THE LAST SONG

Based on Nicholas Sparks' best-selling novel, The Last Song is set in a small Southern beach town where a separated father gets a chance to spend the summer with his unenthusiastic teenage daughter, who would rather be at home in New York. He tries to reconnect with her through the only thing they have in common,  music.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, EMILY BRONTË!

Emily Brontë was born on 30th July 1818, the 5th child of the Reverend Patrick Brontë, a stern Evangelical curate, and his wife Maria. When Emily was three years old, her mother died of cancer, and her Aunt Branwell, a strict Calvinist, moved in to help raise the six children (another daughter, Anne, was born soon after Emily). They lived in a parsonage in Haworth with the bleak moors of Yorkshire on one side and the parish graveyard on the other. 
Continue reading  here.

“My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Healthcliff! He's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.” 
Emily Brontë, "Wuthering Heights"

HOMOPHONES AND HOMONYMS

ENGLISH VOCABULARY TRAINING

Here you can find tons of exercises to help you learn English words and expressions. 

http://www.learnenglish.de/vocabpage.html

http://learnersdictionary.com/3000-words

http://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/en/grammar-and-vocabulary

REVISING THE FUTURE

REVISING JANE EYRE

Jane Eyre was Charlotte Brontë’s second novel, but the first to be published. The first, The Professor, was rejected several times  by the publishers and was published posthumously. Jane Eyre, on the other hand, was accepted at once, favourably reviewed and recognised as something new in English fiction  -  it used traditional conventions in a very personal way. The strong autobiographical element is what typifies all her work and this novel in particular. In fact, Charlotte Brontë’s  fiction is best understood in the light of her personal background, as it is essentially  the expression of her passionate  temper and the imaginary world  in which  she lived.  The first-person  narrator, who in 18^th-century fiction was used to add the realism of narration, is used by Charlotte Brontë  to convey  personal feelings  in order that the narrator becomes directly identified with the author. This accounts  for the emotional use of language and reveals the strength of Charlotte Brontë’s feelings and her interest in the nature  of human relationships. She also employed Gothic conventions in a personal way, not just for the sake of arousing  a sense  of horror, but as a means of evoking feelings. The handling of nature  serves the same purpose.  The emotional use of  language, the symbolic handling of nature and the projection of personal feelings are features typical of Romantic poetry, but they appear  for the first time in serious  fiction  in the novels of  Charlotte Brontë. The Romantic aspect is also evident in the male protagonist of Jane Eyre  -  Rochester is a typical Byronic hero. Despite his stern manner and not particularly handsome appearance, he is very attractive to women, but restless and moody and with something mysterious about his past. 

You can read The Guardian review here.
Here you can read the novel.

https://webtv.loescher.it/home/zoomPublic?contentId=1682921

"Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags."

Charlotte Brontë

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH!

Happy birthday to Benedict Cumberbatch, who turns 40 today.  Read here.

COMMEMORATING JANE AUSTEN

Jane Austen died on 18 July 1817, after a long illness. She spent the last weeks of her life in Winchester and is buried in the cathedral there.

Here you can read a lovely post about a visit to Jane Austen's House Museum in Chawton, Hampshire … unfortunately I still haven’t had the chance of going there!  Maybe some day …

Here you can find another interesting post about Jane Austen in Winchester.

JULY

"To see the Summer Sky

Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie  -

True Poems flee"

Emily Dickinson