"A really, really terrible ‘Wuthering Heights’ musical"

The Argus has an article on a temporary exhibition at the County Museum, Dundalk, Ireland.

The first [exhibition] celebrates the county’s connection to Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte in the exhibition ‘The Reverend Patrick Bronte: A Life In Ireland’.
The Bronte sisters’ grandfather, Hugh, lived in the Boyne Valley, near Drogheda until the age of 16 when he ran way to the lime kilns at Mount Pleasant and it was here that he met his future wife Alice McCrory. Hugh’s reputation as a storyteller of renown and it is sometime said that this gift was passed on to his renowned grand-daughters.
The exhibition concentrates for the most part on the life experiences of one of Hugh’s children, Patrick, father of Charlotte, Emily and Anne, and his life in the south Down area.

If you are in the area you may be interested in going. It runs until the end of August and admission is free. The museum's website has pictures of its temporal exhibitions and a couple from Patrick's can be seen.

Another area well-known to Patrick was, of course, Haworth, or Howarth (grrrr) as Caterer Search insists on spelling it when reporting the news that the famous local restaurant The Stirrup has been bought by a London restaurateur:

The Stirrup restaurant in the Brontë Village of Howarth, West Yorkshire, has been sold to a London restaurateur after attracting international interest.
Created from three former weavers’ cottages, the restaurant lies in the village’s narrow cobbled Main Street close to Howarth Parsonage, where the Brontë family lived between 1820 and 1861.
Howarth, on the eastern slope of the Pennine moors in the Worth Valley, is within easy walking distance of Howarth Moors, the Brontë Waterfalls and Top Withens farm (the inspiration for Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights).
The restaurant can seat up to 40 diners across two dining rooms.
The building is made from Yorkshire stone with mullioned stone window frames, period-style sash windows and a cottage-style décor inside with beamed ceilings and two open fireplaces.
For the owners, there is three-bedroom accommodation on the first floor along with a private garden and rockery to the rear.
New owner, Polly Costin from Wanstead, previously ran a restaurant in London for 14 years serving modern European cuisine.
The Leeds office of Christie + Co sold the freehold off a guide price of £345,000.on behalf of Jane and Frank Parkin, who have run the restaurant since 1965. (Angela Frewin)

That's not all for Brontë Country today: the Harrogate Advertiser has an article on local artist Clifford William Blakey whose work can be currently seen at Anstey Galleries (Harrogate, UK).

The Dales, with hilly horizons and stone walls, outcrops of trees and rivers are the stuff of dreams to Clifford and to follow this round to Penistone and the Bronte Country stirred up all the romantic ideas which flow through his work.
Clifford said: “The inspiration for all my work comes from the ever changing relationship between the weather, light, land and sea.
“Yorkshire had everything I was looking for when I planned this exhibition of paintings.
“The coastline, for example, is rich with high clifftops, rugged seas, small fishing villages and I have witnessed some dramatic skies there that would be the envy of anywhere in the world.
“Moving inland across the North Yorkshire Moors there is an ever shifting array of colour through the seasons, from the burnt moorland of spring and early summer to the beautiful heather clad hills of late summer.
“Painting in such places is a real challenge and a joy.”

On a different - but still visual - format, Flickr user stevec77 has uploaded a beautiful set of pictures from Brontë Country as well - highly worth looking at.

And we are not leaving the place just yet! A few days ago we mentioned the publication of a book called Made In Yorkshire by Tony Earnshaw & Jim Moran. Today the Evening Courier carries an article on it.

Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche made a brief visit to Shibden Hall to film scenes for Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights in 1991 – the first movie to attempt to tackle the entirety of the novel.
"I enjoyed the challenge of playing a character as dark as Heathcliff – you have to bring your own darkness to it," revealed Fiennes. "I'd like to have gone even further with it."
One might expect the detail surrounding such productions to have been lost in the mists of time until one embraces the ordinary folk who found themselves gently press-ganged into taking part.
Thus it was the humble movie extras that provided some of the cornerstones in building a composite picture of Yorkshire's film heritage, along with intriguing photographs and snapshots of the films themselves.
With the support of various editors and archivists we trawled through newspaper picture libraries, unearthing images that had not been seen for more than half a century. Many of the images from Room at the Top were provided by the Courier, along with an image of Fiennes and Binoche at Shibden Hall surrounded by the paraphernalia of filmmaking.

The book is officially released today and next Monday at 7pm Tony Earnshaw will be at The Viaduct Cafe, Dean Clough, Halifax, for a talk-and-signing session organised by Fred Wade Books.

Wuthering Heights 1992 is also reviewed on Spout today. But we don't know what Broadway-débutante Jill Santoriello would make of that film given the following as reported by NY1:

Jill Santoriello will be making her Broadway debut by bringing the French Revolution to life. Santoriello is the book writer, composer and lyricist for the show, a project she began working on more than 20 years ago.
“I had already written a really, really terrible ‘Wuthering Heights’ musical, and my brother convinced me, go somewhere else with that because everyone's dead at the end. It's just depressing, you need to have something positive,” said Santoriello. “So I looked around for another story that would be equally romantic and epic and have all those passions that I found so intriguing as a teenager. And I read ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ and I fell in love with it.” (Shazia Khan)

Jane Eyre. The Musical Rochester, James Barbour, features in this musical, which begins previous on August 19 and opens on September 18. Not the first time that Santoriello's Dickens adaptation is featured on BrontëBlog.

Zhang Lijia, author of Socialism is Great! talks to The Australian. She's a well-known Brontëite around these parts:

Again, she writes in the book: "My 'Dear John' letter to him was more or less a copy of Jane's confession to Mr Rochester. I wished I was more beautiful, I said, better educated, and of better social standing. But my spirit was equal to his, and I wanted to be treated as an equal. If I wasn't as important to him as he to me, I just had to give him up." [...]
"Traditionally, a person was defined by relationships, and the individual didn't have a place," she says. "In my own transformation, Jane Eyre played an important part. The book struck a chord."
Zhang says that she was viewed as an ugly child, partly because she had dark skin, something perceived to be "almost a crime". (Rowan Callick)

And if a governess is mentioned a reference to Jane Eyre is cumpolsury. The Telegraph reviews the film (based on the book of the same title by Winifred Watson, published in 1938) Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day.

It's never been easy being a governess in an English novel: from Jane Eyre onwards, such a heroine is traditionally as drab as a sparrow and only a sacking away from penury. In Miss Pettrigrew Lives for a Day (PG), adapted from Winifred Watson's 1938 novel, Guinevere Pettigrew (Frances McDormand) is no different. (Jenny McCartney)

And finally the blog Valleys of the Mind reviews Villette and Popgeezer describes Twilight as the 'Jane Eyre' for the Hannah Montana generation (sic).

Categories: Art-Exhibitions, Books, Brontëites, Haworth, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, Music, Patrick Brontë, Wuthering Heights