Literary Tourists

Richard Wilcocks posts in The Brontë Parsonage Blog about last Sunday's Brontë Society May Walk. Check the post for some very interesting pictures as the one on the right (Inside Tunstall Church - ladder to porch room):

A couple of dozen walkers, including several children, walked to the 13th century Tunstall Church (the Brocklebridge church of Jane Eyre) from the cottages which are the remains of the original Clergy Daughters School and returned by way of Leck Church, retracing the footsteps of the young girls who were pupils about 180 years ago.

Tunstall Church was attended by the girls even though it is a far greater distance away from the school than Leck Church, which was then little more than a chapel. The little room in the church tower where the girls ate lunch after climbing up some steps (now replaced by a ladder) is still there.

Several walkers climbed into this room, now a dusty repository for church bric-a-brac. About a dozen small girls would have been able to sit in it, at a guess. A couple of small girls from 2007 looked out of the window, shuddered at the spiders’ nests in the corners and remarked that this was not a good place to eat. (Read more)

More blog entries. Ask the Brontë Sisters posts a very funny article that we encourage you to read,

Meli at The Little Book Room has tagged the Sistahs for the Eight Things meme.

We liked specially this bit:

3) Anne’s dying words were ‘Take courage, Charlotte.’ (I often think that Anne has been badly underrated.) (Pavlov's Cat)

Our almost daily selection of blogosphere reviews highlights today this one on Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights and Kristie's review of Jane Eyre 2006. Art Passion continues with her Brontë frenzy with new brief posts, in French, about Charlotte and Emily Brontë.

Finally, an interesting vindication. Author Susan Hill advocates in her blog for a paperback, and more accessible, edition of Nicola Watson's The Literary Tourist (more information about the book on this old post of ours):

After reading it they would be likely to read more of the Brontes, Scott, Hardy, Wordsworth – and Lewis Carroll, Philip Pullman and Harry Potter for that matter. They might well go on to visit Haworth, Abbotsford, Dove Cottage, Oxford and Platform 9 and a half on King`s Cross Station. I enjoyed it so much and found it so full of information and original thought that I plan to write about it in more than one post.
I know that in one sense it is an ‘academic’ book. Nicola Watson is a Senior Lecturer in Literature at the Open University. It has full, scholarly notes – though not as invasive and irritating footnotes, thank goodness – and an index. The Introduction in particular is a little too loaded with modern academic jargon. Nevertheless, it is not an academic book in the sense of being so learned and abstruse that only half a dozen of Ms Watson`s colleagues would be likely to understand it. The subject is a far more popular one than that.
But in their wisdom the publishers have not only made it look more like a scholarly book than a popular one which is a pity – but worse they have the nerve to charge £45 for it. Yes, you heard me correctly.
Even libraries – which do not buy many new books now anyway – are not going to order this for you.
I tell you what. I challenge Palgrave to hand THE LITERARY TOURIST over to their general division, Macmillan. I then challenge Macmillan to issue another edition – for the general interested reader, with a new, more lively jacket and as a paperback, to cost no more than £10. It still would not (probably) make Richard and Judy but it would definitely reach the parts that a £45 academic book will not reach.
And if Macmillan won`t do it, with my publisher`s hat on, I will.

Categories: Books, Brontëana, Brontë Society, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, Wuthering Heights