Paul Hilton to play Mr Earnshaw and other news

First of all, thanks to an anonymous reader of BrontëBlog who left a comment alerting us to a new name listed on the IMDb as part of Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights cast: Paul Hilton (pictured), said to be playing Mr Earnshaw.

On to something else now, as The North County Times asks Griff Duncan, general manager of the Fullerton Civic Light Opera, about the cancellation of the Jane Eyre performances at the California Center for the Arts in Escondido.

"Escondido has a theater that is the envy of most cities, but it just hasn't worked for us there," said Duncan, explaining why he canceled a five-night run for the musical "Jane Eyre" just before it was scheduled to begin early this month. "Ticket sales were very poor. Even the people who came to our other shows and liked them didn't want to come back. We just couldn't build an audience."
Duncan said he lost $40,000 total on his first three shows ---- "Backwards in High Heels," "Ring of Fire" and "Brigadoon" ---- and that he would have lost $50,000 more on "Jane Eyre." He said he has sold fewer than 300 tickets for each of his shows, even though the arts center's large theater holds 1,500. (David Garrick)

It really saddens us to hear that. We wholeheartedly hope that the business will pick up soon.

The Telegraph has a long, in-depth article on photographer Francesca Woodman.

Many point to the graveyards and crumbling, derelict buildings that recur in her work, and suggest that she belongs to a tradition of “American Gothic”. I have a lot of sympathy with this idea, since her work is suffused with a Gothic sensibility. She loved Jane Eyre and her photographs have a creepy, crepuscular feel. In them she often appears insubstantial, sylphlike, almost spectral – a visitation or an apparition from another realm. (Alastair Sooke)

And The Herald (Scotland) sings the praises of J.K. Rowling, her work and its Britishness:

Rowling’s Britain does not subvert the stereotype, but she does reshape it. Her Britain does not jar with the versions of British life readers may have imbibed from authors such as Dickens, Brontë or Blyton, but follows on seamlessly from it – celebrates it, even. The whole aesthetic of the books and films is what a tourist brochure might term “olde world”. It’s as good a description as any for the contextual mish-mash of Gothic, Victorian and pre-war.

The Irish Emigrant has a quiz with at least on very easy question for any reader of BrontëBlog.

2. Which Brontë sister died one year after the publication of her second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall?

On the blogosphere, O Prazer das Coisas posts in Portuguese about Jane Eyre and Caroline Bookbinder reviews Sheila Kohler's Becoming Jane Eyre. Finally, via The Reading and Writing Blog, we have come across an interesting fragment from a Paris Review interview with A.S. Byatt (A. S. Byatt, The Art of Fiction No. 168. The Paris Review No. 159, Fall 2001):

INTERVIEWER
There’s a very strong picture in your second novel, The Game, of childhood creativity, but I have the feeling that there’s an element of the smokescreen to it. It’s quite an accurate portrait of what the Brontës got up to, isn’t it?
BYATT
Yes, this is true. It’s also something to do with what a man I once knew said to me about his sister. It was the only thing he ever said about his sister, and what he said was that she played an imaginary board game with imaginary pieces. That was like the thing Henry James said about going up the stair and finding the one needful bit of information. A lot of what I write is about the need, the fear, the desire for solitude. I find the Brontës’ joint imagination absolutely appalling. So, in a sense, the whole thing was, as you rightly say, a construct and a smokescreen. (Interview by Philip Hensher)

Categories: Books, Brontëites, Jane Eyre, Juvenilia, Movies-DVD-TV, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Theatre, Wuthering Heights