I like period dramas where there’s mud on skirts

Kent News talks with Andrea Arnold, brand-new Bafta winner in the English film category for Fish Tank and next director of Wuthering Heights:

Arnold’s next movie project is Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.
She said: “It’s a story that’s very close to my heart. It’s close to a lot of people’s hearts, which makes it a huge responsibility.
“It dropped out of the sky before Christmas for me. I never thought I would ever take on an adaptation of a book.
“Think about Heathcliff: he’s an outsider, a gypsy. It’s a big class story. All my films have been about class and Wuthering Heights is more of the same.”

And The Times interviews Mia Wasikowska, who is in the middle of the Alice in Wonderland promotion, and says about her next project Jane Eyre:

And she will shortly start shooting Jane Eyre, with Michael Fassbender as Mr Rochester.
“She’s another incredible female character,” she acknowledges, “but I’m really excited because of Cary Fukunaga, the director. He’s not British, and his previous film, Sin Nombre, was about illegal immigration into America. I think it’s a brilliant choice, because he’s not following any preconceived notions, so it’s going to be really exciting to see what he does with it. I like period dramas that aren’t afraid to be messy, where there’s mud on skirts.” (Christopher Goodwin)

The Independent (Ireland) interviews Leslie Kenton, author of Love Affair, who describes the disturbing relationship between her and her father, the noteworthy jazz musician Stan Kenton:

And yet, despite the almost identical landscape of this story, the resonance is less Humbert Humbert and Lolita than Cathy and Heathcliffe of Wuthering Heights. It is a story of two people impacted together against their peers, their relatives, their circumstances. Against the world. (Anne Harris)

Kirkus Reviews publishes an account of Adèle, Grace, and Céline. The Other Woman of Jane Eyre:

Adele Varens was an inquisitive, intuitive child while growing up at Thornfield Manor, the home of her guardian, Edward Rochester. She discovered a crazy woman in the attic early in her stay, and could also sense the connection between her governess, Jane, and the man she would eventually knowas her father, Rochester himself. Adele’s natural gift of insight comes in handy when she becomes one of the first women to attend university in London and during the war in Crimea where she works alongside Florence Nightingale. When she marries Sir Garnet Gresham and settles at Drayton Abbey, Adele eschews a life of leisure. Instead, she works hard to restore an herb garden to glory, raises her children, makes friends and keeps up with current scientific knowledge and theory. When Adele inherits the letters that passed between her mother, Celine, and Grace, the servant who took care of the mad woman in the attic at Rochester’s estate, she learns much more, good and bad, about her family and the people she loves. Jane Eyre has become an iconic novel, sparking many sequels, revisions, screen and stage versions. Moïse writes hers with a delicate 19th-century sensibility that serves her characters well. They thrive under the author’s care, much like the herb gardens under Adele’s green thumb. Even as she tackles tough subjects of the times, like the clash between the religious view of how life began and the newfangled theories of evolution, the writing is entertaining and deft. Readers will easily follow Moïse’s smooth transitions between the epistolary form and Adele’s first-person narrative, even with a multitude of characters from past and present to account for.
Authentic, exciting and well-researched.

The Day (Connecticut) talks about Ruben Toledo's cover for Wuthering Heights, the Tampa Bay Online announces the new season of the American Stage Theatre Company including

Charles Ludlam's Gothic spoof "The Mystery of Irma Vep" (Sept. 17-Oct. 10) lampoons classic whodunits and horror films. Referencing Alfred Hitchcock's film noir "Rebecca," "Wuthering Heights," mummies and vampires, "Irma Vep" (an anagram for vampire) is campy fun that has achieved cult status. (Kathy L. Greenberg)

Another Brontë horse, Heathcliff, in the Cheltenham Festival reported in News of the World, the other 'professional' Heathcliff around, i.e. Gordon Brown, features in the Daily Mail (quoting again the Heathcliffgate) and The Independent (Ireland):

Hilariously, when Brown discovered that some idiot had lost a computer disk containing 20 million British people's personal banking details, he leaped across his desk to grab the lapels of his deputy chief of staff and snarled: "They're out to get me." Forget Heathcliff; cue the James Bond theme music. (Carol Hunt)

Associated Content publishes an article with the title What Does the Color Red Symbolize in Jane Eyre? by Morgan Drake Eckstein, a Portuguese blog, Janela de Guilhotina, a French one, Lectures d'un dévoreuse de livres... and Bookmarked discuss Jane Eyre (the latter in the Dame Darcy illustrated edition). Finally, an interesting guide to Jane Eyre adaptations has been posted on HubPages (including a first reaction from the Literature Network Forum defending Jane Eyre 1997).

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

Charlotte and Emily in the Belgian Post

The Belgian national post (La Poste) has issued a collection of stamps with the title: Promenade Littéraire à travers Bruxelles. Five stamps presented in a booklet which celebrates writers associated with Brussels: Arthur Rimbaud & Paul Verlaine, Charles Baudelaire, Multatuli, Victor Hugo and, of course, Charlotte and Emily Brontë. These are the details:

Création :	Jan De Maesschalck MVTM
Valeur :	valeur du timbre : 2 prix du carnet : 5,90 € vendu par carnet
Format :	format du carnet : 180 mm x 64 mm format des timbres : 25,30 mm x 44 mm
Procédé d'impression :	cover:offset timbres : héliogravure gravure : De Schutter ‘Neroc sa impression : Stamps Production Belgium
Nombre de planches :
Composition de feuilles:	5 timbres-poste
Dentelure :	11½
Papier :	GPW phosphorescent
Code commande :	1005BO

EDIT:
Further information can be read on the Brontë Parsonage Blog and the Brussels Brontë Blog.

Categories: Brussels, Weirdo

Jane meets Alice

Mia Wasikowska, the next on-screen Jane Eyre, talks with The Toronto Star and finds similarities between Jane and Lewis Carroll's Alice:

Wasikowska will get an opportunity to take some stunning photos when she heads to Yorkshire shortly after Alice in Wonderland opens to begin work on Cary Fukunaga's version of the Charlotte Brontë classic, Jane Eyre. She'll play the lead in the dark romance with Michael Fassbender (Hunger) as the tortured Mr. Rochester.
While they are very different characters, she sees similarities between Alice and Jane. "What I admire about Jane is she has such self-respect and similar concepts to Alice in terms of how do you sacrifice for somebody else, and what do you do to feel fulfilled and empowered as your own person." (Linda Barnard)

Other news outlets which also mention Mia Wasikowska's part as Jane Eyre are Paste Magazine, the Daily Mail, the Boston Globe and Winnipeg Free Press.

Coincidentally, the premiere of Tim Burton's take on Alice in Wonderland is the reason behind this article in The Guardian by AS Byatt:

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was written in 1862 and published in 1865. Through the Looking-Glass was published in 1871. The great children's books that shaped the imaginations of successive generations came later and many were written around the turn of the 20th century. Kipling's Jungle Books and Puck of Pook's Hill, E Nesbit's tales of children meeting psammeads and phoenixes and other opinionated beasts, George MacDonald's tales of Curdie the miner and his princess, L Frank Baum's tales of the land of Oz, Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden and Little Lord Fauntleroy, Mrs Molesworth's The Cuckoo Clock, Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows and JM Barrie's Peter Pan, even Treasure Island, have children making their own lives and fates in strange worlds outside the daily experience of family and school. Children in these books have a kind of emotional and moral autonomy which is new in literature. The child reader feels their problems, decisions and dangers differently from those of either children in real fairy stories (Hansel and Gretel) or children in novels who will grow up – Pip in terror by his parents' gravestone, Oliver Twist in the orphanage, David Copperfield tormented by the Murdstones, Jane Eyre in the Red Room, or furious, sulky Maggie Tulliver.

