A memorial and a web of mindgames

In the news today:

The Edinburgh Evening News reports that a permanent memorial to Dame Muriel Spark is to be created in Edinburgh:

The memorial stone in Makar's Court, just off the Royal Mile, is seen as a suitably "dignified" tribute to the Edinburgh-born writer, who died in April last year. The simple stone slab will feature either a quotation from one of Dame Muriel's novels or her autobiography.
At the Makar's Court, she will take her place alongside Rabbie Burns, Robert Louis Stevenson and Sir Walter Scott, who are also celebrated with inscriptions outside the city's Writers' Museum.(...)
The Muriel Spark Society has been planning a tribute to the author ever since her death, but has struggled to find funds.
But now, following a "generous donation" from an anonymous donor, the plans can go ahead. (Gemma Fraser)

Among the quotes proposed, there's one from her biography on Emily Brontë:

• "All great genius attracts legend to itself" - from Emily Bronte: Her Life and Works

The Financial Times reviews Stella Vine's exhibit in Oxford. Aptly enough, considering her portrait of the Brontës, the article begins with a Brontë mention:

Among world-class female writers, woman as victim has always been a big theme: Jane Austen's Persuasion, the Brontës, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Sylvia Plath. There is nothing comparable in painting (...) (Jackie Wullschlager)

Let's go to the blogosphere now. Let's begin - ahem - by ourselves. An anonymous reader has left a comment with the following evocative description of the dance piece Art of Memory, performed in New York by the So.Go.No Company that we presented some days ago:

The Bronte connection was a web of mindgames literally blown in on the wind from the moors. Each segment of the play had tenuous relations to each other always hovering on the edges of illusion and dreams. The Bronte element was powerful (no surprise there) and served as a link both literary and emotional to books and the essence of creation. The sisters whispered in furtive tones as if pursued by the Furies. Although separate entities, they combined to assume both an Emily persona and, subsequently, one of the inhabitants of the Heights. The Bronte connection was what drew me to the production and the densely textured flights of fantasy and creation were what kept me there. The site of the perfomance added to the hypnotic allure... St. Mark's Church in the East Village of New York City. Flanked by a churchyard with markers dating back to the 1700s, the church provided the perfect setting for such an unusual gem.

Lydie posts in TravelPod about the recent Wuthering Heights performances in York. Belluccia devotes a lengthy article, in Italian, to Cime Tempestose (Wuthering Heights), with some brief biographical details not only on Emily Brontë but the whole family. Palavras Perpétuas also discusses Wuthering Heights, this time in Portuguese. The Further Adventures of DeLuzy posts about Agnes Grey. Her Brontë phase is long from being exhausted as she now envisages reading Lucasta Miller's The Brontë Myth. Finally, a curious and interesting post: GPB Cover to Cover posts about his own name: St. John.

Categories: Agnes Grey, Dance, In the News, Theatre, Wuthering Heights