Celtic Jane

Celtic Jane: The Diaries of Jane McIver is an independent/amateur film project that seems to be moving on. The Aberdeen Press and Journal informs that Jane has been cast:

Drama students at Inverness College and local acting stalwarts have lined up to take part in a Highland film version of one of literature’s best-loved tales.
The vast majority of the cast are now in place for Celtic Jane – The Diaries of Jane McIver, which is being made by Great Glen Film Arts.
The story is inspired by Charlotte Brontë's novel Jane Eyre, but is set just after World WarI in the Highlands. (...)
The adult Jane will be played by 18-year-old Amy Hasson (picture) from Fortrose, a drama student at Inverness College.
Director Clive Malcouronne said Amy was a star in the making.
'She is just ideal,' he said.
'She has got a lovely face and very expressive eyes. She could just pick up the dialogue and really bring it to life.
'Her screen test was full of feeling and emotion -- it was exactly what I wanted.'
A leading man aged 30-40 is still being sought to play the hero, Captain Andrew Ross, and severe headmaster the Rev Blandford-Grant.
Mr Malcouronne, 74, is also on the hunt for suitable locations before filming starts in the new year.
He said: 'Captain Ross needs to be fairly handsome. He is charismatic and also the subject of quite dark moods.
'We have got to find an old-fashioned school suitable for the 1920s and we also need a very large house which will fit in with the period.'
Mr Malcouronne, of Cabrich, near Inverness, said he decided to write the screenplay because Jane Eyre was a novel that had intrigued him for most of his life. (Laura Paterson / Rita Campbell)

Other members of the cast include Iona Thomson and Shanzie Kennedy.


The Telegraph & Argus talks about the full peal of bells that took place yesterday at Haworth Church and elsewhere and includes a video:

Celebrations were held at the weekend to mark 200 years since the Reverend Patrick Brontë, father of the famous literary sisters, married Maria Branwell.
A full peal of bells was attempted at two churches significant to the Brontës on Saturday – firstly at Guiseley Parish Church, where the original wedding ceremony took place, and later at Haworth Parish Church, where Patrick Brontë was vicar from 1820 to 1861.
A band of ringers from the Yorkshire Association of Change Ringers were drafted in to help and organise the full peal at both churches.
A full peal consists of 5,040 changes and takes about three hours to complete. It requires great concentration from the ringers, because any mistake can invalidate the performance.
Simon Burnett, the bell captain at Haworth, where the six bells were installed by Patrick Brontë in 1845, said that the attempts at both churches had been successful.
He added: “It’s only the 20th full peal on these bells, which were installed in 1845. Patrick Brontë actually raised the money for them to be installed. So to complete a full peal this weekend was quite an achievement.
“It took us two hours and 47 minutes, with 5,040 changes and three different methods. It’s quite a feat of concentration as there must be no repetition of a particular sequence of bells.”
It was exactly 200 years to the day since the Brontë wedding that the demanding full peal, involving nearly three hours of constant bell ringing, was attempted twice.

The Herald publishes a summary of 2012 in Scottish theatre, including the all-male version of Wuthering Heights premiered in Glasgow:

Tucked away in Arches Live!, Peter McMaster's quirky, affecting all-male Wuthering Heights went where few pieces of performance have gone for a long time: he looked at the changing roles and preconceptions of men in a post-feminist society. Clearly times have been a-changing, and work like this brings cogent debates centre-stage. (Mary Brennan)

And The Saint Louis Times-Dispatch remembers the local dance proposals of the year:

In September, choreographer and St. Louis native Annie Loui brought her Counter-Balance Theater to the Edison Theatre for performances of “Jane Eyre,” her interpretation of the classic novel. The show was an imaginative adventure in storytelling through text and movement. (Calvin Wilson)

The New York Times reviews a peformance by the comedian and singer Sandra Bernhard at Joe's Pub:

In one of my favorite bits Ms. Bernhard imagined Twitter posts exchanged by Jane Eyre with Nicki Minaj, and Joan of Arc with Snooki. The satire spoke for itself and didn’t need the kind of scornful editorial elaboration she might have added in earlier times. (Stephen Holden)

BBC News talks about anonymous writers:

Literature mavens tease out real lives from the mischievous games authors have used to hide themselves. While we are well acquainted with the Brontë sisters today, they originally published under the names Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. (Brooke Magnanti)

Süddeutsche (Germany) reviews the film The Lost Moment (1947), the only film directed by Martin Gabel:

'The Lost Moment', 1947, schließt die Reihe phantomhafter Frauenmelos der Vierziger, 'Wuthering Heights', 'Jane Eyre', Hitchcocks 'Rebecca'. Frei nach Henry James, die 'Aspern Papers', und ein Shelley-Porträt figuriert als das des toten Dichters.

