Three-card Trick with a Piano

The Leicester Mercury talks about Brontë country, Haworth (although consistently misspelled Howarth...) and the Parsonage, including an intriguing mention to a TV programme devoted to Branwell Brontë. We don't know if they are talking about a documentary about the current exhitibion at the Brontë Parsonage Museum: ‘Sex, Drugs and Literature: The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë’ or a dramatization:

What do you know about the Brontë brothers? The truth is there was only one, Branwell... whose colourful life is to be explored on TV in 2010. He was eclipsed by the brilliance of his sisters, Charlotte, Emily and Anne, who originally wrote poems under male pseudonyms Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, to disguise their gender.
Of course, Charlotte (Jane Eyre), Emily (Wuthering Heights) and Anne (Agnes Grey) became the most famous family in English literature.
But do look out for the TV programme which will build on Sex Drugs & Literature: The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë the exhibition, which runs until December 2010 at the Brontë Parsonage Museum.
The museum, in Haworth, is the perfect starting point for a tour of "Brontë country", the area of rural Pennine Yorkshire which has to be experienced to fully appreciate the influence of the wild country on the sisters' atmospheric writing.
As an early reviewer wrote of Currer Bell (Charlotte)'s early novel Shirley: "To estimate this work aright, the reader must have all the scenic accompaniment before him; he must not fancy himself in a London mansion, but in an old north-country manor house, situated in the dreary, dreamy moorland, far from the haunts of civilized men."
Turn right out of the front door of the parsonage and the Brontë Way path takes you to the beautiful Brontë Falls and Top Withens, the secret meeting place of Cathy and Heathcliffe in Wuthering Heights and Emily's and her fiancé Arthur Bell Nicholls.
So romantic – and so much healthier than skidding down the main street of Howarth, which was effectively an open sewer which caused thousands of deaths from typhus!
Today, the cobbled main street is a picturesque mix of modern and the historic, and still contains the apothecary's shop where Branwell would buy his opium and the pub from which he would stagger home with help from his father's servants.
The modern visitor will get all the help they need to explore the rural area from a new 28-page guide booklet called Brontës in Pennine Yorkshire, which has been produced by Pennine Yorkshire. The easy-to-follow guide leads to much more than the must-see Howarth sights of the church, Black Bull and Old Apothecary.
The wild rural areas including Brontë Falls and Charlotte's Seat and the atmospheric ruined farmhouse at Top Withens (believed to be the site of Wuthering Heights) as well as the magical Ponden Kirk (no church, just a large block of gritstone where Cathy and Heathcliff met) are magnets for walkers, picnickers and photographers. The full 40-mile Brontë Walk is far more challenging and not to be undertaken lightly.
If a shower comes along, you can be assured a warming welcome in any of the Howarth tea-rooms like The Stirrup, which offer filling snacks and lunches.
And if the shower settles in for a couple of hours, you could do a lot worse than take a round trip on the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway.
A family ticket for the full length of the track will cost £22 and for £11 more, the family can hop on and off as often as they like at any of the six stations for one day.
The guide shows that Rural Yorkshire has much to offer the less mobile, too.
The drive from Howarth (about nine miles north west of Bradford) to Gomersal (about six miles south east of Bradford) takes about 40 minutes and takes you to the area where much of Charlotte Brontë's novel Shirley was set.
This is the area where the anti- machine Luddites – named after Anstey's Ned Lud – roamed. The Red House Museum is beautifully presented and gives another good insight into the social history of the 1830s.
Nearby Oakwell Hall is wonderfully atmospheric, as befits a stately home which saw action in the Civil War. Look out for ghosts!
Although the new booklet guides you to a score of Brontë-linked sites, and the signs and interactive displays there answer most questions, they still leave scope for you to exercise your brain about remaining mysteries.
The one which I enjoy speculating about most is the famous painting of the Brontë sisters.
As soon as I saw it, I realised that a fourth figure had been painted out. Some experts suggest that Branwell, whose work it was, removed himself from the scene with his stellar sisters.
I still wonder whether it was he, or they, who exorcised the black sheep of an otherwise genius family. (Jim Matthews)

The Times vindicates Jane Campion's film The Piano (1993) as a classic. The Wuthering Heights influences on the film are also recalled:

“I feel a kinship between the kind of romance Emily Brontë portrayed in Wuthering Heights and this film,” Campion said, explaining what had inspired her. “Hers is not the notion of romance that we’ve come to use; it’s very harsh and extreme, a gothic exploration of the romantic impulse.” The parallels between Catherine in Wuthering Heights, trapped between Edgar, her cold, sexless husband, and Heathcliff, her dan­gerous love, are obvious. Campion believes sexuality is “the animal inside you. You can’t resist it. If you don’t embrace disturbance, it will shut down your life”. (Christopher Goodwin)

In The Guardian, Louise Carpenter recommends Brian Dillon's Tormented Hope:

Recently Brian Dillon published to great acclaim Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives, in which he provides elegant, empathic biographies of the world's greatest hypochondriacs: Boswell, Brontë, Florence Nightingale, Proust, Warhol and more. The book, accompanied by an incisive introduction on the condition, is not only a mini-masterpiece, but for the so-called "hypochondriac" or "health anxious" like me a source of great comfort and reassurance.

Ted McCagg uploads to The Nervous Breakdown a funny cartoon where the Brontës are transformed into con (wo)men with a weakness for the Three-card Monte trick. Another drawing, a solo of Charlotte this time, can be found on Small Expectations, courtesy of hmstrjam, who is also very fond of Charlotte Brontë's poems. Abyss-Mystery reviews in Czech Wuthering Heights.

Categories: Branwell Brontë, Brontë Parsonage Museum, Haworth, Humour, Poetry, References, Wide Sargasso Sea, Wuthering Heights