Brontë mania is here to stay

Two articles in The Times salute the forthcoming Brontë season in British cinemas. Hannah Betts repeats some of the usual late feminist criticism of Jane Eyre (the castration of Rochester, etc...) and adds some boutades à la Tanya Gold, trying to convert Charlotte Brontë into a single militant:

A new celluloid Jane Eyre will shortly be upon us, and in it a Hollywood hottie will be given the requisite make-under/Jane-over. It is a guise that Victoria Wood described in her skit on the Haworth industry, Brontëburgers. Charlotte Brontë, she noted, was no looker, but these days she’d have sported some blusher and a perm. Unlikely, one feels. William Thackeray’s daughter, Anne, recalled a dinner at which Currer Bell frustrated the family’s “wild excitement” by Janian mumbling to the governess, provoking a guest to observe that it was the dullest evening she had ever spent and causing her father to do a runner to his club.
Brontë reserved her passion for her writing. Despite Jane’s “Reader, I married him”, the novel constitutes a spinster manifesto. Ms Eyre is a plain, poor, independent, bolshily articulate career girl – reserved yet hotly neurotic – with a pronounced streak of S&M. Proposed to by the man of her dreams, she fears the loss of name and identity and detests feeling kept and dressed up like a doll. She rejects his rival because the sex wouldghastly, and marries Rochester only once he has been emasculated and she holds the financial clout. Reader, I crippled him. It remains the most radical text a child will read. Unless, of course, they get hold of Villette, in which the hero is obliged to go missing at sea so that the heroine is not compromised by wedlock. Our poster spinster did finally get hitched, dying of shame less than a year later.

And Valerie Grove interviews Blake Morrison and gives a solid article about the Brontës now and then:

The square grey stone parsonage alongside the grim slabs of gravestones, the wild and windswept moorland beyond: here the Rev Patrick Brontë brought his doomed family to live in 1820. Today visitors flock in their thousands to see the Brontë sisters’ tiny shoes and the thumb-sized books that they wrote as children, in microscopic script. Despite its remoteness, Haworth Parsonage is second only to Stratford-upon-Avon among literary shrines. For a century and a half the Brontë story has held the world in thrall. It fits into an ancient English narrative tradition: three sisters living with their lone father (woodcutter or monarch) is a is a staple theme of folklore, from Beauty and the Beast to King Lear. The three surviving Brontë sisters would ceaselessly walk around the dining-room table, or sit talking, drawing, secretly writing novels and poetry. The errant brother, Branwell, their “chief genius”, adds a dash of dangerous testosterone to their legend. Collectively they possessed what we most admire in Victorian literary giants: thwarted romance, tragic loss and early deaths. Beneath the apparently repressed and isolated spinsterhood, sidelined into working as governesses, they seethed with fury — and in their writing they voiced it. And what was shocking in 1847 is still exciting in 2011. This autumn there are two major big-screen adaptations — Cary Joji Fukunaga’s Jane Eyre and Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights — and a new biographical Brontë play by Blake Morrison. It’s time to brace yourselves for a new wave of Brontë mania. [...].
Now the novelist Blake Morrison has loosely adapted Chekhov’s Three Sisters into a Brontë play, We Are Three Sisters. The evening before we met, Morrison had taken a walk from Haworth Parsonage up to Top Withens (a seven-mile round trip), the ruined farmhouse still regarded as the prototype of Wuthering Heights. He grew up not far away, in Skipton, “so any literary influence that was in the air came from Haworth”. He once wrote a Wuthering Heights musical with Howard Goodall, scuppered only by Tim Rice’s Heathcliff, starring Cliff Richard. But Morrison’s favourite Brontë novel is Jane Eyre: “Emily fans say she’s more passionate and innovative than Charlotte, but I find Wuthering Heights structurally a bit of a mess.” He started noting parallels between Chekhov’s Three Sisters and the Brontës ten years ago. Chekhov had certainly read about the Brontës (in the Gaskell biography) soon before he wrote Three Sisters; they even have a troubled and self-destructive brother in common. Morrison found links in the sisters’ frustration and longing to be elsewhere and humour in their bantering dialogue, and “liked the idea of letting a bit of light in”. Playwright’s licence allows him liberties, but anyone toying with the Brontë story has to face the fiercely protective Brontë Society. At a read-through of Morrison's play at Howarth (sic) Parsonage one member queried the line “Branwell’s been screwing money out of Father for years” (a quotation from Charlotte) and another queried the word “automaton” as anachronistic — but it is there, in Jane Eyre. Morrison wanted to show that they were not really three intellectually isolated spinsters from the sticks: they had a cultural life in Haworth, a busy town with a good lending library, “and they went to hear Paganini in Halifax”. Their father — “the hypochondriac whose health they were always fretting over, who outlived them all” — was not the stern, eccentric patriarch usually portrayed. “He had his foibles, but he was an active citizen, supporting education and health in Howarth (sic). He was interested in his daughters’ lives and eventually proud of Charlotte.” Morrison includes the scene in which Charlotte reveals to her astonished father that she has published a book. All Patrick’s aspirations had centred on Branwell, though he educated the three daughters himself after the eldest two died. “It mattered to him that they read poetry and could play the piano. But he was a man of his time: he expected women to be useful around the house and didn’t necessarily want them to marry. He was outraged when his curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls, presumed to propose to Charlotte.” Another well-documented episode is Charlotte and Anne’s visit to their publisher in London, determined to scotch a rumour that Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell (the sisters’ pen names) were all one male author. This was the moment that Charlotte explained: “We are three sisters.” And the play’s dialogue reflects many thoughts revealed in the sisters’ novels — about women’s lives and expectations, marriage and men — all highly relevant today. “Our mode of writing and thinking was not what is called ‘feminine’,” as Charlotte put it. Had she dropped her masculine pen name, Currer Bell, she feared that she would lose with it her strength and courage and would ever after “shrink from writing the plain truth”. [...]
The Fish Tank director Andrea Arnold has cast James Howson, an unknown young black actor from Leeds, as Heathcliff, inspiring not so much a buzz as a roar of expectation. Fukunaga’s Jane Eyre opens next week. It is a stunningly good film, faithfully scripted by Moira Buffini, inevitably melodramatic but firmly rooted in northern earth, aided by the plainspoken Yorkshirewoman Judi Dench’s strong performance as the homespun Mrs Fairfax. Rochester (Michael Fassbender) has the ideal combination of good looks and brooding menace, and the Polish-Australian Mia Wasikowska, 21, is a Jane behind whose enigmatic stillness beats a vivid inner life. I think we may have found at last the perfect Jane Eyre. “The Brontës’ works possess an enduring appeal,” says Morrison. “But the lives of the Brontës are at least as fascinating as the books, and both are as the books, and both are endlessly open to new interpretation.” Brontë mania is here to stay.

