Emily Brontë and the accurate article

May we congratulate a newspaper for writing something that we should take for granted (ie. an accurate, well-researched article) but we can hardly find in reality? We think so, and thus our congratulations and thank-yous find their way to the Irish Times, particularly to Frank McNally and his article on Patrick and Emily Brontë.

Your starter for 10: What have Emily Brontë - 160 years dead this week, but assured of literary immortality - and half the GAA pitches of Ulster got in common? No, it's not their association with dark, violent passions, as portrayed both in Wuthering Heights and in reports of last Sunday's senior club football final in Enniskillen, won by Crossmaglen; although, now that you mention it, there is that too, writes Frank McNally.
But what I really had in mind was a surname. To wit: many latter-day northern GAA pitches, including Enniskillen's Brewster Park, are the work of a man called "Prunty". And so, in a sense, was Emily.
From the Irish Ó Proinntigh, the anglicised name lends itself better to soil mechanics than it does to literature. No doubt Joe Pat Prunty's success, first in agricultural drainage and subsequently in the construction of playing surfaces, is due mainly to his products' durability in stormy conditions (or "wuthering", as they say in Yorkshire).
But the brand has been given an extra competitive edge by a happy accident of alliteration that readily springs to the modern GAA supporter's lips. Admire the mid-winter surface of a football field in Crosserlough (Cavan), or Maguiresbridge (Fermanagh), or the aptly named Aghabog (Monaghan) and the man next to you will probably explain it in two words that have become synonymous with any club's progressiveness. It's a "Prunty pitch", he will say, before telling you proudly just how much it cost.
Whether the name would have been as successful in a literary context is at least questionable. No doubt we would have grown used to it by now. But in the 16 decades since Emily Brontë's death, her father's exotic respelling - a little piece of the Mediterranean transplanted to the north of England where he would rear his tragic family - has become so much a part of her image as to seem inseparable.
Not that it was much use to her in life. To escape the contemporary prejudice against female novelists, she and her sisters wrote under the prosaic surnom-de-plume of Bell, with androgynous forenames. And it was as Ellis Bell that Emily enjoyed modest success before dying, aged 30. It would be years later before the romantic Brontë legend took off.
Biographers differ on why Patrick Prunty/Brunty (the forms were interchangeable) rebranded himself. One explanation is that, among his apprenticeships, he had served time as a blacksmith. He then became a schoolteacher, versed in the classics, so he would have been familiar with those one-eyed blacksmiths of Greek mythology, the Cyclops: Arges, Steropes, and Brontes.
The last name meant "thunder", which would later fit nicely with the tempestuous theme of Emily's masterpiece.
But it's just as likely the name change was prompted by current affairs. In 1799, when Brunty/Prunty was still teaching at a hedge-school in Co Down, England's hero Lord Nelson was being honoured by the King of Naples for defying the French navy.
The title conferred on him on that occasion, Duke of Bronte, may have given a cue to the upwardly mobile headmaster, soon bound for Cambridge and a career as an Anglican minister.
An early biographer of Emily, Mary F. Robinson, saw the name change as part of an ambition to escape the poverty of his origins. One of 10 children who had inherited "strength, good looks, and a few scant acres of potato-growing soil" in Aghaderg, he was pointed towards university by an impressed local clergyman whose children he taught, and the young man duly obliged.
As Robinson writes: "He left Ireland in July 1802, never to visit it again. He never cared to look again on the scenes of his early struggle. He never found the means to revisit his mother or home, friends or country. Between Patrick Brontë, proud of his Greek profile and his Greek name, the handsome undergraduate at St John's, and the nine, shoeless, hungry young Pruntys of Aghaderg, there stretched a distance not to be measured by miles." Having Hellenised his own children, in name and education, Bronte Snr lived to see three of them achieve literary fame - contributing to it himself by commissioning Elizabeth Gaskell's biography of Charlotte, which would paint him in a harsh light.
Unfortunately, their fame was mostly posthumous. All his offspring predeceased him, Charlotte's 39 years easily the closest any of them got to old age.
It was while attending her brother Branwell's funeral in October 1848 that Emily caught the infection from which she would never recover. Her condition degenerated into tuberculosis. And, after refusing treatment, she died on December 19th.
Poor as her health was, Emily certainly did not lack mental fortitude. In her final poem, Last Lines, she embraced her fate with a religious fervour: "No coward soul is mine,/ No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere:/ I see Heaven's glories shine/ And faith shines equal, arming me from fear."

