre series consists of two books and a film. Rebecca Chalmers, PhD. English professor at the University of Mary, will come to Powers Lake March 30 (Jane Eyre), April 27 (Wide Sargasso Sea) , and May 25 (Film & Discussion) for series discussion. All are welcome!

Categories: Alert, Brontë Parsonage Museum, Haworth, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, References, Talks, Wuthering Heights

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Easter Fun at the Brontë Parsonage

A press release from the Brontë Parsonage Museum:

EASTER FUN AT THE BRONTË PARSONAGE

The newly refurbished Brontë Parsonage Museum is hoping for a busy Easter break this year. The museum has had a brisk start to the year following a major refurbishment funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund. There are various new displays featuring several newly acquired treasures including Emily Brontë’s artists box and an early Charlotte Brontë poetry manuscript as well as items not previously displayed; amongst which are some of the Brontës' stockings! There are also new items relating to Haworth Church and day to day life in the village in the nineteenth century that have been donated by locals following a recent appeal, and an exhibition of contemporary paintings based on Emily Brontë’s poems by local artist Jo Brown.

In addition to the new displays there will also be an Easter quiz for children to enjoy as they explore the Parsonage and a special Easter trail with a host of clues that will take families on a mysterious journey around the Parsonage grounds and Haworth Churchyard. Those able to crack the code will win a prize!

And for those looking for a bargain day out over Easter, special vouchers have been distributed around the shops and cafes on Haworth Main Street giving two people admission to the museum for the price of one. These will be available from Thursday 1 April.

A trip to Haworth offers a great day out over Easter. There’s so much to enjoy in and around the village and it’s a great time to see the museum. A lot of work has been done over the winter to improve our displays and give visitors the chance to see more wonderful Brontë treasures than ever before. And with the two-for-one vouchers available to pick up in the shops and cafes it all makes for an enjoyable but not costly day out.
Andrew McCarthy, Director, Brontë Parsonage Museum

EDIT: More information in the Telegraph & Argus.

Categories: Brontë Parsonage Museum

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More Jane Eyre than Luke Skywalker

The Millions talks about fairy tales and the presence of myths in literature:

There is a tradition in literature – not just fairy tales – of the pure, silent, virginal young girl on one side, and the powerful, sexual, wicked woman on the other. (...) Similarly, in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, powerful Bertha is locked in an attic, while good and patient Jane gets her man.

The madwoman in the attic is also one of the references of the theatre piece Taking Steps by Alan Ayckbourn which is now on stage at the Orange Tree Theatre (Outer London). What's on Stage reviews it:

The play is dedicated to the grand old man of British farce, Ben Travers, and sure enough the action takes place in a creaky old cavern of a house, as in Thark, where a desperate fiancée is locked in an attic, and a hapless solicitor called Tristram is unwittingly seduced by the desperate housewife of the man trying to seal a deal on the place. (...)
Anna Francolini is hilarious, too, as the hard-edged ex-dancer straining to be free while practicing her entre-chats, Stephen Beckett is her morose lump of a brother and Emily Pithon the poor mad woman in the attic (thank you, Charlotte Bronte). (Michael Coveney)

The Daily Michigan reviews the animation film How to Train your Dragon:

Hiccup[the boy] and Toothless[the dragon] are more Jane Eyre than Luke Skywalker. They’re not handed the heads of their enemies on sticks at the end of the movie, and they’re not past all of the things that gave them trouble at the outset of the film. They don’t “defeat” the popular kids by eventually becoming even-more-popular kids. Instead they become more aware of themselves and their ability to accomplish good in the world. Why beat them when you can have them join you? (Ben Verdi)

On Three Monkeys, Brian Moore's Cold Heaven is reviewed:

The characters in Cold Heaven are unreliable, but unlike John Dowell, narrator of The Good Soldier (or any of the other typical examples used to demonstrate the style, like Emily Brontë.’s Lockwood in Wuthering Heights), they’re keenly aware of their own unreliability[.] (Andrew Lawless)

The recent Heritage Lottery Fund grant to South Pennines projects is presented like this on grough:

The wild landscape that inspired the Bronte sisters, poet Ted Hughes and sculptor Henry Moore has received a £1.9m boost towards helping access, restoration and heritage projects. (John McHale)

More references, difficult words in Jane Eyre in the Boston University Daily Free Press, The Globe and Mail returns to the eternal debate about compulsory school reading and mentions Wuthering Heights, the Yorkshire Post talks about the premiere of the newly-restored version of the 1970 film The Railway Children at the Bradford International Film Festival which as you know was partly filmed at Haworth. The Telegraph & Argus devotes an article to the current exhibition Thornton Memories in Thornton:

Thornton is best known as the birthplace of the Bronte sisters and for its landmark 20-arch railway viaduct.
People born and raised in the village have their own landmarks and places of importance.Bringing these to life is the purpose of Thornton Memories, a community exhibition at South Square Gallery – a location normally associated with unusual art installations and paintings. (...)
Thornton Memories at South Square gallery is on until April 25. Admission is free. Opening hours are Tuesday to Sunday, noon to 3pm. (Jim Greenhalf)

Punnygirl reviews J.L. Neumann's Rochester:

Would I recommend this book? Sure, if you can look at it as an alternative story from the original. It's definitely sexy, and I probably will read the next 2 books because even a slightly different Rochester is still pretty hot. (Bee)

The Sampler Girl announces that the On the Moors with Emily Brontë pillow pattern will be retired on May 1, 2010 , Wissper and L (in Spanish) and Tell Love and Chocolate review Jane Eyre in Spanish.Three reviews of Wuthering Heights: Two positives: The Reading Life (for the All About the Brontës challenge) and Tout peut arriver (in French) and a negative one on Lit Chit Chat. siriuslysnogged posts on billy_the_muse a graphic representation of Heathcliff and Cathy Cullis uploads to her blog some sketches inspired by Jane Eyre. Finally, cha no ma-ri has joined the Brontë-Along initiative.

