First of all, if you haven't yet signed the
Save Red House petition please take a moment to do so. It doesn't mind where you are from,
just sign.
The
Brontë Parsonage Blog addresses locals on the matter:
A public meeting of the Spen Valley Area Committee of Kirklees Council is scheduled for this Tuesday (31 January) in the Cleckheaton Town Hall, Bradford Road, BD19 3RH at 7pm. As the 'cabinet' meeting of the Council on 7 February is going to be closed to the public, this is one of few chances left to actually speak with councillors in the hope of influencing them to keep the Red House Museum in Gomersal open.
If you can make it, meet at 6.30pm outside the front entrance.
The Daily Mail suggests a trip to 'Emily Bronte's Yorkshire: Dreaming of Heathcliff in the land of fat rascals':
Heathcliff! Heathcliff! I call across the moors but my words are washed away by the wind. I'm halfway up a hill, sitting on a dry-stone wall outside the village of Haworth, reading Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë's only novel and my favourite book when I was a teenager.
At home, a copy of the famous portrait of the three Brontë sisters, painted by their brother Bramwell [sic], was tacked to the wall above my bed. The book echoed all my typical teenage anxieties - young passion, wild dreams and terrible injustices against me. [...]
With the recent release of a new film version, a whole new generation of youngsters has been introduced to the teenage lovers.
Today Haworth buzzes with bakeries selling curd tarts, Yorkshire parkin and scone-type cakes called fat rascals - and there are tea shops stacked with scrumptious treats (try the ginger cake at No10 Teashop near the Fleece Inn). But it's far quieter than it was in Emily's day.
Johnnie Briggs of Brontë Walks told me there were ten working cotton mills and the air would have been thick with smoke. The trade route from Bradford to Lancashire passed through the village and the noise of the traffic on the single main cobbled street must have been deafening. And then there was the smell: there were 790 homes in Haworth but only 64 toilets.
No wonder Emily liked to wander up the path behind the parsonage and across the moors to Top Withins, the crumbling farmhouse on which she based the remote, forlorn Wuthering Heights. Now a place of pilgrimage, these days signposts point the way, even in Japanese, making sure no one gets lost.
There is nothing much left to see except the hint of a ruin. But the landscape is the same - a patchwork of warm browns and dusty pinks cut by grey stone, the heather billowing like a surfing sea, the wind so strong it lifts your skirt and dries your face.
The Bronte parsonage, now a museum, is furnished as it was when the family lived there and attracts 75,000 visitors a year. The red mahogany dining-room table, where the sisters sat and scribbled in their tiny, cramped handwriting, stands in the middle of the dining room.
Against a wall, there's the green horsehair sofa on which Emily died, and in the bedroom, Charlotte's paisley dress, white leather gloves and thigh-high white stockings are on display in a glass cabinet. There's also a school report stating that the author of Jane Eyre 'writes indifferently'.
In the village, the old post office is now a general stationers run by Margaret Hartley, whose family have been in business in the village for more than 350 years.
'My great-great-great-grandad was the postmaster and served the Brontes,' says Margaret, 74. 'And this is the counter that the girls passed their manuscripts over.'
'The girls' is how the people of Haworth refer to Anne, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, as if they were family. [...]
Despite the teeming tourists - and signs advertising Ye Old Brontë Tearooms and Heathcliff Bed and Breakfast - Haworth still grips your heart and imagination. It certainly reminded me of being a dreamy teenager again, staring up at Emily on my bedroom wall. (Dea Birkett)
And
The New York Times reviews the Artemis Theatre production
Wuthering Heights: Restless Souls:
An elemental wildness runs through “Wuthering Heights, Restless Souls,” Theater Artemis’s spare but impressively theatrical adaptation of Emily Brontë’s novel. Though intended for young audiences (13 and up), this production never condescends. Quite the opposite: it can be ferocious, even scary, as it gives physical shape to the bond between Cathy and Heathcliff (Alejandra Theus and Joris Smit, both feral, both terrific).
