It’s a wrap

The Kirklees Museum staff in Oakwell Hall reminisce about the filming of Wuthering Heights 2009 in the Huddersfield Examiner:

THE delights of Oakwell Hall will be seen on TV later this month when ITV1 screens a new, two part adaptation of Emily Bronte’s novel Wuthering Heights.
The Elizabethan manor house at Birstall was one of several locations used for filming the Mammoth Screen production which stars Tom Hardy as Heathcliff and Charlotte Riley as Cathy. It also features Sarah Lancashire and Andrew Lincoln.
The museum was closed to the public for the whole of July last year to allow a film crew to transform the historic house into Wuthering Heights. That included redressing rooms and adding props and atmospheric lighting.
Now, a year later, Kirklees Museum staff, who were on hand throughout the filming, are eager to see the part Oakwell plays in the drama.“Oakwell is popular as a historic film location but this was by far the biggest production to involve the site,” said Deborah Marsland, Kirklees Museums operations manager. (...)
“It was very exciting having the film crew here and it will be interesting to see how much of Oakwell Hall we can recognise. “Many of the museum’s historic items of furniture, ornaments, paintings and wall hangings had to be removed for safekeeping to allow the crew to prepare their sets.”
“Staff rubbed shoulders with the stars and got a real behind-the-scenes insight into the making of a major drama. But it wasn’t as glamorous as expected.
“It sounds like endless fun but the days were long and fairly tedious – and you had to be very quiet,” said collections assistant Linda Levick.
Joanne Catlow, Museums and Galleries education manager, had to spend an evening sitting in a ‘set’ in Oakwell’s Great Hall.
“The windows were blacked out and there was a coffin sitting in the middle of the room. It was very spooky,” she said.
Staff also saw tricks of the trade – a specially-made latex kitchen floor to avoid injury to the actors during a fight scene and when Heathcliff was having his infamous tantrums; and the use of identical twin babies to play Cathy as a baby, both of whom had to be squeezed into original gowns worn by much smaller 18th century babies.
Museum staff also experienced the end of filming celebrations. When the director uttered those famous words “It’s a wrap”, the sound engineers flooded Oakwell’s Great Hall with the sound of Kate Bush’s hit single Wuthering Heights.
An exhibition linked to the filming of Wuthering Heights will be going on display at Oakwell Hall in September. (Val Javin)

The Guardian has an interesting article about Paula Rego which mentions in passing her Jane Eyre series:

Much of her work is directly inspired by literature, from Brontë's Jane Eyre to Kafka's The Metamorphosis to Martin McDonagh's play The Pillowman. (Simon Hattenstone)

Another of Paula Rego's inspirations, and as a matter of fact the one that brought her to Jane Eyre, is Wide Sargasso Sea. The latest biography about its author, Jean Rhys (Lilian Pizzichini's The Blue Hour) is also reviewed in The Guardian by no other than Elaine Showalter herself:

Ezra Pound's cruel "Portrait d'une Femme" uncannily foretells the life of Jean Rhys: "Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea, / London has swept about you these score years, / And bright ships left you this or that in fee." Like Pound's femme, Rhys was a passive and exotic temptress, who hoarded fragments of the literary and artistic demi-monde she inhabited. But unlike Pound's siren, who has finally "nothing that is quite your own", Rhys was an artist who managed to survive poverty, alcoholism, loneliness, mental depression and physical dilapidation, and produce one great novel, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), a prequel to Jane Eyre which tells the story from the viewpoint of the first Mrs Rochester, as well as four other fine novels, short stories and an unfinished memoir.

UIT in Brabant (Netherlands) presents the October performances of Wuthering Heights by the Artemis Theater Company:

Schuilt er in ieder van ons een Heathcliff en valt deze te temmen? Wuthering Heights is bekend van de vele verfilmingen, bewerkingen en songteksten. In de voorstelling van Artemis speelt een groep veelbelovende jonge acteurs dit indringende toneelstuk.
Cathy en haar broer Patrick wonen op het afgelegen landgoed Woeste Hoogten, waar het leven zich in alle vredigheid en harmonie afspeelt. De harmonie wordt flink verstoord wanneer Heathcliff in hun leven verschijnt. Dit weeskind brengt tweespalt in het gesloten gezin. Patrick haat hem direct en Cathy sluit hem in haar hart. Wanneer Cathy uiteindelijk toch kiest voor de fijnzinnige Edgar, verdwijnt Heathcliff uit haar leven. Maar niet voor goed…
De chaos die zijn terugkeer veroorzaakt sleurt alle bewoners van de Woeste Hoogten mee de diepte in. (Google translation)

This comment in The Independent (Ireland) mixes a good point with a deeply wrong one. Guess what's what:

I have met people who start to shake with fear at the mention of Wuthering Heights because they had such a bad experience with it at school. I read it a couple of years ago for the radio show book club. It's a tough little read and probably a girls' book in reality but it was worth looking at and the film with Laurence Olivier is a melodramatic treat (and that's before I even mention Kate Bush). It seems a shame that a whole generation of people will end up hating that book due to an uninterested teacher or a poorly thought out curriculum.

The New York Times reviews Valerie Martin's new novel, The Confessions of Edward Day. Faithful readers of BrontëBlog will remember the Wuthering Heights references in her previous novel Trespass but what the NYT reviewer quotes is not from this novel but from what is, still today, her best known novel Mary Reilly:

In fact the novel “Mary Reilly” is so riveting, in a “Jane Eyre” kind of way, that when I misplaced it halfway through, I was in psychic pain until I located it again. (Laurie Winer)

Clarín (Argentina) reviews the Spanish translation of Peter Ackroyd's The Fall of Troy:

El autor, además, acude al argumento de Jane Eyre en una maniobra inteligente y sutil que proporciona la clave de diversos enigmas. (Jorge de Cominges) (Google translation)

And feeling like a character in Jane Eyre in The Kingston Whig Standard (Canada), Fly High! reviews The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (book and 1996 adaptation), Life in the thumb reviews Wuthering Heights, a twitvideo at the Brontë Bridge by Ged_uk, El Comercio (Spain) links together Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca and the Brontës.

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