The Border Mail talks about film adaptations of books:

Like Shakespeare, Dickens, Austen and the Brontës, Tolstoy can bear any number of fresh interpretations, and we've seen a few.  (Sandra Hall)

The Itinerant Medievalist interviews the writer Julia Klassen:

Most Christian Historical novels that I know of are set in America, what made you choose to set ‘The Tutor’s Daughter’ and some of your other novels in Britain or England?
Yes, all of my novels have been set in England so far, with The Tutor’s Daughter being set specifically in Cornwall. I have been fascinated with England ever since I read The Secret Gardenand Jane Eyre as a girl.

Mardecortésbaja, A Complicated Woman (in Spanish) and Sweet Fall (in Spanish, she also reviews Wuthering Heights 2011) review Jane Eyre 2011; The Frugal Chariot reviews Wide Sargasso Sea; Nessa News (in Portuguese) posts about Being Emily by Anne Donovan; Czasu coraz mniej, a książek coraz więcej (in Polish) reviews Agnes Grey; Ex/Elle has visited Yorkshire including Haworth; Oxford Erin reviews Black Spring by Alison Croggon.

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2012. A Brontë Year in Images

Our traditional summary of the year in images (and with a little help from the wonders of Picasa 3.9):

The Brontë year in... books/audiobooks:

In Movies/TV/Radio:

In Music and Opera:

In Arts and Exhibitions:

In Theatre:

In Memoriams:

In Brontë news: 

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Security Cameras in the Graveyard

The Telegraph & Argus follows the events after the theft of of the gravestones at Thornton churchyard last month:

The hunt for three ancient gravestones pinched from a historic cemetery with Brontë links is still ongoing as it was revealed locals have raised £700 to pay for security cameras in the graveyard. (...)
Churchwarden Steven Stanworth, who said he was left sickened at the gravestone theft, said he hoped the stone would eventually be recovered.
“It is a bit disappointing,” he said.“Police recovered a lot of stone in Keighley, but we won’t know if any of that is ours until January.
“We have raised £700 to buy security cameras, including £500 from Dean Barker Electricals, and have a Community Payback team coming in March to re-do the decking and revarnish in the grounds. So out of that, we have had some good things come out of it and it has been really positive.
“We have created a commemorative plate to try and raise more money to pay for security measures.”
Officers found 50 slabs at an address in Northcliffe Avenue, Thornton, following information on the theft of flags in November.
A 21-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of the theft of stone from the graveyard and remains on bail. (Dolores Cowburn)

The Huddersfield Daily Examiner recommends tonight's Countryfile programme on BBC One:

Artist Ashley Jackson will be on TV tomorrow – painting the historic ruin he campaigned to save 40 years ago.
The Holmfirth artist has been painting Top Withens – this time for Countryfile which will be shown on BBC1 on Sunday (7pm).
The ruined cottage on a moor, near Haworth, is widely regarded as the inspiration for the Earnshaw family house, Wuthering Heights, in the novel of the same name by Emily Brontë.
In the 1970s, Ashley battled to save the ruins which had been damaged by vandals, weather and over-enthusiastic Brontë fans.
On Sunday, Ashley will be talking to Countryfile presenter Ellie Harrison about how the Brontë sisters and Top Withens inspired him and continue to stimulate other artists.
Ashley, who first visited Top Withens in 1966 with artist and friend Stanley Chapman, will also be giving the Countryfile presenter a masterclass in sketching.

The Huffington Post's Word & Film publishes a list of the best book adaptations of the year:  Wuthering Heights is one of them.