The Guardian also has an article about historical literary epistolary feuds and there's a mention of a Brontë-related one:

This was the charge, too, that lay at the heart of Elizabeth Gaskell's epistolary feud with Rev Carus Wilson 20 years later. In 1857, Gaskell's biography of her late friend Charlotte Brontë suggested that Lowood, the nightmare school described in the early chapters of Jane Eyre, was a direct transcription of Cowan Bridge, the establishment attended by the Brontë sisters in the 1820s. Gaskell had since visited the place and found it dirty, serving up sour milk in which dust, dirt and goodness knows what floated. It was this "want of cleanliness", implied Gaskell, which had been responsible for the deaths of the two eldest Brontë girls.
With a howl of indignation, the family of the school's founder, Rev Wilson, conducted a vicious letter campaign against Mrs Gaskell in which she was accused of being a fantasist. Battle lines were drawn, and a teary Mrs Gaskell marshalled her troops, including Charlotte Brontë's clerical widower, into responding on her behalf. And so, for several weeks in 1857, newspaper readers in the north of England were treated to the unedifying sight of a clutch of Church of England clergyman arguing over whether Britain's greatest female novelist of the day had really been forced to eat "bingy" porridge as a little girl. (Kathryn Hughes)

Not to mention that Arthur Bell Nichols also took part in the literary exchanges.

Edwin Heathcote's column in the Financial Times talks about cellars and attics and Thornfield Hall is mentioned:

As [Gaston] Bachelard suggests, these twin architectural poles are also bastions of the sinister, the deliberately buried or forgotten. Whether in Charlotte Brontë’s image of the mad Mrs Rochester shut away in the attic or in the terrifying nightmare reality of Josef Fritzl’s basement dungeon (in which he held his daughter for 24 years and which chillingly reminds us of the etymology of “cellar” as a collection of cells), the idea of both spaces also embodies a terrible notion of the imprisonment of the unwanted, both symbolic and actual.

Lyndall Gordon's biography of Emily Dickinson, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family’s Feuds, is reviewed by the Irish Times:

She kept abreast of new books, snapping up new editions of the Brontë sisters and George Eliot. She had a small but significant circle of admiring readers to whom she circulated hundreds of copies of her poems. (Vona Groarke)

Maud Newton reviews Brian Dillon's The Hypochondriacs, which is the US title of Tormented Hope for NPR's WBUR:

Charlotte Bronte, for instance, was beset by headaches, chest pain and nervous, melancholic breakdowns that became a central theme of her fiction and tended to lift when she finished a novel.

Lucy Mangan writes about (and rambles around) the upcoming World Book Day in The Guardian. Including a Jane Eyre mention:

World Book Day is a wondrous hive of activity. There are exhibitions, school visits by authors, story­time sessions, the distribution of vouchers, trips to libraries and book shops, and all of this is, of course, A Very Good Thing, pointing as it does the way for many to an unfamiliar source of entertainment. But it does all have that slightly worthy, top-down feel that only heightens the real problem with reading, which is that it is and always has been terminally uncool (even in Victorian times, the boy with the hoop and stick got more kudos than the one who got the third volume of Jane Eyre before anyone else).

The Seattle Times reviews one of the latest UK TV little gems, Red Riding:

"Yorkshire noir" is a fairly unpopulated genre, but after watching five gripping hours of the "Red Riding" trilogy, I hope there's more where this came from. A century and a half after "Wuthering Heights," this windswept region still shows up on screen with a terrifying remoteness; where houses look out over barren hillsides and there's a sense that, if you wander a few steps too far, no one will hear you scream. "This is the North," says a policeman in the film, as if stating his personal credo. "We do what we want." (Moira MacDonald)

Pascal Bonitzer, screenwriter of Les Soeurs Brontë (1977) is interviewed by BSC News Magazine:

Quand j'ai commencé à écrire, j'étais loin d'avoir de la méthode et d'être professionnel, donc ça c'est fait un peu sur le tas. Pour Téchiné, ça c'est fait un peu comme ça, il m'a proposé de retravailler une biographie des soeurs Bronté. Je n'étais pas spécialiste, mais « Les hauts de Hurlevent » avait été longtemps mon livre de chevet, donc cela m'intéressait et je me suis lancé avec lui. On a abouti à une espèce de monstre de plus de 200 pages, un film de plus de 3 heures, retravaillé et recoupé ensuite par Toscan du Plantier le producteur. Cela a donné le film que l'on connaît, qui a failli du reste mettre un terme prématurément à ma carrière puisqu'accueilli à Cannes par une kabbale dont je me souviens encore... (Élodie Trouvé) (Google translation)

O Globo (Brazil) talks about the recently opened Paula Rego museum in Cascais (Portugal):

A condição feminina é um tema favorito da artista. Influenciou até na escolha dos romances que servem de inspiração para outras séries, como "Jane Eyre", de Charlotte Brontë, e "O Crime do Padre Amaro", do conterrâneo Eça de Queirós, ou a peça "As criadas", de Jean Genet. (Gustavo Alves) (Google translation)

Página 12 (Argentina) defines the Olsen Sisters as the

(...) antítesis de las Bronte, al runaway de Nueva York y por otro la presentación de una línea de vestidos diseñados por Victoria Beckham. (Victoria Lescano) (Google translation)

L'Expression (Algeria) reviews the Folies Berbères (Théâtre régional de Constantine):

Dans un dosage d’ingrédients explosifs, rappelant le burlesque, palpant les maux les plus ancrés dans la société, puisant dans tous les répertoires dans un rituel époustouflant, de la danse, à la mimique, au chant, les artistes ont sublimé l’art sans frontières, sans tabous, exorcisant à l’épuisement les vieux démons des Hauts de Hurlevent d’Emily Brontë. (R.C.) (Google translation)

The Jornal do Comércio (Brazil) reviews the Portuguese translation of The Virago Book of Ghost Stories edited by Richard Dalby which includes Charlotte Brontë's Napoleon and the Spectre. TechNews Daily mentions the Nintendo DS Classic Book Collection, The Pocahontas Times wants to re-read Jane Eyre, bilkat7800 reviews on Open Salon Wide Sargasso Sea, an Emily Brontë T-shirt and the girl who wore it The Vanity Ward, Florcita de Pura Flor posts about Jane Eyre (in Spanish), Rarities, B-Sides and Other Stuff talks about Albert Niland's cover of Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights.

Categories: Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, Music, References, Translations, Wide Sargasso Sea, Wuthering Heights

Breaking the Frame in Brussels

An alert from the Brussels Brontë Group:

TALK ON WUTHERING HEIGHTS

Saturday 27 February 2010
Facultés Universitaires Saint-Louis (Room P61), Blvd du Jardin Botanique/Kruidtuinlaan 43, 1000 Brussels (Access map)

11.00: Breaking the Frame: the Narrators of Wuthering Heights. A talk by Nicholas Marsh, editor of Palgrave Macmillan's Analysing Texts series and author of many books in the series, including the study of Wuthering Heights.

Followed by questions and discussion.

We are very fortunate that Nicholas Marsh has agreed to come and talk to us. He is the general editor of Palgrave Macmillan's Analysing Texts series. Each book in the series sets out to give a thorough understanding of a writer by examining key passages from his/her works. Nicholas Marsh, a teacher of English literature, has written many of the books in the series, including a very clear and illuminating study of Wuthering Heights. His step-by-step, easy-to-follow and jargon-free analyses are not only full of insights about the novel, picking up on a lot of things that probably pass many readers by, but also provide you with tools and techniques for reading attentively that you can apply to all authors.

His book on Wuthering Heights is intended in particular for students but is perfect for general readers as well – anyone interested in gaining a deeper understanding of the novel will get a lot out of it.

Nicholas Marsh is also the author of the popular How to Begin Studying English Literature.

In this talk, Nicholas Marsh will be discussing the ways in which the narrators in Wuthering Heights, unreliable and biased as they are and with only a partial view of the events related, are in fact used by Emily Brontë to make the novel more powerful.

More information, Brussels Brontë Group.

Categories: Brussels, Talks, Wuthering Heights

Brontë geeks

Most readers of this blog would know what to say if they found themselves in the situation described by Varsity:

Faced with a party of cultural snobs waffling on about how seminal Jane Eyre is, try telling them that actually you thought Jane was a bit frigid and that a couple of VKs and a night on the town would have sorted her out. (Laura Freeman)

Although we sincerely doubt any reader of this blog would say that.

Readers of this blog would have at least one point won towards becoming a 'Book Geek'. The Book Geek featured in the Manila Bulletin had to answer this:

What was the book that was most often mentioned in “Twilight”? (Wuthering Heights – Much as I detested the Twilight series I read all four books and remember them in excruciating detail). (Blooey P. Singson)

And this bit of useless trivia 'revealed' by Clash Music is quite common knowledge among Brontëites with a little bit of pop culture knowledge on the side.

