We suffer from utter lack of critical discrimination

NorthJersey News talks about Pontius Pilate's wife, aka Claudia Procula in the Christian tradition, and brings out a well documented Brontë reference:

Most contemporary Christians, though, consider Claudia a hero, and female artists especially have been intrigued by her legend. Charlotte Bronte, best known for her novel "Jane Eyre," penned "Pilate's Wife's Dream," a poem that imagines Claudia as an overwrought seer who envisions a "dreadful doom for Pilate." (Daniel Burke)

The poem can be read here.

Regrettably the poem will not be appreciated by Greg Garrard who in Times Higher Education attacks the Brontës' poetry (with the sole and not very enthusiastic exception of Emily):

"Works of art are sometimes unjustly forgotten, but no work of art is unjustly remembered." Auden's line may once have been a handy rule of thumb, but he reckoned without the AQA, the board responsible for 42 per cent of English literature A levels. There can be only two excuses for requiring anyone to study the drab, whining, incompetent poetry of Anne Bronte: utter lack of critical discrimination or overactive feminist historicism. It is not enough that poetry be interesting in some anthropological sense, or merely express strong emotions. Unless we are deliberately choosing bad poems to foster discrimination, every poem we teach must be superb. It's not as if there's a shortage.(...)
It is no good whingeing from the sidelines, and I imagine that the AQA headquarters is secured from rash assault. The awful proliferation of exams and league tables may at last be in reverse, and it may not be too late to put the Brontes back in the grave where, as poets, all bar Emily belong.

Needless to say, we don't agree with the statement that Anne Brontë's poetry was incompetent. We probably suffer from lack of critical discrimination but we have something better, the ability to capture a fleeting glimpse of the poet's soul. Something which transpires in many of the poems of Anne and in some of Charlotte's.

More information about the Welcome To Yorkshire initiative, formerly the Yorkshire Tourist Board, has been published in The Telegraph & Argus:

The £30m being invested in promoting tourism across the county over the next three years by the organisation and Yorkshire Forward is a bold counter-recession strategy, intended to bolster confidence in all aspects of tourism, especially what’s known as ‘front-line hospitality’. (...)
The promotional campaign’s two slogans – You Can Do More In Yorkshire, and A Long Weekend In Yorkshire Is Not Enough – should drive the message home on television commercials throughout the country.
But over and above the advertising campaigns on radio, television, in cinemas, at mainline London railway stations (more than 150 trains travel between Yorkshire destinations and the capital daily), in newspapers, magazines and on the internet, there are other opportunities for companies. (...)
Bradford people involved in what’s called “front-line hospitality” will be glad to know that the attractive and punchy promotional dvd going round the world features Cartwright Hall, the Bronte Parsonage Museum at Haworth, Salts Mill and the National Media Museum. (Jim Greenhalf)

The Haworth parking problems are also mentioned in this article in Keighley News:

Robin Jackson told the Bronte Country Partnership his association would again approach Bradford Council about the parking situation in Haworth.
He said coach tour companies were still keen on bringing groups of tourists to the village but warned a lack of suitable parking for such vehicles remained a big problem. “If we want this to be dealt with we need to do something. It’s a serious issue,” he said. (Miran Rahman)

And another local piece of news published in The Telegraph & Argus:

Flat caps were the uniform of the day when Threshfield’s Netherside Hall School hosted a Victorian Day for primary schools.
Staff and more than 150 pupils from Giggleswick, Kirkby Malham, Beamsley, Hellifield and Settle dressed in appropriate garb for the period and were entertained by people posing as a host of characters, from the Bronte Sisters to Sherlock Holmes.

Michael Nevadomski reviews with enthusiasm the performances of Polly Teale's After Mrs Rochester at the Middlebury College in in Middlebury Campus: (Picture source. Credits: Jessica Appelson)