This is the live and unplugged version of Cathy and Heathcliff’s doomed love affair on the wind-whipped Yorkshire moors. Writer-director Andrea Arnold distilled Emily Brontë’s novel down to its vaporous and visceral essence using sparse dialogue, stark painterly imagery, and an interracial romance whose savage sensuality emerges out of the primal intimacy of early exchanges where Cathy literally licks Heathcliff’s wounds and sidles up to him to ride over the rocky cliffs on the bare back of a horse nearly as wild as they are. (Christine Spines)

The Miami Herald reviews several new graphic novels:

The Graphic Canon, Vol. 2: From “Kubla Khan” to the Brontë Sisters to The Picture of Dorian Gray by Russ Kick.
This prodigious and astounding collection of literary adaptations is staggering in its ambition, but even more so in its execution and realization. Kick’s anthology, the middle volume of a chronological trilogy, includes graphic iterations of works by Coleridge, Keats, Twain, Blake, Wordsworth and others, by Megan Kelso, S. Clay Wilson, Dame Darcy, Hunt Emerson, Lance Tooks and Kim Deitch, among the superb array of contributors. (Richard Pachter)

The Sunday Express explores heritage trains in Britain and the KWVR is on the list:

Keighley & Worth Valley Railway
Transferring at dark-stoned Keighley station from an electric train from Leeds on to a steam train is to step back more than half a century.
This short, five-mile railway (01535 645 214/kwvr.co.uk) will always be associated with the classic 1970 film The Railway Children, starring Jenny Agutter and Bernard Cribbins.
Beside the characterful station at Ingrow is the Museum of Rail Travel, which supplied period carriages for the filming of TV mini-series South Riding, based on Winifred Holtby’s novel.
Another association with female authors is found at the main intermediate station of Haworth, where a walk up cobbled Main Street to the Brontë family parsonage is almost obligatory.
The final mile to the terminus at Oxenhope is the prettiest on the railway as it follows Bridgehouse Beck, crossed by a packhorse bridge on the Railway Children Walk linking the valley’s sites.
For the more intrepid there are walks out on to the moors and Top Withens, thought to have inspired the setting for the Earnshaw home in Wuthering Heights. (Anthony Lambert)

Harriet Walker talks about New Year's Eve in New York in The Independent (and in spite of her words we can't but be really jealous):

I shouldn't be in this situation. If you believe in karma, I should have every New Year's Eve planned from now until that serene point when you stop caring about feeling bleak if you just stay in and cheer Jonathan Ross from the comfort of your armchair, looking around your empty front-room with all the misanthropic gusto of Heathcliff turfing a houseguest out into the snow.

The Asian Age describes the Indian soap opera Phir Subah Hogi  like this:

Phir Subah Hogi’s complex story — a Jane Eyre-esque romance against the backdrop of socially sanctioned prostitution in a north Indian village — brought Varun Badola and Narayani Shastri back into the limelight, while a brash, effervescent role was inducement enough for Rakhi Vijan. (Priyanka Kelkar & Rohini Nair)

The writer Xu Xi lists 2012 literary highlights for the South China Morning Post:

Cold Light by Frank Moorhouse. Edith Campbell Berry ranks right up there alongside Isabel Archer, Anna Wulf, Jean Brodie, Jane Eyre, Becky Sharp, Wong Chia Chi and other memorable female protagonists who create their own lives (and loves).

El País (Uruguay) asks María Fernández (PR of a local casino resort) for her preferences:

Un libro. Cumbres borrascosas, de Emily Brontë. Lo leí a los 17 durante mi viaje a clases de inglés y me sumergí de tal manera que viví cada segundo de los personajes principales.

More Brontëites on Lancaster Online; today's Plus Ten puzzle at the New York Times includes a "Brontë heroine" question;  the Bayside Douglaston Patch includes Wuthering Heights 2011 among the best films of the year; the original novel is also included in this top ten of Bella Online; The Daily Prophecy reviews Aviva Orr's The Mist on Brontë Moor; Litterature et cie (in French) posts about Jane Eyre; cinemalodica reviews Jane Eyre 1944; Filmy Kostiumowe (in Polish) talks about Jane Eyre 1970.

Several blogs and websites post pictures and audio from yesterday's 200th Anniversary of Patrick and Maria Brontë's wedding. The Brontë Parsonage Facebook publishes a set of three pictures, the Brontë Sisters and Voice of the Valleys also have pictures; Leeds Daily Photo and Brontë Radio have audios of the Haworth Church bells full peal.

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Inspired by Angria and Sisters

Some new books to be found on the self-published Lulu Press shelves:

Firebrand
Ankaret Wells
ISBN 9781291135213
Copyright S. Haworth
24 October 2012

I sink down on one knee. The purple and black vines embroidered on my skirts spread elegantly out around me.

"Your Grace of Coranza," I say with a little inclination of my head.  "Will you do me the honour of accepting my hand in marriage?"

For a long moment, the Duke doesn't answer me.  I'm beginning to think that he's going to throw me in a dungeon after all.