[Kate Bush] shares a birthday with Emily Brontë. Kate’s debut single, ‘Wuthering Heights’, is, of course, based on Brontë’s novel of the same name. Uncanny, isn’t it? (Christopher Monk)

More pop culture, as Melissa sent us a link to the Go Fug Yourself description of an outfit recently worn by Lilly Allen:

There is a weird part of me that thinks this is kind of awesome: [see picture]. You know, in that weird-ass, Miss Havisham, Grey Gardens, Mrs-Rochester-Locked-in-the-Attic, musty-nutjob kind of way. [...] However, the item underneath: [see picture] Eeeeek. Lily can keep that one. It will be very evocative, after all, when those days when she sneaks out of the attic to wreak havoc upon the other, unsuspecting members of her household. (Jessica)

A review by the Los Angeles Times of Jerome Charyn's The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson, mentions Charlotte Brontë:

While the romantic peccadilloes Charyn conjures may be intriguing, more compelling is his portrait of Emily Dickinson as an intelligent young woman writing on scraps of paper during an era that saw the emergence of writers Currer Bell (Charlotte Brontë) and George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) -- Englishwomen who wrote under male pseudonyms so that they would be taken seriously. (Paula L. Woods)

Which is an interesting reflection.

The London Evening Standard suggests a trip to the North Yorkshire Moors:

If you head to North Yorkshire in midwinter, I suggest taking very, very warm clothes with you. The temperature, as my friend Sas and I climbed off the train at Thirsk, a market town on the southern edge of the moors, felt low enough to freeze our very marrow, and came accompanied by a slicing wind. At least, I pointed out, it was properly Brontë-esque; any of the sisters' heroines would be suitably melancholy tramping across the wiley, windy moors in such weather.
But we're not Brontë heroines and our idea of a good weekend involves pouring wine rather than rain, so imagine what a welcome sight the warmly lit Feversham Arms presented as we pulled up in Helmsley half an hour later; how reassuring the sound of chattering voices floating out from the bar, and the smell of a tasty dinner being prepared in the kitchen. (Hettie Harvey)

Coincidentally, Associated Content has posted information on 'Visiting Haworth'.

And finally, Trombone com vara posts about Wuthering Heights in Portuguese, Brontës.nl announces the broadcast of Jane Eyre 2006 on the Netherlands (RTL4, February 28, 13:30 h) and eightbaII1955 has uploaded to YouTube a short clip taken outside the Brontë Parsonage Museum.

Categories: Books, Haworth, Jane Eyre, Music, Weirdo, Wuthering Heights

Pedagogy and Feminist Practice

More recent scholar papers:

A New Servitude’: Pedagogy and Feminist Practice in Brontë’s Jane Eyre
Kirstin Hanley, SUNY Fredonia
Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies
Issue 5.3 (Winter 2009)

In its deployment of a variety of generic forms and strategies—romance, gothic, bildungsroman—Jane Eyre is representative of numerous eighteenth and nineteenth-century textual traditions, and as Gilbert and Gubar have remarked, also accessible to readers, as “we tend today to think of Jane Eyre as…the archetypal scenario for all those mildly thrilling romantic encounters between a scowling Byronic hero (who owns a gloomy mansion) and a trembling heroine (who can’t quite figure out the mansion’s floor plan)”. Yet, despite a growing interest in how didacticism shaped the reading public of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and the acknowledged pervasiveness of advice books specifically addressed to female audiences, there has been no attempt to explore how didactic traditions influenced mid- nineteenth-century novels like Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Scenes of women teaching and learning comprise a substantial portion of Jane Eyre’s action and function to shape the terms of its discourse, but these scenes are generally overlooked in the interests of emphasizing Jane’s escape from this servitude, an escape associated with the novel’s influential portrayal of feminist individualism. (Read more)

And some recent reviews of Brontë-related books:

The Brontës in the World of the Arts (review)
Kathleen A. Miller
Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature
Volume 28, Number 1, Spring 2009, pp. 195-197

The Brontes in the World of the Arts (Review)
Pamela Gerrish Nunn
Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies
Vol 14, No 1 (2009), pp. 45-46

Imperialism, Reform, and the Making of Englishness in Jane Eyre (review)
Annette M. Van
Victorian Studies
Volume 51, Number 4, Summer 2009, pp. 753-754

Categories: Journals, Scholar

Heathcliff-esque heroes and gardens

Goodness knows Gordon Brown is the Brontë character par excellence, at least for political writers. What's more, he changes costumes extremely easily. One day of being Heathcliff is no obstacle to being Mrs Rochester again the next day, as today on IndiaTalkies, which looks back on Mr Brown's time as Prime Minister.

In the midst of Brown’s coup attempt, Frank Field, a former minister, told Blair: ‘You can’t go yet. You can’t let Mrs Rochester out of the attic.’
Blair is said to have ‘roared with laughter’ at the reference to the famous fictional character – a madwoman who is locked away in an attic – created by the 19th century English writer Charlotte Bronte in her book ‘Jane Eyre’.

We have a couple more usual suspects today. Dennis Lehane continues talking about Shutter Island in connection with the Brontës. Thompson on Hollywood quotes him today as saying,

“It’s very much the Bronte sisters and Mary Shelley,” he added. “It’s all in the pot and I just stirred.” (Anne Thompson)

The Gateway imagines literary theme parks à la The Wizarding World of Harry Potter and considers a Twilight theme park should include

“Where’s Edward?” where the fans must run around a larger-than-life model of a teenage girl’s brain, searching for the brooding, sparkling, iridescent, shiny, and — dare I say it — Heathcliff-esque hero hidden amongst the mirrors and angst. (Catherine Lee)

Weirdly enough, Heathcliff is also mentioned in an article about a garden in The San Francisco Examiner.

The festuca, or grasses, give a “Heathcliff” air to the garden, making it more welcoming and further removed from the hustle and bustle of a busy street. (Elisabeth Laurence)

Honestly, we never thought we'd find 'welcoming' and Heathcliff in the same sentence. Or perhaps they mean Heathcliff the cat?

Sugarscape is excited about Louise Rennison's new book:

We're uber-psyched to announce that the next series from Louise Rennison is going to be called Wuthering Tights.
Y'know, as in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, but funnier. (Kate Wills)

Only Amazon seems to list it as Withering Tights. And it's not yet on the publisher's website.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reviews a stage production of Disney's Beauty and the Beast:

In other words, it's the path that this strange romance takes that makes it satisfyingly romantic, not its conventional ending. Most romantic fantasies end with just another lovely couple, which makes Christine and her Phantom, Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester, and many a romance novel duo the gratifying exception that proves the rule. (Christopher Rawson)

Basia Bulat's 'Brontëiteness' is mentioned by North by Northwestern:

Bulat first made waves at the University of Western Ontario, where she was pursuing a Master’s in English Literature, and she still counts on Bronte and Bukowski to keep her sane. “I think I start to feel frustrated if I don’t have something to read. I’ve always been a bookworm,” she said. (Gus Wezerek)

The Brussels Brontë Blog posts about their Gaskell year event. Le Blog de Delilah reviews Wuthering Heights in French and Old Horse Ran Faster writes about Jane Eyre. Flickr user Poetas has uploaded a few pictures of a 1907 American edition of Jane Eyre.

Categories: Books, Brontëites, Brussels, Elizabeth Gaskell, Jane Eyre, Weirdo, Wuthering Heights

Isabella Linton and British Identity

A couple of recent scholar articles:

"My name was Isabella Linton": Coverture, Domestic Violence, and Mrs. Heathcliff's Narrative in Wuthering Heights
Judith E. Pike‌
Nineteenth-Century Literature
December 2009, Vol. 64, No. 3, Pages 347–383
Abstract
While critics have scrutinized Emily Brontë's use of the framed narrative in Wuthering Heights (1847), raising questions about the reliability of the central narrators, Lockwood and Nelly Dean, scant attention has been paid to Isabella Heathcliff as the third narrator. Though readers have overlooked the importance of Isabella's narrative, Brontë highlights her narrative by including it as the only intact letter in the entire novel and devotes almost an entire chapter to her narrative. Isabella's narrative surfaces in a letter to Nelly Dean, offering a highly unorthodox portrait for the mid-Victorian period of the domestic abuse of a young bride from the gentry class. Isabella's letter, which comprises most of chapter 13, also becomes a critical tool to ferret out the reliability of Heathcliff's account in chapter 14 of their marriage. By analyzing the conflicting accounts of their marriage, this essay demonstrates that Heathcliff 's argument acts as a carefully crafted legal rationale, based upon the laws of coverture, to defend and sanction the domestic confinement of his wife. While the laws of coverture deprived women of a legal and economic voice, Brontë endows Isabella with a complex and at times ironic voice. Brontë paints a powerful portrait of the radical transformation of Isabella from the pampered and infantile Miss Linton to the hardened Mrs. Heathcliff, ending with her as the intrepid, fugitive wife, Isabella Heathcliff. Brontë demonstrates through Isabella's story that as long as the laws of coverture are intact, companionate marriage is at risk of being exploited and compromised.