The Times also asks some other opinions:

Jeanette Winterson on Wuthering Heights
I read Wuthering Heights when I was 16. I did not read it as a love story; I thought it was a loss story. Heathcliff loses Cathy. Cathy loses Heathcliff. Edgar Linton loses Cathy, their daughter, his life and home. Hindley loses Wuthering Heights. His son Hareton is dispossessed. Heathcliff’s revenge on everyone, including himself, is matched only by Cathy’s death wish. Heathcliff is a foundling. As an adopted child myself, I understood his humiliations, his ardour and his capacity to injure. I also learnt that property is power. Whatever Emily Brontë was doing, it was not the sentimental interpretation of this novel: “All for love and the world well lost.” Cathy is a woman and can’t own property in her own right, therefore she can’t rescue Heathcliff unless she marries Edgar (but Heathcliff has already misunderstood and disappeared). Heathcliff himself starts with nothing, so can’t marry Cathy. His gradual gain of every house, horse and heirloom of the Earnshaws and the Lintons is his revenge and his ruin. What’s love got to do with it? (All right, quite a lot, but this is not a love story.)

John Sutherland on The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Anne Brontë was the youngest of a clutch of siblings for whom writing fiction came as naturally as breathing. She followed her two sisters into the genteel spinster’s hell of governessing. Unwisely, she secured her brother Branwell a tutor’s position with her own employers, the Robinsons. He was dismissed from that post for “proceedings ... bad beyond expression”, namely misconduct with Mrs Robinson. Branwell fell into a “spiral of despair”. He died in 1848 of drink and other complications, aged only 31. Anne memorialises him as Arthur Huntingdon in the The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Descriptions of drunkenness are common enough in literature. What is particularly powerful in The Tenant is the close description of the alcoholic death. [...] The novel was published three months before Branwell’s death. Anne may have hoped that plain-speaking, even through one of her characters, would effect a cure. [...] Not the horror, but the accuracy, is what strikes the reader. Anne survived her brother by only a few months, dying decently, aged 29, of the other family complaint, consumption. Antibiotics would have saved her; AA might have saved him. Thank god for the 20th century.

