"Delicious emotions"

The Telegraph and Argus tells more about the Charlotte Brontë letter that arrived recently at the Brontë Parsonage Museum and which will be on display until the end of the year. The article features a picture of the letter too.

It has arrived following a complex export procedure involving special packaging and a courier service from London.
Ann Dinsdale, the museum’s collections manager, said: “It was not a straightforward process getting it here.
“We had to arrange for someone to wrap it at Sotheby’s in New York – they wouldn’t do it themselves.
“It was then collected, flown over to London and then we had to arrange for a courier to get it here. But it’s been worth the wait.”
The black-bordered letter, which went under the hammer for £36,000, reveals Charlotte’s grief over the death of her brother Branwell, aged 31, in September 1848 and her anxiety about the health of her younger sister Emily, who died three months later, aged 30.
Mrs Dinsdale said: “Those letters written to her publisher, William Smith Williams, are amongst the most significant of all Charlotte’s correspondence.
“This particular one had remained in a private collection in America for many years and it is wonderful to be able to make it available for the first time.
“This was a very sad period of her life. Branwell had just died and Emily was showing symptoms of the TB which would kill her three months later.
“The letter doesn’t refer to these things, but it talks about her being ill. I think her deep unhappiness was manifested in this ill-health.” (Clive White)

Libby Sternberg has alerted us to the fact that the first two chapters of her novel Sloane Hall can be read on/downloaded from her website and her blog. It's not everyday that you come across such a generous author, so do take the chance! Also, Libby Sternberg discusses the process of writing a new novel inspired by a classic on Sia McKye's Thoughts...Over Coffee.

My goal sprang from my own selfish desires. I’d reread Brontë’s classic so many times that its high and low moments no longer seemed as high or as low. I knew all too well what would happen when Rochester and Jane prepared to wed. I knew with aching clarity what waited around the corner. (It’s a testament to Brontë’s writing and storytelling, however, that this familiarity never dulled my desire to have her tell me the story again.)
I began to wonder how it would feel to experience Jane Eyre as I had the first time I’d read it, to feel all those delicious emotions--Jane’s joy at discovering Rochester did love her, her subsequent heartbreak and then the glorious soothing of her sorrow—in the same way I had on my initial journey into Brontë’s story.
Thus, Sloane Hall came about. To achieve my goal, I knew I had to change some pretty substantial elements of the book. It wouldn’t be enough to whisk Jane and Rochester through time and over continents. I’d have to shift the story in some fundamental way in order to make it really fresh, ready to pop into the reader’s mind as if never read before, to make the characters seem like strangers, even to diehard Jane fans. (Read more)

And Sloane Hall is reviewed by Fresh Fiction.

Sternberg never loses sight of the story she's re-telling, but this novel is definitely her own. Readers have things to figure out and look forward to. Her prose flows beautifully with vivid descriptions of people and places, bringing to life a Los Angeles of times gone by. Fans of historical fiction and Jane Eyre in particular will relish this novel, and readers who enjoy a love story should definitely pick this one up. (Katherine Petersen)

All this should have made reading the first chapers quite irresistible!

Another Brontëite writer is Lillian Craton, author of The Victorian Freak Show. Speaking to Greenwood Today she says,

"I started reading Jane Austen in elementary school and just never looked back," said Craton, adding that she has a love for Victorian literature in general. "Charlotte Brontë's 'Jane Eyre' has been my favorite book since middle school and I've just followed this childhood passion as far as it would go."

The London Review of Books discusses the work of Frank Kermode, a British literary critic who died a month ago.

What is it about a literary work that enables it to persist over time? Most obviously perhaps, the ‘classic’ in his definition was a text whose plurality of meaning – a ‘requirement and a distinguishing feature of the survivor’ – kept it alive. It is because no reader can exhaust the meaning of such a text, because any one reading cannot but select and forget – to read is always mentally to drop bits and pieces of the writing as you go – that it will continuously be reinvented. A classic is a work that is ‘patient of interpretation’, as he put it in relation to King Lear. That was why he devoted so much time to the cryptic language patterns of the opening of Wuthering Heights in The Classic or to the trope of hendiadys in Hamlet in Forms of Attention. Both were virtuoso performances. But the display was in the service of the work which survived by means of what could be coaxed out of the surfeit of its language. (Jacqueline Rose)

Wuthering Heights is mentioned in a couple of theatre reviews. Backstage on Penny Penniworth (New York City):

Chris Weikel's script is a razor-sharp riff on the complete works of Charles Dickens, tangling multiple plotlines borrowed from "Oliver Twist," "Great Expectations," "A Tale of Two Cities," and "Nicholas Nickleby," plus a bit of Emily Brontë's "Wuthering Heights" for good measure. (David Sheward)

And the Daily Comet on All the Great Books (Thibodaux, Louisiana):

The play is set in a failing public school where three teachers are called upon to remediate their class in the great works of literature of all time, from Wuthering Heights through Harry Potter.

On the anniversay of the death of Maria Brontë, mother of the Brontës, on a day like today in 1821, Les Brontë à Paris has translated into French a fragment from one of her writings, The Advantages of Poverty in Religious Concerns. Also in French, Livres de Malice reviews Daphne du Maurier's The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë. Chouchouette's Blog discusses in German Austen vs Brontë. And The Bookish Type posts about April Lindner's forthcoming Jane.

Categories: Books, Brontë Parsonage Museum, Brontëana, Brontëites, Jane Eyre, References, Wuthering Heights