Fear of Jane

Several British news outlets publish articles about the Everyone's Reading list by the School Library Association:

Each secondary school in England will receive 15 books from a list of 260 that includes traditional and modern classics, as well as fact-based titles.
Schools where more than 30% of children are on free school meals will be able to choose 25 books.
Ministers say they hope the £500,000 scheme, called Everyone's Reading, will open up "new worlds" for young people.
Among the 260 different titles on offer are Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Bill Bryson's A Short History Of Nearly Everything and sports books.
Schools pick the titles from a list divided into themes, including "laugh", "explore", "imagine", "boggle" and "fear".
The list was drawn up by Eileen Armstrong, school librarian at Cramlington Learning Village.
The scheme is jointly run by the Department for Children, Schools and Families and the School Library Association.
Ms Armstrong said: "The themed list offers something to engage and enthuse everyone regardless of background, attitude or previous reading experience - books to appeal to the girls as well as the boys, books to catch the attention of non-readers, books to hook in the resistant and to inspire confidence in the struggling, books to satisfy the hard to please and to stretch voracious readers. (BBC News)

Jane Eyre can be considered a 'traditional' classic indeed but it has to be pointed out that the version included in the SLA scheme is the Classical Comics simplified text version. Furthermore, why is it included in the 'Fear' section? Other articles discussing the list can be read in The Telegraph or The Guardian.

The Telegraph & Argus talks about the Brontë Parsonage involvement in the Pennines art programme:

Keighley and Haworth museums could play a leading role in a planned Pennines arts programme.
The South Pennines Watershed Landscape programme aims to encourage more people to become creative.
Over three years it aims to bring professional artists and writers together with residents and visitors.
They will draw on the Yorkshire and Lancashire countryside as inspiration for new artistic works.
The £106,000 project will heavily involve Cliffe Castle Museum and the Bronte Parsonage Museum.
Bradford Council's museums service is also heavily involved in the programme.
Funding will come from The South Pennines Leader rural development programme -- funded by the government and the European Union -- and the Heritage Lottery Fund.
The proposed launch is this March (2010) at the opening of Cliffe Castle's planned Ways of Looking at our Landscape exhibition.
Visual artists will spend three months at single venues -- including Cliffe Castle -- creating new work, running community workshops and hosted exhibitions. There will be similar writers-in-residence projects, the first one based at the Bronte Parsonage, with workshops, readings and publication of work.
Each year there will be a photographic competition open to local people, who will be asked to capture the uniqueness of upland and reservoir landscapes.
Work will this year be exhibited at Ilkley Manor House Museum, featuring pictures of nearby Rombalds Moor, and a future year's exhibition may be at Cliffe Castle.
A spokesman for the Watershed Landscape said that in past centuries writers and artists had found the South Pennines moorlands a rich source of inspiration.
The spokesman said: "The projects are proposed as a means of celebrating a long tradition, to bring the wealth of creative activities associated with the uplands to the attention of a wider audience.
"Short courses will encourage aspiring artists and writers to find out more while developing their own creativity."
The project will also help more people appreciate the landscape and encourage them to make their own visits.
The South Pennines Leader programme covers areas including Rombalds Moor and the Brontë countryside, and funds. schemes which are innovative, long lasting and improve the quality of people's lives, the environment or the local economy. (David Knights)

The Film Musical Society selects the best vintage scores published in 2009. Michel Legrand's Wuthering Heights 1970 is one of them:

Wuthering Heights (Michel Legrand, La-La Land). One of the French maestro's finest scores for the obscure 1970 remake of the Bronte classic with Timothy Dalton and Anna Calder-Marshall. Legrand's soulful, soaring score – surely the best thing about the American-International film – includes the song "I Was Born in Love With You," which has been recorded by many artists since. (Jon Burlingname)

And The Sun makes a list of the 2009 top 12 Bizarre Sessions:

Aussie rockers Wolfmother were one of the more unusual outfits, dropping their staple heavy metal to warble Kate Bush classic Wuthering Heights.

The Seoul Times (South Korea) celebrates the upcoming 2010 as the year of the tiger and includes Emily Brontë among famous people born in years of the tiger. An article about the traditional values of US conservatism quotes Jane Eyre in the Helena Independent Record, The Valve publishes an interesting article (a selection of fragments rather than a new critical approach) about Humans and Dogs in Wuthering Heights. From Fragile Thoughts to Explosive Ideas posts an imaginative review of Wuthering Heights, Entre Libros posts a more conventional one (in Spanish), Ex-Libris is reading Villette, Trainswhistle's Blog posts a story titled Jane Eyre and the Mammogram, Bad Wolf Day reviews Wide Sargasso Sea 2006 and Vintage Reads reviews The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

Finally, two new participants in Laura's Reviews All About the Brontës Challenge 2010: Cover to Cover and book eater.

Categories: Brontë Parsonage Museum, Jane Eyre, In the News, Movies-DVD-TV, Music, References, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Villette, Wide Sargasso Sea, Wuthering Heights,

2009. A Brontë year in images

Our traditional summary of the year in images (and with a little help from the wonders of Picasa 3.6):

The Brontë year in... books/audiobooks:


In DVD Releases (and a new radio adaptation):


In Art/Exhibitions (and a comic):


In Theatre and Dance:


In Music:


Categories: Messages from BB

In 200 years...

The Telegraph & Argus publishes a list of upcoming 2010 events at the Parsonage (for more information you can check this old post of ours)

Pictures inspired by Emily Bronte’s descriptions of weather are to go on show in Haworth.
Jo Brown will display abstract paintings inspired by the Wuthering Heights author’s poems.
The exhibition, The Sunbeam and the Storm, will be at the Bronte Parsonage Museum from March 5 to May 3.
The parsonage will also host an appearance by writer Lisa Appignanesi on March 10. She will talk about her latest book, The Mad, Bad and Sad: a History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800.
The book, shortlisted for several awards, includes the cases of writers such as Charlotte Bronte and Virginia Woolf.
An Afternoon with Persephone Books will feature a talk by the firm’s founder Nicola Beauman on March 24. It publishes novels, dairies, short stories and cookery books by women writers.

Cape Argus (South Africa) mentions the dangers of playing family games at Christmas:

Every Christmas we play a board game. (...) This year we opted for 30 Seconds, a general knowledge game. (...) According to R, (...) one of the Brontë Sisters penned Little House on the Prairie[.]

The Wall Street Journal mentions the Harper Teen covers of Wuthering Heights (and other novels) marketed à la Twilight. Curiously, The Celebrity Café poses the following question:

The massive numbers of “units” shifted by Meyer, Rowling et al show that in their creation they must be doing something right, but the same cultural theorists warned of a “dumbing down” in culture, and can anyone honestly say that 200 years from now “New Moon” or “Eclipse” will be looked upon as Meyer herself seemingly looks upon “Wuthering Heights”? (Andrew MacLaughlin)

We don't want to sound highbrow, but we think we know the answer to the question.

