Dumped because of Jane Eyre... or how to enter CBGB with a Victorian cuff

Of course, the news of the auction of The Young Men's Magazine, Number 2 manuscript is all over: The Hindustan Times, Art Daily, The Scotsman, CBC News, The Atlantic Wire, Sydney Morning Herald, Foyles,Yorkshire Post, The Irish Independent, The Age ...

The Telegraph gives more details about the manuscript itself:

Written when Charlotte was 14, and dated 1830, The Young Men’s Magazine, Number 2 measures only 35 x 61mm. However, its interest to scholars – who, following the manuscript’s purchase by La Musée des Lettres et Manuscrits in Paris, will be able to study the work – is not proportionate to its size.

Contained within the Magazine’s 19 pages is a vivid tale of murder and madness entitled “A Letter from Lord Charles Wellesley”, which includes an episode prefiguring one of the most famous scenes in fiction: when Jane Eyre’s Bertha – the so-called “madwoman in the attic” – sets fire to her husband Mr Rochester’s bed.

Supposedly written by the son of the Duke of Wellington, “A Letter…” draws on the imaginary world of “Glass Town”, the fictional community created by the Brontë siblings during their isolated childhood at Haworth Parsonage in Yorkshire.

Charlotte and her younger sisters Emily and Anne (who would also go on to be authors) created a world that drew from the Parsonage’s collection of Biblical prints as well as the Arabian Nights. Writing to the novelist Mrs Gaskell in 1855, their father Reverend Brontë observed: “As they had few opportunities of being in learned and polished society … they formed a little society amongst themselves – with which they seem’d content and happy.”

“A Letter from Lord Charles Wellesley” begins when the hero, woken from his sleep, enters his palace garden to admire the night skies. He subsequently witnesses the murder of a girl aboard a boat and, having himself leapt into the water, is captured by the murderer and imprisoned in an attic.
Following his escape, Lord Charles wreaks his revenge on his captor, who becomes delirious:

"he constantly raged about the spirits of Caroline Krista & Charles Wellesley dancing before him. he said that every now & then they glided through his eyes to his brain where an immense fire was continually burning & that he felt them adding fuel to the flames that caused it to catch the curtains of the bed that would soon be reduced to ashes. at other times he said he felt them pulling his heart-strings till a sound like a death knell came from them".

Commenting on today’s sale, Dr Philip Errington, a director and Senior Specialist at Sotheby’s Books and Manuscripts Department, hailed the Magazine as an “important” and “remarkable piece of work – tiny, precise and redolent of the fantasy world the Brontë siblings inhabited”. The manuscript will go on show in Paris in January.  (Stephanie Cross)

The Times also gives details about the auctioned manuscript.

The Harvard Magazine talks about the Brontë manuscripts they have at the Houghton Library:

It is the beginning of a novelette Brontë called “An interesting passage in the lives of some eminent personages of the present age.” The author, she alleged, was one “Lord Charles Wellesley.”
In 1821, Charlotte’s mother died, leaving widower Patrick, a curate in rural West Yorkshire, to care for their six children. The two oldest died four years later of tuberculosis (which would eventually take them all before Patrick himself died). The four surviving children created what their father called “a little society among themselves.” Charlotte, age 10, and Branwell, 9, began a series of plays based on the adventures of their toy soldiers, set in their make-believe world of Glass Town and Angria in Africa. The youngest sisters, Emily and Anne, would follow along with stories, and the self-described “scribblemaniacs” kept at it into early adulthood.
About 20 of these texts took the form of handsewn miniature books two inches tall. Harvard’s Houghton Library has nine of them, given by the poet Amy Lowell. The fragile volumes have just been treated to a painstaking team effort at the library to preserve and protect them. Harvard staffer Melissa Banta has chronicled that initiative in an article for the Harvard Library Bulletin, scheduled for publication this coming fall. (Christopher Reed)

Curiously the New York Times also mentions the Harvard collection of Brontë juvenilia:

The Houghton Library at Harvard University has digitized nine images of the siblings’ many miniature books, including a tiny issue of Blackwood’s Men’s Magazine from 1829 “edited by the genius C. B.,” according to the elaborately lettered first page.
The tiny manuscripts complicate the typical image of the Brontë children as living a completely isolated life on the edge of the moors, said Leah Price, a professor of English at Harvard and the author of the recent book “Unpacking My Library: Writers and Their Books.”
“Yes, they were circulating their own manuscripts, in part because they didn’t have enough access to new books,” Ms. Price said in an e-mail. “But they were also extremely sophisticated about what a masthead looks like, what a colophon looks like, how a magazine is put together.”
In their own way, Ms. Price added, the Brontës were “quite media savvy, even if the image that usually sticks in our mind is of Charlotte knowing so little about publishing that when one publisher rejected her manuscript she would just cross out their address and send it in the same envelope to the next.” (Jennifer Schuessler)