"Reader, perhaps you were never in Belgium?": Negotiating British Identity in Charlotte Brontë's The Professor and Villette
Anne Longmuir‌
Nineteenth-Century Literature
September 2009, Vol. 64, No. 2, Pages 163–188

Abstract
Critical investigations of the foreign settings of Charlotte Brontë's The Professor (1857) and Villette (1853) have tended to conceive Belgium (fictionalized as Labassecour in Villette) as simply "not England." In contrast, this essay considers the historic and geographic specificity of The Professor and Villette, arguing that Belgium represents a crucial middle-ground between British and French values in the mid nineteenth century. Not only was Belgium the location of the decisive British victory over the French at Waterloo, but British commentators also increasingly depicted Belgium as a "little Britain on the continent," or potentially Anglicized space, in the 1840s. Drawing on both Brontë's explicit references to the Napoleonic Wars in The Professor and Villette and contemporary Victorian conceptions of Belgium, this essay argues that Brontë's use of this particular foreign space is not just a result of her experiences in Brussels in the early 1840s. Instead, the overlooked middle—ground of Belgium epitomizes the conflict between British and French values in Brontë's fiction—and the possibility of their reconciliation. While Brontë ultimately rejects the idea that Belgium represents the site of a possible Anglo-Continental union, it is nonetheless a space in which Brontë's characters reformulate or consolidate their ideas of home, revealing Britishness to be both culturally produced and value-laden in Brontë's fiction.

Categories: Journals, Scholar

The secret life of . . .

Due to the Brontë mentions in several reviews of Jerome Charyn's The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson this might look like DickinsonBlog today. We do love Emily Dickinson, so that's not too bad.

From The Washington Post:

As the novel moves along, her various romantic obsessions peak and pass, one by one, in fits of hysterical devotion and outrageous behavior ("I have never had such gymnastics performed upon my face. . . . I have no more morals than a harem girl"). Much of the time she seems to be reenacting her own mash-up of "Jane Eyre" and "The Rape of the Lock." Even after she leaves the rakish college boys behind and settles into her old-maid status as "the Squire's eccentric daughter, a meteor in the dark glasses, hopping along like a wingless bird," she still entertains a series of romantic possibilities. (Ron Charles)

From the Fairfield County Weekly:

It was, in fact, also an exciting time in letters. Dickinson felt great fellowship with the Brontës, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and George Eliot. She called them her fellow "Kangaroos," authoresses shunned and mocked by polite society as strange, odd and most certainly un-marriageable. (Nora Nahid Khan)

From Reuters:

Other recent books re-imagining dead writers have reinterpreted and sexualized such authors as Emily Bronte and Jane Austen. (Editing by Mark Egan and Cynthia Osterman)

What we don't know about this last mention is whether they actually mean Denise Giardina's Emily's Ghost or whether they are mixing it up with Syrie James's The Secret Diaries of Charlotte Brontë.

EDIT 25/02: The New Yorker takes a look at recent/forthcoming publications about Emily Dickinson and mentions Jerome Charyn's book as well:

A particular set of “ladies” make repeat appearances in this genre: the Brontës, Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, and Virginia Woolf (on the late end of this category), whose “Mrs. Dalloway” became distressingly fashionable thanks to Michael Cunningham’s literary mash-up, “The Hours.” Such books, though, are not only written about women—Nicholson Baker’s “U and I” comes to mind—nor as we see, are they necessarily written by women. (That they may be written for women is a discussion for another time.) Regardless, James is onto something: we seem to want something from these women of the past. We ask special things of them. We want them to be feminists or strong-willed lovers. To be rebels or modern heroes. (Ian Crouch)

Well, back now to our old self: BrontëBlog mode on. The Salt Lake City Romance Novels Examiner interviews erotic Romance writer J. Hali Steele.

Do you remember the first Romance novel you read?
I read so many growing up, but I’d bet it was one of the classics. I loved Wuthering Heights. There’s the Wolf and the Dove. Another story that stays with me is Atlas Shrugged but I’m not sure you could call that a romance. John Galt epitomized the phrase alpha male for me! (Fran Lee)

Again, we would label Wuthering Heights Romantic, but not so much romance, to be honest.

Babbling about Books and More interviews another writer, Angela Morrison, author of Sing Me To Sleep.

KB: What does the future hold for you? Any future projects you can tell us about?Angela: This fall I wrote the sequel to TAKEN BY STORM--UNBROKEN CONNECTION. Penguin is considering it. I hope to have good news one of these days, but there is no guarantees in this business. Next, I'll work on the third Leesie/Michael novel, CAYMAN SUMMER.I also have an historical heartbreaking romance, MY ONLY LOVE, that I'm still revising. And I'm thinking about replacing my obnoxious tween boy hero in that time slip novel I told you about earlier with a Bronte-esque Victorian heroine. Think Jane Eyre meets the Terminator--but this guy ain't no robot. He's way too hot for a middle grade adventure. See, everything I write turns into YA. I love the coming of age journey and how love plays a part in it.

Silk and Shadows writes about the Brontës. Napleton Book Review and Mafia Man post briefly about Wuthering Heights. Cookie2697 has read Jane Eyre, the novel, and A Life in Books has read Jane Eyre, the Classical Comics adaptation.

Categories: Books, Jane Eyre, References, Wuthering Heights

The Sunbeam and the Storm

A press release from the Brontë Parsonage Museum:

JO BROWN: THE SUNBEAM AND THE STORM

Picture: ‘Blue Ice Curdling’ by Jo Brown

An exhibition of new work by Yorkshire-based artist Jo Brown will open at the Brontë Parsonage Museum on Friday 5 March 2010.

The exhibition, The Sunbeam and the Storm, will take place as part of the museum’s contemporary arts programme and will feature eight new abstract paintings by Jo Brown in direct response to the poems of Emily Brontë.

Jo Brown’s paintings are abstract and intuitive, and for this exhibition she has used colour, layers and mark making to create a personal response to Emily's poetry - in particular focusing on Emily’s use of weather to express emotion. All of the titles in the exhibition are small quotations taken from the poems.

Jo's inspiration has often been partly drawn from poetry. She discovered the poems of Emily Brontë relatively recently after attending an arts event in Haworth, and her imagination was caught. The poems seemed to Jo heartfelt and moving, and an insight into the mind of the solitary Emily.

All of the paintings in the exhibition are for sale. The exhibition runs until Tuesday 4 May 2010.

About Jo Brown
Jo Brown was born in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, and studied in Yorkshire, at Bretton Hall College then Sheffield Hallam University, gaining a BA (Hons) in Fine Art in 1995. She has been a studio artist at Dean Clough, Halifax since 1995 and has exhibited regularly at municipal and commercial galleries in England, Scotland and the USA. As well as the Brontë Parsonage Museum, Jo has upcoming exhibitions at Cupola Contemporary Art Gallery, Sheffield; Gossipgate Gallery, Alston, Cumbria; 20-21 Visual Arts Centre, Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire and a solo show at Whitfield Fine Art, Mayfair, London (September 2010).

Categories: Art-Exhibitions, Brontë Parsonage Museum

Heathcliff and the E-Reader screen

Slowly, slowly small tidbits regarding the Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre projects are becoming known, which is always a good sign that the production is alive. According to Variety, Wuthering Heights has already got a distributor in Spain:

Alta Films, Spain's arthouse distribution-exhibition company, has nabbed all Spanish rights to British helmer Andrea Arnold's adaptation of Emily Bronte's "Wuthering Heights."
Pic was sold at the European Film Market in Berlin last week by London-based sales agent HanWay Films.
Alta is continuing its relationship with Arnold. Last year it took Spanish rights to her sophomore film, "Fish Tank," winner of Cannes 2009's jury prize; Alta will release it in April. Produced by Blighty's Ecosse Films, "Heights" will go into production in the spring. (Emiliano de Pablos)

And we really don't know why they are bothering casting a new Heathcliff when they have a ready-made one at 10 Downing Street. The Financial Times endorses it too:

This week’s charges of bullying staff are neither substantiated nor surprising. The prime minister’s fits of anger are long a matter of public record. When he ascended to the premiership, even his admirers compared him to Heathcliff, the vengeful, haunted hero of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.

