An unlikely marriage between The Terminator and the Brontë sisters

The Telegraph & Argus has a short notice concerning a Wild Workshop that will take place at the Brontë Parsonage Museum next August 31st.

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The Wild Workshop, which will run from 10am to noon and from 1.30pm to 3.30pm, costs £4.25 and will be open to children aged five to 11.
The workshop will also include finger puppet making. Booking is essential.
For more information contact Sue on (01535) 640185 or e-mail sue.newby@bronte.org.uk. (Clive White)

If you have children and are in the area, don't miss it!

Kathrynlinge interviews Sean McMullen in her blog.

1. Your new book, 'Before the Storm', has been described in review as 'an unlikely marriage between The Terminator and the Bronte sisters'. Do you think this is an apt description and, if so, how did you come up with the book's concept? (If not, how would you describe it?)
Believe it or not, I was not thinking Terminator when I wrote Before the Storm. I was in the air, in a United Airlines plane when the S11 attacks took place, so I am a bit sensitive on the subject of terrorism at the best of times. When I got back to Australia, I began to wonder if an attack that killed two or three thousand people could happen in Australia, then I recalled that a crowd of that size had been in the Exhibition Buildings in May 1901 for the opening of Australia's first parliament. A bombing at such an event could well have changed the entire course of the Twentieth Century if it got the British Empire fighting another major power. World War 1 was triggered by a single assassination, after all. Then I got the idea for a couple of elite cadets from a hyper-militaristic British Empire of the future coming back through time to prevent the bombing. These are BC and Fox, but they are closer to Jason Bourne than a Terminator. Muriel is way too sexy to be one of the Bronte sisters, while Emily has about as much drive as Margaret Thatcher, and not really a Bronte either. While the review quote is a brilliant one-liner, it is not entirely accurate. Like all time travel stories, the book is also about a clash of cultures, in this case 1901 Australia and the 2001 alternate-history British Empire. One reader compared it to Terry Pratchett's Only You Can Save Mankind, and that is probably a good summary of the overall style: serious issues with funny writing.

It does sound like an unlikely - though not impossible - combination.

More creative people out there. Courrieres has published a poem in tribute to Charlotte Brontë in French. It combines fact with fiction. Moonlight Mile has uploaded a bunch of Wuthering Heights 1939 icons to the livejournal community Notley Abbey.

A couple of blogs include Anne Brontë today. Henk Grasduint publishes - in Dutch - the second and third installments of his posts on the youngest Brontë sister. We are 'surprised', however, to find a picture of Jane Austen illustrating the second part. And Wish for Beauty, posing as Anne Brontë, writes an unlikely letter to Branwell which mentions a boy in Anne's bedroom who calles her a 'minx'!

Several adaptations of Jane Eyre are reviewed in Padlocked, albeit in Chinese.

Categories: Anne Brontë, Books, Brontë Parsonage Museum, Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, Websites, Wuthering Heights