That bond, of course, was forged in childhood. And this “Wuthering Heights,” which played over the weekend as part of Zoem! New Dutch Theater at the New Victory Theater, is particularly good at showing Cathy and Heathcliff’s almost-savage childhood world — full of taunting and roughhousing that threatens to turn violent or sexual or both — and the porous way it bleeds into the natural world just outside their door. “This is inside,” she tells him, before leading him just a step. “And this is outside.”
The set, a simple wooden platform with a white curtain and a chair or two, contains no scenery that hints at Brontë’s moors. But the director, Floor Huygen, and the sound designers, Florentijn Boddendijk and Remco de Jong, conjure an active landscape using bird and night sounds, branches and twigs, water and wind. In a wonderfully apt coup de théâtre two giant fans — one in each wing — whip up a storm as Cathy and Heathcliff wander. The wind blows around all sorts of detritus and threatens their home behind the white curtain, which flaps around exposing those inside. But it intoxicates Cathy and Heathcliff, who face its power head on, their hands slowly reaching out to clasp together.
The script has been expertly drawn from Brontë’s novel by Jeroen Olyslaegers, who, with Ms. Huygen, has found clear, dramatic ways to render the story. Long segments have minimal dialogue, but the essential passages from the book are here. The show concentrates on the novel’s first half, with the second part sketched in quickly by Nelly (An Hackselmans), the novel’s servant-narrator, who in this telling seems to have a kind of witchy insight into events past, present and future.
The big complaint to be made about this production, which features excellent ensemble work and top-notch stagecraft, is that its New York run included just four performances. It deserves to be seen by more people. (Rachel Saltz)
The Scotsman looks at the life and works of the writer Andrew Lang:
Old Friends was written in 1890 and has a dazzling premise: if literature really did describe the world rather than invent it, why should characters be restricted to their own books? Lang imagines Catherine Morland, Jane Austen’s gothic-obsessed heroine of Northanger Abbey, turning up at Rochester’s house from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Inspector Lecoq from Émile Gaboriau’s then famous series of novels arrests the eponymous Pickwick, with the help of Bucket from Bleak House. It is the beginning of crossover literature, which reaches its heights with works such as Alan Moore’s The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Christine Brooke-Rose’s Textermination, and its pulp incarnation in Pride And Prejudice And Zombies and Android Karenina. (Stuart Kelly)
The
Yorkshire Post features the local artist Michele Howarth Rashman:
In fact, she’s beginning to acquire the image of a wild woman of the moors. She was recently described as “a charmingly rustic antidote” to the contemporary London art scene (which begs the question what on earth London art critics think goes on in West Yorkshire). But she is enjoying the fun, not least by insisting on drawing parallels between herself and West Yorkshire’s own weird sisters, the Brontës.
There are parallels. Like the talented girls from Haworth Parsonage, Michelle spends her days engaged in meticulous, minute work (“developing long-sight and a dowager’s hump”) and she has a keen eye, which can get her into trouble (“I do use people I know and it can get a bit tricky”). And while she chooses to base herself in Yorkshire, she exhibits with the best of her London contemporaries. In her case Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin rather than William Makepeace Thackeray. And then there is the family connection. On her father’s side she is a Howarth, but on her mother’s side there are Haworths too.
Parish records show her great-great grandmother was christened by none other than Patrick Brontë and her great-great-great-grandmother is buried in the parsonage graveyard. “I’m virtually a tourist attraction,” she insists happily. (Fiona Russell)
The
Bangkok Post makes what we consider an obvious statement (though the likes of
V.S. Naipaul may not think so):
Women are by no means the second sex when it comes to writing. Lady Murasaki, Madame de Stael, Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, Patricia Cornwell, Pearl Buck are at least as good as their male counterparts. They've penned stories in every genre, from war and peace, love and sex, to murder. (Bernard Trink)
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