The Bangalore Mirror seems intent on just looking at the gloomy aspects of Emily Brontë's life:

Emily Bronte who penned the searing Wuthering Heights that continues to inspire adaptations across the world was surrounded by death, disease and despair ever since she was born. The Bronte sisters lost their mother and two older siblings before their novels saw the light of the day. And predictably Emily died too at the ripe old age of thirty! (Vijay Nair)

The Atlanta INTown interviews Margaret Atwood and asks her about her opinion of e-readers.

Do you think readers are getting the same experience by reading books on the fly rather than sitting down with a physical book?
I think people who are using E-readers are picking books they can read quickly. If the text is dense you have to pay closer attention and I don’t think people want to sit with a computer screen trying to digest a more challenging book. I think E-readers have the potential to enhance students’ experiences, especially when it comes to searching text. They could, for example, instantly look up all references to the moors in Wuthering Heights. (Collin Kelley)

To each their own, but just for the record: most e-readers use e-ink, meaning that it's nothing like looking at a computer screen.

The Wichita Eagle has a long post on Jane Austen which includes a small Brontë mention.

No place evokes the English country manners and dispositions of Austen's characters better than Chawton. To see Chawton is to understand Austen's world, just as the bleak Yorkshire moors of Haworth shaped the Bronte sisters. (Gary A. Warner)

Wuthering Heights is discussed by Linda Loves Books and Some Flowers in Our Head (in Portuguese). Mormon Mommy Writers includes a post on The Secret Diaries of Charlotte Brontë by Syrie James. Finally flickr user Like_The_Song has embroidered a quote from Wuthering Heights.

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

Crew names for the Brontë movies

Some new crew names for the two Brontë films that are in pre-production.

The Wuthering Heights production directed by Andrea Arnold and written by Olivia Hetreed announces that its production designer is Helen Scott (who worked also with Andrea Arnold in Fish Tank) and its costume designer is Jacqueline Durran (pictured) Oscar and Bafta Nominee (for Atonement and Pride & Prejudice 1995) and Bafta winner for Vera Drake.

Concerning the Jane Eyre production directed by Cary Fukunaga and written by Moira Buffini, the production designer is, as we posted before, Will Hughes-Jones. The costume designer is Michael O'Connor (pictured) (Oscar and Bafta winner for The Duchess) and the makeup designer is Daniel Phillips (Chéri, The Duchess, The Queen).



Categories: Jane_Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, Wuthering Heights

Gaskell's Year and Jeanette Winterson's script about the Brontës

Because Brontëites tend to have a soft spot for Elizabeth Gaskell despite her errors of judgment (unavoidable as those might have been), we thought this article in The Times about the celebrations of the two-hundredth anniversary of her birth could be interesting per se, not just because of the Brontë connection. We have, however, marked in bold the Brontë-related events of this 'Gaskell year'.

It is time to move on from those corpse-strewn specials of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford shown on television at Christmas. For fans of the increasingly popular Victorian novelist, the mood of 2010 is distinctly cheerier, this being the year they celebrate their heroine’s bicentenary.
The author of Cranford, North and South and Wives and Daughters (all of them titles enthusiastically dramatised by the BBC in recent years), Mrs Gaskell was born in London on September 29, 1810, and on September 25 this year she will be honoured in the city of her birth when her name is added to a stained-glass memorial window in Poets’ Corner. For much of the rest of the year, however, the focus of commemoration will be on her adopted home city of Manchester (or “Drumble” as she calls it in Cranford). (The Times, Sue Corbett)

April 1 to 29 (Previews, 31st March) (Manchester's Portico Library)
Elizabeth Gaskell Bicentenary- An exhibition
April 8 (Manchester's Portico Library)
Brief Lives: Elizabeth Gaskell (due from Hesperus Press in May)
Book launch by Alan Shelston (president of the Gaskell society)
April 10, 11
Guided Tours and Walks at Tabley House and Park, Knutsford.

April 13 (Manchester's Portico Library)
Elizabeth Gaskell & Charlotte Bronte, based on the novelists’ close friendship and mostly in their own words.
A costume presentation by Intertheatre.

April 24, 11 am
Brussels Brontë Group (Room P61, Facultés Universitaires Saint-Louis, Brussels)
On the Brussels trail: Elizabeth Gaskell and The Life of Charlotte Brontë.
A talk by Prof. Angus Easson.

When Elizabeth Gaskell was asked by Patrick Brontë to write the life of his daughter, she already knew Charlotte well, but the demands of a biography meant she had to range widely to establish facts, particularly for the Brussels period. It became clear to her, already knowing Villette and having early access to the posthumously-published The Professor, that much autobiography was woven into them. In pursuit of materials, she visited Brussels, was given the cold shoulder by Mme Heger, but met M. Heger and realised something of the nature of the relation between him and Charlotte. This talk will trace this journey of discovery and consider how Gaskell faced the dilemma of writing about events potentially damaging to the living and to the memory of the dead. Given as a talk, rather than a lecture; intervention from the audience is welcome.

Professor Angus Easson has taught at the universities of Newcastle upon Tyne, London (The Royal Holloway College) and Salford, where he was professor of English until his retirement in 2000. He has published widely on Romantic and Victorian literature, notably on Elizabeth Gaskell, and has edited the Oxford World's Classics edition of The Life of Charlotte Brontë. He is currently working on supplements to the Pilgrim Edition of the Letters of Charles Dickens and a book on Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Friday 14th, Saturday 15th, Sunday 16th and Monday 17^th May
10:30am - 5:30 pm except Sunday 1pm - 5:30pm.
Flower Festival and Victorian Victuals
Brook Street Chapel, Knutsford
Exhibition with Victorian high tea in the garden.

Outside of these times by request. Knutsford and District Flower Club are creating the flower arrangements and each arrangement will depict one of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Novels. There will also be a special arrangement on her grave.
Food & drinks will be served by members of the chapel dressed in Victorian Costume. This will be held either in the chapel garden or in the schoolroom depending on the weather.

June 9
Sheffield University Day School on Elizabeth Gaskell's longer short stories.

June 16 (Metropolitan University)
Dear Scherezade

The actress Gabrielle Drake will give a gala performance of her one-woman show, Dear Scheherazade, based on the writer’s novels and letters (its title deriving from Mrs Gaskell’s friend and editor Charles Dickens, who christened her “my dear Scheherazade” in tribute to her Arabian Nights-style storytelling.
Presented jointly by the Gaskell Society (gaskellsociety.co.uk) and the Manchester Historic Buildings Trust, the performance will help to raise funds for a £2.75 million restoration of 84 Plymouth Grove, the Grade II* listed Manchester house where Mrs Gaskell lived from 1850 to 1865 and produced most of her work. (The Times, Sue Corbett)

June 25
Guided walk : Discover Knutsford's Cranford Days
with Joan Leach MBE as your guide
Sunday 25th June , 2.30 pm

Assemble in Canute Square. The walk will trace the scenes and people Elizabeth Gaskell knew and wrote about in Cranford.
The walk ends at Brook Street Chapel where she is buried with William and two daughters

July 14 - November 28 (Christie Gallery, John Rylands University Library)
Elizabeth Gaskell: A Connected Life

Elizabeth Gaskell was a prolific correspondent and stood at the centre of a wide and varied social network. Her personal connections extended to people in many different walks of life - from some of the most famous figures of the day to the poorest factory workers in her home town of Manchester.
This exhibition, which marks the bicentenary of her birth, draws on the Library's world-class Gaskell collections to explore her place in these diverse communities. It looks at how her social networks influenced her fiction and the worlds she depicted in her books. It also considers the worldwide community of readers past and present who have found enjoyment in Gaskell's work.

