Kimberly writes: I long to blog more here at Georgiana Circle. Time and other blogging responsibilities get in the way.
I am still exploring Jane Eyre. Which, I feel somewhat guilty about. I enjoyed promoting Georgiana of Devonshire as a real-life, woman political figure. Though, I suppose someone should promote Charlotte Bronte, real-life woman author.
Anyway, for the Jane Austen fans among us, and the Jane Eyre fans, too, I stumbled upon a very interesting comedienne. She does a whole shtick about 19th century literature. Then, she sends the audience away with WWJED bracelets. (What Would Jane Eyre Do?) Now, that is cool. (Though, while I like Jane Eyre, I am not sure I would follow her lead. I think several times, she should have forgotten about the patriarch, handsome as he was, and set up a co-op business with one of the other women from the story.)
(excerpt from) Spoonfed UK
We Need to Talk Bonnets with Grainne Maguire
September 1, 2009
There is a slight air of desperation in the small Camden Head theatre. Desperation of various Bennet sisters looking for a suitable husband, desperation of the Brontes trying to make a living by their pen while keeping their anonymity and the more immediate desperation of comedian Grainne Maguire who has realised that the ten-person audience won’t be growing and it’s time to start the show.
We Need to Talk Bonnets is a comic monologue in which Maguire converts her obsession with 19th century literature and happy endings into a lens through which to view the real, and often much less happy, world. Tonight I am a sizable percentage of the lit geek audience that has come to Camden to hear Maguire’s performance running for three nights as part of the Camden Fringe.The tiny crowd certainly fits the English studies profile: be-spectacled young women with serious looking men (or perhaps they’re just looking nervous someone is about to force them into a top hat)…
We are ushered out of the Camden Head with a WWJED bracelet (that’s ‘what would Jane Eyre do,’ of course) and the advice that, despite the fact we can’t choose the plot of the story of our own life, we can decide what genre it’s in.
Grainne Maguire is the definition of a niche comedian and her audience will always be limited to 19th century literature fanatics who attend fringe comedy shows. That said, for that audience, her show will resonate with the hope that our love of literature isn’t in vain and we all have a happy ending ahead – or at least a weighty moral to our story and a place in the national canon…
this is awsome