Dorothy and Emily

The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth by Frances Wilson and its Brontë similarities continue attracting the reviewers' attention. Margaret Drabble writes about it for The Times Literary Suplement:

The Wordsworth walks were more Brontë than Austen, and Wilson uses Emily Brontë as a key to her understanding of brother and sister:
"When I read Dorothy’s accounts of her love for William in the Grasmere Journals I am moved in the same way as I am by Catherine Earnshaw’s description of her love for Heathcliff . . . and it is through Wuthering Heights that the peculiarity of [their] relationship can best be understood. Powerful in both cases is the elusive, visionary nature of what each woman is straining to define, her hunger for twinship with the one she loves . . . her confusion about where she ends and he begins. "
This comparison makes sense, and it connects with the idea of incest which F. W. Bateson so memorably introduced in 1954 when he suggested that William and Dorothy fell in love in the intimacy of their cold winter in Germany. Bateson, according to Wilson, only pointed out “what was obvious to all”, which is that something odd went on in Goslar. (Wordsworth’s comment that he wrote in Goslar “in self-defence” is intriguing.) The Heathcliff–Catherine relationship has an incestuous element, as they were brought up together as children, and their sexuality is obviously abnormal (though not very unusual in the context of Gothic fiction and Byronic poetry). Emily Brontë could not have read Dorothy’s journals but, Wilson argues, she is more than likely to have read De Quincey’s portraits of the Wordsworths in Tait’s in 1839, which describe her “gipsy tan”, outdoor spirit and impulsive nature. It is intriguing to think that descriptions of the high-minded homely life of Dove Cottage could have prompted the melodramatic tragedy of Wuthering Heights – a shadow story spun from what lay concealed and repressed.
Influence or no, Dorothy and Emily were indisputably and for obvious reasons affected by the same imagery – by solitary flowers and lone birds. I would add to Dorothy’s description of the columbine, “a graceful slender creature, a female seeking retirement”, young Cathy Linton’s response to the last bluebell of summer, which Nelly Dean urges her to pluck for her father: “Cathy stared a long time at the lonely blossom trembling in its earthly shelter, and replied, at length – ‘No, I’ll not touch it: but it looks melancholy, does it not, Ellen?’”. I hadn’t noticed this before, but it now seems pure Dorothy. Emily’s greatest intimacy, like Dorothy’s, was with her siblings, but for Dorothy the sibling relationship with her famous brother was unequal, and became more unequal. Wilson explores the shifting balance between William and Dorothy, and her demotion from the role of the chosen one, the partner swan of the “solitary pair” who inspired “Home at Grasmere”, to that of the “surplus relation” or “perpetual third party”, subsumed by unspoken jealousies. She marks the point at which (with “The Leech Gatherer”) he began to move away from his sister’s way of looking. He ceased to need her insights, her butterflies, her mosses and little birds, though he needed her devotion, her childcare, her cooking. But maybe he needed them only because they were there. Maybe, after the trauma of his marriage to her “dearest sister” Mary, some separation should have taken place, instead of the endlessly loving reassurance that kept her imprisoned in a secondary role and finally, Wilson assumes, drove her into depression and dementia.

Ink 19 reviews several horror films included in the recently released Amicus Collection DVD box set, among which is Roy Ward Baker's And Now the Screaming Starts, defined thus:

Based on David Case’s novel Fengriffen, And Now the Screaming Starts is a rare foray into Gothic horror for Amicus films. The film is a somewhat uneasy mix of Jane Eyre, Hound of the Baskervilles, and Rosemary’s Baby. (Phil Bailey)

And here's a combination of words we had never imagined we'd see in the same paragraph. From The Tampa Tribune:

The impetus for the Bull Testicle Act of 2008 was grounded in Baker's sensitivities being offended, which might suggest this guy leads a more sheltered life than a Bronte sister. (Daniel Ruth)

A journalist who includes the supposedly sheltered lives of the Brontës in an article on the Bull Testicle Act is no ordinary journalist. Here's a challenge for other journalists: can you actually top that? Because we hardly think so.

Two blogs review novels by Charlotte Brontë Library Kendriya Vidyalaya Pattom reviews Jane Eyre and Bogormen writes about Villette.

Categories: Books, Emily Brontë, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, Weirdo, Wuthering Heights