When adventurous widow Kadia Warner inherits the airship Concordia, she finds herself at the eye of a gathering storm. In the one duchy that remains free of the Empire, can she find love with the Emperor's erstwhile best friend? And how far will the Emperor go to get the Concordia - and Kadia - back? An industrial fantasy romance inspired by Charlotte Brontë’s Angria novelettes, featuring castles with dungeons, border fortresses without dungeons, kidnappings, masquerades, railway stranglers, duels with sword and pistol, airships, the opera, shady business practices, love, sex, danger and a mechanical birdcage.

Worlds Apart in the Same World: A Study of the Brontë Sisters
Renn Shearin
ISBN 9781257716203
January 2, 2012

Sisters know each other’s biggest dreams and greatest fears. Sisters remain when everyone else has left. Sisters hate each other, cry together, laugh together, and most of all they love. Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë were sisters who lived together all of their lives. Most of the time their only companions were each other, and they were close friends. All three sisters wrote and found their strength through expressing their beliefs in their novels. However, even though Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë were close sisters, they had very different worldviews. Each sister had a unique belief about reality, morality, and what is valuable that they expressed through their writing. In spite of the sisters’ shared experiences, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne were women were worlds apart living in the same world.

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Perchance to Dream

The Spenborough Guardian talks about the Red House Museum celebration of the the bicentenary of the marriage of the Reverend Patrick Brontë and Maria Branwell,

This year marks the bicentenary of the marriage of the Rev Patrick Brontë and Maria Branwell, and to mark the event, as well as Christmas, the Friends of Red House held a special event complete with costumed characters.
On hand to welcome guests was Carol Fox, a direct descendant of the vicar, who made his first marital home in the Spen Valley. Santa was also there, and the Kirklees Brontë group members dressed as Mr Brontë, a mill owner at the time of the Luddite uprisings and men and women of the time.
One of the organisers, Imelda Marsden, said it went so well it was hoped it would become an annual event. Money raised will help publish a book about past residents and visitors to Red House. In turn, the book will raise funds for Holly Bank School and Friends of Red House.

Paul Routledge defends Yorkshire's honour in The Mirror after Eric Pickles wrote about preferring Essex to Yorkshire:

Stunning vistas where the White Rose flag is proudly flown on August 1, Yorkshire Day. Do they even have an Essex Day?
But that panoramic variety has nothing on the people, going back to Wakefield native Robin Hood.
Writer JB Priestley personified patriotic Britain in the Second World War.
Winifred Holtby, radical author of televised South Riding, brought Holderness to life.
Sixties writers John Braine and Stan Barlow gave us novels of the working class.
They are simply the heirs of a great tradition best known in the works of the Brontë sisters, who revolutionised English literature and whose home in Haworth is today a place of pilgrimage.

Financial Times' Quiz of the Year includes a rather sophisticated question:

38 Can you match the following writers – Kurt Vonnegut, Charlotte Brontë, James Joyce – to the opening lines of the following pieces of writing, all posthumously discovered or published for the first time this year?
(i) “In many ways, Haley, this is the nicest room in the house, even though it is little and has only one window,” said Annie Cooley, a woman in her middle twenties.
(ii) Alas! I cannot send you a Copenhagen cat because there are no cats in Copenhagen.
(iii) A rat, weary of the life of cities, and of courts (for he had played his part in the palaces of kings and in the salons of great lords), a rat whom experience had made wise, in short, a rat who from a courtier had become a philosopher, had withdrawn to his country house (a hole in the trunk of a large young elm), where he lived as a hermit devoting all his time and care to the education of his only son.

If you are a faithful reader of Brontëblog and remember the discovery in Brussels of a previously unknown French devoir by Charlotte Brontë earlier this year, you will know part of the answer.

Today on BBC Radio 3:

Words and Music  - Perchance to Dream 6:30pm - 7:45pm
Dreams can be both expressive and repressive, and one man’s dream is another’s man’s nightmare.
In this particularly ethereal and unsettling edition of the jewel in Radio 3’s crown, the actors Sophie Thompson (EastEnders) and Chiwetel Ejiofor (Dirty Pretty Things) read disturbing dream-linked extracts from George Orwell’s 1984, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. 
These prose pieces are interspersed with chimerical works by Berlioz and Stravinsky. Expect the unexpected when you settle down tonight . . . (Jane Alexander in Radio Times)

Chiwetel Ejiofor will read the fragment "where Mr Lockwood dreams of a ghostly child called Catherine trying to get in through his window".