Categories: Fiction, Haworth, Illustrations, Jane Eyre, References, Sequels, Wuthering Heights

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The Brontës and the Idea of Influence. First papers

The first articles of the dossier The Brontës and the Idea of Influence, edited by Élise Ouvrard, have been published on the LISA e-journal:

Influence on the Brontës

Yukari Oda
Emily Brontë and the Gothic: Female Characters in Wuthering Heights

In Wuthering Heights, Catherine can be placed in the genealogy of Gothic heroines, and the fact that the novel has been seen as an example of the Female Gothic is further evidence that the Gothic has a far-reaching influence on Wuthering Heights. It is also noticeable that Isabella and Cathy Linton resemble Gothic heroines. I do not intend to discuss these female characters as persecuted heroines. Rather, what I would like to see in this paper is how Emily Brontë received the Gothic and how her female characters are influenced by the genre. I suggest that Emily gradually makes her female characters shift into more lively figures, and Gothic heroines are transformed into several versions of more animated women in Wuthering Heights, and echo each other, mirror each other, and collaborate with one another to provide a whole view. In short, as an opposite or an incomprehensible example, each character helps others to identify themselves. They explore others to find themselves, and see others as distorted mirrors that they are not what they are. The female figures in Wuthering Heights create a whole version of women together.

Cristina Ceron
Emily and Charlotte Brontë’s Re-reading of the Byronic hero

The widespread popularity of Byron’s work during the Victorian age introduced several subversive possibilities for reading his characters as icons of transgression and insights into the literary tabooed. For Victorian novelists, one of the most intriguing aspects of his works was his obsessive explorations of literal or symbolic sibling incest, as the possibility that desire arises from an identification between male and female versions of the same psyche. Emily Brontë’s reading of Byron privileges this dark side of the literary myth, and her main focus is on the mysterious identity and Gothic aspects of the Byronic hero. Even though several critics have actually labelled the character of Heathcliff as ‘Byronic hero’, the debate has not delved into the textual or thematic evidence of the relation between Brontë’s protagonist and Byron hypertexts. My paper aims at investigating Brontë’s reading of Byron’s works, in particular her indebtedness to Manfred and to the relationship between Manfred and Astarte for the creation of the morbid passion experienced by Heathcliff and Catherine. The study will concentrate on Brontë’s appropriation and emphasis on the Gothic elements presented in nuce in Manfred, such as the spectral nature of Astarte, or the supernatural aspects of Manfred’s nature, whose will supersedes even Fate. My hypothesis is that Brontë makes use of these aspects of Byron’s characters with the precise aim of setting the Gothic element as alternative narrative mode, as the subversive element inside a realistic novel. On the contrary, in spite of some juvenile experiments on the gothic, Charlotte’s reading of the Byronic hero is much more framed within the conventions of the realistic novel, and in the second section of my essay I maintain that what comes to the fore in Jane Eyre is the unsurpassed mastery the novelist shows in the combination of the realistic plot with the gothic elements and features of the protagonists. Far from enacting mere Romantic passion, the relationship between Jane and Rochester, just like Catherine’s liaison with Heathcliff, follows the textual dynamics of the Gothic romance, in that the woman falls prey to the more or less demonic instincts of her lover, suffers from the violence of his feelings and at the end is entangled by his thwarted passion, even though when we read the domestic happy ending we tend to forget the gothic matrix of the story…

The Brontë Influence in literature

Ivonne Defant
The Mystery of the Past Haunts Again: Jane Eyre and Eugenie Marlitt’s Die zweite Frau

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is a classic in women’s fiction. When it was published in 1847, it made an immediate impact in mid-Victorian England, partly because it drew on the paradigmatic story of a romance heroine, partly because it interpreted the needs of the women of the time. Since then, the Thornfield Hall attic where Bertha Mason is kept hidden by the master of the house, Mr. Rochester, has become the metaphor of a feminine place of imprisonment and,at the same time, of rebellion against patriarchal rules.About thirty years after Jane Eyre, another woman writer published a book which evokes the haunting atmosphere of the Thornfield Hall theme, i.e., the German writer Eugenie Marlitt, the author of Die zweite Frau ( The second wife, 1874).Interestingly, Marlitt seems to recapture, while rewriting it, the character of Bertha within the context of German domestic fiction. Bothnovels explore indeed the issue of the imprisoned and socially marginalised woman in terms of ethnicity to show how gender roles are inevitably complicit with power relations. In Jane Eyre and Die zweite Frau the house motif is a pivotal element that leads to our understanding of the female characters, but it is above all the mystery that reverberates through the houses of the two novels, represented by two women, the Creole Bertha and the Indian Lotusblume, which, being crucial to the articulation of the discursive thrust underlying the two narratives, discloses the multi-layered construction of femininity.

