The curse of Charlotte Brontë

The Telegraph and Argus continues with the topic they introduced a few days ago, when the Brontë Parsonage Museum received an Esmée Fairbairn Foundation grant for its Contemporary Arts Programme.

The Brontë shrine is to employ its first person dedicated to championing the museum as a centre for contemporary arts.
The job will be to reveal how the Brontë sisters and the wider story of their family, is an inspiration to 21st century writers and artists.
And to help fund the three-year post, the Brontë Parsonage Museum at Haworth has won a grant from the Esmee Fairburn Foundation.
Brontë Parsonage Museum manager Alan Bentley, said: "The grant has given a significant boost to the groundbreaking work to establish the Parsonage not just as a heritage museum but as a place of excellence for contemporary arts."
The arts programme has been in operation since 2005 and had attracted internationally renowned artists and poets like Cornelia Parker, the poet laureate, Andrew Motion and Paula Rego.
The programme of events for 2007-2008 has already been drawn up and includes Amanda Dalton, who will act as poet in residence to mark National Poetry Day, which will be celebrated at the Parsonage tomorrow.
Best selling author Margaret Drabble, who has written about how landscape has influenced writers like the Brontës, will come to Haworth on Wednesday, November 28.
She will be reading her work and discussing the influence of the Brontes.
Joining her will be poetry award winner Wendy Cope who will be discussing her Whitbread poetry award poem If I Don't Know."
Novelist and prize winning writer, Tamar Yellin, who lives in Stanbury, will speak about being a jew in Bronteland, on Wednesday October 17. (Clive White)

As BrontëBlog readers know perfectly well, the Brontës are alive and well in the 21st century, so this new post at the Parsonage will be a very interesting one, we are sure.

The Daily Mail echoes the news about the mother who intends to burn books (at the Bad Books Bonfire) simply because she doesn't like unhappy endings for children in books such as Villette (which actually lets the reader pick up their favourite ending) or Wide Sargasso Sea. Fortunately, we hear some sense from other quarters.

Last night critics of the group said children needed a healthy balance in their reading. Others said the book burnings were a sinister reminder of similar events in Nazi Germany.
But children's charity Kidscape condemned a campaign which would lead to young people 'missing out on the magic of literature'.
Director Michele Elliott said: "There is a distance between you and a book which allows you to experience emotions and think about what's happening - but it's not happening to you. That's incredibly healthy.
"There has to be a balance. I would not feed children a complete diet of morbid books."
Award-winning children's author Kevin Brooks, whose books have a reputation for emotional rollercoasters and disturbing cliffhangers, said the proposed burnings were reminiscent of the Nazi regime.
"Controversy and bad stuff is everywhere," he said. "It is far better to find out about it in books where it is written with some feeling and poetry and power." (Andrew Levy)

The book burning in Don Quixote didn't burn his imagination, if anything it fuelled it even more. We hope these children - and their mothers - will eventually enjoy books in general, not just shiny, happy books.

What with Becoming Jane opening, many websites feel the need to remind us - once again - of Charlotte's dislike of Jane Austen's prose. St Louis Today does so anyway.

Jane Austen was a provincial Englishwoman who wrote six novels about courtship and class before dying unmarried in 1817 at the age of 41. She was an astute observer of social customs, but subsequent writers who considered Austen's work to be mannered and lifeless included Charlotte Bronte, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Mark Twain.
Yet these days, Austen probably outsells them all, in part because her books have been adapted into countless movies. She also was the subject of a recent biopic, "Becoming Jane," which suggested that her star-crossed life was the inspiration for her fiction. (Joe Williams)

You would think rather than a mere opinion, what Charlotte wrote was a curse, vowing she would sell more books than Jane Austen ever after. We leave the 'inspiration for her fiction' bit to the experts, who kindly explain that that's simply not true.

The Austin Chronicle aptly introduces a tiny tidbit on the upcoming Brontë movie in a review of Becoming Jane.

Dog breeder Jocelyn (Bello, who’s marvelously earthy here) is oblivious to the throbbing passions of biofueling book-clubber and sci-fi nerd Grigg (Dancy, reportedly next appearing in Brontë) while fretting about her recently abandoned friend (Brenneman). (Marrit Ingman)

Hugh Dancy will supposedly play George Smith. Variety also echoes the news in the cast in an article on Icon Entertainment International.

Icon’s theatrical slate includes “Push,” starring Chris Evans, Dakota Fanning and Djimon Hounsou, “The Stanford Prison Experiment,” directed by Christopher McQuarrie, and “Bronte,” starring Rebecca Hall, Natalie Press and Evan Rachel-Wood. (Archie Thomas)

We hear today of a book that includes Brontë references. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has an article on Rudolph Delson's debut novel Maynard & Jennica.

Then there is Jennica, a transplanted Californian who loves Manhattan but has little luck in employment or romance. She is a relentless self-analyzer, yet also a perennial romantic, always hoping for the lucky fate that has proved so elusive in the past.
As she says, "I don't think my life is as sad as, like, 'Wuthering Heights' or 'Love in the Time of Cholera,' or Dave Eggers, or whatever. But I am the only person I know who is practically 30 years old but who has never had a relationship last more than a year. Obviously I am doing something wrong. That, or I am unlovable." (John Marshall)

Also Past the Popcorn chats with Daniel Housman about the movie he's adapted, The Treatment, and we find out there's a reference to Wuthering Heights in it as well.

I really tried in the school-teaching scenes to show his soul, and those are my writing—they don’t exist in the book at all.
Oh, really?
DH: No, he’s not depicted actually teaching at all in the book. And when we first started to adapt it, that was the first thing I said: “That’s how we’re going to relate to this man: as we see him with kids.” And there’s another scene that didn’t make the cut—and is available on the DVD—that was meant to go first. There was meant to be a little bit of an arc seen in how he interacts with the kids, identifying with the protagonists in the books that he’s teaching. In the first scene, that was cut, he’s teaching Wuthering Heights; he’s identifying with Heathcliff, the romantic, doomed, self-pitying hero. And he’s giving one of the students a really hard time, almost like his therapist, Morales, does with him. And he’s giving this stuff to the kids: “You cannot be a fully-grown child.” And in the second scene, he’s teaching Chekhov, and there’s this beautiful poetry in Chekhov, and all this sympathy for these very flawed characters that don’t always fit in with our modern view—and he’s telling the kids to back up and give these characters some room with their flaws. And finally, looking at The Stranger, and about taking responsibility and existentialism—and he’s connecting with the students the most. So one of those scenes is missing in the end, but that’s where I was trying to reveal his personal arc. (Greg Wright)

The Lancaster UAF blog has a post on Terry Eagleton, author of Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontës.

A couple of blogs review Wuthering Heights: Women of the 19th Century and Book Quickies. The Writer's Home also mentions Charlotte's opinion on Jane Austen's work, same as above. And Left of Cyber-Center writes about I Walked with a Zombie.

Finally, The Times has published the Top Ten British and American Classic Books, an extract from The Book Club Bible, Michael O’Mara Books.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (you may be interested to read Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, which is something of a 'prequel' to Jane Eyre)

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte (you may be interested to read Here on Earth by Alice Hoffman, who was inspired by the themes of Wuthering Heights)

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

Walden by Henry David Thoreau

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

Categories: Books, Brontë Parsonage Museum, In the News, Movies-DVD-TV, References, Wuthering Heights