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Monday, December 21, 2009

Monday, December 21, 2009 8:00 pm by Cristina in , , , ,    No comments
The Niagara Falls Review tells about a recent visit to the National Potrait Gallery in London.
Perhaps the most moving for me were the paintings of the Bronte sisters -Charlotte, Emily and Anne -two of them by their brother Branwell, including the rather strangely spaced portrait of the sisters with what at first appears to be a ghostly pillar just right of the canvas's centre, which is actually a long turpentine smear where the artist erased his own image.
Convinced of his own worthlessness as a man and a writer and -what he most wanted to be -a painter, Branwell died shortly after of a combination of the family's usual tubercular curse and his own laudanum-laced despair. How one wishes there was some way to signal across the valley of death for just a second to tell him, "Branwell, you were good enough to hang with the immortals in the National Portrait Gallery." (Herman Goodden)
Oh, he'd be thrilled about that, no doubt, with a touch of 'I already knew I deserved that', of course.

The Financial looks at the bestsellers of 2009 in Georgia (the country, not the state).
The 5 most popular books at Parnasi [a bookshop]: out-of-print books (sold 508 units), Dato Turashvili - Jinsebis Taoba (Generation of Jeans), Antuan De Sent Exupery - Little Prince, Emily Bronte - Wuthering Heights, Lali Moroshkina - Me, the President and the World Champion. (Kate Chkhikvadze)
It looks as if people in Georgia don't need 'rap lit' in order to appreciate the classics. As seen in The Times:
Our education correspondent reports the latest wheeze to help children over the hurdles of Eng Lit GCSE. A company is translating Shakespeare and the classic Victorian novels of the kind set by examiners into rap and rock’n’roll summaries of the hot points of the plot. The student wears earphones and plays the summaries while she or he revises. Since modern children cannot be parted from their music, the scheme is devised to combine business with pleasure, study with the modern juju of constant music. [...]
Rap Lit is merely bringing the ancient crib of examination notes up to date, in a form familiar to most children. Old crusties might object. But, like all exam notes, the hip-hop summary will be no use without having read the text.
Heathcliff’s a wild boy Treated as scum;
But after revenge and slights, His lost love for Cathy

Haunts the moors of Wuthering Heights.
Another approach is via comics. The Forbidden Planet blog has a post on Masterpiece comics, including The Crypt of Brontë.
“The Crypt of Bronte” – Cathy! Heathcliff! An epic melodramatic romance in a ghoulish tale narrated by “The Housekeeper”. (Richard Bruton)
The Brontë Parsonage Blog posts an appeal for help on orphans:
I am currently doing an MA in Victorian Studies and am putting together my dissertation proposal which I am intending to do on the portrayal of orphans in the works of the Brontës and how this links to their own experiences of mother-loss and isolation.
I was wondering if you knew of any links that the Brontë Sisters had with regards to orphans as they grew older, i.e. any references to any of them visiting Coram's Foundling Hospital for example. Any advice or tips on where to look would be much appreciated. (Helen Kirk)
Any help is welcome through the comments of that post or by email to heveliusx1@yahoo.co.uk.

The Book Smugglers picks Jude Morgan's The Taste of Sorrow as one of the favourites of 2009. And we heartily agree! Peppermint Kiss is thrilled by Ruben Toledo's cover for Wuthering Heights. El devorador de libros posts about Jane Eyre in Spanish. Finally, the Vivat Trust has uploaded to flickr several pictures of North Lees Hall.

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