Jane Silvey
“We wove a web in childhood” Angria Revisited: A. S. Byatt’s The Game

Many women writers have been fascinated with Charlotte Brontë’s life and their admiration for her work has infected their own creative writing. The Game is a complex and profoundly and self-consciously ‘literary’ novel in which A.S. Byatt takes the Brontë myth and uses it to reflect on the nature and power of the creative imagination. She explores how that imagination can become an overwhelming and ultimately destructive force in the lives of reading and brooding female selves. A work of extraordinary intelligence as well as of emotional intensity, its literary illusions play a vital part in the novel’s rich density of implication.

Wolfgang Funk
“What’s Next?” Jasper Fforde’s Attempts on Jane Eyre

This article attempts to analyse the interplay of Jane Eyre with one of its most daring re-appropriations, Jasper Fforde’s 2001 novel The Eyre Affair, which will be presented as a ‘parallolotopia’ in this essay. The main focus is on the inter-textual relationship between the two texts and the interplay and entanglement of the two novels will be analysed as a particular form of post-modern pastiche (in the sense of Fredric Jameson), the main characteristic of which is its self-reflective attitude. This pastiche does not only disestablish traditional role allocations in the framework of literary communication (such as author, story and reader), it also might serve as a completely new paradigm in the relation of literature and its perception, who which (as the article attempts to point out) will be grounded in an ‘aesthetics of insolence’ rather than one of diffidence, as was traditionally the case.

Categories: Journals, Scholar

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Every word counts

The Grand Rapids Press reviews Sheila Kohler's Becoming Jane Eyre:

“Becoming Jane Eyre” by Sheila Kohler is the newest fictional account of one of the sisters. Kohler offers a spare, yet emotional vision of how Charlotte Brontë came to write “Jane Eyre,” the novel that gave Charlotte the success she craved yet feared. (Read more)
Kohler’s writing is emotional and taut, a case of less is more when it comes to description and drama. Every word counts, so readers must take time and invest their attention to the understated drama of both the book and Charlotte Brontë’s life. But it’s worth this focusing as Kohler brings Charlotte’s life alive with all it pathos and little dramas. Readers will believe what Kohler says because she seems to know the heart of the oldest surviving Bronte sister. (Ann Byle)

Zoë Heller chooses for the Wall Street Journal the Five Best Books on Sisters. Talking about Louisa May Alcott's Little Women:

Louisa May Alcott's novel may not be a great work of literature, but it has proved an enormously influential and salutary text for generations of young girls—as important in its way as "Jane Eyre" or "The Golden Notebook" in shaping ideas about womanhood.

The Ogden Standard-Examiner asks K. Silem Mohammad, associate professor in the English department at Southern Oregon University, about the best zombie movies:

"I Walked with a Zombie" (1943). "It's a personal favorite of mine," Mohammad said. "It's a beautiful, lyrical adaptation of 'Jane Eyre.' It's not really a zombie film, in the contemporary sense of brain-eating ghouls, it's more of a melodrama in which a character is turned into a brain-controlled zombie." (Becky Wright)

According to the Daily KOS, Gordon Brown has a prestigious precedent in the category of political mandatories and Heathcliff-wannabes. No less than Queen Victoria herself:

As a Queen, Victoria fashioned herself after Heathcliff from Emily Bronte’s "Wuthering Heights", but I find her more like Lady Honoria from Dickens’ novel "Bleak House"; arrogant, conceited and obsessed with her own reputation. (KAMuston)

nolalibrarian chooses Jane Eyre as one of the ten most influential books on open salon:

2. Jane Eyre. Haven't read it for a while. One of the great feminist statement novels of all time--and really hot. They kiss for the first time and a bolt of lightning strikes the tree they are standing under!

Jane Eyre is around the blogosphere today: Blogging the Canon is reading Jane Eyre and Coltul Colectionarului reviews it in Romanian. Feather Pen and Ink has joined the Brontë-Along project due to her love for Charlotte Brontë's novel. On YouTube there's this speech (with some dramatized reading) about Wuthering Heights by Lindsey Jones, performed at the South Carolina Association of Christian Schools Junior & Senior High Fine Arts Festival.

Categories: Fiction, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, References, Wuthering Heights

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More Jane Eyre Casting Details

To be added to the ones or these other ones already known.

Miss Abbott... Lizzie Hopley Credits: Jonathan Dockar-Drysdale	Undercook ... Angela Curran Credits: Chris Baker	Martha ... Sally Reeve Credits: L.B. Photography
John ... Ewart James Walter Credits:Robert Workman

If you are confused by the casting of John and the presence of a character named Martha, this comment by Sally Reeve on her blog maybe can shed some light:

I’m actually playing Martha – the cook and wife of John who has come over with Rochester from Jamaica – he’s played by Ewart James Walters.(...) He’s a wonderful actor and I’m really looking forward to working with him. We had a lovely rehearsal with Cary Fukunaga, Mia Wasikowska and a few other cast members at Pinewood on Monday.
We improvised some kitchen based scenes and I think I’m going to love working on this – Cary is wonderful – so is Mia – it’s all so exciting!

Another interesting name in the crew is Krystian Mallett, special makeup effects designer and usual member of the crew on the Harry Potter films.

Categories: Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV

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Almost Preternatural in its Power

Kathryn Hugues writes in The Guardian about George Elliot's The Mill on the Floss on the 150th anniversary of its publication. A Jane Eyre comparison crops up:

It is, though, Maggie Tulliver who towers over The Mill on the Floss, one of those great literary heroines whom bookish girls grow up wanting to be. Just like Anne of Green Gables or even Jane Eyre, Maggie captures exactly the dilemma of being the clever girl of the family, the ugly duckling, the misplaced foundling who longs to be recognised for the genius she secretly knows herself to be.