A local Brontëite in the Palm Beach Post, cleverviolet uploads to flickr an original illustration for Jane Eyre and david.mc.. a couple of stunning pictures of Haworth moors, I used to have a life, then the books took over has read Wuthering Heights. Finally Nadia-Fiennes from The Inn at Lambton reviews Edward F. Rochester by Christine Paris Bruyère:

J'ai beaucoup aimé me replonger dans cette oeuvre, et le fait de voir les choses du point de vue de Rochester est assez plaisant.
On dirait un peu un journal intime, où Rochester écrirait ses pensées, raconterait sa journée à un lecteur, qui au fur et à mesure de la lecture, devient un peu son confident. Il prend beaucoup les lecteurs comme témoin ou lui posent des questions.. Cela peut être assez déroutant durant les premieres pages.. (Google translation)

Categories: Brontë Parsonage Museum, Jane Eyre, References, Sequels, Wuthering Heights

Wuthering Heights in Tel Aviv

An alert from Tel Aviv, Israel:

Revisiting the Classics of English Literature
Lecture Series Sponsored by
The Department of English and American Studies
Tel Aviv University

Encounters with the great works of English literature mark all of us. The engrossment in a Dickens novel, the awe inspired by Milton’s Paradise Lost, the laughter at the wry wit of Chaucer, the tremor elicited by the inundating lines of Shelley and Keats, the wonder at the magical worlds
of Shakespearean drama, gorgeous palaces and solemn temples brought to life through the power of words alone …
For over 1500 years, literature in the English language has taught, nurtured, thrilled, outraged and humbled readers, and, no less significantly, provided and challenged them with new ways of understanding an ever-changing world. This first-of-its-kind lecture series offers you a unique opportunity to meet or revisit the impressive literary legacy of Great Britain and America: the works of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Defoe, Dickens, Austen, Swift, Wordsworth, Woolf,
Henry James, Yeats, Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald … We invite you to experience or re-experience the magic of these grand literary masterpieces and to step beyond their surface
to experience the times and conditions they came from and the diverse issues with which their writers grappled. Our professors will ignite your enthusiasm for the classics in the English language with their knowledge, wit and passion. Experience a reunion with works of literature you have always loved and that have marked some of your precious moments, or discover the magic of texts that have always facinated you from afar.
Join us for the lectures on the text or texts to which you feel a most intimate connection or come
to the entire lecture series to enjoy a lively and thoughtprovoking conversation with the giants of literature in the English language. You need not have read all the texts slated for discussion but will undoubtedly be inspired to do so!
Each meeting will offer a short lecture followed by an informal discussion with the professor and light refreshments. We would be delighted to have you as our guest!

Today, December 30:

Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights
Dr. Galia Benziman – 30 December, 2009

Categories: Alert, Talks

A Spirit's Triumph

More reviews of Sheila Kohler's Becoming Jane Eyre. This one comes from Associated Press:

Charlotte Bronte was a dutiful daughter of the Victorian age. Her best-known character, Jane Eyre, endures as a woman who transcends time and social order. How Charlotte released Jane into the world is the subject of Sheila Kohler's new novel, "Becoming Jane Eyre." (...)
Kohler illuminates how Charlotte created a character who could act on the emotions she was forced to suppress. Jane says - loudly, brazenly - all the things Charlotte cannot say.
Charlotte's imagination was the one place where she was not bound by decorum. Her unrequited love, her loneliness, the indignity of dependence, her rage at her inability to express herself openly - even to her father - all feed the story of a young governess who will not be overlooked.
"Becoming Jane Eyre," rather than dwelling on a family's tragedies, shows a spirit's triumph.

You can read the Kirkus Review of the novel on the author's website.

On the blogosphere there's more activity: MonsterHouse reviews Jane Eyre 1944. Both Aneca's World and Zubon Book Reviews post about Agnes Grey (the first one more positively than the second one), life:and:lim talks about her reading of Wuthering Heights, Alas de Papel devotes a post to the Brontës (in Spanish). Finally, Medieval Woman: Blogging with Historical Fiction Writer Susan Higginbotham posts a very positive review of Jude Morgan's The Taste of Sorrow.

Categories: Agnes Grey, Books, Fiction, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV

Tales of the Islanders & Charlotte Brontë's Brief Life

Two new Brontë-related books published by Hesperus Press are scheduled to appear these days. The official release date was set for December 25, 2009 but we know that the release has been delayed.

Tales of the Islanders
Charlotte Brontë
Hesperus Press
November 25, 2009
ISBN: 9781843912019
£7.99

A high-spirited and hugely enjoyable collection of juvenilia, Tales of the Islanders showcases Brontë’s remarkable creative powers, suffused with a youthful zeal and exuberance.

When Charlotte’s brother Branwell was given a set of twelve toy soldiers, an entire new imaginary world opened before them. The Twelves, or Young Men, became a constant source of inspiration for the Brontë children, spawning tales of swashbuckling adventure, darkest intrigue, doomed romance and malevolent spirits. The four volumes of tales collected here make delightful reading, whilst offering a unique insight into Brontë family life and Charlotte’s development as a writer.

Brief Lives: Charlotte Brontë
Jessica Cox
Hesperus Press
November 25, 2009
ISBN: 9781843919209
Format: Paperback

Charlotte Brontë is one of the world’s best-loved writers. Her extraordinary literary talent manifested itself at an early age when she penned a series of imaginative and entertaining tales. Before her untimely death at the age of thirty-eight she had produced the masterpieces Jane Eyre, Shirley and Villette.

Jessica Cox’s superb and meticulously researched biography provides a fascinating new interpretation both of Brontë’s celebrated works and of her personal life, notably her – often intense – relationships with those around her. The result is a beautifully drawn portrait of the creator of some of the world’s most remarkable novels, which marvellously augments the Hesperus collection of her writings.

Categories: Biography, Books, Charlotte Brontë, Juvenilia

The scratching of a pencil

The paucity of news or even mentions this Christmas is leaving the spotlight to Sheila Kohler's Becoming Jane Eyre. Today's review comes from The Boston Globe:

There are many famous literary marriages, but only a few families whose shared genius earned more than one member a place in the history of literature. Americans have the Jameses, but the English have the Brontës.
Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë - or Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell as they were known pseudonymously to their contemporaries - produced some of the most beloved novels of the English language. Between mourning the early loss of their mother and two older sisters, fighting for their father’s affections, rescuing their prodigal brother from his addictions, worrying over their finances as children of a country curate, educating intolerable pupils as governesses, and pursuing love affairs, they found the energy and resolve to write "Jane Eyre," "Wuthering Heights," "Agnes Grey," "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall," "Shirley," "Villette," and "The Professor."
The celebrated, usually exaggerated conditions in which they wrote their novels, poems, and childhood fantasies, described most often as cloistered or incestuous, have already fueled biographers and mythmakers. Sheila Kohler’s passionate novel is a fresh contribution to Brontë legendry.
“Becoming Jane Eyre’’ begins and ends with “the scratching of a pencil,’’ an appreciable detail in a novel that refuses to be distracted from the simple but sophisticated act of literary creation. Kohler’s fictional chronicle travels Manchester, Haworth, and London while volleying between the voices of Charlotte, Anne, Emily, their father Patrick, their brother Branwell, and their servants. But Kohler stays concentrated on conjuring the sounds of pencils producing words and the rustling of packaging materials protecting manuscripts as they move from parsonage to publishers.
Kohler’s novel opens in 1846, the year the sisters published their joint volume of poetry, submitted their first novels for publication, and commenced work on their second novels. Kohler seizes on the eldest sister, Charlotte, whose “new story of an orphan’’ comes to life in the dim squalor of her father’s recovery room after he undergoes cataract surgery. With great awareness of creativity’s curiosities, Kohler dramatizes Charlotte’s decisions to “not hide behind the persona of a man’’ and to “avoid mawkishness by creating the complexity of a real child’s mind.’’
Kohler reveals her own knowledge of character in a beautiful account of Charlotte naming her heroine: “It comes to her out of thin air . . . a name that conjures up duty and dullness, childhood and obedience, but also spirit and liberty, a sprite’s name, a fairy’s name, half spirit, half flesh, light in darkness, truth amid hypocrisy, the name of one who sees: Jane Eyre.’’ Her language is playfully imitative of the Brontës’ own gothic-romantic style: Patrick wakes as “small fingers brush his face like a cobweb’’ and Charlotte writes because “an idea comes scurrying into her mind like a mouse.’’
But Kohler’s novel is not all easeful poetry. She does not shy away from the jealousy and rivalry of these sisters, the difficulties they faced in finding the courage to write in an era unreceptive to female authors, or the fecklessness with which they loved unavailable men. She refuses to flinch at the successive deaths of Branwell, Emily, and Anne or even the death of her chosen subject, foretelling Charlotte’s passing in childbirth.
It is in Charlotte’s solitude that Kohler finds the greatest empathy. “Above all,’’ Kohler writes of this dark, lonely period, “she would like to share what she has written with her dead sisters, as they had so often done . . . walking together around the dining room table arm in arm . . . encouraging, criticizing, laughing in the freedom of the dark.’’ With an appreciation for their craft and sympathy for their difficult profession, Kohler’s “Becoming Jane Eyre’’ is a tender telling of the Brontë family’s saga and the stories they told. (Casey N. Cep)

