Brontë Sisters = 3-in-1 Charlotte Brontë?

Got an email a while back about a new Brontë biography that's out now. The email didn't say too much about it (like a title), aside from that it "rocks major myths surrounding the family", but there was a link to a YouTube video. Thought I'd share it and see what you reckon.

Video description reads:

More than just a biography, 'Charlotte Brontë's Thunder' is for readers who love a good detective story or a dark, haunting murder mystery. This shocking and controversial biography proves that Charlotte wrote all the Bronte novels. Why did she use 3 male pen names? Charlotte was desperate to protect herself and her sisters Emily and Anne from a few corrupt and dangerous men whose crimes she was secretly recording in her writing.

Footage from Jane Eyre event at Haddon Hall

If you would like to see some footage from See Film Differently's Jane Eyre premiere at Haddon Hall, there's a little film here:



Both the Squeeze and I completely managed to evade being captured on film, apparently, despite me wearing my "Team Edward Rochester" t-shirt. Nice to see the bit with Cary Fukanaga (doesn't he kinda remind you of Johnny Depp?), as that seemed to be cut off when we were actually there, due to some terrible lag in the system.

Also, there's an event on next Saturday, which I'm hoping to attend.

And yes, I know, I still need to type up about the screening. Things got in the way, I'm afraid. Considering making it a Sunday Matinée post, which means it's still a few weeks in the future, as it's currently occupied by the German travel diary. Or maybe I'll reschedule. We'll see.

P.S. If you want to live in a place that inspired Charlotte Brontë, Thornton Hall in Thornton near Bradford is up for sale, for those who have £850,000+ to spare. Guide price is £849,000 and for that you get seven bedrooms, a pond and formal gardens. Even a library. Bargain! The Express have written a piece about it too.

Jane Eyre '11: The Rant

In the review of Jane Eyre (2011), I mentioned that there were a few things I would have a separate rant about. This is that post. It will contain lots of spoilers, it will be ranting. Readers of a delicate disposition might want to look away now, even though I don't use the F word once. This is in some sort of chronological order and might be edited if I can think of more things after posting.

Ready? Here we go.

Filming locations: North Lees Hall in Derbyshire

So, we finally made it to North Lees Hall outside Hathersage in north Derbyshire. (Previous post about this day is here, by the way.)

We drove up to the house, parked on the side of the field where other people were parked, tried to get an overturned sign to stay up in the wind (it wouldn't), and walked up to the old house.

First impressions, aside from fangirly glee of being somewhere where Charlotte Brontë had been and been so inspired by, was that the house itself is rather on the small side, but wow, the views of the Derbyshire hills from there are extraordinary!

How's this for a view?

The reason behind going to North Lees Hall in the first place is of course that it's one of the buildings that inspired Charlotte Brontë to write about Thornfield in Jane Eyre. In fact, the description of Thornfield Hall does ring true with North Lees (which also, as it happens, was the ancestral home of the Eyre family), with a tower and turrets and the surroundings, nestled among hills and so on. It's not exactly massive, though. You couldn't host a big house party, because it's nowhere big enough. A couple with a couple of kids or no kids at all could live here okay, but it's not much bigger than that. Anyway, I get ahead of myself.

Eyes in Jane Eyre: A Quiz - Guest post by Nan

I love the richness of detail in Jane Eyre. Charlotte Brontë weaves Jane’s inner life and her outer surroundings into a tapestry of emotion, physical sensation and contrast. The themes that run throughout the story are both subtle and strong, resulting in a coming-of-age / gothic horror / love story / portrait of integrity that I return to again and again. One theme is that of insight and blindness. Brontë describes many of her characters’ eyes in great detail. Take this quiz to see if you can match the eyes with the character. Who has:

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1847)

Book review: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (Puffin Classics: The Essential Collection, 1994 [1847])

Mystery, hardship - and love

Orphaned Jane Eyre, hated by her aunt and cousins, is sent away to Lowood School. Though life improves for Jane, she longs for true love and friendship. Then one day she meets Mr. Rochester, and everything changes ...

COMPLETE AND UNABRIDGED

Jane Eyre follows the life of a Jane Eyre - a poor, plain, unconnected and very small-bodied young woman. When the novel begins, she's ten years old and lives with her horrible Aunt Reed and her equally dreadful cousins, who enjoy bullying her. Deemed a troublesome and disagreeable (even "passionate", gasp, the horror!) girl, Jane is passed onto Lowood, a school for orphaned girls.

