More on Textmessaging and the Brontes

From the New York Times Sunday Book Review:

They lived happily ever after, and maybe things would have been easier for Emily Brontë too. You can see her, can’t you, mischievously texting her older sister across the garden at Haworth; scholars guess that, many years after Emily’s tragic early death, her sister Charlotte was raising a literary memorial in the text-messaging lingo that plays so crucial a role in “Jane Eyre” (“Hlp! Im in the attc!”).

O.K. Maybe not. I first read “Wuthering Heights” in ninth grade and loathed it; I would have been glad for a hundred pages less of the stuff. Lately I’ve come around — not only to Emily’s queer, savage novel, but also to the realization that cellphones, while they might have their uses in what we are pleased to call “real life” (though I’m still to come to a final verdict on that), are nothing but an albatross around the neck of any writer who wants to tell a story.

Yes, I can see how cellphones would have obliterated Western Literature! Jane would return from the Morton Schoolroom and find her cell phone full of calls and messages from E.Rochester, Cathy would have fired off a message to Heathcliff preventing him from running off before she could marry Edgar Linton.

Related post: Jane Eyre in textspeakOMG! (Do you think me handsome? No sir. LOL OMG WTF?).