You can read BrontëBlog's review here. And our contest giving away two copies is now closed and the winners have been emailed, so if you sent in your Christmas quote do check your email account.

Daily Kos explains something that sometimes is not quite as obvious as we would expect it to.

A great deal could be said about how fiction by and for women is rated in relation to more masculinist fiction -- whether it be Jane Austen or Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens or Henry James -- but in this case, by "romance novel," I mean genre romance. Romances are the books in the romance section of the bookstore, not the books in the "fiction" or "literature" section that have a love story but are given a pass on the stigma of being romance novels. (Laura Clawson)

On the blogosphere, Julie's Crafts and Hobbies joins in the All About the Brontës Challenge.

Categories: Books, Fiction, Jane Eyre

Becoming Jane Eyre - A Review

Our thanks to Penguin for sending us a review copy of this book.

Becoming Jane Eyre
by Sheila Kohler
Paperback: 256 pages
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (December 29, 2009)
ISBN-10: 0143115979
ISBN-13: 978-0143115977

More Brontë biofiction! And it's still amazing how at first sight the many releases could seem overwhelming and yet, when they are finally in your hands, they are unique and very welcome.

In the case of Becoming Jane Eyre, Sheila Kohler has decided to focus - at least initially - on Charlotte Brontë's stay in Manchester in 1846 looking after her father, who has just been operated on to remove his cataracts. What could seem like a claustrophobic atmosphere - dimmed lighting, hushed noises, hardly any talking and confined, secluded quarters and also in Charlotte's case a persistent toothache - becomes the breeding ground which first sees Jane Eyre.

Sheila Kohler herself explains how her novel was born:

The spark for this novel came from a line in Lyndall Gordon's biography of Charlotte Brontë: "What happened as she sat with Papa in the darkened room in Boundary Street remains in shadow". I have tried to imagine what might have happened during the writing of Jane Eyre in Manchester and Haworth, and how the book changed the lives of the Brontës and all the rest of us.

Sheila Kohler brings a candle into the room and gives the anonymous nurse a nickname and a background while giving Charlotte the ideas for her Jane Eyre. This first 'volume' of the book is perhaps the most static and yet it is probably the best and most fascinating. Kohler explores the origins of everything in Jane Eyre, from the name of our heroine - which sees the light in a beautiful paragraph - to particular events and situations in the novel, all this mingled with Charlotte's and Patrick's reflections on their own lives and choices.

The story - or indeed, the stories - is not told from a unique point of view, and we can see what one given character is thinking at all times. Most of the time, it is Charlotte, but Emily, Anne, Branwell, Patrick and even Tabby and a few key others⁽¹⁾ are the narrators - or thinkers - at some point, which certainly contributes to an unbiased sort of story-telling, very much like real life, where everyone has an opinion and sees things differently from the rest.

Patrick's reflections help give the story the needed family background, while also delving into the choices he has made along the way, and unavoidably leaving some question marks scattered along the way. Charlotte's reflections are the most extensive and they serve to give a personality to her character, while introducing events that may or may not help to shape Jane Eyre. The thoughts of Anne, Emily, Branwell and Tabby are interesting both because they provide us with yet more useful background information - this is subtly done and thus readers new to the Brontë story will follow the tale quite naturally - but even more so because they help to bring Charlotte forward as a character. We realise that she might be the proverbial 'unrealiable narrator' thanks to them.

Emily, however, comes across a bit strangely. Her personality and depiction are alright, but when she speaks... well, we just didn't imagine her speaking quite like that in real life.

It is a story told in 'petit comité', where all secondary - though not less important - characters are tiny satellites serving only to make the story move forward at some point. Many of these are even banished to a world of initials: Monsieur Heger becomes Monsieur H. or Mrs Robinson becomes Mrs R. A touch of irreality that serves, yet again, to bring what really matters, to the foreground.

One of the best things about biofiction is that it allows a different look into the Brontë family. Biofiction brings to Brontë matters, the minds of writers used to thinking of motives and shaping characters, which they put to good use with what's known about the Brontës. But also, fiction allows writers to make decisions and explore themes and subjects in a way that non-fiction - biography - hardly allows. The connections Sheila Kohler has come up with when tracing sources - or hints or prompts, after all it was Charlotte Brontë herself who said that, 'we only suffer reality to suggest, never to dictate' - to events in the novel are quite impressive. Impossible to tell whether the actual Charlotte Brontë made the connection as well, but in the novel and in the context of the Brontës' lives, most of them do work marvellously.

Becoming Jane Eyre begins in Manchester in 1846, but it follows Charlotte Brontë right to the (her) end. and while it doesn't in the least tell each and every thing, for it is told in episodes, it does tell the main story. And while a few things are different from the real story, no change is so important to disfigure the story. On the contrary, the fiction seems to benefit from these changes. Fiction, too, allows for a more poetical kind of writing that non-fiction does. Thus, Kohler writes beautifully sad things such as 'the family tragedies, that now occur one after the other, like beads in a dark necklace of woe'.

One of the most remarkable things about Becoming Jane Eyre is that while most biographical retellings seem to base the plot around a love story, in Becoming Jane Eyre the love story - if love story there is - is hardly a footnote, an epilogue. Or better still: the love story told is the love story between a writer and her writing, and how it can turn into a lifeline at precisely the right moment.

Sheila Kohler cites as her (Brontë) influences a trio of Gs: Gaskell, Gérin and Gordon, though we wonder if she read or had in mind Virginia Woolf at some point. Charlotte once decides that 'she will write out of rage out of a deep sense of her won worth and of the injustice of the world's reception of her words. She will write about something she knows well: her passion', which is of course very reminiscent of what Virginia Woolf wrote⁽²⁾.

We are not alone praising the book, Amy Tan, Lyndall Gordon or even J.M. Coetzee have done so before - and better, too. Non-Brontëites - surely soon to be Brontëites - will find a treat but Brontëites? Oh, Brontëites will find a treat, food for thought and an interesting new glimpse into this unique family.

Notes

(1) The journey into the mind of Mrs Smith while at the opera with the mysterious 'Misses Brown' is truly remarkable, for instance. Sheila Kohler has commented on this:

It is great fun to get into different heads, it seems to me, to see life from very different points of view, all of which are part of my own: the nurse's somewhat coarse sensuality, the father's religiosity, and Charlotte's passion of course. All these different characters express different facets of our common humanity, I hope.

(2) In A Room of One's Own:

She will write in a rage where she should write calmly. She will write foolishly where she should write wisely. She will write of herself where she should write of her characters. She is at war with her lot.