As a matter of fact George Elliot had Villette in great esteem:

I am only just returned to a sense of the real world about me, for I have been reading Villette, a still more wonderful book than Jane Eyre. There is something almost preternatural in its power... (George Elliot to Mrs Bray, February 15, 1853)

Patricia McLaughlin in The Saint Louis Post-Dispatch has a Heathcliff-like experience with a raincoat:

About a million years ago — OK, really more like 30 — I bought a raincoat at a thrift shop on Third Avenue in New York. (...) Apparently unremarkable except for its labels. One said GRENFELL CLOTH Made in England over a woven vignette of a man scaling a dark mountain, long-handled ice ax in left hand, a second snowy peak looming in the distance. In a white rectangle beneath the dark mountain, in red thread, were stitched the words:

IMPORTANT
WHEN WET
DRY BY A FIRE.

As if the coat's maker expected it to be worn by some Heathcliff who could count on finding a roaring fire in the grate at Wuthering Heights or Thrushcross Grange when he came in, drenched, from one of his lugubrious lovelorn rambles across the moors.

Another curious column today is Susie Boyt's in the Financial Times. About literary prejudices:

I was discussing with some friends the prejudices of our parents and whether we felt duty-bound to inherit them or had fought hard to resist. “I think the most powerful family prejudices to discard are the literary ones,” I said. “There is a whole ream of authors I know I am not quite meant to like, and the awful thing is that I don’t.” “My whole family is named after Jane Austen characters,” a pal said. “My mother read her novels aloud to me when I was in the womb, so what chance did I have?”
“Do you sometimes almost find yourself daring to prefer the Brontës out of – I don’t know – spite?”, I inquired. “I do not,” she says. “The thing is,” I continued, “once a parent has expressed to you that Beckett’s work has a ‘forced intensity’, or Wordsworth is humourless, or The Confusions of Young Törless by Robert Musil is ‘so adolescent’, or Iris Murdoch reads ‘like a drawer with shoes and socks and even feet in it’, then it’s kind of hard to like those guys anymore.”

Gary A. Warner after his visit to Brontë country now publishes an article about Jane Austen's England in The Vancouver Sun. Talking about Chawton, he says:

To see Chawton is to understand Austen’s world, just as the bleak Yorkshire moors of Haworth shaped the Bronte sisters.

Frances Wilson reviews for The Times Literary Supplement Olena Beal's Dora Wordsworth. A Poet’s Daughter:

The life of Dora Wordsworth reads like a more complex version of the second half of Wuthering Heights, where the sickly children of Cathy and Heathcliff are doomed to repeat and repair the miseries of their parents.

The Independent (Ireland) reviews Lyndall Gordon's Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds:

In contrast to our ignorance about Shakespeare, we know a great deal about Emily's family. Her prosperous Old Testament father was Treasurer of Amherst College in Massachusetts, which was founded by her grandfather. She had a cold mother, a sister, disappointed in love, and a brother, Austin, as broodingly handsome as Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights. (Brian Lynch)

St Petersburg Times presents the second installment of the Charlotte Brontë adventures by Laura Joh Rowland:

Bedlam: The Further Secret Adventures of Charlotte Brontë (Overlook) by Laura Joh Rowland is the second of a series of thriller-romances featuring the author of Jane Eyre; this time a mystery takes Charlotte into history's most notorious mental asylum. (Colette Bancroft)

BrontëBlog will publish a review of this book closer to the publication date.

The Catholic Herald publishes an extract of Criticising the Critics by Fr Aidan Nichols who quotes MP Dennis McShane saying

This does not sit well with our culture which, as the Labour Member of Parliament Denis McShane has written, "from Shakespeare to Pope to Brontë to Orwell has been about a deeply felt sense of language and history".

The quote comes from a 2008 article in The Telegraph.

Ocho Leguas, the travel supplement of El Mundo (Spain) has an article on Yorkshire ("Un jardín encantado en el corazón de Inglaterra") with obvious mentions to the Brontës and particularly Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights:

Un jardín con mil caras y expresiones que tan pronto aparece rodeado de cultura como la que envuelve a su principal museo en el mismo York y que incluye una de las instituciones arqueológicas más completas e interesantes de Gran Bretaña como se transforma en esos atormentados y emblemáticos páramos que inspiraron a Emily Brontë para escribir su famosa novela Cumbres Borrascosas.(...)
2.500 kilómetros cuadrados de superficie que engloban los páramos cubiertos de brezo que sirvieron para esconderse a los atormentados personajes de Emily Bronte, los bucólicos valles de los Yorkshire Dales. (Javier Mazorra) (Google translation)

Yorkshire is also present in Público (Spain) through an article about the publication of the Spanish translations of poems by Ted Hughes:

El condado ya se había hecho famoso antes de que naciera Hughes, con Cumbres borrascosas, que Emily Brontë escribió en 1847. (Peio H. Riaño) (Google translation)

A student in the Times-Transcript consider herself more an arts than a science student and uses a Wuthering Heights reference, Fantasy Magazine (Italy) reviews a recent Italian translation of Margaret Oliphant's A Little Pilgrim in the Unseen (1882) and the Brontës are mentioned, on Open Salon bloggers choose Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights as their ten books that influenced their lives, My Reading Garden posts a poem inspired by Wuthering Heights and River's Blue Elephants posts another one celebrating ten years of teaching Jane Eyre. A drugstore owner who loves Wuthering Heights 1939 in La Depêche (France).

