Parsonage Power sinks into the reader's DNA

Richard Rayner tries to understand why Wuthering Heights is such a powerful and inmortal book in Los Angeles Times:

Emily Brontë died in 1848, aged 30, leaving only one published book and some poems. That book, of course, is "Wuthering Heights" (recently issued in new editions, by Penguin and HarperCollins), a novel so strange and powerful that it sinks into the reader's DNA. (...)
It's wild, gothic stuff, but there's much more going on. "Wuthering Heights," as Joyce Carol Oates has pointed out, is a parable of innocence and loss, of "childhood's necessary defeat." But it presents too a contrasting tale, a story of education, maturing and affection -- that happens in the novel's present-day frame -- observed by Lockwood and the glowering Heathcliff.
This second romance, between Cathy's daughter and the grandson of Heathcliff's foster-father, thought by some critics and many readers to be but a pale reflection of what has gone before, is essential to the novel's conception. Escape from family doom is possible, Brontë suggests, even though the shadow of that doom will always linger, out there on the moor.
"The place of Catherine's interment, to the surprise of the villagers, was neither in the chapel under the carved monument of the Lintons, nor yet in the tombs of her own relations. It was dug on a green slope in a corner of the kirkyard, where the wall is so low that heath and bilberry plants have climbed over it from the moor; and peat mould almost buries it," says Nelly Dean. "Wuthering Heights" is a beautifully wrought novel about passion's destructive force and the blind power of nature. "There was no sound through the house but the moaning wind, which shook the windows every now and then."
This same wind was described by the great American poet Sylvia Plath, who made a visit to Brontë's beloved moors and the huge skies that loom and lean between Haworth and Ilkley in West Yorkshire. In her 1961 poem "Wuthering Heights," she wrote:

There is no life higher than the grasstops
Or the hearts of sheep, and the wind
Pours by like destiny, bending
Everything in one direction.
I can feel it trying
To funnel my heat away.
If I pay the roots of the heather
Too close attention, they will invite me
To whiten my bones among them.

Years later Ted Hughes, a Yorkshireman, who had been Plath's husband at the time, remembered this pilgrimage in a poem that he too titled, "Wuthering Heights":

The moor-wind
Came with its empty eyes to look at you.
And the clouds gazed sidelong, going elsewhere,
The heath-grass, fidgeting in its fever,
Took idiot notice of you. And the stone,
Reaching to touch your hand, found you real
And warm, and lucent, like that earlier one.

Plath cast herself as Emily Brontë, or Cathy, and saw Hughes as her own stubborn, untamable Heathcliff. This was a story that ended badly, with Hughes deserting Plath, and Plath committing suicide in the bitter British winter of 1963, a warning, maybe, about what literature and love can do.
A new film version of "Wuthering Heights," the 15th, recently aired in Britain. Here in the United States, Penguin Classics has just put out a "couture classic" with French flaps and a lovely jacket by the fashion illustrator Ruben Toledo. HarperCollins, meanwhile, has issued new editions of the book with broody "Twilight"-inspired covers, because the characters read and talk about "Wuthering Heights" in the Stephanie Meyer series.
"Wuthering Heights" is a classic that seems infinitely porous, waiting to be rediscovered and repackaged infinitely. "Love Never Dies" runs the tag line on the HarperCollins edition. Really, the book should come with flashing health alerts.
On a personal note: I was born in West Yorkshire, on one side of the Brontë moor, and I spent my teenage years living in a house just on the other side. I first read "Wuthering Heights" when I was 13 and, every couple of years ever since, I have re-subjected myself to its undiminished beauties and oddities and cruelties. Guns go bang, puppies are slaughtered and weak lungs burst, as Emily Brontë's did soon after she finished the writing. "Wuthering Heights" has realism, and tries to tell us that it is only by daylight and reason that love can survive.
But it is the sickly fevered radiance of the remembered Heathcliff-Cathy story line that threatens to whiten our bones. We long for such passion, and gain it at our peril.