Categories: Books, Jane Eyre, Review

An intense page-turning narrative

Another review of Sheila Kohler's Becoming Jane Eyre (this one not so positive, but also not very deep) appears in Deseret News:

The Brontë sisters, Charlotte, Emily and Anne, are in style right now.
Not that the authors of the classics "Jane Eyre," "Wuthering Heights" and "Agnes Grey" have ever gone out of style, but they seem to be experiencing a resurgence as of late, with a number of pieces about them recently released.
The three sisters, who lived during the mid-19th century, experienced tragedies that seem straight out of the books they wrote.
It's those parallels that author Sheila Kohler draws upon in her new novel, "Becoming Jane Eyre."
Kohler opens her story in 1846. The Brontës live in a cold parsonage on the gloomy moors of Northern England. Mrs. Brontë and two of her daughters are dead. The family's one son is addicted to alcohol and opiates. The curate is in poor health, and the three surviving daughters are spinsters.
Lacking any real chance at marriage, the sisters look to other ways of securing their futures, namely by writing.
And while Kohler touches on all the sisters, it's Charlotte who is the focus. Kohler draws on the similarities between the character Jane Eyre and Charlotte, speculating whether certain incidents and people made the transition from real life to fiction. And in doing so, Kohler changes the way readers approach the timeless work.
"Becoming Jane Eyre" is mostly told in present tense ("She lifts her gaze …" and "She surveys the scene …"), a curious decision considering most authors adopt a past tense ("They talked of many things.").
The almost stage-direction-like style is distracting, which is too bad, because Kohler has made a valiant and somewhat successful effort here. Readers will have to make it through a few chapters before reaching a rhythm.
What also makes it a curious choice is that Kohler's style is in no way similar to Charlotte's. It's as if Kohler is deliberately trying to separate her work from that of the person she writes about rather than channel her energy.
While the main focus of "Becoming Jane Eyre" is Charlotte, Kohler also writes from the points of view of sisters Anne and Emily and other family players. While informative, it's also a bit disjointed, leaving the reader guessing at times.
"Becoming Jane Eyre" is not without its merits, though. Kohler obviously did a lot of research, and her passion for the Brontë sisters' work shines through. Kohler is a master at creating tension, and once she reaches her stride, her work becomes an intense page-turning narrative. (Jessica Harrison)

The Sunday News (New Zealand) traces the Brontë past of the writer Michelle Holman:

As a child, she had started out Bronte-style, banging out Victorian romances on an old typewriter and bright pink paper. (Catherine Woulfe)

Finally, National Post (Canada) mentions the Wuthering Heights book covers à la Twilight and afewdaysinseptemberblog posts about Jane Eyre 1996.

Categories: Brontëites, Fiction, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, Wuthering Heights

More recent auctions

After the Christie's and Sotheby's auctions of Brontëana it's not a bad time to look at other recent auctions:

Bonhams
Sale 16199 -
Printed Books, Maps, Manuscripts and Photographs, 18 Mar 2008
New Bond Street, Bradford, 18 Mar 2008

Lot No: 266

BRONTË FAMILY

Papers of Francis Alexander Leyland, friend of Branwell Brontë and early biographer of the family, comprising autograph letters to him by Charlotte's widower Arthur Bell Nicholls, her friend Ellen Nussey, William Brown, sexton of Haworth Church, and those who had served with Branwell on the railway at Luddenden Foot; together with Leyland's own notes on visiting the Browns in Haworth in 1874, retained copies and transcripts of letters, etc., over 30 items, some foxing and dust-staining, 1857-1886

Sold for £4,320 inclusive of Buyer's Premium to the Brontë Society.

More information here.

International Autograph Auctions

Extremely rare ink signature ('Yours faithfully, C Bronte') on a small piece neatly clipped from the conclusion of a letter. Lightly mounted and with very slight age wear.
Autograph Auction
Radisson Edwardian Hotel Heathrow
Estimate £400-£600. Sold for £1800, 16 May 2009

Other recent acquisitions of the Brontë Society are:

From Maggs Rare Books a letter from Mrs Gaskell to an unknown correspondent (13 May s.a.)

From Modern First Editions in Ilkley, a collection of items associated with Winifred Gérin.

From Hatchard & Daughters in Haworth, two letters from Jane E. Brown (friend of Ellen Nussey) to Mrs. Wilkinson (dated 7 February 1914 and 16 February 1914).

Categories: Brontëana

“What is she to write about now, in the silence of this darkened room?”

The New York Times reviews positively Becoming Jane Eyre by Sheila Kohler. You still have the weekend to enter our Christmas contest. BrontëBlog will publish a review in the coming days.

“It is moorish, and wild, and knotty as a root of heath,” Charlotte Brontë wrote of her sister Emily’s novel, “Wuthering Heights.” The Brontës brought a new emotional weather to the English novel — stormy, blasted and passionate. “I never saw a Moor,” Emily Dickinson wrote, as though speaking for the whole far-flung Brontë cult. “Yet know I how the Heather looks.”
“Becoming Jane Eyre,” Sheila Kohler’s muted and gently probing 10th work of fiction, opens during the summer of 1846 amid the “charmless, suffocating streets” of industrial Manchester. The 69-year-old Rev. Patrick Brontë has come from his rural parsonage on the Yorkshire moors to have a cataract removed. He is attended by a hired nurse who raids the kitchen late at night and “gnaws . . . ravenously” at a lamb bone, “grinding on a delicious piece of gristle with her good back teeth.”
Less intrusive is his prim daughter Charlotte, who receives a rejection letter for her first novel on the very day her father submits to surgery, “excruciatingly conscious of the knife’s work in that delicate place.” Charlotte is 30, single, with two unemployed and unmarried younger sisters with rejected novels of their own, “a shiftless, dissipated wreck” of a brother far gone to gin and opium, and an aging father reduced to “a blind mouth.” “What is she to write about now, in the silence of this darkened room?”
The spark for Kohler’s novel was a line from Lyndall Gordon’s biography, “Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life”: “What happened as she sat with Papa in that darkened room in Boundary Street remains in shadow.” Gordon proposed that the crucial breached “boundary” was the adoption of an androgynous pseudo­nym, Currer Bell, which allowed Brontë to project herself beyond the confines of proper domestic womanhood. For Kohler, however, liberation comes with the sudden invention of Brontë’s fictional alter ego, Jane Eyre, the dauntless and self-reliant heroine, both “ire and eyer,” of her second novel. “Sitting by her blinded, silenced father, she dares to take up her pencil and write for the first time in her own voice.”
“Becoming Jane Eyre” is narrated in a continual present, the tense of “becoming.” Short chapters take us back through remembered moments in Charlotte’s life, spots of time that, disguised and transformed, make their way into “Jane Eyre.” From her days as a governess, she invents a bully for the opening pages of the novel. From her difficult period in Brussels, when she fell in love with a married teacher whom she addressed abjectly as “Master,” she draws the contours of “the bigamous Mr. Rochester.” A visit to a “house with battlements” yields a housekeeper’s story of “a madwoman . . . confined up here during the 18th century,” the inspiration for the bestial Creole heiress whom Rochester has locked in his attic. Some parallels between novel and biography seem more of a reach: “An orphan is not so far from a middle child.”
“Becoming Jane Eyre” is divided into three parts, rather grandly called “volumes.” The first, centered on the operation in Manchester, is claustrophobic, with comic relief provided by that peckish nurse. The second opens more broadly into the world of Haworth Parsonage, where tough-minded Emily offers a fresh view of her sister. Why, she wonders, is Charlotte “so preoccupied with her own small problems of love when her brother’s are so much more serious?”
The third section, which follows Charlotte to London after the triumphant publication
of “Jane Eyre,” is full of satisfying recognitions. When Charlotte, the plain country girl, reveals herself as the writer behind the pseudonym Currer Bell, her stupefied young publisher echoes Lincoln encountering Harriet Beecher Stowe. “Can this be, is it possible that this little woman is the author of ‘Jane Eyre’?”
“Becoming Jane Eyre” is driven by interesting questions. How exactly does a fictional character take shape in a writer’s imagination? What impact can an invented character have on a writer’s life? Kohler believes that writing “Jane Eyre” was therapeutic for Charlotte, a release from “stifled rage.” “She writes, hardly seeing the words. Her toothache is better, and since she has been writing her bowels, so often obstructed, have moved regularly.”
But the Brontës seem diminished in “Becoming Jane Eyre.” One ­wearies of their incessant questions and exclamations, meant to reproduce their thoughts but sounding a bit too much like 21st-century anxieties. “Can she own these words,” Charlotte wonders, “which speak of the longings of a woman for fulfillment, for love, for the same rights as a man?”
Kohler was wise to pitch the novel in a subdued mode, not vying with the passions unleashed in the Brontë novels or in “Wide Sargasso Sea,” Jean Rhys’s excruciatingly gorgeous fictional evocation of the first Mrs. Rochester’s life. She has written instead a small, uncluttered novel about sibling rivalry and the various meanings of “publication” for women writers in a straitened world where women were supposed to stay private. (Christopher Benfey)

