Film: Shadowlands

Shadowlands: This film is directed by Richard Attenborough, (who has also acted in, Directed, and Produced dozens of great movies including "Elizabeth", "David Copperfield", "A Bridge Too Far", "Gandhi", and "Cry Freedom"). The screenplay is written by William Nicholson (who also wrote "Gladiator" and "Nell").

Shadowlands is a (slightly fictionalised) movie about author C. S. (Clive Staples) Lewis and his marriage to Joy Gresham. He meets her after he has written his Narnia chronicles and while still teaching at Oxford. She's an American fan who comes to visit him, her son in tow. It's really a fabulous story and the cinematography of the film has that Attenborough stamp of grand atmosphere, and Anthony Hopkins does a stellar performance as "Jack" Lewis. But the best thing about the whole movie is that line…

       "We read to know that we’re not alone".

Author: Jean Rhys

Wide Sargasso Sea (published 1966) In the film, Antoinette Cosway is the Brontëan Jane Eyre (pub. 1847) mad-woman in the attic. The wonderful interpretation and adaptation to the screen was produced in 1993, though sadly the acclaim came too late to fully honour Jean Rhys' (1890-1979) effort. Her novel of the same name, a 'prequel' to Charlotte Brontë's novel was first published in 1966. It earned her the WH Smith Literary Award in 1967. Rhys herself led a difficult life, as described in a new biography of her: The Blue Hour: A Portrait of Jean Rhys, By Lilian Pizzichini.

"Alcoholic, often destitute, and abandoned by a series of men, Jean Rhys led a tortured life,...."

Author: Azar Nafisi

Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003) by Azar Nafisi. An interesting history of Iran and a memoir of sorts about the impact of western literature in a Muslim country. It opens "In the fall of 1995, after resigning from my last academic post, I decided to indulge myself and fulfill a dream."

Nafisi has taught at universities in Iran, was a journalist in the United States and is visiting professor at Johns Hopkins University. She also wrote a critical study of Vladimir Nabokov's works, Anti-Terra (1994).
Whilst describing the everyday life issues (of women in Iran) under oppression and censure, she includes biographical insight into Nabokov and his experience during the Russian Revolution when he started writing and later and how it affected his outlook on life. Nafisi and her students can personally relate to him, he seems to have embodied the hopes and dreams of these Iranian girls who clandestinely gather weekly to study literature. She also discusses works by Henry James, Jane Austen, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.