"Two other friends (...) and myself agreed to write each a story founded on some supernatural occurr

[selenak]

Allow me to geek out for a moment: Byron's copy of 'Frankenstein' with a handwritten dedication by Mary Shelley goes on sale at an auction! Haunted summer! One of the more creative laudanum-drenched get togethers of English writers while touring Switzerland! (Also a bad Highlander episode, but forget that one.) (The Ken Russell movie Gothic,

Comments

[littlepunkryo]

These two meta links have made me want to consider reading the book. I've only seen the Tom Hardy adaptation, which did have Hareton in it but I don't think to the degree you talked about in your post. I didn't want to read it because I knew a little bit about it but had always heard that it was a romantic but fucked up and I wasn't interested in reading a book about that. When I watched the adaptation I was baffled as to why you'd describe it as "romantic" at all because it was a great depiction of a horribly toxic relationships mess people up and how abuse cycles get started and all of these other things that didn't have much to do with "romance" at all, even if technically people in it were supposedly in love.

[selenak]

It's Romantic with a big R but not in the sense most people use the word today; in terms of literary style, where it actually has more in common with the generation that preceded Emily Bronte than with her fellow Victorians. (Think of scenes like Cathy telling Nelly Dean she dreamt of being in Heaven, hating it and crying. Because you don't belong there, you have to become a better person first, says Nelly. No, Cathy replies, because heaven is not my home, and then the angels threw me out and I was back on earth, in the heath and sobbed with joy. This is Romantic in the sense that Shelley and Byron were (cue "Thou, West Wind etc.") but has nothing to do with boy loves girl, obstacles are overcome, girl gets boy.)

I haven't seen the Tom Hardy adaption, but I've seen several, and wasn't really content with any of them, not least because, as boot_the_grime says elsewhere, a lot of key scenes take place when Heathcliff and Cathy are children or in their very early puberty (12, 13) and the films try to solve the dilemma of having to use different

[cmattg]

I can never think about that get-together without thinking of Tim Powers' version in The Stress of Her Regard.

[selenak]

Oh, I liked that one, too!

[itsnotmymind]

I haven't read Jane Eyre--I saw part of a movie version years ago, and don't remember much except that I found the scenes where she is in the orphanage rage-inducing, and the portrayal of Rochester's wife to be confusing--before the viewers saw her, there was mad laughing heard off screen, but when she actually appeared, she never laughed. Wuthering Heights I have read, and quite enjoyed. And I think this meta links help to explain why--all the characters get to have their own perspectives, and portrays a complicated and twisted situation without giving any one character excessive sympathy.

[selenak]

The school scenes in Jane Eyre are fantastic in that rage inducing way, not least because they're quite autobiographical. Charlotte B.s two older sisters died in that school, and the headmaster, going by the pamphlets of child education he wrote, was just that type of sadistic Victorian hypocrite. Nonetheless his widow had a fiery argument in letters to newspapers with Charlotte's widower when The Life of Charlotte Bronte was published, naming for the first time Cowan Bridge as the original of the school in Jane Eyre.

JE the book is very much worth reading, not just the the Charlotte-vents-her-rage-and-grief childhood scenes, but also for Jane herself, who is a wonderful character. But it does have its problems for me, which the meta names.