The exhibition draws on the library’s own extensive collection of Gaskelliana, including the manuscript of Wives and Daughters and the writer’s inkstand and paper-knife, but will also include loans from Mrs Gaskell’s descendants: her 1854 portrait by Samuel Laurence, and her passport (which shows how unusually widely travelled she was for a woman of her time). From the Brotherton Library at Leeds University (where it is on permanent loan from the Gaskell family) it will borrow her manuscript diary of 1835-38, in which she interestingly records her thoughts on the character development of her infant daughter Marianne, born in 1834. (The Times, Sue Corbett)

August 5
Professor Pamela Copron Parker talks on 'Elizabeth Gaskell and Autographs' at the John Rylands Library.

August 14 (Christie Gallery, John Rylands University Library)
Elegant Economy — the Clothes of Cranford, by The History Wardrobe

September
Exhibition on 'Elizabeth Gaskell's Cheshire' at Tatton Park, Knutsford.

September 5
Penny-farthing Race round Knutsford Moor.

September 14
Talk about the Whitfield Collection at Knutsford Library.

September 16
Jenny Uglow talks on 'Country and City' at the John Rylands Library.

September 18
History Wardrobe perform 'The Clothes of Cranford' at the John Rylands Library.

September 25
Dedication of window in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey.

September 29
Elizabeth Gaskell’s Birthday Celebration
Wednesday 29th September
11am. A talk in Brook Street Chapel on Elizabeth Gaskell and her novels by Elizabeth Williams, Chairman of the Gaskell Society
12:30pm. Two course lunch at the Belle Epoque (Gaskell Memorial Tower)
3:00pm. Gaskell guided walk round the town by Joan Leach

Sunday 3rd October, 11am (Brook Street Chapel)
Service Commemorating Mrs Gaskell’s 200^th Birth Anniversary
A special chapel service dedicated to Elizabeth Gaskell followed by the laying of a wreath on her grave by the Gaskell Society. This will be followed by a finger buffet in the schoolroom.

October 6
Joan Leach gives talk on 'Elizabeth Gaskell and Cheshire' at Tatton Hall.

October 8 (Tatton Park)
Friday October 8th, 11 am
Lunchtime Lecture: Elizabeth Gaskell and the 19th century novel
Join Ed Potton, Assistant Keeper of Printed Books, and Fran Baker, Assistant Modern Literary Archivist, both from John Ryland's University Library, Manchester. Discover the secrets of Elizabeth Gaskell's world and literary works. Learn about surviving Gaskell archive materials from the John Ryland's collection, and what this tells us about her writing career. Special access to the atmospheric Egerton library. Lecture takes place in the impressive Mansion Entrance Hall - booking essential.

October 5-9
Victorian Music Hall at Knutsford Little Theatre (to include Old Poz).

October 11
Elizabeth Williams talks on 'The Life and Works of Elizabeth Gaskell' as part of the Wellington Literary Festival, Shropshire.

October 14
Alan Shelston talks on 'Gaskell and her Publishers' at the John Rylands Library.

Another Brontë-connected, albeit more remotely, author is Jeanette Winterson, who wrote Oranges are Not the Only Fruit (which in turn helped inspire the song Just Don't Read Jane Eyre by Los Campesinos!). She is featured in the Guardian today.

But to some, she had become insufferable – arrogant, pretentious. "I have made a lot of mistakes in my life," she says shrugging. But she argues that mistakes were inevitable because she was breaking new ground for women writers. "At college, I was told there were four great women novelists in the 19th century – Jane Austen, George Eliot, Charlotte and Emily Brontë. Not one of them led an enviable life – all of them had to sacrifice ludicrously in order to be writers. I wasn't prepared to do that."You could become ill so that you could retreat to the bedroom, avoid your domestic responsibilities and write like Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti. You had to forget about writing if you weren't prepared to sacrifice any other things you might want from life, like kids or lovers. It's not like that now." (Stuart Jeffries)

But most importantly:

Winterson isn't writing a novel and hasn't been for three years. "You can't force it so I'm not going to." But she's expecting to be busy. She's considering writing two scripts – one about the relationship between Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas and another a BBC drama on the lives of the Brontë sisters. Will you write novels again? "I'm sure. I love writing. I always wanted to tell stories and I always want to be useful." (Stuart Jeffries)

Fingers crossed something will come out of that!

Now that there is a casting going on looking for a new Heathcliff and Cathy they might want to consider Gordon Brown, the Heathcliff of newspapers. The Independent writes,

Not many people are saying that about Mr Brown. A blend of Heathcliff, Lear on the heath and Frankenstein's monster, his vile treatment of his officials should be kept constantly in mind, especially when he next prates on about his values and the decencies which he absorbed during his childhood in the manse. Anyone who can talk about values and behave like Gordon Brown deserves a Pulitzer Prize for hypocrisy. Criminals are serving prison sentences for less morally culpable behaviour. (Bruce Anderson)

Psiquiatria e Toxicodependência talks about Jane Eyre, particularly Bertha Rochester of course (in Portuguese), Conquering the Classics reviews Wuthering Heights. Book Reviews posts about Agnes Grey.

Categories: Agnes Grey, Elizabeth Gaskell, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, Wuthering Heights

Loved Twilight? Then you'll adore Jane Eyre!

Harper Collins, publisher of the Twilight-oriented edition of Wuthering Heights relapses with an edition of Jane Eyre:

Jane Eyre
By Charlotte Brontë
Harper Collins Children's Books
ISBN: 9780007353361

One of the greatest love stories ever told, beautifully repackaged for a modern teen audience
Loved TWILIGHT? Then you'll adore Jane Eyre!
You can't choose who you fall in love with. For Jane Eyre, orphan and impoverished governess, the last person she should want is the only person she needs: her employer, Rochester. Not only is he socially inaccessible, he's also a man of few words and many secrets -- and one of his secrets is so terrible it could destroy everything he and Jane hold dear!

Categories: Books, Jane Eyre

Rochester chained up

An alert from Ontario, Canada. Auditions for a local production of Gordon & Caird's Jane Eyre. A Musical Drama:

The Youth Theatre Coalition is holding auditions for their upcoming musical production:

Jane Eyre

Youth Director: Taylor Gammon, Mentor Director: Corey LaPointe
Musical Director: Sandy Bainbridge

February 21, 23, 24, 6:00PM - 9:00PM
At St. Mary’s High School, 555 15th St. E. Owen Sound
Production Dates: May 19 - 22
(Morning and Evening Productions)

The Youth Theatre Coalition is looking to cast:
2 Principal Roles (1 female, 1 male)
20 Supporting Roles (13 female, 9 male)
4 Young Supporting Roles (3 female, 1 male)
10 Female Chorus Roles
3 General Chorus Roles

Come prepared with a song of your choice. (Sheet music is not required, but it is always acceptable and welcomed). Auditions are a no pressure situation!

*The Youth Theatre Coalition is a youth-specific theatre company; therefore all people auditioning must be ages 10-20.

Romance Bandits interviews author Janet Mullany who announces the forthcoming release of an erotic e-novella inspired by Jane Eyre: Reader, I Married Him.

What’s next for Janet Mullany?
This year is a huge writing/publishing year for me. I have an e-novella coming out next month from Loose-Id, Reader, I Married Him, which is a dirty riff on Jane Eyre. (Christie Kelly)

On her website she defines the novella like this:

March, 2010 from Loose-Id. What if it was Mr. Rochester chained up in the attic? An erotic e-novella based on Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, Reader I Married Him.

The Macomb Daily tries to convice its readership that March is a great time to read:

What a hoot it would have been to have met authors such as Ernest Hemingway, Charlotte Bronte or Laura Ingalls Wilder or to have attended the midnight release of Charles Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities" or Hemingway's "A Farewell to Arms." (Gina Joseph)

Our Prattville interviews actress and author Carolyn Hennesy,

Melissa Parker (Our Prattville): What authors have inspired you in your writing?
Carolyn Hennesy: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Edith Wharton, the Brontes, Jane Austin, to name a few.

The Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette recommends the Wuthering Heights edition with cover by Ruben Toledo, the same edition which Åsa Carlsson – Liberal posts about (in Swedish), dagelijks iets degelijks posts about Charlotte Brontë in Dutch, June H. is reading (but is not very convinced) Villette, Advanced Gaming & Theory considers Emily Brontë an author of influence, Dani's Daily Drop talks about Wuthering Heights from the perspective of a Twilight reader, The Reading Life reviews Wide Sargasso Sea 1992.

