To follow on the footsteps of the Brontës

The Literary Walks series of The Times is devoted today to the Brontës. And who better than Juliet Barker to guide us across Haworth and the Brontë moors?

There is no better place to begin a walk in Brontë country than at Haworth Parsonage, the home of the Brontë family for more than 40 years. A purist might wish to struggle up the cobbled Main Street, but I prefer to save my breath for the moors.
The parsonage stands at the top of the hill behind the church, its stolid exterior betraying no hint that it was a powerhouse of extraordinary creativity. It was here that, as young children, Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne conjured up the exotic imaginary worlds of Glasstown, Angria and Gondal, which were to become a consuming passion well into their adult lives and lead to the creation of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.
A visit to the parsonage, now the Brontë Parsonage Museum, is essential to set the scene for our walk. There is such a contrast between the handmade books, no bigger than a credit card, written in script so tiny that they are almost indecipherable and the imaginative power of the stories that they contain. There is a similar and equally symbolic contrast between the cramped parsonage and the wide open spaces of the moors, which were the inspiration and setting for the Brontës’ novels and poetry.
To follow on the footsteps of the Brontës, take the footpath from the parsonage, past the last remnants of the village and the old stone-pits and quarries, which Mrs Gaskell describes in her Life of Charlotte Brontë. You are heading high on the hillside, in the words of Emily’s poem: For the moors, For the moors, where the short grass like velvet beneath us should lie!
The great vista of open moorland broods on the horizon but the lower reaches of the hills are green: a testament to the tenacity of generations of Yorkshire farmers who have carved their fields out of a hostile environment and even today battle against the encroaching bracken and heather of the moor. The land is too poor to support crops, so the fields are small, bounded by drystone walls and provide only pasture for sheep. The scattered farmhouses hunker into the hillsides, as if sheltering from the constant “wuthering” of the wind. In the valley bottoms you occasionally glimpse a tall chimney and a square-built mill, sometimes with a row of cottages, all relics of the industrial revolution that transformed this corner of the West Riding and inspired Charlotte’s novel Shirley.
As early as 1850, Charlotte had observed that “various folks are beginning to come boring to Haworth, on the wise errand of seeing the scenery described in Jane Eyre and Shirley”. Today most visitors come with the landscape of Emily’s Wuthering Heights in mind. They won’t be disappointed, unless their impressions have been drawn from the films, rather than the books.
The real Brontë moors are as harsh and uncompromising as millstone grit. This is a landscape in thrall to the elements. The sinuous hills are riven with steep-sided valleys and, here and there, amid the heath and bracken, a landslip has gouged out a bare hollow or a black mass of rock rears on an exposed ridge. Clinging to the hills are a few scattered trees. There are no hedgerows, only grey drystone walls.
Apart from a few weeks in autumn, when the moors become a sea of purple, heavy with the scent of heather, the landscape is a variety of greens, browns and greys that change with the season and weather. The silence is broken only by the plaintive cry of sheep, the liquid warbling of curlew and the lyrical crescendos of lark-song. The one discordant element is the wind turbines, an affront to the eyes and an insult to the intelligence.
There are well-worn paths to the official tourist sites. All have questionable Brontë associations but that is irrelevant. “In the hill-country silence,” Charlotte wrote after her sisters had died, “their poetry comes by lines and stanzas into my mind”. We can share that experience and begin to understand the genesis of some of the greatest novels in the English language.
In search of Heathcliff’s lair
Out on the moor, following the path to the Brontë Falls, it’s easy to see the source of the power and the inspiration for Emily’s brutal battering-ram of a fable, Wuthering Heights. From the rim of the moor beyond the falls juts the ruined farmhouse of Top Withins, a hard, black angle of walls under a pair of skeletal trees.
Whether Emily modelled her fortress-like novel on Top Withins is open to question. But the isolated farmhouse under the edge of the moor was well known to her and, in its harshly beautiful setting, commanding a vast panorama of moorland, it makes by far the best candidate for Heathcliff’s lair.
Down in the valley, on a bank overlooking Ponden Reservoir, stands Ponden Hall, a Pennine farmhouse, long and low among its shelter trees. This was Emily’s Thrushcross Grange, home of the Linton family so sadistically and remorselessly destroyed by Heathcliff and his lover and foster-sister Catherine. It was also the setting for one of Emily’s lighter scenes, with Cathy and Heathcliff as naughty children, terrifying Edgar and Isabella Linton by making faces at them through the window — a chink of light and laughter in the dark stormy sky of Emily Brontë’s extraordinary imagination. (Juliet Barker)