Digital Spy publishes a picture of what the 'Brontë night' (check yesterday's post) means on Emmerdale 

Bob starts to see Brenda (Lesley Dunlop) in a new light when his friend Dan Spencer (Liam Fox) shares a kiss with her next month.
The unexpected moment between Dan and Brenda takes place at a Brontë literature night that Bob has organised in an effort to meet new women. (Daniel Kilkelly)

Film School Rejects proposes a list of entirely deserving but very unlikely Oscar nominations:

Best Cinematography – Ginger and Rosa or Wuthering Heights
Robbie Ryan is one of the best cinematographers working today. His collaborations with Andrea Arnold are bold, dramatic revelations that bring an elemental magic to the worlds they build. Wuthering Heights is unlike anything else that came out this year, a unique take on literary adaptation that used its brutal, rural images to turn a classic love story into a haunting. Yet I don’t expect the Academy to each out to Arnold’s difficult, minimalist screenplay. I would be impressed if many of them even watched the entire film. (Daniel Walber)

The Montclair Times selects Wuthering Heights 2011 on its top ten film list (it also almost made it onto MovieMaker's list):

As a culture, we're bombarded by generic stories of young love, and usually prompted to find idealized surrogates of ourselves on the screen. Not so here, with Wes Anderson and Andrea Arnold making their tales of "forbidden love" fully character-specific and thus revitalizing the form. (Peter Gutiérrez)

The Telegraph reviews the BBC sitcom Miranda:

In Miranda, no one comes to any harm. There’s physical embarrassment, but no psychological humiliation. There’s teasing from mother and friends, but no real cruelty. Our heroine has an on-off relationship with the male friend she fancies, but as heartbreak goes it’s hardly Wuthering Heights. (Michael Deacon)

The Age reviews By the Book by Ramona Koval:

The central image in By the Book is that of Sara, lying on a couch, always reading, and from time to time passing books to her daughter, always in silence. At 15, Ramona was given Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. Was this a signal that Sara's life as wife and mother had lacked fulfilment, or that her daughter should plot a different course? Simone de Beauvoir soon followed; and Mary McCarthy's The Group (banned in Australia in 1963) was left casually available on a shelf. Koval recounts the feminist lessons she failed to learn. With ''Reader, I married him'', she sums up an early, doomed relationship. The words are those of triumphant Jane Eyre, but the tone is wry. (Brenda Niall)

NPR talks about the biographic genre:

Novelists can create unique and unforgettable characters — there's never been anyone quite like Jane Eyre or Ignatius J. Reilly — but there's no shortage of fascinating literary protagonists who just happened to exist in real life. (Michael Schaub)

The Wall Street Journal reviews Shakespeare's Tremor and Orwell's Cough:

The usual suspects, syphilis (Shakespeare), gonorrhea (Joyce) and tuberculosis (the Brontës, Orwell), are joined by more exotic transmissible misfortunes such as yaws, a tropical disease that causes dreadful ulcers (London), and relapsing fever, or Brucellosis (Yeats). (Raymond Tallis)

Financial Times publishes an article about JM Coetzee:

How canny of him to rewrite Robinson Crusoe like that, with a tongueless Man Friday and a female narrator. Wasn’t a book like Foe (1986) just made to slot into a thousand postcolonial/feminist course outlines on “Rewriting the Canon”, alongside Wide Sargasso Sea and Things Fall Apart? How methodical he had been in his assault on the Nobel – the novels, the serious essays about Kafka, Robert Musil and the Russians, the measured not-quite memoirs – how strategic. Bravo JM! (Hedley Twidle)

Las Provincias (Spain) explains Christmas reading habits:

La semana pasada hablaba de la importancia de volver al pueblo en estas fechas. Yo añadiría que es el momento ideal para volver a los clásicos favoritos. Alguien, no recuerdo quién, me dijo que releía 'Cumbres Borrascosas' todas las Pascuas. Yo lo hice el año pasado envuelto en una manta frente a la chimenea, seguido por 'Jane Eyre'. Pero en esta ocasión he abandonado a las hermanas Brontë por Charles Dickens y 'Oliver Twist'. (Carlos García-Calvo) (Translation)

Amy's Classic Movie Blog - Now With Jessica Added! posts about Jane Eyre 1944; Sam Still Reading reviews Wide Sargasso Sea; a group reading of Wuthering Heights is taking place here; Summer Day announces that her book Wuthering Nights is today available for free on Kindle;

And finally, our congratulations to Dame Kate Bush, a frequent name in our daily posts, who has been appointed Commander of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II.