Categories: Books, Haworth, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, References, Wuthering Heights

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Henry Hastings in Salerno and Mark Ryan postpones Wuthering Heights's musical premiere

A very recent event in Italy and a postponed one that was to take place in Cyprus:

1. Maddalena De Leo has written to us concerning a recent talk celebrated yesterday, March 26, in Salerno where she presented her Italian translation of Charlotte Brontë's Henry Hastings.

The meeting was held in Salerno, a town in the South of Italy in Guida Bookshop at 26th March at 6 p.m. After some introducing words by which Dr. Annamaria Fiorillo explained my literary activity related to the Bronte sisters, I spoke of the writing process as the basis of Charlotte Brontë's inspiration in Juvenilia and of the importance of the Brontë Society.

More information here.

2. The second alert was to take place at the Vineyard Film Festival (Nicosia, Cyprus) (March 26-28). The first live performance of some songs of Mark Ryan's musical project on Wuthering Heights:

Mark Ryan, Robb Vallier, Tom & Jennifer Korbee plus 1 surprise guest will be giving VFF the WORLD PREMIERE performance of the music from their new Wuthering Heights musical (still in production) - event details coming soon

But, regrettably Mark Ryan recently posted on his blog that the event was postponed:

Due to circumstances beyond my control, I am unable to attend and participate in The Vineyard Film Festival due to open in Cyprus on 26-28 March. This will also include the postponement of the presentation of the musical project: Wuthering Heights. Everyone involved with this project was looking forward to the presentation and we're all very saddened and disappointed by the current turn of event.

Categories: Alert, Juvenilia, Music, Talks, Translations, Wuthering Heights

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A psychologist's nightmare

The characters in Wuthering Heights must be a psychologist's nightmare. Psychology Today analyses a key scene from Wuthering Heights, which can't be easy either:

I was even more astonished that we then instantly started to talk about a book rarely discussed on Ocean Avenue: Bronte's Wuthering Heights. It's still the Bad Boy/Good Boy motherlode.
If Heathcliff represents the raw, a la Levi-Strauss, then Linton represents the cooked. Heathcliff is destined by his very soul to be the Bad Boy; Linton, equally bound by his destiny, is the Good.
In one telling scene, Bronte shows us a very young Cathy dividing her food and attention between a fierce guard dog that has attacked her but is now gently won over to her side, and a small indoor-pet dog that is equally affectionate. It is clear that the dogs represent the two men. (Insert "duh" here.) This becomes especially clear when Cathy pinches the nose of the guard dog to hurt it slightly, but she keeps it by her. So will Cathy and Heathcliff torment each other but be unable to separate. Cathy can articulate quite clearly her attraction to Linton as well as to Heathcliff; some critics seem remarkably surprised by the very idea that she can desire two men simultaneously. She wants one man who can be both lover and husband at the same time.
She doesn't want two men; she wants one man who can meet all her needs. "‘I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hardy, and free ... and laughing at injuries, not maddening under them!‘" Cathy longs for the prelapsarian moment, the time before her fall into the world of romance, in order to escape from the decision of having to choose between the two.
That's what we're really looking for: a Bad Boy who not only offers drama, but who can help us organize our lives. (Regina Barreca)

Still on the topic of not-so-functional relationships, The New York Times reviews the French film La Barbe Bleue, French director Catherine Breillat's take on Bluebeard.

Maria Tatar, a Harvard professor and the author of “Secrets Beyond the Door: The Story of Bluebeard and His Wives” (Princeton University Press), said that teaching fairy tales to her students and researching the book convinced her that the tale of Bluebeard had fallen into a “cultural black hole”; she encountered few Americans who were able to recite the details of the story, despite its cultural resonance.
“I’m always astonished at how few people know this story,” she said in a phone interview, “especially considering how many films and other works it has inspired.” Ms. Tatar noted that Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre” and Daphne du Maurier’s “Rebecca” owe something of their plots to the spirit of “Bluebeard.” (Kristin Hohenadel)

Incidentally, a new book on the subject - Jane Eyre connection included - is coming out next week: Bluebeard Gothic: Jane Eyre and Its Progeny by Heta Pyrhönen. Stay tuned for a BrontëBlog review in the coming weeks.

Daelnet is pleased to have the importance of the upland peat moors in areas like the Yorkshire Dales finally recognised.

Sheep were introduced to the new grazing and proceeded, amongst other things, to clear swathes of heather, the subject of a million picture post cards from the Dales, the North York Moors, and parts of the Yorkshire Pennines which inspired Wuthering Heights.

A press release on i-Newswire also mentions the Yorkshire Dales, though much less accurately (to put it mildly).

During a tour of the Yorkshire Dales in England in July, made famous by Charlotte Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, they will visit the Bronte Parsonage in Howarth.

Apparently not so very famous, as such a tiny sentence includes two big mistakes: saying Charlotte penned Wuthering Heights which, needless to say (well, not as needless as one might suppose) was written by her sister Emily Brontë and spelling Haworth Howarth. Once again: it's H-A-W-O-R-T-H!

Monkey See - an NPR blog - brings up Wuthering Heights on the topic of Twilight and teenagers' reads.

The rest of today's blogs are mostly challenge-driven: Terri's Notebook has just joined in the Brontë-Along, Jayne's Books posts briefly about Wuthering Heights 2009 as part of the All About the Brontës challenge. Finally, 54 Books blog writes about Wuthering Heights.

