Fascinating Brontës

The Sidney Morning Herald publishes about literary tourism in Great Britain and a Brontë reference turns up in the middle of some Colin Firth/Darcy madness:

You would have journeyed to Haworth to tramp the Yorkshire moors like a latter-day Bronte, and you would have visited Lyme Park and gazed at the pond, perhaps hoping for the sexy emergence of your very own Colin Firth. I had always thought that was just me, but it turns out it's not. (Jacqueline Maley)

The Christian Science Monitor reviews Maureen Adams' Shaggy Muses (check our own review):

Adams might have simply told the stories of these women and their dogs; instead, she cannot resist diagnosing them. In terms so modern that they feel grafted on, Adams draws broad conclusions about childhood trauma, attachment disorders, and other difficulties she thinks these women faced. She sizes up Barrett Browning's early illness as a possible eating disorder and suggests that Brontë, who lost her mother as a toddler, spent her life searching for a surrogate. (...)

Much more interesting are the charming details sprinkled through the book. (...)Neighbors afraid of Brontë's mastiff, Keeper, listened for "the dog's odd breathing, a wheezing whistle ... an injury from one of his fierce brawls with the local dogs."

What's missing as a result of the book's narrow focus is the rewarding complexity of these women's other relationships, as if those with their dogs were the most revealing. (...)
[I]s it not possible that, rather than running through the English moors with her dog to "experience vicarious pleasure from Keeper's freedom," the notoriously misanthropic Emily Brontë simply preferred nature to strangers?

Adams does best what she does least: showing, not telling. In a book that implies one's only choice is between apathy toward animals or an unbalanced dependence on them, I am content to be like Charlotte Brontë, a secondary character in her sister's story here, who misspells dogs' names, forgets their sex, and refers to them individually with the callously indifferent pronoun "it." (Jina Moore and Marjorie Kehe)

The Lansing State Journal informs of yet another theatrical adaptation of Jane Eyre for next year:

-- "Jane Eyre" (March 21-30, Lansing Community College), adapting the Charlotte Bronte novel.
Tickets are at the box offices of BoarsHead (484-7805), Riverwalk (482-5700) or LCC (372-0945). (...)
Chad Badgero, who will direct "Jane Eyre," said the ethics involve Mr. Rochester's secret - and Jane's choices, once she learns. "She struggles with it. It's a real dilemma." (Mike Hughes)

And Tonight.co.za informs of performances of The Mystery of Irma Vep in Durban, South Africa.

Bits of News finds similarities between Max Ophüls's masterpiece Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948) and Jane Eyre:

There is something Jane Eyreish in both Fontaine's character and Jourdain's pianist- he is Rotchester (sic) to her Eyre, crushing her with his charisma. The degree to which he has power over her is revealed when he asks her not to leave, and he responds that she will not be the one who leaves him. (Henry Midgley)

As much as we like Max Ophüls film we can't see this parallel. Jane is precisely a character which is defined by not being crushed by anybody. Not even by Rochester's charisma.

In a Strange Land posts a very interesting review of Villette:

And that is where Charlotte Bronte makes a stunning move, anticipating the dual ends of The French Lieutenant’s Woman by over a century. She does not tell us whether her heroine’s fiance comes home. She leaves it to the reader to decide what the ending of the novel will be. (...)
Charlotte Bronte’s challenge is more subtle. She invites us to read the book, understand its themes, and then work out what the likely ending is. Do we think that out of the storm will come hope, or will it be another loss for Lucy? And if we prefer one ending to the other, do we dare to override the author’s will, and impose it on the narrative?
I found Villette to be a fascinating book, both engaging, and disturbing. It amply repaid the effort put into reading it. (Deborah)

Carmen María Camacho Adarve's blog publishes a beautiful poem by Patricia Díaz Bialet (in Spanish) devoted to Emily Brontë, included in Los despojos del diluvio (1990).

Finally, we highlight today this post in Latvian about Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

Categories: Books, Emily Brontë, Haworth, Jane Eyre, Poetry, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Villette, Wuthering Heights