After six years in that hell-hole, having survived a typhus outbreak and malnourishment, Jane is promoted to teacher, and stays on for a further couple of years, until the headmistress gets married and takes off. Eager to broaden her horizons now that her friend is gone, Jane advertises for a position as a governess. The only response is from Thornfield Hall, where a young French girl needs tutoring.

At Thornfield, Jane finds her pupil to be very vain, but agreeable nonetheless. The housekeeper, Mrs. Fairfax, is an old dear and life is a bit monotonous ... until the master of the house happens to finally return. Edward Fairfax Rochester - harsh, sarcastic, brooding ... and oh such a darling deep within. And about 20 years older than Jane, but what does that matter when you're in love? Question is, can an unconnected governess really find happiness with the rich master of Thornfield?

Jane Eyre's Husband by Tara Bradley (2011)

Book review: Jane Eyre's Husband - The Life of Edward Rochester by Tara Bradley (Kindle, 2011)

Jane Eyre's Husband tells the fascinating story of Edward Rochester's life in richly textured detail, revealing Rochester’s innermost thoughts, hopes, and passions. This is the Rochester of Charlotte Brontë’s novel: proud, arrogant, privileged, and searching for love and a better life. Beginning with his early years, then continuing to his time in Jamaica and his nightmarish first marriage, his desperate wanderings in Europe, his love for Jane Eyre and the tragedy that follows his attempt to marry her, his recovery from his injuries, and his married life with Jane, this story will take you inside the secret workings of Rochester’s mind.

Edward Rochester is one of literature's most compelling male characters, and this book discloses Rochester’s own intimate experience of his life in vivid narrative. This is a story that is always original, while set firmly within the context of Charlotte Brontë’s work.

If you love Jane Eyre just the way it is, you will find it difficult to read derivative (fan) fiction. Invariably, the author will get the characters’ personalities wrong, misunderstand their intentions or just make a mess of the plot one way or the other. Needless to say, I downloaded this Kindle e-book expecting yet another disappointment, because Mr. Rochester is a notoriously difficult character to get right. To my surprise, it didn’t even take half a chapter before I was both hooked and intrigued. Disappointed? More like ecstatic!

Jane Eyre’s Husband, like J.L. Niemann’s Rochester, is a version of Jane Eyre told from the perspective of Edward Fairfax Rochester, but it’s so much more than that - it’s truly the life of Mr. Rochester, like a biography, only much, much more interesting to read.

The novel is split into three distinct parts, so if printed, it would work best as a trilogy, as each section could easily equate to over 300 printed pages. Part one is a prequel, stretching from before the birth of Edward Rochester, through his upbringing, his time on Jamaica and with his mistresses on the continent and ends just as the events we know from Brontë’s original are about to begin. Part two is Jane Eyre, but seen through Mr. Rochester’s eyes. Part three is a sequel, dealing with what happens to the couple during their happily ever afters.

Miss Elliott and the Eldritch by Laura Neubert (2011)

Novella review: Miss Elliott and the Eldritch by Laura Neubert (2011)

Alone and haunted by her past, the indomitable Jane Eyre finds herself confronted not only by secrets within herself, but by Eldritch horrors from unfathomable realms. Will she be able to survive the horrors of these beasts and rescue her love Edward Rochester from madness ... or worse? Part Brontë and part H.P. Lovecraft, this is a combination not to be missed, and a tale not to be forgotten.

When I was offered to read this by author and illustrator Laura Neubert and the cover designer Joanne Renaud, I was delighted. (Thanks ladies!) Something Jane Eyre and in a horror setting - how intriguing. It spans 70+ pages, so it's a decent size and what's more - it's a take on what happens at Morton. None of that tedious and miserable Lowood stuff, for instance. None of that wonderfully romantic Thornfield stuff either, regrettably, but still, it's cut straight to the part most of us would probably gladly have chipped away from the original novel if we could.

However. By adding some serious HP Lovecraft vibes into the otherwise sort of dreary Morton stuff, what we get is really good. I enjoyed it tremendously. There is a mysterious "affliction" about and there are creepy beings afoot called "the Eldritch" and they're not exactly cute and cuddly. Deadly and nightmarish, yes. This is the sort of scenery change Jane is treated to from the gloomy but wonderful times at Thornfield.