And don't forget to check out the nice illustration by A. Richard Allen which goes with the article.

The Belleville News-Democrat includes a Brontë question in their Christmas Quiz:

4. Who are Acton, Currer and Ellis Bell better known as?

El Sur (Spain) talks about the publication of a new Spanish translation of Wide Sargasso Sea:

Se publican dos obras de Jean Rhys: unos apuntes autobiográficos elaborados al final de su vida recogidos bajo el título 'Una sonrisa, por favor' y una nueva traducción de su obra más célebre, 'Ancho mar de los Sargazos'. En esta novela, Jean Rhys (Roseau, Dominica, 1890-Londres, 1978) se atrevió a dotar de protagonismo a un personaje enigmático y secundario de una de las grandes historias románticas de la literatura inglesa del siglo XIX, 'Jane Eyre'. Ese personaje es Bherta, la esposa loca que Rochester tenía encerrada y oculta en una de las torres de su mansión, responsable de que la boda entre la institutriz Jane Eyre y el señor Rochester no se llevara a cabo.
Hasta ahí la anécdota metaliteraria, la idea de hacer literatura de la literatura que a menudo denota escasa imaginación o falta de talento para contar lo ya contado en 'remakes' con ligeros cambios de enfoque.
No es el caso de Jean Rhys. Al utilizar ese personaje de la loca del desván para construirle una vida anterior en Las Antillas, acentúa los problemas de su origen criollo. Y con la evocación del mundo mágico de la isla antillana, consigue una recreación brillante y única en la historia de la literatura, de modo que ya nunca podremos volver a leer 'Jane Eyre' de la misma manera que después de 'Ancho mar de los Sargazos'.
La esposa enajenada de Rochester no será sólo esa figura fantasmal, ni el personaje plano dibujado por Charlote Brontë, desde que Jean Rhys imaginó para ella la educación jamaicana de la hija de un viejo hacendado. Su profundo contacto con la santería, junto con la rebelión de los esclavos que presencia cuando se aprueba la Ley de Emancipación en su Martinica natal, explican un desarraigo que deriva hacia una vida atormentada. Y desembocará en locura al ser trasladada a Inglaterra tras un matrimonio de conveniencia. Antes de permanecer encerrada en una habitación durante años e incendiar la mansión de Rochester en la que ella misma muere, mucho antes de perder la razón, será Bertha Antoniette Cosway, una mujer de existencia conmovedora y atormentada a quien la triste figura gótica que se le reserva en 'Jane Eyre' no hará justicia.
Jean Rhys adoraba esa novela que le obsesionó durante años. Uno de los motivos es que compartía sus orígenes jamaicanos con el personaje literario extraído de 'Jane Eyre'. El padre de la escritora era un médico galés y su madre, una dama criolla de origen escocés. Además, a Jean Rhys le acompañó siempre ese profundo sentimiento de desarraigo propio de quienes pertenecen simultáneamente a dos culturas alejadas entre sí, sin sentirse plenamente integrados en ninguna. (...)
Uno de los logros técnicos de 'Ancho mar de los Sargazos' es manejar diferentes puntos de vista con maestría. En la primera y tercera parte habla Antoinette, la criolla, pero su voz interior es muy distinta antes y después de enloquecer. La segunda da cuenta de los hechos a través de la voz ajena del señor Rochester, un contrapunto para hablar de esa locura que progresa. Las hondas reflexiones y la exploración contenida de la desdicha se deslizan en una historia de la que nosotros, y sólo nosotros, lectores, conocemos la continuación trágica. Así esta novela sería lo que hoy se conoce como una 'precuela', cuya referencia cronológica se sitúa en el pasado de la obra de referencia, que no 'secuela'. Sabemos más que los propios protagonistas de la historia: conocemos su futuro. (María Bengoa) (Google translation)

Toneelblog reviews the performances of De Brontë Sisters by the Toneelgroep Dorst:

De personages worden door de, door de wol geverfde, cast van het stuk uitstekend neergezet. Elsje de Wijn speelt de jongste, Anne, met veel humor en worstelend met het godsbeeld van haar vader. Trudy de Jong is zeer scherp als Emily en Petra Laseur zet Charlotte neer als een zeer ambitieuze vrouw. Theo de Groot lijkt haast een jonge god in de rol van de veelbelovende Branwell. Maar hoe intrigerend het spel ook is, toch rijst de vraag waarom ervoor gekozen is om dit stuk te spelen. Charlotte Brontë bereikte met haar 38 jaar de hoogste leeftijd, de anderen werden niet ouder dan 30. Waarom een personage spelen dat niet veel ouder geworden is dan de helft van je eigen leeftijd? Deze vraag verdwijnt door het goede spel weer snel naar de achtergrond. In het simpele decor – een kamerscherm en wat stoelen en tafels – zetten de spelers doeltreffend verschillende situaties neer, van kindertijd tot volwassenheid, van droom tot succes. De door Yan Tax ontworpen kostuums zijn erg mooi en variabel, al naar gelang de situatie verandert.
De regisseur en de spelers hebben gekozen voor een vrij ronde, vloeiende manier van bewegen. Hierdoor lijken sommige handelingen een beetje gemaakt en wordt het geheel zachter dan je zou verwachten. De hardheid van de tijd, de overheersing door vader, de ziekte en dood komen hierdoor iets minder overtuigend over. Uitzondering hierop is de dronkenschap van Branwell en alle handelingen die hieruit voortvloeien.
Uiteindelijk blijft de voorstelling boeien door het innemende spel van vier klasbakken van acteurs. De manier waarop zij samenspelen maakt elk decor overbodig. De geluidseffecten van de wind mogen wat mij betreft uit de voorstelling gelaten worden. Als Trudy de Jong speelt dat Emily op de hei staat, dan geloof je dat ook zonder wind.
De Brontë Sisters is geen voorstelling voor ‘de gezellig’, want het leven van de personages gaat nu eenmaal niet over rozen, integendeel. Er is zeer veel ongeluk en maar een klein beetje geluk om daar tegenover te zetten. Een liefhebber van goed spel mag zich hier zeker niet door laten tegen houden. (Martijn Groenendijk) (Google translation)

Read Like Me recommends Wuthering Heights 2009, Television Obscurities mentions a virtually-unknown TV adaptation of Jane Eyre. It was aired by NBC’s experimental station W2XBS in New York City in 1939 (October, 12):

8:30-9:30PM – “Jane Eyre,” by Helen Jerome, with Margaret Curtis, Dennis Hoey, Effie Shannon, Ruth Matteson, Carl Harbord.