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Maria and Patrick's 200th Wedding Anniversary

Today, December 29th, at the Brontë Parsonage Museum:

Celebrate the 200th Wedding Anniversary of Maria and Patrick Brontë

December 29, 2012 is the 200th anniversary of the day that Patrick Brontë and Maria Branwell - parents of Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne - married at Guiseley Church, West Yorkshire.

To mark the occasion the Brontë Parsonage Museum is offering a day of free activities – and a piece of wedding cake! – to all visitors.

• Meet ‘Mrs Brontë’ as she tours the Museum in her wedding dress

• Listen to a short talk about Maria and Patrick’s courtship and wedding at intervals throughout the day

• Handle real period costume items

• Enjoy children’s activities in the foyer

• And partake of a free slice of commemorative wedding cake!

Mrs Brontë will be at the Museum between 11am and 4pm, and is available for pictures outside the church, in the Museum and in the Museum garden.

Mrs Brontë herself discuss what she will wear for the occasion on Hathaways of Haworth.

Picture Source: Hathaways of Haworth. More information in Keighley News.

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The moors, my mistress

The Telegraph & Argus talks about tomorrow's (December 29th) activities in Haworth:

A double wedding anniversary celebration will be held at Haworth Parish Church tomorrow.
It will be 200 years since the Reverend Patrick Brontë, father of the famous sisters, married his wife Maria. He was vicar at Haworth from 1820 to 1861. It will also be 39 years since the current Priest-in-Charge, the Reverend Peter Mayo-Smith and his wife Eileen, were married.
To mark Patrick Brontë’s double-centenary the bell-ringers at the parish church will carry out a two-and-three-quarter- hour full peal.
Simon Burnett, the Haworth Church bell captain, said: “A full peal of bell involves 5,040 changes in various methods.”
Earlier in the day, the bell-ringers at Guiseley Parish Church, where Patrick and Maria were married, will also be attempting a full peal.
The Haworth peal will start at 3pm.

Keighley News gives more information about the bell ringers' full peal attempt:

The bell ringers will attempt a full peal, which consists of 5,040 changes and takes about three hours to ring. It requires great concentration on the part of the ringers as any mistake invalidates the performance. The peal is scheduled to start at 3pm. The ringing band will consist of four members from Haworth, one from Oxenhope and will be conducted by the president of The Yorkshire Association of Change Ringers. The guild will also ring in the New Year over midnight. The art of change ringing dates back to the 17th Century and is almost only practised in this country. The ringers at Haworth are always on the lookout for new members, so if you are interested, contact the ringing captain, Simon Burnett, on 07815 186074 or (01535) 643928. You do not need to be strong or musical and you would be joining a national ‘fellowship of ringers’ and most of all you would help keep the Brontë Bells ringing.

Yorkshire Post remembers that this Sunday, December 30th, BBC's Countryfile will be quite Brontë-related:

The dramatic landscape believed to have been the setting for Emily Brontë’s classic novel Wuthering Heights is continuing to inspire another Yorkshire artist.
Ashley Jackson set up his easel at Top Withens, above Haworth, to give a lesson in sketching to BBC Countryfile presenter Ellie Harrison. The results will be screened on Sunday.
Mr Jackson’s fascination with the site began with a first visit in 1966 when he was accompanied by fellow artist and friend Stanley Chapman. He brought schoolchildren to see it in 1972 and continues to campaign for the preservation of the Yorkshire heritage site.
He said: “When I was 16, I wrote in my sketchbook that I wished to do with the brush what the Brontës had done with the pen. Today at 72 my passion remains the same for Yorkshire and the Brontës; I hope that Countryfile will allow others to view the moors as I see her – my mistress, with all her womanly contours.”