Categories: Books, Haworth, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, References, Wuthering Heights

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Erotic Moors

A couple of recent novels with Brontë references. The first one is not for purists:

Reader, I Married Him
Author: Janet Mullany
Cover Artist: Christine M. Griffin
Loose-Id
ISBN: 978-1-60737-562-3
March 23, 2010

Two con artists descend on the heroic Miss Jane Eyre, presenting themselves as her cousins Diana and St. John Rivers, and discover the dark secret of Thornfield Hall. Edward Rochester, whom Jane was to marry, is her prisoner and sex slave, but he’s tiring of the game.

Diana frees him and herself, finally able to choose love and the life she wants. St. John, who fears he’s lost his nerve as a con man, becomes Jane’s lover with reenactments of her sadistic Lowood School memories, and love sets him off on a new adventure in pursuit of Jane.

Publisher's Note: This book contains explicit sexual content, graphic language, and situations that some readers may find objectionable: Captivity, partner swapping, voyeurism.

Silent on the Moor
A Lady Julia Novel
Deanna Raybourn
March 2009
MIRA Books
ISBN: 978-0778326144

Despite his admonitions to stay away, Lady Julia arrives in Yorkshire to find Brisbane as remote and maddeningly attractive as ever. Cloistered together, they share the moldering house with the proud but impoverished remnants of an ancient family—the sort that keeps their bloodline pure and their secrets close. Lady Allenby and her daughters, dependent upon Brisbane and devastated by their fall in society, seem adrift on the moor winds, powerless to change their fortunes. But poison does not discriminate between classes….
A mystery unfolds from the rotten heart of Grimsgrave, one Lady Julia may have to solve alone, as Brisbane appears inextricably tangled in its heinous twists and turns. But blood will out, and before spring touches the craggy northern landscape, Lady Julia will have uncovered a Gypsy witch, a dark rider and a long-buried legacy of malevolence and evil.

On the author's blog there are more explicit references to Wuthering Heights:

No doubt I've been hugely influenced by the Brontes and Jane Austen, and a trifle by Dickens, although that was entirely against my will, I assure you. Wuthering Heights has long been one of my two favorites of the Bronte novels for a variety of reasons. (Read more)

Bookreporter confirms it:

Do you read a lot of mystery novels? Who are some of your favorite authors, whether or not they influenced your own work?
WUTHERING HEIGHTS, because Emily Brontë was ruthless. Great writers are not afraid to break a reader's heart.

Categories: Books, Jane Eyre, References, Sequels, Wuthering Heights

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Mr Rochester's '500-watt smile'

The Prague Post reviews Jacques Offenbach's Les Contes d'Hoffmann, on stage at Prague's National Theatre. Apparently the production has a Wuthering Heights moment:

Havelka also uses a video sequence to turn a romantic duet by Hoffmann and his second love, Antonia, into a witty take on Wuthering Heights. (Frank Kuznik)

CNN interviews Seth Grahame-Smith, author of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies:

CNN: And then came the imitators
Grahame-Smith: There have been so many attempts at mash-ups in the past year.
People don't seem to understand that the mash-up isn't arbitrary. We're not putting folded pieces of paper into two hats and then pulling out Emily Bronte with one hand and werewolves with the other. It has to work on both a superficial, fun level, and it has to work on a thematic level and for the characters.
In PPZ, the book is about repression and the role of women in Jane Austen's regency era, so I'm taking those same themes and giving them scope. The repression of women becomes "women aren't the best zombie slayers; men are." Or, the class system that's in the original book is portrayed through, "your training isn't as good as my training in the deadly arts." (Breeanna Hare)

Funny he should mention Emily Brontë and werewolves because we have a) Wuthering Bites coming out at the end of the summer and about vampires (with a very Twilight-y cover) and b) Jane Slayre coming out in a couple of weeks and featuring many creatures, including werewolves.

The San Diego Reader includes quite a sweeping statement:

Alex is tall, dark, and broodingly handsome, but with a 500-watt smile (eye-candy alert to Jane Eyre fans and Goth girls!). (Naomi Wise)

Because, you know, that's how Charlotte Brontë described Mr Rochester, with special emphasis on the '500-watt smile'. Read the novel again if you don't remember that bit!

On the blogosphere, CraftyPod invites you to join in the Brontë-Along and Pinarthan reviews Wuthering Heights 1992.

Categories: Books, Jane Eyre, References, Theatre, Weirdo, Wuthering Heights

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About Shirley and Christianity

Talks and alerts for the following days:

1. In Sidney, Australia:

Australian Brontë Association
27 Mar 10:30am , Sydney Mechanics School of Arts
Charlotte Brontë's Christianity [Professor Christine ALEXANDER]

Christine will focus on the narrative of pilgrimage as a clue to Charlotte Bronte's attitude to Christianity and her strong hold on life through adversity.

2. In Wainfleet, Ontario, Canada:

Classic Book Club: Shirley
March 25, 2 pm, Wainfleet Township Public Library

Classic Book Club at the Wainfleet Township Public Library from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m. Join us for afternoon tea on the last Thursday of the month as we discuss the works of the Bronte sisters. This month's selection is Shirley by Charlotte Bronte. Please call 905-899-1277 to pre-register and request a copy of the book.

Categories: Alert, Charlotte Brontë, Shirley, Talks

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"Is that Charlotte Bronte or Lady Gaga?"

Highly varied news today.

