House Developments, Entrance Fees commented by Karl Marx

The February 22nd Kirklees Council meeting has ratified the decision of keeping the Red House museum open:

Cllr [Mehboon] Khan said that there was cross party agreement to keep Red House museum open, and the council will now look to innovative ways of funding this proposal.

One of these proposals could be to introduce an admission charge. The Huddersfield  Daily Examiner confirms:

Visitors to a Brontë-linked tourist attraction could have to pay entrance fees for the first time.
Councillors will decide next week whether to introduce admission charges at Red House Museum in Gomersal.
Last year 28,602 people visited the home, which was owned by cloth merchants the Taylors in the 1830s.
Daughter Mary was friends with Charlotte Brontë, who featured Red House as “Briarmains” in her novel Shirley.

Earlier this year Kirklees Council officials suggested closing the tourist attraction to save £116,000 a year.
But politicians have promised to try to keep Red House open by charging for admission.
The council’s Labour cabinet will decide next week whether to introduce the entrance fees.
Under the plan, adults would pay £3.50, children £1.50 and a family ticket would cost £8.50. Kirklees Passport holders would be eligible for a 50% discount.
Season tickets would also be available allowing unlimited visits to Red House and nearby Oakwell Hall in Birstall – which also has links to Charlotte Brontë.
The passes would cost £6 for adults, £2.50 for children and £14.50 for families, with a 50% discount for Kirklees Passport holders.
Admission charges are already in place at Oakwell Hall, with adult visitors paying £2.50, children £1 and families £6.
The stately home also features in the novel Shirley, where it appears as “Fieldhead”.
Kirklees officers believe the admission charges at Red House will generate £20,000 a year – though the visitor numbers could drop by 6,000 a year.
Council officials believe the admission charges could be a success.
A report to the Kirklees cabinet reads: “Red House has a high ratio of adult visitors who comprise 70% of the audience. Its Brontë connections help to draw tourists and day visitors as well as local visitors.
“Red House is therefore relatively well-placed to accommodate admission charges given the profile of its visitors and the wider interest generated by its Brontë connections.”
The Labour cabinet will consider the plan at its meeting at Huddersfield Town Hall from 4pm on Tuesday.
Admission charges would begin on April 1. (Barry Gibson)

Additional information in the same Huddersfield Daily Examiner or BBC News.

Another controversial local issue was the building of 38 houses on Haworth. The Bradford Council has approved the petition.The Telegraph & Argus reports:

Proposals to build 38 homes on a field in Haworth were passed by councillors yesterday. The Telegraph . Bradford Council’s Keighley Area Planning Panel agreed to give permission to Skipton Properties to build on land south of Lees Mill, Shuttle Fold.
Planning officers had recommended the application be approved, but 34 people objected.
Speaking as an objector at the panel’s meeting, Andy Quarmby said: “This application shows no understanding of the semi-rural nature of this area.
“This field has a real value as it stands and no amount of extra funding will get that back when it’s gone.”

Applicant’s agent Jo Steel responded that none of the statutory bodies the planners had consulted had objected to the scheme.
He added the development would contribute to a need for affordable housing.
In the subsequent vote the panel passed the proposals by four votes in favour to one against. (Miran Rahman)

The complete report can be read here (starting on page 22).

Stylelist interviews Michael O'Connor, costume designer of Jane Eyre 2011 and Oscar nominee:

What was the inspiration behind “Jane Eyre?”
The inspiration is her character, the challenge is making a woman from that time look stylish today, while still looking simple. She’s sort of a “thinking” Jane, so it was about looking and finding paintings of women in simple costumes at the time. And notes from Emily Dickinson, things like that. I just thought, "How would we make something exciting in all black?" So, instead of black, she could be in dark grey, and it could show more of the style, or detail. The original costumes were a great inspiration. I looked at them and was like, "Oh my God. How did they do it?" I was trying to recreate it really, without, you know, replicating.
Do you feel like it’s more challenging to work on a film where people have read the book and have an idea of how “Jane Eyre” should look?
I think it is, unless the script is designed to run away from the vision of the book. I think in this case, the original source of material is crucial, really, to what we were trying to do. So for me, although the characters are being described as sort of plain and simple, I didn't want to make them not plain and not simple. The character doesn’t have to be exact, but you don't want them to be unrecognizable. It's about achieving the spirit of the character, I think.
How do you bring a contemporary aesthetic to the period costumes?
It's challenging because people are looking at the actors, they know the actors and know that they are real people, so you can’t kind of over-encumber them with lots of fuss. The key is in the details, like Jane’s sleeves are probably tighter than they would have been, or adjusting the fabrics. It's not an exact replica of what Jane would have worn. If she had great big, puffy sleeves or something, I feel that would be inappropriate.
What was it like working with the stars, Mia Wasikowska, Michael Fassbender and Judi Dench, on the film?
Well, I don’t think many women want to wear a corset everyday of their lives, but that is what Mia had to do to get the right shape. I’m sure Michael doesn’t want to wear trousers cut quite so high with braces and skirted coat and scarves around his neck. And likewise, I don’t think Judi Dench really wants to be so buttoned up. I know with Judi, we could’ve gone further over-the-top with her, but I know that she wouldn’t have felt correct like that. So even though it was a dialogue with all of the actors about those things, but you know, really, Mia has to be congratulated because she tolerated all of it everyday, without a single complaint.
Were there any things you did to make the corsets more comfortable?
Not really. It’d be great if you could, but for them to do their work, it has to be constructed in a certain way. If they’re not, they won’t last half a day. It’d just be like a flannel or an old rag. And I know when Mia put it on, she was feeling - she was becoming Jane as it were, so it helps the character. It’s quite a relief to take it off, as I’m sure she’ll tell you. (Sarah Leon)

Guy Lodge on HitFix continues his crusade pro-Jane Eyre 2011 here and here:

They've singled out outstanding technical elements in such Oscar-disadvantaged films as "Jane Eyre" and "Drive." 