Congratulations also keep on going the Brontë Parsonage way: the Yorkshire Post and the Telegraph and Argus report the newly-received full accreditation status given to it by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council.

The News Shopper Online reviews the production of Polly Teale's Jane Eyre in Brockley, Greater London, UK.

The Brockley Jack Theatre presents its seasonal anti-pantomime, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre.
Brilliantly adapted by Polly Teale, this classic novel, first published in 1847, is condensed into a just-long-enough play, with all the realism Bronte was known for.
Orphaned at a young age, Jane Eyre finds herself at a harsh school where she fights the fate of her tuberculosis afflicted friends.
Succeeding with a brave and hard outlook, she moves to the house of the mysterious Rochester, as governess to his sickly sweet French ward, Adele.
Here, a strange woman inhabits the top of the house – rattling about and making screeching noises - but who is she and why does Rochester put up with her mad ways?
Jane is the happiest she has been (though it is very hard to tell – a smile flashes across her face now and again - but could it ever last? Of course not, prepare yourself for anguish, despair and gloom.
Pilot the dog gives the standout performance with Filip Krenus conveying loyalty, affection and lovely doggy ticks and traits and Martin Durrant is a suitably gruff and stern Rochester.
While this production is superb and the skills of cast and crew of a high standard, Jane Eyre fails to deliver on that seasonal promise.
Life is depressing enough in today’s climate without a thoroughly miserable plain Jane struggling gormlessly through hardships.
Plus, natural and simple as she is meant to be, Clare Harlow’s Jane lacks the spirit and fervour which animates her character in the novel and makes her the heroine we love and support.
A play for Jane Eyre fans only, perhaps, or literature students.
Jane Eyre at Brockley Jack Theatre until Jan 4. 7.45pm. £12/ £9. Box office 0844 847 2454. (Zee Gaines)

Books are the subject of two of this season's unavoidable topics: gifts, as shown in the Herald Tribune, where The Thirteenth Tale is suggested as a good present:

WENDY BASHANT Dean of Students
The Bronte sisters published and perished: in five years, they added seven classics to the English language, and then died. How would literature be different if they lived? Diane Setterfield's recent novel "The Thirteenth Tale" (Atria Books, 2006) teases us: It isn't a sequel, but it is so completely informed by the Brontes' spirit, you feel as though you have found one of their lost manuscripts. The novel is about a young girl, bred in a bookstore and invited to write the biography of a reclusive writer. The novel includes ghosts, madness, twins and charred estates. It has a healthy dose of murder, illicit relationships and the Yorkshire moors. But mostly it is just a love letter to anyone who has ever read the Brontes and fallen for their books. Early in the novel, the narrator receives a mysterious letter: "I was spellbound. There is something about the words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner." Beware! The same is true for the reader of Setterfield's novel. Her words "wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk ...they pierce your skin, enter your blood... Inside you they work their magic."

And New Year's resolutions, as seen in the Proviso Herald:

It's not quite Christmas yet, but I am already worrying about my New Year's Resolutions. As a librarian my task is easy. First and foremost on every resolutions list, I firmly resolve to read more. This year, I'm resolving to read books that I've always wanted to read (e.g. Northhanger Abbey by Jane Austen) or felt I should read (e.g.War and Peace by Leo Tolsty) but, for one reason or another, never get around to. As I began to formulate my list, I polled my coworkers to find out what books they have been meaning to read. Here are their choices and some interesting reasons why:
Sarah Holtkamp, Youth Services Librarian: "Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, because it is a classic and it is the natural precursor to Stephenie Meyer's best-selling Twilight." (Margaret Flanagan)

The blogosphere brings us a French review of Jane Eyre by Un peu de tout, beaucoup de rien.

Categories: Books, Emily Brontë, Jane Eyre, Patrick Brontë, Theatre, Wuthering Heights