The Guardian gives some interesting information about the restauration of Top Withens and many other details, including an artistic project by Simon Warner:

The windy farmhouse thought to be Emily Brontë's most likely inspiration for Wuthering Heights has been carefully preserved against its notorious weather for at least another decade.:
Even Heathcliff at his most bad-tempered would be unlikely to want to live in the shell of a former chicken farm, but the old stones attract thousands of literary pilgrims and other tourists every year. They are a fair step from Haworth, albeit a very lovely one, past the Brontë Waterfall (everything is Brontë round here), with helpful direction signs in both English and Japanese.
Mass visiting isn't always good for ruins, and there are vandals even out here, so work on sealing the remaining stones has involved a bit of mortaring. But you wouldn't notice from a distance and it's not easy to detect too much from near at hand. The landowners Yorkshire Water and Pennine Prospect's Watershed Project which won £1.9 million of Lottery money last year for this sort of thing, have been careful.
Top Withens was the highest of three farms which, interestingly, all depended on dairy cattle initially, rather than the sheep which roam much of the Pennine spine. Quite a few people would have lived on the heathery hillside, effectively forming a hamlet and supplementing their income by weaving worsted cloth on handlooms.
The industrial revolution did for that and by the end of the 1870s all were abandoned. Top Withens came back to life in the 1920s with its chickens farmed by a Mr Ernest Roddie but he gave up in 1926 and the then Keighley corporation fenced off the building to protect it against vandals (yep, they are not new) and demolished the other two farms.
Carol Prenton, of Yorkshire Water's land and planning department, says:

We are managing the building as a ruin with a view to protecting it from vandals but at the same time making sure it's accessible to visitors. People will be able to walk around the ruins but we've blocked off the cellar now.

Robin Gray, project officer for the Watershed Landscape Project, goes into a bit more detail:

The work includes re-pointing the building with materials sympathetic to its original construction, making the ruin better able to withstand the erosive nature of the sometimes vicious upland weather. This will ensure that the ruin remains intact for many more years to come and that those intrepid explorers that venture out into the wilds of the moors above Haworth can continue to enjoy and be inspired by the stories surrounding this atmospheric place.

They will include an artist and photographer, Simon Warner, who starts the fifth Watershed Landscape artist residency in the New Year. He says:

I'm fascinated by the literary landscape and the sense of wildness at Top Withens, which has undergone a process of ruination since it was abandoned in the 1930s. I aim to spend a lot of time up there to get to grips with the place; the elemental aspects of its remoteness.

You could be part of his work too.

As part of a filming project I'll be speaking to people to find out why they make the trip to Top Withens; are they making a literary pilgrimage to the site, or are they just out walking? There's no doubt it's an evocative site and on a good day the views are stunning. Over the years it's been photographed countless times, offering us an archive of its advancing ruination. I hope to bring together these photographs as part of my exhibition. (Martin Wainwright)

The article ends with a reference to an old post (and oddly one of our most visited ones) of ours.

Andy McSmith in The Independent shares a conversation overheard on a train:

I couldn't help but overhear this conversation on one of the last trains out of London on Thursday evening, between two young men and a young woman who seemed to be reaching a decision point.
First youth: "Seriously, mate, she's going to dump you if you don't say who wrote Jane Eyre."
Second youth: "Jane Eyre? Jane Eyre? That's not a book."
Young woman, slowly, drawing out every syllable: "Oh my god!"
I assume she dumped him.

Film Comment lists it the 49th of 50 films and Wuthering Heights 2011 is number twenty on a list of unreleased films the US.

John Mullan knows by heart Jane Eyre and many anecdotes about it. In The Guardian:

Novels or novellas? One can surely use a simple principle to see the difference: a novella is a work short enough to be read comfortably in a single sitting. Indeed, short enough to invite such an uninterrupted reading. Some, like Thackeray staying up all night to finish Jane Eyre, may swallow longer narratives whole, but a novella is designed to be read in this way.

The Guardian makes a list of dark heroes in children literature:

1. Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
Heathcliff is an astonishing creation. Some films have turned him into a rugged, romantic hero but read the original and you'll find he's much darker. Brutal, passionate and with an incredible strength of will (whether bent on making himself a fortune or wreaking revenge on his enemies) he is described even by Cathy, who loves him, as "a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man". After Cathy's early death, he is haunted by her ghost, and he longs to join her in the grave. (H.M. Castor)

It doesn't seem that Haaretz has any idea of what a Charlotte Brontë novel is:

My writer friend decided it had been too long - that it was time for me to get back into things, into the game, into life. And that she was going to get me out into society, like in a Charlotte Brontë novel. She'd already taken the initiative and given my phone number to the guy. (Dea Hadar)