And, of course, trying to get over the fact that the love of her life is already married. In Morton, she encounters one of the peasant girls who seems to have been afflicted, and who has an important message for her ...

Witches and Devilry in Wuthering Heights by Jamie Freeman (2011)

Essay review: Witches and Devilry in Wuthering Heights: A Call for Neo-Pagan Perspective (Amazon Kindle, 2011)

Neo-Paganism is a growing religious movement in America, England and around the world. As such, Academia has a unique opportunity to watch and record a culture come into being. The Neo-Pagan perspective comes out of a rich history interlaced with mythology (both world mythology and our own foundational myths), magick and history. Not only is literature being written by Neo-Pagans, but their methods of discourse, history and theology can be used to evaluate and examine other texts. Charlotte Bronte’s novel Wuthering Heights can benefit from such an exploration, showing the mythical side of Wiccan origin in a fiction written before the Murrayite debate.

This paper applies cultural analysis to well-documented literature in an attempt to provide new insight for those within the culture, and without. It is a call for Neo-Pagan perspective in literature as a viable model of evaluation, and enlarges the scope of Neo-Pagan theology and philosophy beyond the foundational texts to search for meaning within the culture of the Western canon. Utilizing an exploration of Adian Kelly’s “Foundational Myths” as the framework for New Historicism, the paper examines Bronte’s novel from the perspective of a Wiccan practitioner awash in a sea of differentiated meaning from mainstream culture. Using sources such as the Malleus Mallificarum and “commonly accepted knowledge” of The Burning Times, Wuthering Heights is explored from the sacred marriage of Heathcliff and Cathy Earnshaw, of Cathy’s empowerment as a High Priestess Witch, and of Heathcliff’s demonic possession of Cathy’s mind. The paper concludes with the value of such evaluation, and how it might be applied to other works of literature to develop of canon or perspective of Neo-Pagan literature.

Yeah, that's about half the essay right there. Okay, no, not half exactly, but let's face it, at 70 kb/163 Kindle locations, it's not a very long or in-depth paper and it could just as easily have been posted on someone's blog or on a Pagan website. It really didn't need to be a Kindle book, especially not one that hasn't been proof-read properly and could have done with some more formatting work. The "Charlotte Bronte" of the introduction is later mentioned as "Charolette", but then she's (correctly) the sister of the author of Wuthering Heights, Emely (sic). Eventually, Freeman gets it right ("Emily" - never "Brontë" with the two dots), though.

The most "bangable" man in British literature

The Awl has posted a list of 111 Male Characters Of British Literature, In Order Of Bangability. (Thanks for posting about it in the forum, rhubarbsmom!)

First of all, let's correct the image they use to illustrate the article, as they've chosen number THREE on the list as opposed to number one. Can't have that now, can we?

There we go. MUCH better. Order is restored.

Ta-daaaah!! Mr. Rochester of Jane Eyre made number one! :D Congratulations on your impeccable taste, Carrie Frye! Of course he is the most bangable character in British literature. Here are some reflections on selected parts of the rest of the list:

Jane and her Master by Stephen Rawlings (1996)

Book review: Jane and her Master by Stephen Rawlings (Silver Moon Books, 2002 [1996])

'Jane and her Master' is a classic in all senses of the word. Stephen Rawlings brings his unique talent to bear on a re-working of 'Jane Eyre' and creates an SM tale of truly searing intensity.

And in the category "Books I would never have read in a million years even if you paid me", meet a sadomasochistic take on Jane Eyre, which I've only read because I set myself the task of reading everything Jane Eyre. Books like this make me wish I hadn't.

A kind word of warning: If you're of a young and/or sensitive disposition, you might want to give this review a miss.

No, really.

The sick b author was (according to the preface) inspired by P.N. Dedeaux's An English Education, but felt like it "whetted our appetities" and "cruelly left us suspended in limbo, hungry for a feast that was never served". So he took it upon himself to rectify that. Without being able to spell "Haworth" properly. (Howarth? Seriously?)