More on Coronation Street's own Wuthering Heights as seen on the Coronation Street Blog:

Mary seems to be showing increasing signs of madness in her attempts to win over Norris. Going back what originally brought them together she digs out a competition to win a holiday in Bronte country. He can be Heathcliffe [sic] and she can be Kathy [and sic]. Today is the last day for entries and she's sure that together they could win it. (Sunny Jim)

Another reference to Wuthering Heights today - albeit the song - comes from BBC Sport:

However, they have not won away at West Ham for 32 years at which time, apparently, Wuthering Heights was at number one in the charts. I am far too busy (and professional) to come up with a pun on that, but I'm sure you lot can deliver something... right? (Sam Lyon)

The Herald (Ireland) has an article about 'little things that turn you on . . . and off'.

Another fellow passed all the preliminary tests. I sent him a book; he responded with a thank-you email. Perfectly fine, until I read it. Staring at me in black and white was: "I can't wait to curl up with a good book."
Curl up?! I wasn't aware that men curled up. In fact, I thought the only people who curled up were toddlers and women in hot chocolate commercials. It was the end. Attempts to reignite my interest were impeded by images of him in the foetal position, cup of Horlicks in one hand, copy of Jane Eyre in the other. For some reason, he was also wearing Y-fronts and ankle socks -- my imagination ran riot.(Katie Byrne)

And reviewing the Impossible Project's new Polaroid-licensed film, Engadget describes the ancient-looking results as follows:

Is that Charlotte Bronte or Lady Gaga hanging tough in the foreground? (Laura June)

An article on TB in the Financial Times obviously and unavoidably mentions 'the Brontë sisters' in general and some of its victimes. (Actually, as you well know, Charlotte Brontë didn't die of TB, but in all probability of hyperemesis gravidarum).

And if you are in or near Chicago or plan to be there next autumn, here's an event to jot down, as announced by the Chicago Sun-Times:

At Lifeline Theatre, three shows are planned, including:
• "Wuthering Heights" (Sept. 10-Oct. 31): Christina Calvit's world premiere adaptation of the Emily Bronte classic about the epic passion between Heathcliff and Cathy, all played out on the stormy moors of Yorkshire, England. Elise Kauzlaric will direct. (Hedy Weiss)

Finally, Great Works of Style posts about Wuthering Heights.

Categories: Jane Eyre, Music, References, Theatre, Weirdo, Wuthering Heights

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Brontë Studies. Volume 35, Issue 1

The new issue of Brontë Studies (Volume 35, Issue 1, March 2010) is already available online. We provide you with the table of contents and abstracts:

Articles

Jane Eyre and the New Testament Parable of the Mustard Seed
pp. 1-6(6) Author: Hochberg, Shifra
Abstract:
Editors of Jane Eyre have glossed the term 'mustard-seed' — an endearment used by Rochester to describe Jane after she has agreed to marry him — as a reference to Shakespeare's fairy in A Midsummer Night's Dream. I argue that the term also alludes to the Parable of the Mustard Seed, which appears three times in the New Testament and which Charlotte Brontë undoubtedly knew. The metaphoric language describing the Kingdom of God in the parable provides an important subtext to the theme of moral redemption and to the recurring bird and tree imagery in Jane Eyre.

'That Peculiar Voice': Jane Eyre and Mary Bosanquet Fletcher, an Early Wesleyan Female Preacher
pp. 7-22(16) Author: Henck, Karen Cubie
Abstract
References to the plain appearance of Charlotte Brontë's heroine in her first published novel, Jane Eyre, link the character to Wesleyanism, a movement which extended the priesthood of all believers to women and granted them access to the pulpit during the late eighteenth century. The Brontë sisters came under the influence of this movement in their childhood, through the Wesleyan theology of their father's Haworth parsonage. As the autobiographical writings of one Wesleyan preaching figure, Mary Bosanquet Fletcher, make clear, this tradition that shaped Charlotte Brontë and her views about gender linked women's choice of plain dress to John Wesley's expectation that all Wesleyans publicly voice their spiritual experience. This essay explores the relationship between the life and theological concerns of Mary Bosanquet Fletcher, an acquaintance of Charlotte Brontë's father, in order to expose an important clue to the source of Jane's 'peculiar voice', which, as Rochester claims, 'renews hope' and 'sounds so truthful' (JE, p. 432).

Abandoning and Re-inhabiting Domestic Space in Jane Eyre, Villette and Wide Sargasso Sea
pp. 23-29(7) Author: Lydon, Susan
Abstract
In Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre and Villette and Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, patriarchs often fail to provide safe homes for women. Patriarchal homes in these novels are largely either non-existent or presented as dangerous places that threaten the female protagonists who must choose either to suffer abuse or leave home, abandoning their roles as angels of the hearth. Curiously, these novels all invert the typical Victorian notion of home, the notion that women were expected to sacrifice female autonomy for the safety and protection of a home defended by a male, as characterized, for example, in John Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies. Rather, homes in these novels are menacing places that serve as catalysts for female agency. Each female protagonist will need to seek refuge outside a traditional home at some point in the novels in order to survive. In Jane Eyre and Villette, Ferndean Manor and Lucy's educational establishment represent a revised version of Victorian domesticity where women have greater personal agency rather than a return to a traditional domestic space.

Gender, Conflict, Continuity: Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) and Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins (1893)
pp. 30-39(10) Author: Cox, Jessica
Abstract
The New Woman fiction of the fin de siècle brought into conflict patriarchal and feminist ideologies, challenging widely held assumptions about gender roles and the position of women. Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins is an important contribution to the genre, and engages with a number of the key issues that concerned feminists at the end of the nineteenth century, including marriage, the education of women, the double standard, male licentiousness, and the wider issue of social purity. These are also key themes in Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall — published nearly fifty years before Grand's seminal New Woman text. In this essay, I consider Anne Brontë's text as a forerunner to the New Woman fiction of the fin de siècle, through a comparative examination of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and The Heavenly Twins.