The original play by Helen Jerome was premiered in 1936.

The Pursuit of Happiness is reading Jane Eyre (in Swedish), O Globo (Brazil) links Wuthering Heights and the Twilight saga once again, ABC (Spain) reviews 44 escritores de la literatura universal by Jesús Marchamalo and Damián Flores, Europa Sur (Spain) compares Charles Dickens's short tale The Ghost in the Bridal Chamber with Wuthering Heights (!). Finally, an alert for our Romanian readers, as Wuthering Heights 2009 will be broadcast tonight (December 26) and tomorrow (December 27):

TVR2
Sâmbătă, 26 decembrie şi duminică, 27 decembrie, 20.40 - premieră
LA RĂSCRUCE DE VÂNTURI (WUTHERING HEIGHTS-Marea Britanie, 2009)
Regia: Goky Giedroyc
Cu: Tom Hardy, Charlotte Riley
Dramă. Cea mai recentă ecranizare a romanului scris de Emily Bronte. Povestea, întinsă pe două generaţii, a clanurilor Earnshaw şi Linton, complexa împletire a destinelor lor şi blestemul fatal care urmăreşte una dintre cele mai celebre perechi de îndrăgostiţi din istoria literaturii: Catherine şi Heathcliff.

Categories: Books, Fiction, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, References, Theatre, Wide Sargasso Sea, Wuthering Heights

Recent Scholar work (II)

More scholar work:

Robert L. Herbert
Naive Impressions from Nature: Millet's Readings, from Montaigne to Charlotte Brontë
The Art Bulletin
September 2007, Volume LXXXIX Number 3, 540-562

In 1865 Jean-François Millet copied many passages from Montaigne, Palissy, Piccolpasso, Grimm, Germaine de Staël, and Charlotte Brontë, confirming the erudition evident in his letters. In his 1865 Salon review, Alfred Sensier, writing under the name Jean Ravenel, used some of these copies supplied by the artist; he quoted from Millet's letters and from the latter's heretofore undated and little-known manifesto “Notes sur l'art,” to make Millet his undisclosed collaborator. Millet's extracts, featuring sixteenth-century writers, give evidence of the distinctive character of his naturalism, a “rustic language” corroborated by his own collection of sixteenth-century art.

David Yost
A Tale of Three Lucys: Wordsworth and Brontë in Kincaid's Antiguan Villette
MELUS: Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, 31:2 (12006) 141-56

Sarah Selby
Wuthering Heights and Pop Culture: or, Googling Heathcliff
Journal of Georgia Philological Association 1 (2006) 158-74

Categories: Journals, Scholar

What better time of year to visit the Brontë Parsonage?

The Yorkshire Post has a most superb suggestion for these holidays. A visit to the Brontë Parsonage Museum:

Brontë Parsonage Museum: The moors. The snow. The Brontës. What better time of year than right now to visit the literary museum, former home of the Brontës? Over the past few years the museum has been building a contemporary art strand and, under the guidance of Jenna Holmes, has brought some interesting exhibitions to the museum. The current exhibition at the museum is the provocatively titled Sex, Drugs and Literature – The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë, a new special exhibition focusing on the troubled brother of the family, Branwell. The museum is closed this weekend, but open all next week until Thursday, Dec 31.

The same destination recommended by Canada.com:

Haworth (West Yorkshire): Second only to Stratford-upon-Avon as a major literary pilgrimage site is the home of the Bronte Parsonage Museum. Here the famous Bronte sisters lived and spun their web of romance. Emily wrote Wuthering Heights, Charlotte wrote Jane Eyre and Villette, and even Anne wrote two novels, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Agnes Grey, though neither measures up to her sisters' works.

The Guardian reviewed the audiobook compilation Classic Romance:

They're all here: Shakespeare's Henry V wooing Princess Katharine in pigeon franglais; Jane Eyre still managing to sound straitlaced sitting on Mr Rochester's lap[,] Heathcliff and Cathy[.] (Sue Arnold)

The Times Literary Supplement reviews Kitchens, Smokehouses, and Privies: Outbuildings and the Architecture of Daily Life in the Eighteenth-century Mid-Atlantic by Michael Olmert

Olmert breezes relentlessly through superficial and sometimes inexplicable comparisons: now a laundry basket from The Merry Wives of Windsor, now a pillow stuffed with pigeon feathers from Wuthering Heights. (Dan Hicks)

The Times Education Supplement has uploaded a useful plot summary of the novel (KS4) of Wuthering Heights. Theater Notes (Australia) talks about a recent forum on women in theatre at Belvoir St:

More, as the Brontes well knew, the same writing will generate different responses if it is perceived to be by a man than if it is thought to be by a woman. And I'm afraid that, however we like to congratulate ourselves on being more advanced than the 19th century, that is still the case. (Alison Croggon)

Finally, Micah Leigh's has uploaded to flickr a picture named "Cathy come back to me, oh do once more".

Categories: Brontë Parsonage Museum, Haworth, References, Wuthering Heights

Happy holidays!

BrontëBlog would like to wish all Brontëites out there a very happy Christmas: may you 'greet with joy the glorious morn' and may Peace 'smile from heaven' as Anne Brontë put it in her famous poem Music on Christmas Morning.

You can read it, listen to it on LibriVox, with a musical background by Henry J.E. Holmes, read Paul Reiners's score or look at a picture on flickr.

We hope all Brontëites around the world will find a Brontë-connected little something in their stocking!

Categories: Messages from BB

Fine books and/or Twilight-ification

The Scotsman talks about a new auction at Lyon & Turnbull in Edinburgh (13 Jan 2010 11:00) which includes some fine editions of Brontë books:

Books, Maps & Manuscripts - Sale 274
Lot 55
Bronte, Charlotte, Emily & Anne
Life and works. London: Smith Elder, 1890-94. 7 volumes, 8vo, plates, original green cloth, some hinges a little weak
Estimate £100-150
Lot 56
Bronte, Charlotte, Emily and Anne
[Novels]. Edinburgh: W. Blackwood, [n.d.]. 7 volumes, 8vo, green half calf gilt, spines slightly faded; Dickens, C. [Works]. [N.d.] 19 volumes, Daily News Memorial Edition, plates, maroon half morocco, slightly rubbed; Minarik, E.H. Little bear's visit. 1961. 8vo, plates by Maurice Sendak, cloth-backed boards, corners slightly rubbed; Burns, R. Poems. Edinburgh, 1811. 8vo, 2 volumes, engraved plates, modern cloth, pencil to frontispiece of volume 2; Waugh, E. Men at arms. 1952; Robb, J. Murrayfield Golf Club. 1947. Original cloth; and 20 others, miscellaneous (51)
Estimate £200-300

Anne Rice is interviewed by L.A. Weekly and insists on the debt the Twilight saga owes to Jane Eyre:

While she hasn’t read the Twilight novels, Rice has seen the movies. “They’re romances for very young kids. They’re about a young woman wanting and needing an older, mysterious figure who’s protective and yet something of a menace,” she says. It’s the Brontë sisters and Jane Eyre. “It was almost genius on Stephenie Meyer’s part to set it in high school. It works perfectly.” (Gendy Alimirung)

More Twilight connections. On the Canwest News Service we read one more example of the saga of Wuthering Heights marketed as Bella's favourite:

The sign on a table inside a Toronto bookstore says, "Bella's picks. "Here, among Stephenie Meyer's bestselling vampire novels, are other titles wearing the series's trademark black, glossy jackets: Romeo and Juliet, Pride and Prejudice and Wuthering Heights.
The tagline on the cover of Shakespeare's tragic play says "The original forbidden love," while the cover of Emily Brontë's 1847 novel Wuthering Heights features a seal that declares it to be: "Bella and Edward's favorite book."
HarperCollins, the publisher, has boosted sales of the classics by reprinting them with new "gothic" jackets to attract Twilight fans.
"Wuthering Heights has been selling much better ever since Twilight became so popular because fans know it's Bella's favourite book. But these editions in particular, because they look so similar to Twilight, have really taken off," says Trevor Dayton, vice-president, kids and entertainment at Indigo Books & Music Inc.
He says since the retailer started carrying the revamped books in the summer, stores have sold more than twice as many as previous editions, with sales heating up this holiday season.
"I remember reading Emily Brontë in high school. I can't say that I had any interest in reading those books but was told to by the teacher," he said. "I think it's better to have the books packaged in a way that is going to appeal to [readers] and endorsed by an author they clearly love."
Meyer's books, Breaking Dawn, Eclipse and New Moon, were among the top five best-selling books of the year, according to industry tracker BookNet Canada.
The protagonist, Bella Swan, makes reference to Wuthering Heights in the series, comparing her vampire love, Edward Cullen, to Brontë's brooding Heathcliff.
Wuthering Heights, with its Meyer-inspired jacket, has topped British bookseller, Waterstone's classic book chart for the first time since it started recording figures in 1998. "I don't think a vampire's recommendation has ever sent a book to No. 1 before," Simon Robertson, the company's classics buyer, told The Telegraph.

And YPulse:

Realizing that Teens Read. As horrified as some critics and literature buffs were at the “Twilight-ification” of classics like “Wuthering Heights” both here and in the UK, the fact that these teen-friendly covers helped centuries-old books top bestseller lists is pretty sweet. (meredith)

The Financial Times includes a question with a Brontë reference in its Christmas Quiz:

In his book Tormented Hope, Brian Dillon identifies a disorder shared by Charlotte Brontë, Charles Darwin, Marcel Proust, Andy Warhol, Florence Nightingale, Alice James and Glenn Gould. What is it? (Ludovic Hunter-Tilney)

Finally, 夢飛的地方…… posts about Jane Eyre 1996.

Categories: Books, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, References, Wuthering Heights

Brontë Gifts (II)

From Lullabys comes this rag doll (probably not Brontë-related, but a good gift anyway):

Silver Cross Bronte Rag Doll

Adorable and classic, Bronte comes with removable clothes for dressing up fun. Presented in a beautiful Silver Cross gift box.
Height approximately 40cm

A Stitching pattern from The Sampler Girl:

Check out the July issue of The Gift of Stitching Magazine for my design, On the Moors with Emily Bronte Pillow Pattern. The pillow finishing was done by Vonna, finishing extraordinaire. Verse on design comes from Bronte's novel, Wuthering Heights, published in 1847:
'He said the pleasantest manner of spending a hot July day was lying from morning till evening on a bank of heath in the middle of the moors, with the bees humming dreamily about among the bloom, and the larks singing high up overhead, and the blue sky and bright sun shining steadily and cloudlessly.'

Brontë T-Shirts, Brontë Gifts, Art, Posters and more on Zazzle.

Aprons, posters, t-shirts, cards, mugs, prints, tote bags, stickers, mouse mats, magnets, postcards, keychains including a Prayer the Brontës' Father Taught Us parody.

Categories: Weirdo

Becoming Edward Rochester

IndieWire has uploaded a video interview with Michael Fassbender where he confirms - viva voce, so to speak - that he will indeed be playing Mr Rochester in the forthcoming production directed by Cary Fukunaga.

As you can see, he says the shooting is expected to begin around March. He seems quite excited to have Cary Fukunaga as a director, and he thinks he is 'a brilliant choice' and a positive thing that Fukunaga is not British and will give

'perhaps a different edge to it . . . there's always something interesting about an outsider coming in doing something which has traditionally . . . been dealt with by British directors. . . I'm very, very exciting about working with him'.

Well, it's not the first time that a non-British director does a Jane Eyre... Franco Zeffirelli's 1996 version, for instance.

About Mia Wasikowska he says that,

'she's wonderful. . . she's definitely a superb actress, so many facets to her. I'm very excited about working with her'.

Something else to look forward to is Sheila Kohler's Becoming Jane Eyre of which you can win a copy by participating in our Christmas contest! The Washington Post publishes an early review of the novel:

I didn't read Charlotte Brontë's "Jane Eyre" until I was an adult, but I still reacted with all the whiny complaints of a 14-year-old boy. Unfortunately, I was teaching it to 14-year-old boys at the time, so I had to feign a certain amount of enthusiasm. But a funny thing happened on the way to education: While John Knowles's "A Separate Peace" grew thinner and sillier to me every year, "Jane Eyre" blossomed into one of my favorites. With the plot's smoldering melodrama, the heroine's boundless suffering ("Unjust! Unjust!") and those outrageous villains, it's a captivating book, a chance to luxuriate in your own private fantasies of aggrieved victimhood.
Adaptations of Brontë's work haven't reached the fever pitch of Jane Austen knockoffs, but "Jane Eyre" got zombies in a 1943 Val Lewton horror movie, almost 70 years before the undead crawled into "Pride and Prejudice," and a new film version (sans zombies) is underway, starring Mia Wasikowska with Michael Fassbender as the brooding Mr. Rochester. A fair number of talented writers have transformed Brontë's most famous novel into exceptionally creative and memorable books of their own: Daphne du Maurier's "Rebecca" (1938) generates almost as much devotion among certain circles as "Jane Eyre" itself; Jean Rhys's "Wide Sargasso Sea" (1966) is one of the classics of 20th-century feminist fiction; Jasper Fforde's "The Eyre Affair" (2001) launched his fantastical career. (Heads up: Fforde starts a new series next week.) And now we have this exquisite fictionalized biography of Brontë called "Becoming Jane Eyre."
If you know "Jane Eyre" and love it, don't deny yourself the pleasure of this intense little companion book. South African-born Sheila Kohler, who now teaches at Princeton, sinks deep into the details of Brontë's life to re-create the atmosphere of her tragic, cloistered family. Parallels between Charlotte and her famous heroine are an irresistible subject of critical inquiry, and even if those parallels are sometimes drawn too baldly in "Becoming Jane Eyre," Kohler's novel remains a stirring exploration of the passions and resentments that inspired this 19th-century classic.
The story begins in a silence so complete that you can hear Charlotte's pencil scratching on paper. She's nursing her stern though needy father, who's recovering from eye surgery that has left him temporarily (they hope) blind. The horror of her mother's long illness and death still hangs over this family, but there's a more recent cause for sadness: Charlotte's novel, "The Professor," has just been rejected, and the poet Robert Southey has written her a condescending note: "Literature cannot and should not be the business of a woman's life." In desperation -- for money, for recognition, for a way out of "solitude, darkness, and despair!" -- Charlotte decides to try once more. "She dares to take up her pencil and write for the first time in her own voice," Kohler says. "She will write out of rage, out of a deep sense of her own worth and of the injustice of the world's reception of her words. She will write about something she knows well: her passion."
The story begins in 1846 and runs until Charlotte's death nine years later, a remarkable period that saw her emerge from obscurity as the daughter of a Yorkshire clergyman to become one of the most celebrated writers of the day. Kohler's method is highly impressionistic, concentrating expansively on some moments while brushing over whole years elsewhere. The brief chapters sometimes concentrate on other characters, allowing Charlotte's perennially dying father (who outlived them all) to give his own anxious testimony, along with her sisters, Anne and Emily, and even a servant, who finds the dreary Brontë family hardly worth the wage.
But this story is always Charlotte's, and it's always quietly hypnotic. We follow her memories of that deadly boarding school we know as Lowood. We see her studying and then teaching in Brussels under the tutelage of a capricious but mesmerizing married man who stole Charlotte's heart and then cast it aside (William Hurt, Timothy Dalton, Orson Welles?). And everywhere, we catch impassioned echoes of "Jane Eyre": "Do you think," Charlotte screams at her choleric teacher, "I don't feel what other people do, that I don't long for the same things as you!"
"Becoming Jane Eyre" is motivated largely by Charlotte's desperate thirst for revenge: "She will vanquish all those arrogant fools, all those hateful asses, who have passed her by without a glance. How they have humiliated her, again and again. . . . Let her employers get down on their fat knees and beg her pardon!" Generations of smart, capable, overlooked women (and men) have responded to that pent-up anger, but Kohler also wants to give Brontë a larger, more noble purpose that makes her a forerunner of the feminist movement: "She would like to reach other women, large numbers of them. She would like to entertain, to startle, to give voice to what they hold in secret in their hearts, to allow them to feel they are part of a larger community of sufferers. She would like to show them all that a woman feels: the boredom of a life confined to tedious domestic tasks."
Kohler shows another side of Charlotte's life, too, the complicated tensions of living in close quarters with talented writers: Emily, Anne and Charlotte had made a pact to publish their works under a single pseudonym, Currer Bell, but the asymmetrical success of their books puts enormous pressure on that agreement. And then, of course, there's the even larger problem of their precocious, shamelessly spoiled brother, who first absorbs all their father's hopes and then inspires all his despair. Kohler depicts him as Heathcliff and the first Mrs. Rochester spun together, a vampiric young man full of charm but driven by addictions that threaten to drag this remarkable family into the flames.
And yet despite everything that befell the Brontës, Charlotte eventually attained some of the wealth and domestic happiness she imagined at the conclusion of "Jane Eyre." If only, Dear Reader, real life would stay frozen at that triumphal moment of "The End." Kohler moves us swiftly and poignantly past that, into the haunting silence that swept over this windblown house when the last of those talented siblings was finally laid to rest. (Ron Charles)