First things first: If you're not into sadomasochism, this book is NOT for you. Let me make that perfectly clear, and repeat it: NOT for you. I had an inkling S&M wasn't for me, but have never willingly submitted myself (pun not intended) to reading anything that would actually make me find out. Well, now I know. And I dread having to suffer read endure An English Education as well.

One does not suffer Jane Eyre fools gladly

We interrupt the regular broadcast of FanstRAvaganza 2 in order to have a rant about some mucking fuppets I just came across online and want to scream about for a bit. If you're the sort of person whose religious prejudices get in the way of, oh I dunno, education, you should really give this post a miss, or you're likely to be tremendously offended. Don't say I didn't warn you.

The first one, Jane Eyre: Oblivious or Needy? tries to make some kind of point of Jane being oblivious for not realising there was something shady going on at Thornefield. "No one can be that oblivious" it says, and also goes on to claim that Jane was needy for ... St. John wanting to marry her? Does not compute? How can Jane be blamed for being needy when it's not as if she encouraged St. John's attentions and in fact, when he asked her to marry him, she flat out refused? If she was needy, surely she would have accepted his proposal and ignored his jibe about her being made for work instead of love? (*gag*)

Also, the article is factually incorrect:

He had several ladies vying for his attentions while he was trying to lure Jane to his side

Blanche Ingram counts as "several" now, does she? There was never a question of Mary Ingram or indeed either of the Eshton girls trying to snag him, or he flirting with any of them. It was Blanche. I'm not disputing the claim that he's a liar, but I do protest to him being a womaniser. If he was a womaniser, wouldn't he have jumped on everything in a skirt?

Reflection on Rowland and the Rochesters

Originally posted 25 January 2010 on a different blog.

Wow, that header sounds like a 50s/60s band! :)

Work has begun on a second scene, set in Edward Rochester's childhood, where we get to meet not only him but also his older brother Rowland. From what I can tell, there's no names given for their parents, nor does it say what the age difference between the brothers is, or indeed what Rowland eventually died of. This means, I suppose, I'm at liberty to make these things up as I go along, which is both exciting and scary. I want to be following Charlotte Brontë's original text as closely as possible, so if I do come across a reference that actually mentions these things, I'll go by the book.

Now, I don't think there are that many years between the boys. Doubt it's more than five. Haven't exactly decided on what, but on the other hand, I haven't even decided how old Edward is supposed to be in the scene, or exactly what happened, but I have an incling. Something that I think has shaped part of his character, and his relationship with Rowland. Rowland comes across as a snobbish little brat, which is fun, because it reminds me of the horrid little John Reed.

"Wild Apples" - a Jane Eyre epilogue of sorts

Originally posted 23 January 2010 on a different blog.

Handwritten draft, exactly as it was written on paper, so no corrections more than the ones on the paper itself. Just typing it down makes me want to change stuff around, add things, remove repetitions, and realise that there are a few instances of where the text gets rather confusing, or even goes to innuendo town...

Charlotte Brontë's Shirley adapted for radio

If you thought Charlotte Brontë only wrote Jane Eyre, you are mistaken. Her second published book was Shirley, and good ol' BBC have made an adaptation in six parts of it. For radio, not TV. Oh well, you can't have everything. If I understand the website correctly, it was first broadcast in September 2007, so it's not actually new new.

Part one was broadcast this morning at 10 am (thanks for the tip, BrontëBlog!) and part two is tomorrow at 10 am, and the rest follow at the same time in the rest of the working week, with the final two parts next Monday and Tuesday.

Linkage: Charlotte Brontë's Shirley on BBC Radio 7 - part 1 is available on BBC iPlayer for 7 days.

Skins 5.1

Have to admit, I've never seen an episode of Skins in my life, but there were three things that made me want to watch this particular episode:

1. An English teacher with a Charlotte Brontë tattoo.
2. Said English teacher being played by Little John of BBC's Robin Hood!
3. A character played by the girl who played Lyra in The Golden Compass.

The English teacher (Gordon Kennedy) only had about two scenes, the second one is the one where he ripped open his shirt and asked the students about the tattoo. A boy suggested it was his mum, but the teacher showed his forearm instead, where the image of his mum was tatooed between Dickens and Nabokov. No, it's "the original punk, Charlotte f***ing Brontë!" Dude, you had me at the shirt-ripping and Scottish accent. Without the staff and the medieval clothing and general burliness, Gordon Kennedy is actually really attractive! Who'da thought it, eh? :)

Anyway, the episode centred around Franky, new girl in town, played by Dakota Blue Richards. It's always tough starting in a new school, but for Franky, it's even more difficult. Her style is rather masculine, you might say, she has two dads and was severely bullied where she used to live before the move to Bristol.