More best-of-the-year film lists that feature Wuthering Heights 2011. Now the Frederick News-Post:

2. A disarmingly stripped-down version of Emily Brontë’s classic doomed romance between Heathcliff and his beloved Cathy, it’s the same story you were forced to read in high school, but director Andrea Arnold’s stark, gritty style is what makes this retelling so effective. (It’s also notably the first production to cast a black actor as Heathcliff, inspired by the book’s description of him as a “dark-skinned gypsy in aspect.”) U.K.-born Arnold has become known for her contemporary, hard-hitting dramas like 2010’s superb “Fish Tank,” filming with jittery handheld cameras and utilizing only natural light. She brings the same type of aesthetic to the 19th-century-set “Heights,” transforming the Yorkshire moors into a dark, menacing creature, with its oppressive fog and wind, muddy fields and heavy rain. The moor appears to be a character itself, standing in for the characters’ repressed, often wordless love affair. It’s a beautifully shot, slow-burning melodrama, and it seeps in under your skin and lingers with you for days. (Michael Hunley)

And Television Without Pity:

8. All too often, cinematic adaptations of classic 19th century novels arrive onscreen already feeling like museum pieces. That's not the case with Andrea Arnold's raw, stripped-down version of Emily Brontë's oft-filmed 1847 romance, which has a vitality and immediacy rare to this genre. Although Arnold's decision to cast a black actor as Heathcliff garnered the most attention, her boldest creative decision was to root the story's events so strongly in nature. Filmed on location on the windswept, desolate moors of Northern England, the movie captures how petty the characters' personal dramas seem when set against such a majestic backdrop, but also how their cruelty to each other in the name of love is, ultimately, part of the natural order of things. (Ethan Alter)

The Seattle Times:

Best kid performance: In addition to Wallis (above), kid-sized kudos to Zoé Héran in “Tomboy,” Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward in “Moonrise Kingdom,” Isabelle Allen and Daniel Huttlestone in “Les Misérables,” and the young cast of “Wuthering Heights.” (Moira MacDonald)

Washingtonian's After Hours also mentions the film. But, of course, Andrea Arnold's film also figures on some worst-films-of-the-year lists:

Andrea Arnold’s completely unnecessary remake of “Wuthering Heights” does so many things wrong it almost deserves an award for wrong turns. This painfully slow adaptation of Emily Brontë’s novel clocks in at two hours and nine minutes, and if it only felt that long you’d count yourself lucky. The absolute lack of chemistry between Kaya Scodelario as Catherine and James Howson as Heathcliff is one of the reasons there’s no romance whatsoever here. Arnold’s screenplay can’t find a redeemable characteristic in any of its characters. Robbie Ryan’s cinematography is not just bleak—it’s murky. Some scenes are actually difficult to see. The color has been bleached to near black and white in places but if you want “Wuthering Heights” in black and white, they made that version in 1939. It was photographed by Gregg Toland, who also photographed “Citizen Kane,” and it looked a lot better. The new version was photographed with a 1.33:1 aspect ratio, which is actually less wide screen than the 1939 version, and no, I have no idea why. Solomon Grave and Shannon Beer play Heathcliff and Catherine as teenagers. They bear no resemblance to Scodelario and Howson. (Jim Dixon in Capital District Movies Examiner)

Movie Reviews also posts a bad review of the film.

Digital Spy talks about one of the upcoming episodes of Emmerdale (January 10, 2013) which has several Brontë references:

Elsewhere, Bob is listening to Wuthering Heights on audio book and when he and Dan both flirt with Vanessa in the café, Dan is envious of Bob's charm. Dan reads The Idiot's Guide to Wuthering Heights while at the garage and questions Moira about women. Bob tries to persuade Brenda to go to Brontë night and mischievously lets Dan think people will be dressing up in costume. 

Daily Mail's Mike Read's Poptastic Puzzlers includes the following question:

Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights was published in 1847. In which year did Kate Bush top the charts with her song with the same name?

A: 1976 B: 1978 C: 1980

The Lancashire Telegraph has an article about walking to Wycoller Hall and remembers the Brontë links associated with the place:

Spend some time around the hall, which has a fascinating history. The Brontë family knew it well and they had a friend in the area called Eyre. The book was therefore easy to name and Charlotte called Wycoller Hall Ferndean Manor. Although the hall is now ruined, I have a copy of an old print which shows Wycoller Hall enjoying Christmas in 1650. (Ron Freethy)

Albeit they seem to be mixing Wycoller Hall and North Lees Hall, where the Eyre family traditionally lived and which Charlotte visited while on a stay in Hathersage with Ellen Nussey.

Otago Daily Times recommends Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair;  Lady Lira uploads a drawing inspired by Wuthering Heights; Kiss the Book posts about Catherine Reef's The Brontë Sisters; Ms. Yingling Reads posts about Catherine Reef's book and Heather Vogel Frederick's Wish You Were Eyre; ekúltura (in Hungarian) reviews Villette;  Stef's Book Room talks about Wuthering Heights.