Vigny's Kitty Bell, Eugène Sue's Mathilde and 'Kitty Bell'
pp. 40-56(17) Author: Heywood, Christopher
Abstract
The tales 'Kitty Bell' and 'Giulio and Eleanor' appeared as interpolations in the serial 'Mary Lawson by M. Eugene Sue', published in The London Journal , a penny weekly, during 1850/51. Handwriting and other clues identify G. W. M. Reynolds as the compiler of this novel from three manuscript sources, and as the pseudonymous correspondent 'K.T.' whose letter to Charlotte, claiming 'Kitty Bell' as a 'paraphrase' of Jane Eyre, has prompted the theory that 'Kitty Bell' was a plagiarism of the novel. The name Kitty Bell and associated topics appear among the works by Alfred de Vigny and Eugène Sue that contributed to Charlotte's literary formation. In that context, this article develops the view, first advanced by Mrs Ellis H. Chadwick, that Charlotte wrote 'Kitty Bell' as a first attempt at the subject of Jane Eyre. 'Giulio and Eleanor' emerges as her matching sketch for The Professor.

Mr Wise and Mr Wood: Two Brontë Bibliographers in Harmony. Part 2
pp. 57-79(23) Author: Duckett, Bob
Abstract
This paper is presented in two parts; the first part was published in Brontë Studies, vol. 34, no. 3, November 2009, pp. 185-208. The correspondence continues here.

Reviews pp. 80-94(15)

Categories: Brontë Society, Journals, Scholar

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Jane Eyre: past, present and future

Jane Eyre seems to be the perfect material for discussing e-readers. Whether it is in favour of the experience (sort of) as on Engadget:

Reading Jane Eyre on a sunny day was pretty much the typical e-reading experience: the black text looked crisp, and there was the expected second-long refresh when we turned pages. In a side-by-side comparison with the Nook, the Alex took the same amount of time to flip a page -- the Kindle 2 was a hair faster than both. (Joanna Stern)

Or against it, as in The Pitt News:

But books aren’t the same. Books don’t change every minute, and many have stayed the same for centuries. I know that the copy of “Jane Eyre” that I open today will tell the same story that my parents read years ago.
Maybe I won’t win this battle, but I think books are something worth holding on to. There’s so much a book has that e-readers can’t offer. . . (Hay Thuppal)

We personally don't think it's a case of 'either ... or...' Books offer things that e-readers can't offer and e-readers offer things that books can't offer. And Jane Eyre is brilliant on both formats, of course.

Actress Romola Garai, who is currently on stage at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, playing Chekhov's The Three Sisters (which may have been inspired by the Brontës), confesses to loving Jane Eyre as a child to The Scotsman:

"As a kid, I really loved Jane Eyre, I used to fantasise that the past was so much better and my lifetime was crap. There was something about Chekhov which made me go: 'No, it was always shit.' I really loved that, it made me feel really comforted. (Susan Mansfield)

You have to wonder, though, if she skipped some bits: a miserable childhood, a miserable boarding school, sleeping on the moors under the rain, a house burnt to the ground and nothing anyone could do about it. Also, we recently read about Charlotte's governessing as seen from a modern point of view and it's definitely not something we'd want to relive. Galleycat brings this up and quotes Joyce Carol Oates on Jane Eyre:

In 1997, Joyce Carol Oates reviewed Charlotte Bronte-- a novelist who earned a bit more than $1,800 a year as a governess in 1839. A sample: "Why does Jane Eyre retain its appeal after so many decades, and so many intervening novels of virginal young heroines, Byronic moody mysterious elder men, and melodramatic disclosures? One answer is, simply, the quality of Jane's and Rochester's characters. They are believable. They are intelligent, yet emotional, superior beings who are human, even flawed; as the 19th-century reader would have discerned, they are models for us all." (Jason Boog)

More pining for the past as Joan Collins 'laments the demise of the Hollywood hunk' in the Daily Mail:

Another great example of a totally masculine-looking actor from the 30s and 40s was, believe it or not, Laurence Olivier. As Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, you could almost smell the scent of the stables as he canoodled with Cathy - a somewhat miscast Merle Oberon. I would have thought Vivien Leigh or Hedy Lamarr would have been better, but then I consider them to be two of the most beautiful actresses to have graced the silver screen.

Other mentions today include: a Ted Hughes memorial to join the Brontë sisters' (among others) at Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner, as reported by the Guardian. Teacher Susan Miriam Arenson profiled by The Tigers' Print picks Jane Eyre as her 'all-time favourite' while some students doubt that they can ever relate to classics such as Wuthering Heights (The Macon Telegraph). And finally The Northern Echo features Ruth Campbell, a 40-year-old woman who has set herself a few challenges such as

learning the words to Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights in order to be filmed, dressed in a white gown and long, black wig, singing it on the moors.

On the blogosphere, Wuthering Heights is internationally reviewed by Vibekebloggen (in Norwegian) and Comedora de Livros (in Portuguese). And Risky Regencies has a post on the e-novella Reader, I Married Him by its own author (Janet Mullany) who closes the post by inviting readers: 'So, let's talk about Jane Eyre. Why is the novel important to YOU?'

Categories: Books, Brontëites, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, Wuthering Heights

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