Franky's story was really compelling. I was curious to see what Lyra from The Golden Compass looked like a few years later, and well, as above! I guess they really won't be filming any sequels to that film, by the way, which is such a shame. Those books are freaking AWESOME. But anyway.

Seeing Franky trying to fit in, find friends and then when she had found some, the queen bitch of the new friend group decides to, well, show her true colours and betray her trust in a horrid way. You could tell a mile off that she was going to do something horrid, just not when exactly. Luckily, there were some people there who were also genuinely nice.

Maybe I'll stick around and watch some more of this show. I'm intrigued. It's actually a pretty good show. So yeah, who'da thought it?

Reader, I Married Him by Janet Mullany (2010)

Novella review: Reader, I Married Him by Janet Mullany (Loose-Id, 2010)

Wow, a book that comes with a warning from the author: "if you really, really love Jane Eyre and consider Jane the archetypal romance heroine–don’t buy this book!" - and here's why:

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.

What she means is, if you're looking for anything that's close to the book, look elsewhere. This is an erotic novella using a couple of characters from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, albeit in a way that CB's characters never would.

Here, the fire occurred the night before the wedding, and Rochester died, leaving Thornfield to Jane. Except he didn't die at all, Bertha did. All they found was a horribly burned body, everyone assumed it was Rochester - but him, Jane locked up in the attics because she was pissed off that he lied to her about Bertha. And there she's kept him as a sex slave, except she's never actually, you know, had full-on intercourse with him.

Cue the two con artists, who quickly set the tone by having it off in the carriage on the way to Millcote. They had encountered Grace Poole in London, and got the idea to play the parts of Miss Eyre's cousins St. John and Diana Rivers in order to get some money off the the heiress.

Jane Eyre's Daughter by Elizabeth Newark (1997)

Book review: Jane Eyre's Daughter by Elizabeth Newark (Sourcebooks Casablanca, 2008 [1997])

A passionate young woman of high courage ...

In this sequel to Jane Eyre, young Janet Rochester is consigned to Highcrest Manor and the guardianship of the strict Colonel Dent while her parents journey to the West Indies. As Janet struggles to make a life for herself, guided by the ideals of her parents, she finds herself caught up in the mysteries of Highcrest.

Why is the East Wing forbidden to her? What lies behind locked gates? And what is the source of the voices she hears in hte night? Can she trust the enigmatic Roderick Landless, or should she transfer her allegiance to the suave and charming Sir Hugo Calendar?

Whether riding her mare on the Yorkshire moors, holding her own with Colonel Dent, or waltzing at her first ball, Janet is strong, sympathetic, and corageous.

After all, she is her mother's daughter ...

This is a pretty good book and it has some nice parallels with the original, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. Not to say it's without it's problems.

Doth contain elements of spoilerage.

It starts out with Janet Rochester, the daughter of Jane and Edward. She had read her mother's memoirs (i.e. Jane Eyre), and sure, that works. The name Janet also works. What doesn't work for me is how Jane (Eyre) as a mother cares very little for her daughter, who perhaps looks a bit too much like herself - plain and little. Instead, she dotes on the son, who is the spitting image of his father, leaving Rochester to dote on his daughter. It has "dysfunctional" written all over it. I just can't believe the Jane Charlotte Brontë wrote about would be so callous toward her own offspring as to basically do her best to ignore her. It doesn't sit right with me. Rochester seems more like the father I believe he would be.

If you're detecting a certain hint of reverse Oedipus complex in the Jane/Edward Jr relationship, you'd be right. If you're wondering if there's also a case of Electra complex with regards to Janet and her father - damn straight there is. In fact, the book could just as well be called Jane Eyre's Daughter: The Electra Complex, because in parts, Janet's love for her father gets rather creeptastic and squicky. Did I imagine things or did the author actually allude to Janet getting her own rocks off while thinking of her dad? It was really a case of "wait, did that just say what I think it said? o.O Eww, that is WRONG!" (If anyone reads this who is a fellow member of a certain online roleplaying game and who might therefore be familiar with a couple of my characters and their ... unorthodox relationship: yes, there is definitely a limit to that sort of thing, even for me. :P)

Jane Slayre by Charlotte Brontë and Sherri Browning Erwin (2010)

Jane Slayre by Charlotte Brontë and Sherri Browning Erwin (Pocket Books/Simon & Schuster, 2010)

"Reader, I buried him."