In the interests of full disclosure, I should mention before my review that I can't stand either postcolonial studies or Charlotte Brontë's "Jane Eyre." It was with genuine skepticism that I walked through the doors of Wright Theatre and watched Vanessa Mildenberg's production of "After Mrs Rochester," a play by Polly Teale based on the life and letters of Jean Rhys - who just happened to embody both of those things.
Premiering in 2003 to critical acclaim at the Lyric in London, "After Mrs Rochester" was first produced under the auspices of the Shared Experience Theater Company, a troupe well known for its literary-themed productions that delve specifically into great authors or their works. The subject of "Rochester" is Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams, known to the world as Jean Rhys. When the play's action opens, she is on the brink of writing her most famous novel, "Wide Sargasso Sea," and we quickly discover, as the plot unfolds, that she is remembering her own rather unhappy life.
Rhys is divided into three characters that appear onstage simultaneously. Lilli Stein '11 played the older, self-isolated form of the author, whose memories and flashbacks constitute the main action of the play. She commented and narrated, delivering a cynical, alcohol-hazed perspective that rose from her numerous disappointments in love and art and life. Stein's delivery was nonetheless incredibly sympathetic and impressed the audience with moments of startling vulnerability and tenderness (as when she remembered her first love affair or the review of her first book), while maintaining a toughness that she spat out to her younger self.
Lucy Faust '09 portrayed a developing, younger Jean Rhys, moving from memory to memory, from childhood to education to abuse and heartbreak, to motherhood and art and beyond. One moment, we were absolutely convinced she was the rebellious child of a third-generation English Creole family; scenes later, we found her broken, pouring out her heart in pages. Yet Faust's characterization managed to avoid melodrama or cliché; rather, her Ella was vulnerable and heroic without fragility or moralization. This balanced and precise performance portrayed not only a woman at every stage of her life, but an "everywoman" that we somehow felt we knew in our own lives.
If the female characters were dynamic, the male ones were (intentionally) flat. Schuyler Beeman '10 and Sasha Hirsch '10.5 played a rotating round of husbands, lovers and other male figures, and although each role was certainly distinct, the effect of two actors rotating through so many characters rendered the male figures as faceless as they were cruel. Unnerving, discomforting and (to some extent) horrifying, the two complemented one another and gave us a portrait of masculine society at its worst: promiscuous, abusive, self-absorbed, blasé and, ultimately, disappointing.
By its very nature as a postcolonial play, "Rochester" demands English and Creole accents; overall, these were quite good - enough to provide substantial verisimilitude - but occasionally an American -ing or a weak Britishism slipped in and shattered the illusion. These slips, however, were saved by the play's overwhelming sense of self-awareness: how could we forget that we were watching a play when the stage floor and the main bed were covered in prints of the author's handwriting, or when characters were divided into different actors?
Lest that sound too critical of resident scenic and lighting designer Hallie Zieselman's set design, I should note my sheer awe at the beauty of the stage and scenery, which transitioned seamlessly from scene to scene and setting to setting. I should also mention that my jaw dropped to the ground when I saw a river (literally) flow across the stage and a substantial rain come pouring down on the windows in several scenes. Wow.
And at the end of it all, Stephanie Spencer '09 broke my heart. As Bertha, "the madwoman in the attic" and the third division of Rhys, she manifested Ella's inner voice - the embodiment of a primeval womanhood that Rhys seldom expressed and so often bound and gagged throughout the play. At once a symbol and an insight into Ella, Spencer milked pathos from every scene with a powerful physical language that underscored her "nonpresence" to the exterior characters onstage - screaming unheard, whimpering unseen. But to call her character a merely hysterical representation of Ella and Rhys would be misleading; Spencer gave "the madwoman in the attic" such an underlying tenderness, such an evident desire to be loved, that her screams and smiles and whimpers pierced us to the core. Her "Sorry … sorry … sorry … " during the love scenes with Ford devastated me as little else has.
Every aspect of this production should be applauded: a beautiful set, fantastic direction, an amazing script.
And perhaps the finest acting I've seen on stage at Middlebury.

Another published review is this one in The Hindu about the recent performances of Wuthering Heights in Bangalore, India:

While there have been celebrated celluloid avatars of Emily Bronte’s gothic classic “Wuthering Heights”, it is quite difficult to imagine a play based on the novel. There was the Laurence Olivier-Merle Oberon starrer in 1939 and a m ore recent version in 1992 where Ralph Fiennes and Juliet Binoche played the doomed lovers.
Orange Sky Productions staged a Charles Vance adaptation of the play. The stage was divided into two with the left side representing Wuthering Heights and the right standing in for Thrushcross Grange. There was no attempt to take the play outside to the desolate moors where Kathy and Heathcliff played out their love story.
Cutting out the atmosphere, leaves you with a play where the story is faithfully followed but where the soul is decidedly weak. The production was competent and moved at a spanking pace. Of the cast, Karthik Iyer was impressive as the crotchety domestic help Joseph, while Parthasarathy Devarajan made for a fairly-tortured Heathcliff. Aparna Warrier held her own as the loquacious housekeeper Nelly Dean. While the book is rather confusing for its flashbacks within flashbacks, the play kept the narrative fairly linear. All in all it was a pleasant evening’s entertainment from the company that seems to have a weakness for atmosphere-heavy works — Orange Sky did an earlier production of Agatha Christie’s famous thriller “And then There were None.” (M.A.C.)

The Economist reviews Frances Wilson's The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth:

The intensity of the Wordsworths’ sibling connection has been noted before, but Ms Wilson places it suggestively within the context of its time. Brother-sister love is a common Romantic preoccupation. It comes up, for example, in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s work and in the love that binds Cathy and Heathcliff in Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights”.

BBC News interviews Seth Grahame-Smith, author of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies:

So how did it come about that you mashed these two genres?

I owe the title to my editor at Quirk Books. He'd been wanting to do some kind of literary remix or mash-up, and he had lists of possible books.
On one side he had Wuthering Heights and Sense and Sensibility and so forth, and on the other side he had things like pirates and robots and vampires.
And one day he called me excitedly and said all I have is a title: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.
It clicked with me as something that I needed to start immediately. (Tim Masters)

And The Guardian also insists on it:

Grahame-Smith said he expected other publishers would also be looking for similarly weird concoctions. "It's inevitable that other companies are going to see that this book has been received with so much enthusiasm. I'm sure that as we speak someone is poring through Wuthering Heights looking for opportunities to add whatever mayhem they can to it," he told the BBC yesterday. But he wasn't sure he was the man to continue what he called "a mini-trend of literary mash-ups". "I don't know that I want to follow this book up with Sense and Sensibility and vampires, because I could easily box myself in as being the mash-up guy," he said. (Alison Flood)

On the blogosphere: F.R.I.E.N.D.S., Leitura Nossa de Cada Dia... (in Portuguese) and Wilson's world talks about Jane Eyre. Bells Books and La bibliothèque malounienne (in French) post about Wuthering Heights. Finally, Books I Done Read reviews Villette.

Categories: Haworth, Jane Eyre, Poetry, References, Theatre, Villette, Wide Sargasso Sea, Wuthering Heights