Joyce Carol Oates on Jane Eyre
“I resisted all the way” — these defiant words of the child Jane, at the start of chapter 2 of Jane Eyre, were quite a surprise for me when I first read this novel as a girl of 13 or 14. [...] My first love had been the more tumultuous Wuthering Heights, and so it had been a challenge for me to see in Jane Eyre the less spectacular, but perhaps more enduring, qualities of female resis the less spectacular, but perhaps more enduring, qualities of female resistance and self-reliance — in the articulate “plain” Jane, qualities of of forthrightness and stubborn irony largely missing in more feminine heroines. The great enduring appeal of Jane Eyre for contemporary readers is Jane’s voice. University students with whom I’ve read the novel are struck by what seems to them the modernity of Jane’s speech — her tone of rebellion, her distrust of her elders and of conventional morality, her expressions of fear, dismay, helplessness, rage. [...]
What are we to make, as contemporary readers and film viewers, of Brontë’s pitilessly harsh portrait of Rochester’s rejected lawfully wed wife, Bertha, a syphilitic madwoman kept captive in an attic room in Rochester’s house? If only, we think, Jane would feel pity for Bertha, and a tug of sisterly solicitude. But to expect this is, perhaps, to expect too much of a novel already quite subversive in its time, and wonderfully alive in our own.

Simon Armitage
Emily B: a new poem
Too much rain in the blood.
Too much cloud in the lungs
One summer in ten a dry wind rushes the moor.
[...]

John Burnside on Apostasy by Charlotte Brontë
In his study of how we play, Finite and Infinite Games, James Carse distinguishes between ‘the theatrical’ and ‘the dramatic’, suggesting that theatrical play conforms to a known script, enacted for a given audience, while the dramatic discards predetermined roles and launches into a game that makes “all scripts useless”. “Dramatically,” he says, “one chooses to be a mother; theatrically, one takes on the role of mother.”
It’s a distinction that might apply to Charlotte and Emily Brontë: for me, it seems that Emily takes on the lover’s role, while Charlotte chooses, and so, affirms it, something we see in her deeply moving poem ‘Apostasy’, which tells the tale of a dying woman who rejects the ministrations of a “solemn Priest” in order to concentrate on memories of her lost husband, Walter, for whose love she “sold her earthly truth”. [...]

Also in The Times there is an interview with Mia Wasikowska:

Jane Eyre, already released in the USA, to an outpouring of superlatives from the critics. “Radiant spirit blossoms in barren land,” gushes The New York Times. “Wasikowska beautifully captures Jane’s watchful, mature intelligence and wounded spirit,” concurs USA Today. “She embodies Jane's most endearing qualities but not for a moment the moist poignance that many of the umpteen previous versions have inflicted on her,” sighs The Wall Street Journal. (Helena De Bertodano)

The Italian press is having a good time describing (without any real knowledge) Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights which will be presented at the upcoming Biennale:

Sex and violence: Non mancherà poi anche un nuovo originalissimo adattamento di Cime tempestose di Andrea Arnold, con un Heatcliff (sic) versione nera e con un particolare concentrato di sesso e violenza. (Alice Zampa in Best Movie)

More sex and violence and... pop: Il 6 settembre sarà poi la volta della versione pop di «Cime tempestose» di Andrea Arnold, dove violenza e sesso abbondano in ogni scena e per la prima volta il protagonista Heatcliff (sic again) sarà nero. (Il Tempo)

Wuthering Pulp: Sono tratti invece da celebri romanzi Cime tempestose di Andrea Arnold, versione pulp del capolavoro di Emily Brontë[.] (Erica Premoli in Milanodabere)

With all that sex Heathcliff had to be renamed, of course.

And as Jane Eyre 2011 opens in Russia next September 1st, several Russian magazines/websites present the film: Glamour, Коммерсантъ, Lostfilm, Woman proposes a poll with fifteen previous Jane Eyre couples, Film.ru, Газета.Ru, Grazia Magazine (with an interview with Mia Wasikowska)...

The Stage interviews Blake Morrison about his upcoming theatre play, We Are Three Sisters:

“I’m trying to get away from the image of the Brontes as rather gloomy and depressed,” says Morrison. “Basing my play on Chekhov gave me plenty of opportunities for humour.” His We Are Three Sisters is based on Juliet Barker’s The Brontes, her huge biography, but he readily admits to using dramatic licence, inventing peripheral characters and telescoping events.
Yet this has had a positive response from what could have been his most critical audience - members of the Bronte Society. “We had a read-through at Haworth in the chapel,” says Morrison. “Juliet Barker and members of the Bronte Society were there and the feedback was okay. I was expecting trouble but people were quite receptive to it, and one man actually said that it was very powerful, better than most other versions of their lives, such as the Shared Experience Bronte.” (...) (Alekz Sierz)