Michael O'Connor, both my prediction and my personal pick for the Costume Design Oscar[.]

GoldDerby publishes his predictions for the Costume Design Oscar. Jane Eyre 2011 is second in the bets:

Michael O'Connor ("Jane Eyre") won his only previous Oscar race for his designs for "The Duchess" in 2008. This adaptation of Charlotte Brontë's Gothic novel requried costumes for both the wealthy and the working class and his attention to detail was much praised.  (Paul Sheehan)

CBS Minnesota thinks Michael O'Connor will be the winner:

Hard to say for sure, because this is the one category where period frocks tend to usurp pockets of support. I’ll play the law of averages and say Jane Eyre sneaks away with this one.  (Eric Henderson)

NBC Chicago is not so sure:

While “The Artist” deserves mention if only for creating a vivid textural palette in black-and-white, the real battle is between “Jane Eyre” and “Anonymous.” While the attention to detail in “Jane Eyre” is staggering, from the undergarments to the slightly worn approach to the characters’ attire, the fact of the matter is British royal dramas and epically ridiculous collars have dominated this award of late: "Elizabeth: The Golden Age,” “The Young Victoria,” and “The Duchess” and last year’s “Alice in Wonderland." (Scott Ross)

CBS News complains about

It's crazy that Michael Fassbender was not nominated for something (preferably "Jane Eyre"), and Brad Pitt should be nominated for "The Tree of Life," not "Moneyball."  (David Thomson)

World Socialist Web talks about the Dickens bicentenary and quotes Karl Marx:

As Marx noted of Dickens, Thackeray, Charlotte Brontë and Gaskell, their descriptions showed the small-minded brutality of this parasitic layer of the middle class, “full of presumption, affectation, petty tyranny and ignorance…the civilised world have confirmed their verdict with the damning epigram that it has fixed to this class that ‘they are servile to those above, and tyrannical to those beneath them’ ”. (John Clayton and Paul Bond)

The quote comes from the article The English Middle Class, published in the New-York Tribune, 1 August 1854.

Salon discusses the presumed death of chick-lit and mentions other short-life pop-fiction genres:

These were gothics, a subgenre of romantic suspense, which was (sort of) a subgenre of romance. (Also: The gothic is not to be confused with the venerable literary mode referred to as the Gothic.) Taking their pattern from original works like Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre” and Daphne du Maurier’s “Rebecca,” the drugstore paperback gothics were highly formulaic tales of shy young women who came to work in stately manors full of strange doings and ominous secrets. These novels were once a mainstay of the pulp market, and publishers churned them out.  (Laura Miller)

Moneylife shares the love for words:

I am also old school. Dickens lives within, as does Trollope and Austen and Hardy and Brontë and Lawrence and Collins and Chesterton and Joyce and Proust, all the way down to Wodehouse. I eat slower when it comes to words and descriptions, preferring to masticate like a ruminant scholar rather than swallow whole. I am more ungulate than reptile. (V Shantakumar)

Pride Source reviews the theatre play Snowbound by Margaret Edwartowsky:

Suffice it to say that if everyone dies, there would be no second act. In act two, those who survive act one face the consequences - and the future. This is where things get almost embarrassingly contrived. Nineteenth-Century novelists like Thomas Hardy or the Brontë sisters could pull off embarrassingly contrived; 21st-Century playwrights, not so much.  (Martin F. Kohn)

The News-Gazette remembers student days:

I remember sophomore year, "Jane Eyre" was a suggested, but not required, text. I think I was the only person in my class to devour the whole thing.  (Meg Dickinson)

The Stuff (New Zealand) compares Brisbane's weather to a Brontë novel:

With Brisbane intent on recreating weather conditions routinely featured in a Brontë novel, Melbourne offered welcome respite from the rain.  (Danielle Crown)

We are not so sure Charlotte Brontë would be happy being included as an example serving to vindicate that St Margaret Clitherow (a Catholic martyr) deserves recognition by the Britons. On Catholic Herald:

But in the age of feminism, sexual equality and equal opportunities and when the faces of the feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft, and the Brontë sisters are included in commemorative collections alongside Odette, it is a pity that a woman of shining virtue and surpassing courage, St Margaret Clitherow, is not among them. (Francis Phillips)

The Drum (Australia) talks about the resignation of the Australian Foreign Minister, Kevin Rudd:

Mr Rudd has indeed stayed substantially silent on the issue over the last month. But to believe "staying silent" and "staying out of it" are synonymous is to believe that Mrs Rochester wasn't that big a deal in Jane Eyre.  (Eleanor Gordon-Smith)

BBC News covers the story of the 'new' Emily Brontë portrait which is going to be auctioned today, February 23; Science Friday talks about the origins of the term tuberculosis and mentions the Brontës; Salerosa (in Greek), Notes from a She-Hermit and Inseparable post about Wuthering Heights; la Biblioteca Pública Arroyo de la Miel (in Spanish) posts about Jane Eyre;  CineBlog and The Pope's Picks review Jane Eyre 2011.