Vanessa Thorpe in The Guardian also puts together some of the Brontë-related events taking place lately. Her information is not bad but can be improved:

The Brontë sisters' turbo-charged assault on Jane Austen's established reign as the inspiration for 90% of all costume television and film drama continues. Not only was there an intense Peter Bowker production of Emily's Wuthering Heights screened on ITV last month, a film of their lives is to come and, following on from the BBC Radio 4 reading of Charlotte's Villette, there is also a new novel out: Jude Morgan's The Taste of Sorrow, based on the life of the three sisters. The coming week will see the first in a series of high-profile events at Haworth Parsonage, where the trio lived, worked and then died young. Sam Taylor-Wood is exhibiting landscape photographs there until November and next Saturday (19 September) that contemporary chronicler of hard times up north, Barbara Taylor Bradford, arrives to talk about her work and theirs at the Old Schoolroom in Haworth. The internationally bestselling novelist has returned as part of tour celebrating 30 years since the publication of her novel A Woman of Substance and the release of a new book, Breaking the Rules. Other Brontë events to come include readings by Sarah Waters and Tracy Chevalier.

The Brontë film will hopefully come out someday and Jude Morgan's The Taste of Sorrow is an excellent novel about the Brontë sisters but by no means the only one published or to be published this year (check our sidebar for novels by Syrie James, Denise Giardina, Sheila Kohler... ).

An alert from Charleston for next Monday September, 14 concerning one of the aforementioned authors:

Kappa Book Club will meet at 12:45 p.m. Monday at Capitol Roasters. This month's book selection is "Emily's Ghost: A Novel of the Brontë Sisters," by Denise Giardina. (Sunday Gazette-Mail)

Another alert not so well determined can be read on the Bay Area Theater Examiner. It seems that the Subterranean Shakespeare Company is preparing a staged reading of John O'Keefe's The Brontë Cycle (1998) (a play that can be read online here):

Next up: “The Tempest” on Monday, September 14th, to be followed by an after-party celebrating the collaborative efforts of all involved. The readings will run through November, capped by the staged reading of “The Bronte Cycle” by playwright John O’Keefe, co-founder of the Blake Street Hawkeyes, the 70s performance cooperative, and former artist in residence at the Magic Theatre. (Amy Marie Boulanger)

Another play about the Brontës seems to be on the works as we read in The Buffalo News about Jim Baines, author of the recent The Careful Glover (now on the Alleyway Thatre in Buffalo, NY):

Interesting idea and very well written by Baines, now at work writing about the Bronte Sisters. (Ted Hadley)

As you know we have our anniversary contest going on and one of the prizes is a DVD copy of Wuthering Heights 2009. Radio Times also has another contest:

We've got three copies of the DVD to give away, as well as a Philips portable DVD player worth £80 for one lucky winner, courtesy of ITV DVD!

El Librepensador (Spain) reviews Sangre como la mía de Jorge Marchant Lazcano and makes the following Brontë reference:

¿Se trata de un libro en el que una generación tras otra está condenada a cometer los mismos errores como en Cumbres borrascosas, repitiendo roles, como dicen que hacen algunos hijos de maltratadores? (Guillermo Arróniz López) (Bing translation)

iLiteratura (Czech Republic) reviews Sarah Waters's The Little Stranger. The reviewer titles her review Pád domu Ayresů (The Fall of the House of Eyre):

Takto by mohl začít nejeden britský román. Téma upadajícího šlechtického sídla (popř. ještě skrývajícího nějaké to tajemství) získalo za několik posledních staletí na oblibě, a jak vidno na nejnovějším románu Sarah Watersové The Little Stranger, zájem o ně ani na počátku 21. století neopadá. Doylův Pes Baskervillský, Na větrné hůrce Emily Brontëové, Jana Eyrová její sestry Charlotte, v neposlední řadě Zánik domu Usherů amerického mistra hrůzy Edgara Allana Poea. Všechna tato díla spojuje nejen epocha, kdy vznikla, ale především fascinace ponurostí, atmosférou jistého zmaru a značným utrpením protagonistů. (Markéta Musilová) (Google translation)

Yomiuri reviews positively the Tokyo production of Gordon & Caird's Jane Eyre. The Musical:

(Google translation) ->(...) The acting is solid pine and purity, the strength of Hashimoto, who fits together the power of a long entertainment career supporting player, to produce a thick story. Overlap the original author Charlotte Bronte's star-crossed years rolled by the figure of Jane, full of heart.（Ichiro Shiozaki Makoto塩崎淳一郎）

Paixão por Livros posts about Wuthering Heights in Portuguese, the Schleswig-Holsteinischer Zeitungsverlag reports a new performance of Und ich dachte, es sei Liebe (And I thought it was Love) where Hannelore Hoger read (and Siegfried Gerlich played piano compositions of Chopin, Debussy and Schumann) from farewell letters to beloved (or not) men from very different women (including Charlotte Brontë) in Wyk auf Föhr (Germany).

Categories: Alert, Books, In the News, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, Music, Theatre, Wuthering Heights