At Ponden Hall and Cowan Bridge

The box office results for Jane Eyre after this weekend seem to be one of those half-full/half-empty kind of statements. Inside Pulse sees the glass half full:

Jane Eyre continues to perform well as a limited engagement. It’s earned $3.5 million in twenty-four days. (Travis Leamons)

Whereas for Alt Film Guide the glass is half empty:

Meanwhile, the Cary Fukunaga-directed Jane Eyre, starring Michael Fassbender and Mia Wasikowska, continued to perform well — though not quite as impressively as before.
Despite doubling the number of theaters from 90 to 180, Jane Eyre was up only 27.5% this weekend, earning $1.23m at no. 13 on the North American box-office chart. As a result, its per-theater average dropped from $10,778 to $6,872; for a movie in limited release, that isn't exactly a huge number. Although there's still room for further expansion, how far that expansion will go remains to be seen.
To date, Jane Eyre, distributed by Focus Features, has collected $3.5m domestically. (Zac Gille)

And how do you see it?

A couple of reviews of the film:

Positive

The Massachusetts Daily Collegian:

There are, of course, necessary omissions from Brontë’s novel in the screenplay adapted by Moira Buffini. One of the most notable missing scenes is the bizarre incident in which Rochester masquerades as a gypsy fortune teller in order to determine Jane’s true feelings for him. The absence of this scene and others like it is actually a positive quality for the film. While these portions of the novel contribute to the uniquely weird quality that “Jane Eyre” possesses, they likely would have translated awkwardly to the screen. Buffini captures the mood of the original story without compromising the novel’s stranger sequences in the process. (Ian Opolski)

Mostly positive

The Badger Herald gives it 4 out of 5 stars:

This type of deep drama, chock-full of old English language, is not a movie for everyone.
“Jane Eyre” is aimed at a mature crowd that can appreciate the intricacies of the script and beauty of the tale as it slowly unfolds. Although the acting, plot and setting of the film are stellar, the movie was tedious at times.
Listening to the old dialogue and concentrating in order to understand the flashbacks became draining. The movie is not predictable; however, it did resemble other vintage movies set during this time in history. [...]
In an era when we are accustomed to passionate displays of love, Brontë takes a long, circuitous route to love. At times, the path it takes is a bit arduous, even aggravating. [...]
Overall, “Jane Eyre” is a wonderful movie for those who adore fancy language, women in bonnets and a movie steeped in drama. The sheer complexity of literary adaption from the classic tale may frighten some, suggesting it is not a movie for everyone to rush out and see. However, if you are a romantic at heart, completely drawn in by the literary classics, you will find the film to be enchanting, offering talented acting, vivid scenery, befitting costumes and astounding special effects. (Kate Northey)

The film is also reviewed by: ScreenSiren, Before the Dawn (podcast format), Films Watched, Sonia Gensler, Logan E. Turner, Hopeless Bleak Despair, Tierney Alison, We Got This Covered, Soulroots, Sassy Chick Thoughts, Rock 'n Roll Ghost, Ripple Effects, En Foote, Pearl, A Blogwork Orange, I Before E and Freethinker.

The Sacramento Bee seems to be quite intrigued about Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights.

The Keighley News explains how these two films will have a positive impact on the Brontë Parsonage Museum, with special attention to Wuthering Heights:

Parsonage bosses hope to host a visit by the film’s writers later this year as part of the museum’s contemporary arts programme.
They also hope to organise an exhibition of costumes from Wuthering Heights at a future date.
Museum director Andrew McCarthy said it was too early to comment on the quality of the film.
But he said: “We would hope it’s a good rendition. The casting seems pretty promising, and we look forward to it.
“At a practical level a film usually means increased interest in the Brontës which can translate into more visitors, so it’s likely to be positive.” (David Knights)

Mothering Sunday was yesterday in the UK and so the Yorkshire Post asked several local personalities to talk about their mums. Barbara Taylor Bradford - frequently seen on Brontëblog - reminisces about hers:

On weekends, we would take various trams and buses to the Brontë Parsonage in Haworth, the theatre in York, or some stately home where mum could spot a Gainsborough painting or a piece of Hepplewhite furniture from a mile away, ‘Barbara’, she would say, ‘always keep your eyes open and look at everything’. (Sarah Freeman)

The Yorkshire Post also has an article on Ponden Hall which is, as you know, for sale now:

THE world’s most famous literary sisters inspire fanatical devotion but Julie Akhurst and Steve Brown only realised how besotted Brontë lovers can be when they bought Ponden Hall.
“We regularly find people weeping in the front garden. It’s quite extraordinary but I can understand it,” says Julie, whose home is said to have been the inspiration for Wuthering Heights. Its links with both Emily Brontë and one of literature’s best-loved novels are both powerful and verifiable.
Emily and her family were regular visitors to Ponden Hall and would walk across the moor to the Heaton family home. Branwell Brontë’s short story The Thurstons of Darkwell is based on it. The Heatons, who owned nearby Ponden Mill, also had what was reputed to be “the best library in the West Riding” and Emily certainly used it.
Although the Victorian portraits make her look severe, the dark-haired, intense woman is said to have captured the heart of one of the Heaton boys. She spurned him, but in the back garden of Ponden Hall are the withered remains of a now-dead pear tree, supposedly the gift of the lovesick teenager to the older woman.
“Fans love to see that too,” says Julie, who is selling the house after 13 years. “It’s a link with Emily. They can picture her here and that’s very affecting. There is something about her that makes people very emotional. [...]
There is some debate over whether Ponden Hall inspired Heathcliff’s domain, Wuthering Heights, or Thrushcross Grange, the grander home of the fictional Linton family.
Many people, including Julie and Steve, believe it is Wuthering Heights, although there is another contender for that title – Top Withens, a ruined farmhouse with a wilder setting that looks the part, but has no recorded Brontë connection.
“We’ll probably never know for sure and it was all from Emily’s imagination. But this house is much more like Wuthering Heights. It is a much more humble dwelling than Thrushcross Grange. Plus the date plaque above the main entrance identifies the hall as being rebuilt in 1801 and Emily’s story starts with that exact date,” says Julie.
There is another important clue in an account by William Davies, who visited Emily’s father Patrick Brontë and wrote: “We went on to an old manorial farm called ‘Heaton’s of Ponden’, which we were told was the original model of Wuthering Heights, which indeed corresponded in some measure to the description given in Emily Brontë’s romance.”
For fans of the book, the most evocative part of the property is the tiny east gable window in the master bedroom. It is said to have given Emily the idea for Cathy’s ghost, scratching and crying at the pane to get in.
“It’s plausible because there was a box bed beside it at one point and that is just how it is described in Wuthering Heights,” says Julie, a former deputy editor of OK magazine, who bought the hall in 1998 when she moved up from London to marry Steve, a builders’ merchant from Bradford.
“We saw a three-line private advert for it in a newspaper and came up even though it was out of our price range. I’ve always been fascinated by the Brontës and as soon as we saw it we had to have it. The owner Brenda was lovely. She had blue hair and ran it as a B&B and yoga centre and did teas for walkers, but it really was in need of renovation.”
Ponden Hall was built in 1634 by the Heatons and as their fortunes flourished they modernised, added and rebuilt to suit their status.
The family eventually dwindled to a bachelor who died in 1898, after which the contents of the house were sold off. Books from the library were reputedly hawked in the market in Keighley. What didn’t sell was torn up for vegetable wrappings and mystery still surrounds what happened to a Shakespeare First Folio, one of the world’s rarest books worth millions.
The property was then used by farmers before Brenda bought it in 1975. She played host to Juliette Binoche, who stayed there with her voice coach rehearsing for her role as Cathy in the ill-fated film version of the book, and Sir Cliff Richard who visited before playing Heathcliff in the short-lived musical. [...]
Unlike the fictional Wuthering Heights, Ponden Hall feels friendly and warm. “We’d never have bought it otherwise. It’s always felt welcoming,” says Julie. She and Steve are selling to move closer to their daughter’s new school.
“I’ll miss it. I love it for what it is and the little hamlet here is lovely. I’ve also enjoyed the Brontë connection. We’ve always been happy to show people round by appointment and we’ve had people from all over the world including the Japanese ambassador to the United Nations,” says Julie. “I just hope it sells to someone who loves the Brontës as much as I do.” (Sharon Dale)

The Yorkshire Post seems to be having a Brontë day, as there's one more article on 'the Brontës' old school' (ie. Cowan Bridge):