We have to admit to having laughed out loud after reading this on Sytlebistro:

Featured Philadelphia Jewelry Designer J. Rudy Lewis is creating new work this season that is catching the eyes and being acquired by top stylists, celebrities and even Royalty. His “Victoria” cuff seems destined to appear on Charlotte Brontë’s arm – that is if Brontë was on her way to CBGB’s. (Womensmafia)

The New York Observer has some suggestions for the Newsweek's #namePaulasbaby initiative:

The suggestions thus far have been rather, well, old-fashioned…which should never of course reflect the nature of the people who read the publication. But Josephine? Eleanor Breslin Davis? How about just naming her after any/all the Brontë sisters?  (Drew Grant)

Movie Moron lists the best British films of 2011. Number six is Jane Eyre:

An nth take on Charlotte Brontë’s classic novel, this one could only muster a mediocre title figure, in the shape of Alice’s Mia Wasikowska. This shortcoming was, however, more than made up for by a terrific Rochester, played with dash and humour by that man Fassbender.  (Paul Martin)

The Hollywood Reporter talks about possible Costume Design Oscar nominations:

Jane Eyre 
Michael O'Connor
For his fresh take on the much-adapted story, O'Connor created the majority of the clothes, including this dress that the title character (Mia Wasikowska) wears when first arriving at her employer's estate. "The pattern is a subtle ribbon-like stripe and was expertly cut to highlight the different angles," says O'Connor, who relied on paintings by 19th-century artists Franz Winterhalter and Mary Ellen Best for inspiration. (Elizabeth Snead)

Rope of Silicon thinks that Dario Marianelli would be nominated:

In third is one of the scores I actually do really like, Dario Marianelli's work on Jane Eyre. Marianelli is no stranger to Oscar, winning once before for Atonement and also being nominated for Pride and Prejudice. His Jane Eyre score is rather similar to those two in terms of appeal, but like much of Jane Eyre's presentation, there is a haunting, beautiful quality to Marianelli's work here that really stands out. (Brad Brevet)

The Hindu complains that the film hasn't been screened in India yet; CinemaBlend says about Mia Wasikowska:

She’s a fabulous actress who quietly shattered souls in Jane Eyre opposite Michael Fassbender and managed to be one of the bets things about Tim Burton’s bizarre Alice In Wonderland. (Sean O'Connell)

La Voz de Galicia and La Nueva España (in Spanish) review the film.

El País (Babelia) compares Raymond Roussel to Emily Brontë:

Plena de fulgurantes e indómitos hallazgos, como le ocurre a quien ha elegido evadirse de la realidad, los equívocos surgidos de la pluma de Roussel están a medio camino entre la espontaneidad ingenuista, en el terreno pictórico, de un Aduanero Rousseau o la perversión rebelde de una Emily Brontë, dos frentes irreductibles. (Francisco Calvo Serraller) (Translation)

The reason behind the Brontë revival is discussed in La Razón (Spain).We wonder, however, why the article says that there is a new Pride and Prejudice film and how the author, Francisco Nieva, a member of the Royal Spanish Academy, is unable to place correctly the umlaut in Brontë.

Judy Brinkworth's Chicago Sun-Times column:

It’s our honeymoon — the romantic Yorkshire moors. And, just like in Wuthering Heights, we’re the lovestruck Kathy and Heathcliff wandering through heather. Ha! Oh, we’re wandering — because we’re lost. And I don’t mean in newlywed bliss.

Hufvudstadsbladet (Sweden) reviews the theatre play Innan jag kom hit by Hanna Nordenswan, Minerva Peijari, My Ström and Frida Wickholm:

Intressant nog väljer de ett gammalfeministiskt grepp. Traditionella teman som hysteri, sterilisering, karriär och rätten till sin kropp avhandlas i föreställningen som känns starkt inspirerad av Gilberts och Gubars The Madwoman in the Attic.
De fragmentariska karaktärerna bär drag av Jane Eyre, Virgina Woolf, Sylvia Plath. Här finns också kopplingar till nyare alster – på något plan påminner stämningen nämligen om Susanne Ringells senaste noveller. Inte minst längtan till havet och flickorna som vandrar i livmoderns innanhav föder associationer till den finlandssvenska författaren. (Isabella Rothberg) (Translation)

mrschristine posts about Wuthering Heights;  Al final de la estantería...(in Spanish) and The Highly Educated Housewife does the same with Jane Eyre; Amy's Blog wonders what if the Brontës were superheroes; movie2movie reviews in Dutch Jane Eyre 2006; Los Tiempos (Bolivia) uses the usual weather reference to quote Wuthering Heights; Reformatorisch Dagblad (in Dutch) publishes an article about the fascination with Jane Eyre.