Penzance and books, books and more books

Since many people like to go away from the crazy 'routine' of the holiday season, this article brings to mind what sounds like a fabulous retreat:

By the time we got to Penzance there was horizontal rain and driving winds, reminding me of childhood holidays in nearby Hale (ironic name, I've always thought). We struggled up the hill near the church to find our B&B and, once brains had been engaged and we'd worked out how to get in the door, met Curnow - our host for the weekend.
Suddenly we went from troubled travellers, tired after our trip, to welcome guests in the home of one of the friendliest men I have ever met. The place was warm, dry, spacious, value for money and used to be the house of the mother of the Bronte sisters prior to her moving to Howarth. What more could one want from a holiday location? (Tim Fitzpatrick on Sportnetwork)

Once again: it's HAWORTH, no Howarth, Howard, Hayworth or any other name. H-A-W-O-R-T-H.

But ovelooking that, about a year ago we posted about the Penzance home of Maria and Elizabeth Branwell. But if your means are more limited, then you can also simply read the book The Penzance Home of Maria Branwell Mother of the Brontes by Esther & Kerrow Hill. (Once again, Elizabeth Branwell, who lived there as well as is a key figure in the Brontë story is left out).

The Times Literary Supplement reviews the recently published The Virago Book of Ghost Stories.

Richard Dalby has edited two successful anthologies of ghost stories for Virago, drawn from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has now compiled and edited The Virago Book of Ghost Stories, a selection of thirty from his earlier collections, ranging in period from Charlotte Brontë’s exuberant and absurd “Napoleon and the Spectre” (“Mon Dieu!” exclaims the Emperor, “what do I see? Spectre, whence cometh thou?”), written when she was seventeen, to late-twentieth-century tales from Angela Carter, A. S. Byatt and Joan Aiken.

The reviewer - Dinah Birch - goes on to review Elizabeth Gaskell's story at length, with mentions to the Brontës in between.

She [Elizabeth Gaskell] had also learned from the colder landscapes of the Brontës, whose children perpetually haunt and are haunted, standing at windows which open onto another world. “The Old Nurse’s Story” turns on the vision of a lonely child sobbing to be allowed into the house. “I saw a little girl . . . dressed all unfit to be out-of-doors on such a bitter night – crying, and beating against the window-panes, as if she wanted to be let in.” This recalls Emily Brontë’s phantom Cathy, tapping at the distraught Lockwood’s window in Wuthering Heights. The pathos of the child who can never come home is one of the most compelling ways in which ghost stories connect writers and readers with loss. The ghostly Cathy is in part a memory of Emily Brontë’s sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, who had died as children. Elizabeth Gaskell’s son did not survive infancy, a sorrow which first prompted her to write fiction.

Even though book formats are irreplaceable, you an read both stories online. Here's Charlotte Brontë's Napoleon and the Spectre and here's Elizabeth Gaskell's The Old Nurse's Story.

The Salt Lake Tribune has an article on toys and the holiday season and a moving fragment of Jane Eyre turns up:

I've been reading "Jane Eyre" to Julia recently, and I was struck by this passage in which Jane, looking back on her 10-year-old self, describes her intense attachment to a battered doll. "Human beings must love something, and, in the dearth of worthier objects of affection, I contrived to find a pleasure in loving and cherishing a faded graven image, shabby as a miniature scarecrow. It puzzles me now to remember with what absurd sincerity I doted on this wooden toy, half fancying it alive and capable of sensation."
Jane got more pleasure from this doll than Julia did from the must-have gift of a few years back, her $87 American Girl doll. (Julia chose Kit, a child of the Depression, during which, as my father, another child of the Depression, pointed out, no one could have imagined forking over that kind of money for a doll.) (Ruth Marcus)

And finally, a blog called dovegreyreader scribbles has a post about the local book club, Endsleigh Salon, and their current reads:

This session was Prequels and Sequels with about 8 of us tackling Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys because the recent TV adaptation of Jane Eyre had prompted us in that direction.
This was a first time read for me and a book that feels so profound I may need to read it several times before I start to appreciate all the significance. But I enjoyed it immensely so it will be no chore to revisit it.We had a great discussion and included some thoughts about the significance of the title, that alone could have kept us going all evening.It has more and more meaning the deeper you look.There was a wide selection of other books too, the whole point is to read what you want not what you think you should or what anyone else is reading if you don't fancy it.

There is, of course, an adaptation of Wide Sargasso Sea as recent as the new Jane Eyre.

But given the topic, the interest doesn't end there:

One of our gentlemen had chosen Emma Brown by Clare Boylan and that one is now making its loan journey around the group. Clare Boylan took the first and only two chapters of an unfinished work by Charlotte Bronte and carved a novel out of it. Clare Boylan signed my copy so I don't like to open it, daft, I'll give it a go soon.

And we suggest you read the comments - and even leave one yourself - since the discussion goes on there.

Categories: Books, Brontëana, Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea, Sequels