Driving along the A65 on a cold wintry day can be inspiring. As the sun broke through, there were glimpses of the snow-capped Three Peaks and remarkable panoramas of the distant Lake District hills and mountains. Also tipped with gleaming snow, they seemed remarkably close, thanks to the unusual quality of the morning light.
Cowan Bridge is famous as the place where four of the five Brontë sisters went to boarding school and made a big impression on them – mostly for the wrong reasons. A plaque on the side of a building on the main road as you leave the village notes that Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte and Emily Brontë (Anne was too young) were at the school between 1824 and 1825. What is doesn’t add is that the older sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, died as a consequence of illnesses contracted here and the two famous younger sisters were removed from the school by their father, Patrick. The headmaster, the Reverend William Carus Wilson, was later represented by Charlotte in the unflattering portrait of Mr Brocklehurst of Lowood School in the early chapters of Jane Eyre – which almost led to a libel case.
The school moved from Cowan Bridge to nearby Casterton in 1832, since when it has flourished to become one of the most highly regarded girls’ boarding schools in the country.
Turning right off the A65 at Devils’s Bridge near Kirkby Lonsdale, you take the A683 in the direction of Sedburgh. At Casterton, you discover most of the buildings form a part of the school.
We visited the nearby church, Holy Trinity, on a bend in the main road close to the school’s entrance, which has an enchanting interior.
It features a memorial tablet to William Carus Wilson and has impressive wall paintings and stained-glass windows by James Clarke RA (1858-1943) and the better-known Henry Holiday (1839-1927), a close friend of Lewis Carroll, and whose work in stained glass can be seen at Westminster Abbey.
Our next stop was the village of Barbon after turning right off the main road into Barbondale. At the Barbon Inn, we relished the log-burning range and the hospitality of a friendly New Zealand barmaid, Yvonne Thorsen, who has been living around these parts for four years. [...]
The inn which dates back to the 17th century, is owned by the present Baron Shuttleworth, also owner of nearby Barbon Manor. This impressive Victorian mansion was built in 1862 for Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth, a friend and benefactor of Charlotte Brontë. (Yvette Huddleston and Walter Swan)

Although it is true that Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth meant well - he offered Arthur Bell Nicholls a living after his marriage to Charlotte - Charlotte wasn't all that fond of him and we think she'd now hate to hear him spoken of as her 'benefactor'.

The Herald features Kevin Barry, author of City of Bohane, who

says the first book to ever “wallop me to the wall” was Wuthering Heights. He was nine or 10, off school with flu and he picked up his sister’s copy. “I remember being sucked into this world and being absolutely blown away by the kind of transformative magic, the sense of just disappearing from the world around you. Even at nine or 10 I could tell this was a great book.” (Teddy Jamieson)

Jonathan Holloway's radio adaptation of the novel is still being discussed. here's a letter to the Guardian:

Whatever the artistic merits or demerits of adding swearwords to a radio treatment of Wuthering Heights (Radio review, 27 March), it is only making concrete what is alluded to very clearly in the book itself – as I explain in my book, Filthy English. Here is Heathcliff speaking. "'And you, you worthless ----' he broke out as I entered, turning to his daughter-in-law, and employing an epithet as harmless as duck, or sheep, but generally represented by a dash." It's not really at all ambiguous, is it? Duck = fuck. Sheep = shit. And again: "'You'd better open the door, you ----' he answered, addressing me by some elegant term that I don't care to repeat." What rhymes with "elegant"? The word that the Guardian prints more readily than any other newspaper in the world? And which induces slips of the tongue when James Naughtie et al introduce the culture secretary?
Peter Silverton

The Malaya Business Insight mentions another, more exotic adaptation of the novel, Hihintayin kita sa langit:

[Richard] Gomez’s acting has often been criticized for being too blustery. One of his liabilities is his rather thin, sometimes-screeching voice. But the actor compensates for these weak points with earnestness and lucidity. In our book, Gomez is most memorable as the avenging hero in "Hihintayin Kita sa Langit," a local reworking of the foreign literary classic "Wuthering Heights." As a sort of Heathcliff in Siguion-Reyna’s Batanes-filmed "Hihintayin," Richard just fit the role to a T. He was tall, dark, and looked properly stalwart the way the character was written in the book.
His best scene remains that affecting little tryst outside the church where Gomez kneels in front of his beloved (played by Gomez’s then-girlfriend Dawn Zulueta). That was in 1991. (Arnel Ramos)

The Herald praises the books chosen for the Orange Inheritance Collection.

And what’s striking beyond the fact that six women novelists have elected works by five male writers, is that none of these books is remotely contemporary. William Maxwell may be the most recently deceased of them, and Richard Yates’s tale the most “modern”, but their work is as traditionally crafted and old-world as anything by Mark Twain or Charlotte Brontë – far more so, in many ways, given how unconventional those two were in their day. (Rosemary Goring)

The Huffington Post has also compiled a list of 'favourite old books' which includes Jane Eyre.

The York Press reviews LipService's Best Bits, which included sketches from Withering Looks.

Saz101 and The Pen and Whisk post about Jane Eyre, the novel, and Between the Pages and Domingo Nocivo (in Spanish) post about the 1944 and 1996 adaptations respectively. Fizzy Thoughts writes about Wide Sargasso Sea. So Many Books and Tanikeli (in Portuguese) post about Wuthering Heights. Prairie Peasant has transformed a White's Books edition of Wuthering Heights into a rebound journal.

Categories: Audio-Radio, Brontë Parsonage Museum, Brontëana, Haworth, Humour, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, Theatre, Wuthering Heights