Tom Hardy is the subject of an article in today's The Guardian. A paragraph is devoted to his performance as Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights 2009:

Later this year, he'll play Heathcliff in a new adaptation of Wuthering Heights by Peter Bowker, writer of BBC1's recent Occupation. "Tom is the first Heathcliff I've ever seen who you honestly feel could beat the living daylights out of you," Bowker says. "He brings great pain to the role. What Tom instinctively understood was that Heathcliff knows power because he's been abused by those in power. Even at his most bullying, you sense what's driving him." (Gareth McLean)

The Boston Book Examiner makes a list of classic novels inspiring pop culture. Wuthering Heights and Twilight appear:

Wuthering Heights: Emily Bronte's novel is another inspiration for Twilight. Heathcliff, adopted into the Earnshaw family, is terribly mistreated by his adopted brother. However, his love for his adopted sister, Catherine, keeps him sane and alive. Eventually, though, Catherine meets another man, whom she becomes obsessed with, and she is torn between the two men. Catherine, more interested in her chances to advance socially, chooses another man over Heathcliff, so Heathcliff disappears. When he returns, having mysteriously acquired quite a bit of wealth, Heathcliff is determined to have his revenge on everyone who has hurt him. In an incredibly twisted plot of revenge, betrayal, and heartbreak, Heathcliff and Catherine's doomed relationship not only destroys them, but it destroys everyone in their path as well. (Tara Enwistle-Clark)

The Newark Book Examiner exaggerates a bit when it says:

In high school, students fantasize about burning their school books. Of course, since the books are school property, students generally aren't able to fulfill this particular dream. (...)
The cheapest books, and therefore the easiest to burn, are the novels. These little bundles of literature are generally less than ten dollars each and are the bane of many students' existence. Decoding the works of the likes of William Shakespeare and the Bronte sisters, who wrote their works in the vernacular of a different country (not to mention in a different century) was worse torture to some than facing all the algebra problems in the world. (Zinovia Stone)

The Suffolk Times announces two awards for a local student production of Jane Eyre at the Teeny Awards:

Two cast members from Mattituck High School's "Jane Eyre" were recognized: Megan Ross for outstanding performance in a drama and Moggy Vinciguerra for best supporting actress in a drama. (Ms. Vinciguerra won outstanding performance in a drama last year.) (Bridget Degnan)

Pictures of the two winners can be seen in the article.

Variety reviews the film Nebo, Peklo...Zem (Heaven, Hell... Earth) by Laura Veráková:

A comely ballerina has a passionate but painful affair with a mysterious older physician in contempo melodrama "Heaven, Hell ... Earth," the second feature by Slovak writer-director Laura Sivakova ("Quartetto"). This mostly compelling tale of a young woman coming to grips with her love life, career options and dysfunctional family plays more like "The Red Shoe Diaries" than "The Red Shoes," as the genre-savvy helmer tips her hat to romantic thrillers from "Jane Eyre" to "Fatal Attraction." Commercial fare on home turf, where it is still in theaters, the pic could attract fests and Euro tube sales. (Alissa Simon)

Village Voice reviews the performances of Sarah Michelson's Dover Beach dance piece:

Most provocative is a duet between Greg Zuccolo, who appears halfway through Dover Beach looking like Jane Eyre's Mr. Rochester in deshabille, and 13-year-old Allegra Herman, who has intermittently entered to watch. (Deborah Jowitt)

Amanda Fortini quotes on Salon.com a very heterogeneous group of references for her ideas about love:

As with most Americans, my own ideas about love were formed not only by books -- "Jane Eyre" and "Pride and Prejudice," "Emma" and "Wuthering Heights," yes, as well as the incestuous "Flowers in the Attic" series, "The Thorn Birds," and the Andrew Greeley books with their fornicating priests -- but by soap operas and romantic comedies: the tempestuous on-again-off-again affair of Bo and Hope on "Days of Our Lives," the jaunty repartee of "When Harry Met Sally."

Tales from the Reading Room posts about Justine Picardie's Daphne and Literary Trangressions posts about Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

Categories: Books, Haworth, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, References, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Theatre, Wuthering Heights