Expect to see BrontëBlog's review of Becoming Jane Eyre before the year is out.

And if it looks like Michel Fassbender will be our new Rochester, the California Chronicle features an article on a past one: Ciarán Hinds, who played Mr Rochester in 1997.

That face, dark, chiselled and brooding, has helped win him countless movie, television and theatre roles, including Michael Henchard in a small screen adaptation of Thomas Hardy's classic novel The Mayor of Casterbridge and Edward Rochester in Jane Eyre.
I tell him that while I thoroughly enjoyed his portrayal of both, I would have loved to see him cast as the romantic anti-hero Heathcliff in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. He laughs when I say this.
"God, Henchard and Rochester, what happy chaps they were," he jests. "They are both arrogant men, not very sensitive at all. You really like them dark and sullen, don't you? That's the Ulster thing, I suppose, all bleak and soulful.
"I was nearly up for the part of Heathcliff," he adds, "but they gave it to Ralph Fiennes instead."
Modest, funny and down-to-earth, I don't doubt Ciaran for a nano- second when he says he is nothing like these characters he has portrayed.
"Those men must have been very hard to live with. Thankfully, I don't think I'm anything like them in real life," he says.
"I don't know why they keep picking me to do these roles. It must be to do with my physique.
"I always end up playing big, brutish types. It's good from an actor's perspective to play characters that are so different to myself, though it's nice to get a chance to play some light, skittery roles too."

The column Talkin Broadway from ChicagoPride is reminded of an 'upside-down Jane Eyre' by the stage production Icarus.

In that sense, this Icarus is the fullest realization of a gradually emerging sub-genre: the "upside-down" Jane Eyre, where the girl plays the cold, rough Rochester, and the boy plays poor little Jane. (John Olson)

The Kolkata Mirror interviews Brontëite Laura Marling, who mentions the Brontës once again.

Favourite films, music, books…
Anything by Wes Anderson and Coen Brothers! Musically, I worship Joni Mitchell. Not being sexist, but women always outdo men in expressing the resonance of relationships. As for books, I love Jane Austen, Emily Bronte and the classics that are so stark and real, yet bear a strain of positivity. (Sunetro Lahiri)

And now for the blunder of the day. It could also happen that it is very badly phrased, so make of it what you will. As seen on Entertainment and Showbiz:

Or, let’s transport him [Robert Pattinson] back to the Elizabethan period and watch him portray an English gentleman in a may be, Jane Austen or Emily Bronte classic.

On the blogosphere, In To Views interviews writer Tara Hanks who says that Emily Brontë is one of her favourite authors. Pastile pentru suflet reviews Jane Eyre in Romanian. And finally, Scenes from a slow-moving life is giving away a copy of Denise Giardina's Emily's Ghost.

Categories: Books, Brontëites, Fiction, In the News, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, References

Recent Scholar work (I)

Some recent Brontë-related scholar works that have not been featured on BrontëBlog before:

May Sinclair
Moving Towards the Modern
Edited by Andrew J. Kunka, University of South Carolina Sumter, USA, and Michele K. Troy, Hillyer College–University of Hartford, USA
Ashgate
December 2006
Hardback
ISBN: 978-0-7546-5466-7

May Sinclair was a central figure in the modernist movement, whose contribution has long been underacknowledged. A woman of both modern and Victorian impulses, a popular novelist who also embraced modernist narrative techniques, Sinclair embodied the contradictions of her era. The contributors to this collection, the first on Sinclair's career and writings, examine these contradictions, tracing their evolution over the span of Sinclair's professional life as they provide insights into Sinclair's complex and enigmatic texts. In doing so, they engage with the cultural and literary phenomena Sinclair herself critiqued and influenced: the evolving literary marketplace, changing sexual and social mores, developments in the fields of psychology, the women's suffrage movement, and World War I. Sinclair not only had her finger on the pulse of the intellectual and social challenges of her time, but also she was connected through her writing with authors located in diverse regions of literary modernism's social web, including James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, Charlotte Mew, and Dorothy Richardson. The volume is a crucial contribution to our understanding of the political, social, and literary currents of the modernist period.

The book contains the articles:

May Sinclair and the Brontës: 'virgin priestesses of art' by Jane Silvey.
The 'genius of enfranchised womanhood': suffrage and The Three Brontës by Philippa Martindale.

More recent papers:

Why Charlotte Dissed Emily by Stone, Laurie
Literary Review; Spring 2006, Vol. 49 Issue 3, p63-70, 8p

Abstract
The article presents the author's experience in reading Victorian literature specially reading works of Charlotte Brontë.

George Eliot's Conversation with Currer Bell by Margaret Harris
George Eliot-George Henry Lewes Studies, 50-51 (2006), 130-42.

Finally, several articles that were published in Notes and Queries:

Helena Kelly A Possible Literary Source for Jane Eyre (Ethelinde, or The recluse of the lake (1789) by Charlotte Turner Smith)
Notes and Queries 2008 55: 443-444

Margarita Stocker Names and the Yorkshire Heritage in ‘Jane Eyre’
Notes and Queries 2008 55: 444-448

Monica Germanà Plagiarising the Ettrick Shepherd? A Note on the Manuscript of Charlotte Brontë's Tales of the Islanders and Winifred Gérin's Emily Brontë
Notes and Queries 2008 55: 461-463

Categories: Books, Journals, Scholar