Enigmatic Brontë.

It seems that our wishes about Anne have been listened to. IcLiverpool carries an article about the youngest of the Brontës. The excuse is, of course, the performances of Polly Teale's play "Brontë" for the touring theatre company, Shared Experience (the play arrives at the Liverpool Playhouse on Tuesday).

Anne's two contributions, Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, have their admirers but Anne herself remains a shadowy figure.
Catherine Cusack, youngest of the Cusack acting dynasty, decided to do her homework on Anne. "We are all very loyal to our own particular 'sister'," she says..
"There is not much evidence about Anne although she is always spoken of as being sweet and shy. The play is set in the family parsonage where in their own company they can let their hair down a bit, but out in the world she would have been shy."
In the play, she is presented as the sister with the least ambition. "She was trying to be socially responsible when writing, wanting to change injustices that prevailed, especially concerning women and marriage."
The play, she reports, jumps around in time but is set when Anne and Branwell returned home from the York household where she had been working as a governess and he had a teaching job.
The two left when Branwell was discovered to be having an affair with the mistress of the house.
The cast, which includes Fenella Woolgar as Charlotte and Diane Beck as Emily, all did their bits of research - Catherine tackled the industrial revolution - and they all visited the parsonage at Haworth.
When the drama was shown in York, Catherine also visited York Minster, a building Anne had visited on her way to Scarborough to die.

Categories: In_the_News, Theatre