Categories: Brontëites, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, Music, References, Sequels, Theatre, Wide Sargasso Sea, Wuthering Heights

Anne Brontë, in theory

A scholar book with Brontë interests:

Literature, In Theory
Tropes, Subjectivities, Responses and Responsibilities
by Julian Wolfreys
* Imprint: Continuum
* Pub. date: 23 Feb 2010
* ISBN: 9781441123244

Jacques Derrida has argued about the difference between literature and theory that despite its institutional status, part of its ‘institution’ is the right of literature to say anything. Literature cannot be defined as such, and as soon as one seeks to produce a reading of the literary, complications arise.
Yet despite its institutional significance, ‘theory’ remains something many wish would go away; and which, for others, is still not read, is misread, and remains to be read. Like literature, it remains as an enigmatic identity, resistant to definition, but subject to misperceptions and open to general statements that are more or less inaccurate.
By examining how ‘theory’ and ‘literature’ are concepts and names which touch on one other incomplex ways, Julian Wolfreys seeks to understand their intersections and differences. Examining a wide range of authors, from Dickens to Joyce, and engaging directly with a number of major theorists, Wolfreys takes the reader on a journey through the issues and ideas involved in reading literature, in theory.

Chapter three centers on Anne Brontë: In Visibility or, the Appearance of ‘True Histories’: Truth, Confession and Revelation in Anne Brontë.

On the other hand, The Child Writer from Austen to Wolf (edited by Christine Alexander and Juliet McMaster) which includes essays about Charlotte and Branwell's Juvenilia appears now in paperback (the hardback edition was publihed in 2005):

The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf
Series: Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture (No. 47)
Edited by Christine Alexander, Juliet McMaster
Cambridge University Press
ISBN-13: 9780521128384

In this highly original collection leading scholars address the largely overlooked genre of childhood writings by major authors, and explore the genesis of genius. The book includes essays on the first writings of Jane Austen, Byron, Elizabeth Barrett, Charlotte and Branwell Brontë, Louisa May Alcott, George Eliot, John Ruskin, Lewis Carroll and Virginia Woolf. All began writing for pleasure as children, and later developed their professional ambitions. In bursts of creative energy, these young authors, as well as those like Daisy Ashford, who wrote only as a child, produced prose, verse, imitation and parody, wild romance and down-to-earth daily records. Their juvenile writings are fascinating both in themselves, and for the promise of greater works to come. The volume includes an invaluable and thorough annotated bibliography of juvenilia, and will stimulate many directions for research in this lively and fascinating topic.

Categories: Anne Brontë, Books, Juvenilia, Scholar

"Where did Emily Brontë find it?"

The Age (Australia) publishes an extract of the upcoming book On Passion by Dorothy Porter including this enthusiastic appraisal of Wuthering Heights:

The most scorching novel in the English language, Wuthering Heights, was written by a reclusive clergyman's daughter, Emily Bronte, who spent most of her time doing household chores or wandering the moors beyond the Haworth parsonage.
The sketchy details of Bronte's life have been forensically scrutinised, in the more than 150 years since her early death from consumption, for the faintest evidence of a secret love life. Somerset Maugham, in an entertaining and insightful essay on Bronte's life and work, speculates with his familiar worldly cynicism that Bronte may simply have suffered a disastrous love affair at boarding school - and then fed off it for the rest of her life. This speculation is not quite as silly as it sounds. Bronte rarely ventured from her home, and one of the few occasions when she did, was to go to school. She left school suddenly and prematurely, in mysteriously unhappy circumstances. (...) (Read more)
Frankly, I have always envied Cathy and Heathcliff, especially their reunited ghosts wandering forever the nocturnal Yorkshire moors. I know only too well how utterly claustrophobic and toxic is the line: ''Nelly, I am Heathcliff.'' I know that real and liveable and enduring love is not a frenzied cannibal's feast. But how intoxicating the dream of a passion that defiantly trounces everything - even death. Where did Emily Bronte find it?

Also from Australia comes this article in The Courier-Mail about Mia Wasikowska, the next Jane Eyre on Cary Fukanaga's production which will begin shooting next March:

After our chat today, she's off to LA tomorrow to promote Alice, then after a quick trip back to Australia she flies to the UK to take on another much-loved literary character, Jane Eyre, in Cary Fukunaga's adaptation of the Charlotte Bronte novel. (Joanne Hawkins)

And her on-screen partner, Michael Fassbender, also talks about this production in The Press Association:

Fassbender said: "I do like that (a challenge) - it's nice to do things that scare the s**t out of you otherwise you just sort of end up getting comfortable."
The film will be directed by Sin Nombre's Cary Fukunaga and Alice In Wonderland star Mia Wasikowska will play Jane Eyre.
Fassbender said: "I'm really looking forward to it and Cary Fukunaga is a really interesting choice. Sin Nombre was one of my favourite films that I saw last year so I'm very excited to see what he can teach me." (...)
Asked if he would still appear in small British independent films now he had made it in Hollywood, Fassbender said: "I'm going to be working on Jane Eyre here next which is obviously going to be a British based production. I just like to go where the good work is and it's always been interesting for me to mix it up as much as possible and it's always down to the script and the filmmaker."

The other imminent Brontë film, Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights (filming will begin in Yorkshire for six weeks at the end of April) has also its place in the news today. From the Montreal Gazette:

Asked what's next, she says "ever heard of Wuthering Heights?" It has been a favourite of hers since she was a teenager, with themes common to her own work. It is, however, her first film that isn't entirely her own and therefore a major step out of her usual discomfort zone.
"I think I'm doing it for the material and two months of shooting on the moors," Arnold says with a laugh. "I'm going to do it my own way, and I may upset some people. But as long as I don't upset myself, everything will be all right."

The Chicago Classical Review comments on a recent concert of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra devoted to Igor Stravinsky's music. Talking about the piece Ode (1943):

The evening led off with Stravinsky’s Ode, heard in its belated CSO premiere. Commissioned to mark the passing of Natalie Koussevitzky, the Ode strikes only a fleeting elegiac tone in the bustling opening Eulogy, the valedictory element more touchingly manifest in the concluding Epitaph. Yet it is the contrasting central Eclogue that contains the most striking music. Mining recycled music from a film score for an abandoned Jane Eyre film project, Stravinsky’s brilliant wind writing with its lively contrapuntal hunt motif was delightful, played with fine, nimble elan by the four CSO horns.

It is not so well known but Igor Stravinsky was the first composer chosen to write the soundtrack for Jane Eyre 1944 (which finally came to Bernard Herrmann's expert hands). He eventually abandoned the project but the music he composed was recycled as the scherzo-like middle section of his Ode composition called Eclogue. The final piece was first premiered in October 1943 by the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

The New York Times reviews The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson by Jerome Charyn, mentioning other recent secret lifes:

As Charyn assumes Dickinson’s own voice and surrounds her with invented as well as historical characters, “The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson” fits neatly into the flourishing genre of literary body-snatching. These novels, written in the person or from the point of view of a dead great writer, include Laura Joh Rowland’s playful “Secret Adventures of Charlotte Brontë” (Charlotte as sleuth) and Colm Toibin’s insightful novel of Henry James, “The Master,” and let’s not get started on Jane Austen. But all are perfect for the age of too much information. The genre thrives on a contemporary desire to fill in the blanks, and to grant spinsterish ­ladies the sexual desires they so decorously veiled in their 18th- and 19th-century writing. (Caryn James)

Another book review with Brontë mentions is the San Francisco Chronicle's on The Possessed by Elif Batuman:

Elif Batuman of San Francisco is the amused and amusing whiz from Stanford's comparative literature program who rushed into that forest of books and planted herself there. In graduate school, not so long ago, she "moved to Twin Peaks, where winds howled all day and all night, while giant clouds rushed across the street as if in a hurry to get somewhere, occasionally revealing dramatic views of the city. The others all made fun of me for moving there - Ilan called it Wuthering Heights - but I didn't care." (Bob Blaisdell)

The Perthshire Advertiser talks about one young local actress who has been chosen as Adèle in the upcoming production of Jane Eyre at the Perth Theatre (March 4-20):