Novel Ideas: Modern Musings on the Long Nineteenth Century in its Virtually Victorian section reviews Jane Eyre 2011:

Arguably the most intriguing characteristic of the new Jane Eyre is that the film’s contemporary stylings still yield a commendably accurate period drama. A large part of the production’s success stems from its acknowledgement of the inevitability of “historical reciprocity”: the notion that modern perspectives will manifest in some form in any assessment, interpretation, or reinvention of the past (or its literature, for that matter). (...)
True to Charlotte Brontë’s original tone, mood, and vision but with a unique contemporary verve, Fukunaga’s Jane Eyre deserves a place of honor in the growing pantheon of nineteenth-century-literature film adaptations. (Emily K. Cody)

We really like Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca (and Alfred Hitchock's Rebecca, by the way) but we are not sure about what The Daily Advance says:

Rebecca, 1940 - This gothic tale won a Best Picture Oscar, the only Hitchcock film ever to do so. And its story of an unnamed young woman’s return to the haunting Manderley estate outdoes Jane Eyre. (Shirrel Roades)

The Selby Times presents the upcoming edition of the Brontë Mountain Bike Challenge:

Selby area mountain bike enthusiasts are encouraged to take on one of three routes on the Bronte Mountain Bike Challenge in aid of Sue Ryder – Holme Hall on September 18.
The event takes place within the stunning and challenging landscape of ‘Brontë Country’ in the south Pennines, named after the famous literary family who lived in 19th century Haworth and who between them penned classics such as Wuthering Heights and Jayne (sic) Eyre. The three routes are named after the three most famous Brontë sisters. Charlotte is the 31 mile challenge route, Emily is the 21 mile intermediate route and Anne the 11 mile family/beginner route.

Clash Music interviews Jacks Goldstein, singer of Fixers:

What are you reading at the moment?
I'm reading some George Oppen and Bertolt Brecht.
I am also in the middle of Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami.
I want to read Wuthering Heights after too. (Robin Murray)

The Dallas Morning News reviews A Small Hotel by Robert Olen Butler:

Some of literature’s greatest plots would have been ruined by modern technology. Take Romeo and Juliet — if those lovesick teenagers had been able to text each other, there would have been no mix-ups over who was dead and who wasn’t. And what if Jane Eyre could have gone online... (Jenny Shank)

MyNorthwest defends the role of libraries today and slips this reference to Rory Gilmore(?).

You might even discover your child is a savant when they want to bring home Charlotte Brontë at the ripe age of 8. (Alissa Kleven)

Reading in Public posts about Jane Eyre and The Most Illustrious Order of the Bookworms suggests a few books you may want to read if you like Jane Eyre. Feeding the paper ghosts has made a collage inspired by The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Paperblog (Italy) and Filmweb (Poland, with some curious blunders) review Jane Eyre 2011. Meloleggo (also in Italian) reviews the original novel.

Diario de Sevilla (Spain) devotes an article to Bernard Herrmann's one hundredth anniversary:

En Jane Eyre dará rienda suelta a su sensibilidad romántica y a su confesada pasión anglófila (musical y literaria) para crear una atmósfera de misterio gótico que será otra de sus señas de identidad, tanto en el cine (óigase la hermosa y triste música para El fantasma y la señora Muir) como en la radio, la televisión (The twilight zone) o la sala de concierto, para la que compondría la ópera Wuthering Highs, la cantata Moby Dick, una sinfonía y varios conciertos, suites, ballets y piezas de cámara. (Manuel J. Lombardo) (Translation)

El Litoral (Argentina) reviews The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis:

De esta manera comenzará a desplegarse un clima de tensión e intriga sexual en los pasillos y las periferias del castillo, mientras el joven veinteañero irá despachando, una a una, las principales novelas de la literatura inglesa de los siglos XVIII y XIX (Clarissa, Tom Jones, Orgullo y prejuicio, Emma, Cumbres borrascosas, Jane Eyre, Casa Desolada, Middemarch y muchos otros clásicos) y se mantiene al tanto, gracias a la noticia que le hace llegar por correspondencia su hermano Nicholas, de los desmanes sexuales cometidos por su promiscua hermana menor Violet. (Fabricio Welschen) (Translation)

Rue89 (France) loves Little House on the Prairie (both series and novels):

Alors que sa mère s'évertuait à lui répéter qu'une « femme bien élevée n'attire jamais l'attention sur elle », Laura Ingalls Wilder a finalement captivé l'attention de milliers de lecteurs, et de nombreux critiques la placent en tête des héroïnes littéraires aux côtés de Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë et Colette. (Fanny André) (Translation)

Categories: In the News, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, References, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Theatre, Wuthering Heights