From Cornelia Parker to Ruth Wilson

Last Thursday, April 26, at the National Portrait Gallery, Cornelia Parker gave a talk about her recent exhibition at the Brontë Parsonage Museum: Brontëan Abstracts. The Mummy's Bracelet reviews it on this post:

I liked the series of images of Charlotte Brontë's handwriting, focusing on words deleted from her final draft of 'Jane Eyre', along with their replacement words. Handwriting is interesting anyway, it's so personal and you seem to do it less now, with so much text produced by computer, rather than pen or pencil. The photographs Cornelia Parker took of the deleted words were interesting, because it showed how Charlotte Brontë's mind must have been working while she was putting the finishing touches to her manuscript... why did she replace 'blighted' with 'puny'... it made me want to compare my old paperback version with the Parker images, to see the chunk of text those words came from. Word-processing doesn't give a comparable trace of the thought processes that went before, in any piece of written work. (Read more) (Claire)

The Age reviews the last novel by Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero, and some Wuthering Heights similarities are found:

Those three initial characters - Coop, Claire and the narrator who, as the story opens, tells us she has stopped calling herself Anna - live on an isolated farm near Petaluma, in California.
Anna's mother died giving birth to her. Claire was also orphaned at birth and was left without a family, so Anna's father took both babies home from the hospital and raised them as sisters. Coop is five years older.
His parents, who owned the next farm, were murdered by their own hired hand when he was four. The neighbours took him in, too, raising him as a farm worker.
The three young people's lives are intertwined in that lonely place - there are clear echoes of Heathcliff, Cathy and Nelly in Wuthering Heights - until another biblical act of violence scatters the household overnight. (Stephanie Bunbury)

The Facts reminds how a Brontëite is born:

When I outgrew children’s books, the bookshelves in my family’s living room held a lot of old Reader’s Digest “Stories for Young Readers,” that were perfect for an adolescent.

It was in one of those volumes that I discovered the Bronte family. I remember, at age 13, finishing Emily Bronte’s “Wuthering Heights” on a gray, windy afternoon and wandering broodily outside, my head full of delicious wilderness and melodrama. It was disappointing to find my familiar semi-tropical suburban backyard unchanged. It seemed like I should be wandering across rocks and wild moors, with my hair streaming behind me, possibly wearing a cloak.
After “Wuthering Heights,” I discovered the other Brontes. I read Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre” and later tracked down Anne’s “Agnes Grey” and “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.” (Mary Openshaw)

Ruth Wilson, nominated to Best Actress for the upcoming BAFTA TV Awards for her role as Jane Eyre in the recent BBC production, tells Metro her strategy to be a winner:

Bafta nominee Ruth Wilson has thought of a novel way to approach the forthcoming ceremony - she says she plans to put bets on the other nominees in her category - so she's "always a winner"

Categories: Art-Exhibitions, Books, Brontëites, In the News, Jane Eyre, References, Talks