PERTHSHIRE school pupil Beth Duncan, is making her professional stage debut in Perth Theatre’s production of Jane Eyre this spring.
The 16-year-old Kilgraston student plays Jane Eyre’s young charge Adele in the Horsecross Arts production of the stage adaptation of the Charlotte Brontë classic.
Beth, who plans to study drama, has already taken part in several school productions, but this is her first experience of working in a theatre.
“It was a bit daunting at first as I had no idea what it would be like working in a professional theatre, but everybody has been really lovely and supportive,” said Beth.
“I have gone beyond the nervous stage now and am really excited about the production which is a very creative and visual take on the well-known story.”
Beth has been brushing up on her French accent for the role which also requires her to perform some ballet steps.
This stage adaptation of Jane Eyre centres on the idea that hidden inside the sensible frozen Jane, there exists another, more passionate self.
As a child, the orphaned Jane Eyre is taught to stifle her natural exuberance. A part of herself is locked away, out of view of polite society, until she arrives at Rochester’s house as a governess to his young child, Adele.
Director Ian Grieve said: “This production uses a multi-talented team to create a show which combines theatre with elements of music and dance to tell the story in a truly dramatic way.
The Horsecross Arts show is urgent, fast and energetic, capturing, for stage, all the atmosphere and passion of the Brontë novel.”
As well as introducing Beth Duncan, the production brings a number of new faces to Perth Theatre stage, plus a welcome return for Perth’s Tom McGovern as Rochester. Music is by Iain Johnstone and Jon Beales

The (in)famous anecdote of the Ryocroft Inn (in New York) and Charlotte Brontë appears again in the Chantham Daily News. Fortunately this time around the mention is not so imaginative as before:

There are 28 guest suites at The Roycroft Inn that bear the names of notable personalities carved in their doors, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charlotte Bronte, Henry David Thoreau and Susan Anthony. (Bob Boughner)

The Otago Daily News (New Zealand) announces the upcoming productions at the local Fortune Theatre, including one adaptation of Wuthering Heights (they recently staged Polly Teale's Jane Eyre):

"While the theatre still has some way to go, this combination of reworking literary classics and celebrating New Zealand's vernacular wit and humour will continue this year, with Roger Hall's Conjugal Rites and Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights." (Nigel Benson)

The New York fashion week is traditionally an event that generates Brontë references among fashion critics. This year is no exception and Los Angeles Times talks about Marc Jacobs:

Neither wind nor snow would ruffle Marc Jacobs' cape, in thick shearling with a bushy fur collar, which looked like it would be at home on a Brontë on the English moors, while Peter Som's cape, in deep blue broadtail with a fur hem, seemed suited for a snow princess. (Booth Moore)

Spanish writer Ana María Matute has been featured before on BrontëBlog as a Brontëite. In El Sur (Spain) there's one more confirmation:

Es lo que ha querido transmitir siempre desde que lo vivió por sí misma cuando era niña y ya pensaba en ser como Dickens, Bronte o Andersen.(Marina Martínez) (Google translation)

La Vanguardia (México) talks about books about love, including Wuthering Heights:

“Cumbres Borrascosas” podría funcionar como una alegoría de los juegos de la vida, la muerte y el amor, en donde a veces nos toca vivir en la hermosura, la paz, rodeada de jardines y acariciada por el sol, como La Granja de los Tordos; y otras veces el destino nos empuja a vivir entre las oscuras y lejanas Cumbres Borrascosas. Entre los personajes de esta novela inglesa está Heathcliff, el hombre afectado por un amor no correspondido y los maltratos de una mala vida, o la idealizada Catherine y los extremos que puede alcanzar una sola persona. El libro fue escrito por Emily Bronte y tiene la firmeza y habilidad de construcción, de fondo y efecto tan impactante, queen su época la autora fue juzgada como una escritora “masculina”. (Eugenia Flores Soria) (Google translation)

El País (Spain) talks about Google book digitalisation:

Y, mucho más anticuado, por ejemplo, que la edición encuadernada de Cumbres borrascosas que consulté ayer para buscar una frase que pensaba incluir en este artículo. Quizá la diferencia afectiva que experimento ante cada uno de los dos soportes (prescindiendo de que contengan, cada uno a su modo, la inmortal historia de Heathcliff y Catherine Earnshaw) se deba a que al de papel no se me ocurre exigirle eficiencia y rapidez, sino sólo que se comporte como siempre lo ha hecho. (Manuel Rodríguez Rivero) (Google translation)

And El Mundo (Spain) has also something to say using Wuthering Heights:

Lo malo es que los hijos (me refiero a militantes de partido, pues también los hay que se van de casa) aprenden que esto es el amor y las relaciones maritales. Y luego las reproducen, aunque empeoradas, del mismo modo en que la segunda generación de "Cumbres borrascosas" es aún peor que la primera. Que ya es decir. (Alejandro Gándara) (Google translation)

NonSoloCinema (Italy) reviews The Wolfman:

La drammaticità, di quelle rare, senza tempo, di Emily Blunt, perfetta per un film tratto da qualche storia della sorelle Brontë, in Wolfman appare, semplicemente, sprecata.(Ilaria Falcone) (Google translation)

Le Temps (Switzerland) reviews Rachel Cusk's The Bradshaw Variations:

Rachel Cusk, nous l’avons découverte avec Arlington Park, un roman où il pleut sans arrêt. Des trombes d’eau. Mais aussi pas mal de larmes, parce que les femmes qui s’y confessent sont des desperate housewives. Insatisfaites, frustrées, à peine révoltées, coincées dans leurs rôles d’épouses ou de mères, ces Anglaises recluses dans les pavillons coquets de la middle class n’ont pas trouvé meilleure confidente que Rachel Cusk. Laquelle dit s’inspirer d’Elizabeth Bowen et surtout des sœurs Brontë, dont les livres sont également très arrosés. «Leurs sujets de prédilection, explique Rachel Cusk, je les partage: l’oppression sociale, le confinement des êtres, les impasses du désir. Les sœurs Brontë nous rappellent aussi que notre liberté, en tant que femmes, n’est pas un cadeau tombé du ciel mais qu’elle est le fruit d’une très longue lutte, à la fois politique et intime.» (André Clavel) (Google translation)

La République des Lettres talks about Kathy Acker:

Post-moderne, Kathy Acker l'est non moins parce qu'elle laisse son texte être constamment traversé d'autres médias (le rock, le vidéo-clip, la bande dessinée), d'autres cultures (le vaudou, le culte d'Ogun), d'autres voix, d'autres flux, d'autres références (la physique quantique, l'anarcho-syndicalisme catalan), d'autres époques (la Sicile du XIXe siècle, le Yorkshire des Brontë, le Londres de Wedekind), d'autres devenirs (on peut penser au devenir-animal de Deleuze et Guattari, à propos des chiens). (Patrick Hutchinson) (Google translation)

Check the comments to this article of the MIT Technological Review about the PageRank Google algorythm if you want to discover how the Brontës were Sergey Brin/Larry Page forerunners. The Telegraph has an article about Shaykh Abdalqadir as-Sufi, previously known as Ian Dallas who was the screenwriter of Jane Eyre 1956 (!). A modern governess in the Adelaide Advertiser. La Nación (Argentina) reviews Brian Dillon's Tormented Hope. On the blogosphere, The Little Professor reviews Elizabeth Newark's Jane Eyre's Daughter, Blogjem loves Jane Eyre and wants to read Denise Giardina's Emily's Ghost, inky fingers posts about different TV adaptations of Jane Eyre (in Swedish). C. Adoph Moores discusses Jane Eyre 1944. Literariamente Hablando posts about the Brontës in Spanish whereas Fly High! reviews Sparkhouse 2003, Kivus publishes a very curious signpost pointing to... Emily (MN) Brontë (TX) and house.of.joanna has uploaded several pictures of North Lees Hall to flickr.

Finally, the Elm Student Newspaper (Washington College) discovers a new piece of juvenilia by the Brontës. Nothing less than a space opera:

The Hexasphere: A Space Opera
This little known (and little read) novel is the only work that all four Brontes worked on together (even prodigal son Branwell did the illustration on the front cover). The Hexasphere follows the adventures of space governess Gertrude Wickershire and her torrid romance with Lesley Morrowton, the brooding, intergalactic smuggler with a heart of gold. Together, they fight with the resistance movement dedicated to protect the six-sided planet (known as the Hexasphere) from the invading forces of a hostile, alien race set on devouring the souls of all mankind. (Chantel DeIulio)

Categories: Humour, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, Music, References, Sequels Theatre, Wuthering Heights