Apocryphal Emily

Andrea Arnold may have wished to keep it secret, but her choice of Heathcliff is causing quite a stir. Lots of news outlets are talking about him: the Guardian, the Yorkshire Evening Post, Digital Spy, Film Shaft, Empire, Chud.com, Up and Comers, Indie Wire...

Apparently according to writer Alan Bennett's partner, he's a sort of walking Heathcliff. From the Guardian:

There's a story, possibly apocryphal, about Bennett in which he says: "It's funny that people think I'm so nice, I'm actually a bit of a cunt." He laughs when I mention it. Oh no, he says, you've got it all wrong. "It was Rupert, my partner, who said it. He'd been watching Wuthering Heights and he said 'You're a bit like Heathcliff. I said: 'Oh!' He said: 'Yeah, difficult, northern and a cunt.' So he said it, not me." Is that a fair assessment? "Yes, that's all right, that's fine. I'm quite happy with that." (Simon Hattenstone)

If someone is looking for the perfect background music for curling up on the sofa with Wuthering Heights, Straight.com may have the answer:

[Alexander Scriabin]'s Sonata No. 3 has a movement (double-dotted) that is one of the hardest in the book to play, but that Glenn Gould described as perhaps best enjoyed while reading Wuthering Heights. I quite agree and couldn’t see that [pianist Jane] Coop had the slightest difficulty with it. (Lloyd Dykk)

The Hindustan Times has advice on how to react if you happen to come across a valuable copy of Wuthering Heights at the Daryaganj Book Bazaar.

The best trick: if you are an Emily Brontë fan, pretend to be totally bored on spotting a weather-beaten 1877 edition of Wuthering Heights.

Funny they should mention - randomly, we expect - that particular 1877 edition, as it is the one that the Yorkshire tourism board gave to the National Library of Singapore earlier this year.

And The Hindu locates yet another Brontëite: writer Ruskin Bond.

Bond also talks about the authors who have influenced his writing. “I loved reading Charles Dickens and the Brontë sisters as a child. Authors like P.G. Wodehouse, Somerset Maugham and H.E. Bates also inspired and influenced me.” (Swati Daftuar)

With the new Wuthering Heights as well as the new Jane Eyre, it seems quite unlikely in the short term that Home and Away star Lisa Gormley's wish comes true. The Press Association quotes her as exclaiming the following in an interview for Inside Soap:

Give me a sweeping garden and a corset, and I'm happy. Brontë me up! Austen me!

Now for a bit of apocryphal Emily Brontë. First from The Telegraph and Argus:

Also going strong is the custom involving a group of people gathering on Ilkley Moor on New Year’s Eve to sing the Yorkshire anthem Ilkley Moor Baht ’At – which translates as ‘without a hat’.
But they don’t sing the song as we know it. They believe it was written in 1834 by Emily Brontë when she lost her cat Bart. Using the words ‘Bart Cat’, and adapting the rest of the song to match the tale, they sing the song at midnight, the moment they believe the moggy was lost. (Helen Mead)

And also from Al Coombs's blog:

I’ll bet you a dollar per poem written that Emily Brontë read a trashy novel every now and then.

The Telegraph and Argus regrets having recently written about “the late Peggy Hewitt”, author, among others, of Brontë Country. Now that she's been mercifully brought back to life she speaks to the newspaper about life at 'Oldfield House, that lovely old building on the edge of the ‘Brontë Moors’.'

The Santa Barbara Independent has an article on a local production of The Mystery of Irma Vep, with the suitable Brontë references.

Evelyn Tiffany-Castiglioni has uploaded to her YouTube account Emily Brontë's poem 'Yes, holy be thy resting place' set to the old Scottish tune "Hey, Tutti, Taeti". Cindy's Almanac of Good Tales reviews April Lindner's Jane. And finally, Joy daisies and cartwheeling posts her thoughts on Haworth and the Brontë Parsonage.

Categories: Brontëites, Emily Brontë, Haworth, Movies-DVD-TV, Music, Poetry, Weirdo, Wuthering Heights