A TIMELESS TALE OF LOVE, DEVOTION . . . AND THE UNDEAD

Jane Slayre, our plucky demon-slaying heroine, a courageous orphan who spurns the detestable vampyre kin who raised her, sets out on the advice of her ghostly uncle to hone her skills as the fearless slayer she's meant to be. When she takes a job as a governess at a country estate, she falls head-over-heels for her new master, Mr. Rochester, only to discover he's hiding a violent werewolf in the attic - in the form of his first wife. Can a menagerie of bloodthirsty, flesh-eating, savage creatures-of-the-night keep a swashbuckling nineteenth-century lady from the gentleman she intends to marry? Vampyres, zombies, and werewolves transform Charlotte Brontë's unforgettable masterpiece into an eerie paranormal adventure that will delight and terrify.

Charlotte Brontë was an English novelist and the author of the literary classic Jane Eyre. She lived from 1816-1855, and as far as we know, hasn't come back from the dead.

Sherri Browning Erwin is the author of historical and contemporary, often paranormal, fiction. She lives in western Massachusetts with her family. Visit her online at www.sherribrowningerwin.com

Zombies are taking over the Baltimore University curriculum, viruses that turn people into zombies are taking over the world of cinema - along with a bunch of Nazi zombies in Norway, there are corporate vampires, freakshow vampires and goddamn sparkly ones too - and werewolves! The 19th century undead butt-kicking begun with Pride & Prejudice and Zombies and continuing on that theme is Jane Slayre, which feature (in chronological order) vampires, zombies and werewolves. Some are critical of this shameless genre mixture, others love it. In fact, the zombie version of Pride & Prejudice is allegedly being turned into a film as we speak. Is it logical to mix genres like this? Surely all us dainty ladies aren't really into seeing blood and gore spurting in a way that would make Braindead look like a picnic? Saw a good explanation to this, to cite the user nineinchsin on IMDb:

Big fans of zombies tend to be geeks...geeks tend to be smart...smart people tend to read classic literature...and bam! Makes perfect sense.

When you put it like that, yes, it does make sense and I'm freely admit my geekdom. (Geekhood? Yeah, one of those.)

Personally, I thoroughly enjoyed Jane Slayre. Sherri Browning Erwin has taken Charlotte Brontë's original text but removed the tedious babble and added undead and modernised the vocabulary a bit (I didn't really notice that, except for a few jarring occasions). I was impressed by how closely the first chapter was to the original book (not to mention how overjoyed I was to have the droning on about Bewick's History of British Birds ditched) and how cleverly she had made the Reed family into vampires, or - as it says throughout the book - vampyres, and had a good giggle at the fact the stiff servant Abbot had been turned into a zombie!

Why Mr. Rochester is NOT a creep

I know the article "Mr. Rochester is a Creep: A List" by Edan Lepucki is just plain linkbait, and that by posting about it here, The Millions is/are (whatever) getting linklove, but I'll ignore that for now. As a "somewhat" obsessive Jane Eyre fan and definite "Team Rochester" member, my temper has been roused and will not be settled will less than a passionate rebuttal.

While the webcomic that the article links to is one I've seen before and used to have as a wallpaper on my computer (although it completely ignores the fact that Anne wrote more than just Tenant), calling two of the finest authors of the English language "deeply weird" is not on! Charlotte and Emily weren't weird. Heathcliff, fine - asshole, psychopath, creepy and duplicitous are all words that can be used to describe him. I can think of a few more to add to the list as well. But Rochester?! (The author hasn't read Wide Sargasso Sea yet - it's going to be like a dream come true. Jean Rhys wasn't exactly "Team Rochester" either.)

I'm impressed at how civil I managed to comment on the blog itself, frankly. But I had no wish to get banned from a blog I had only come across for the first time today! ;) Speaking one's true mind is better left to one's own blog. Which in my case is this one! So let's get to it!