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Excerpts from Jane Eyre

The British musician Kenny Mitchell (Multi genre guitarist, bassist, keyboardist, composer, engineer, and producer, soundcloud dixit) has released an MP3 album with music inspired by the reading of Jane Eyre:

As a musician, I've been known to take the occasional musical brainstorm and produce something completely off the wall from time to time ; like my 6 track 'Excerpts from Jane Eyre' set which consists entirely of piano and string quartet/quintet[.]

Excerpts from Jane Eyre
by Kenny Mitchell

1. Introduction 01:42
2. Gateshead Hall 03:04
3. The Burning Bed 02:28
4. To Whitcross 01:55
5. The ruin of Thornfield 04:45
6. Close 02:44

Selected moments from Charlotte Brontë's "Jane Eyre' set to music.
Released 06 November 2012
Composed, recorded, engineered and produced by Kenny Mitchell
Artwork design, photography and graphics by Kenny Mitchell

Another musical piece inspired by Jane Eyre is, of course, Dario Marianelli's soundtrack for Jane Eyre 2011. Focus Features celebrates its 10th anniversary with the edition of a collection of film scores, including Cary Fukunaga's Jane Eyre:

Focus Features 10th Anniversary: A Collection of Film Score
December 18, 2012
Lakeshore Records

Track 14.  Yes! from Jane Eyre (Dario Marianelli)

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Amazing Coincidence

Keighley News tells about some of the events that will take place in Haworth next Saturday, December 29th:

A double wedding anniversary celebration will be staged at Haworth Parish Church this Saturday, December 29.
It will be exactly 200 years since the Rev Patrick Brontë, father of the famous sisters, married his wife Maria. He was vicar at Haworth from 1820 to 1861.
It will also be 39 years since the current priest-in-charge, the Rev Peter Mayo-Smith and his wife Eileen, were married.
To mark Patrick Brontë’s double centenary, the church bell ringers will carry out a two-and-three-quarter-hour full peal.
The bell ringers previously staged this demanding performance last year, as part of the celebrations for Prince William’s wedding.
Simon Burnett, the Haworth Church bell captain, said: “A full peal of bell involves 5,040 changes in various methods, and to complete it is a magnificent feat of concentration, because just one mistake invalidates the performance.”
Earlier in the day the bell ringers at Guiseley Parish Church will also be attempting a full peal to mark the Brontë wedding, as it was at their church that the original ceremony took place.
The Haworth peal is expected to start at 3pm.
Mr Mayo-Smith said: “It’s an amazing coincidence that I should be priest-in-charge at Haworth when the 200th anniversary of Patrick and Maria Brontë is celebrated, and even more remarkable that my wife Eileen and I should have three daughters too.
“It’ll be wonderful if our bell ringing team succeed in delivering the full peal and it will help make our anniversary an even more special and memorable day.”

Derbyshire Times presents the book A Peak District Anthology by Roly Smith:

Compiled and introduced by Peak District expert Roly Smith, it revives many forgotten descriptions of one of the finest, most varied and best-loved landscapes in the whole of Britain.
From William Camden to Daniel Defoe, Sir Gawain to Lord Byron, literary visitors have long been astonished by the sublime wonders of the Peak.
The coming of railways proved another great impetus for writers and tourists. Ruskin extolled the beauties of the Peak, while novelists Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot used closely observed Peakland settings for some of their most vivid narratives. Topographical writers including Edward Bradbury, Thomas Tudor and James Croston enthusiastically described the delights of the Derbyshire scenery to the ever-increasing stream of Victorian visitors.

The Oxford Mail interviews Chief Constable Sara Thornton about the Oxfordshire Reading Campaign:

Asked what her favourite book is, she said: “It has got to be Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte which is the only book that I have read many times.
“I was always fascinated by the life of the Bronte sisters and how three girls who lived in a remote house on the edge of the moors could write with such feeling and insight.
“I have always been enchanted by the romance of the story and managed to overlook the fact that the hero, Mr Rochester, had locked his wife in the attic.” (Tom Jennings)

The Dallas Morning News talks about the Django films saga and the like after the premiere of Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained. Talking about Django Kill (1967, Giulio Questi):

(Another of the gruesome sequences is alluded to in Cowboys & Aliens.) There are touches of Macbeth and Jane Eyre. A gang of ambiguously gay outlaws dresses alike in Fascist black. (Howery Pack)

The Student Newspaper reviews an Edinburgh performance of  Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera:

We are talking doomed, elemental, all-consuming love of the Heathcliff/Cathy variety: offering pure escapism into the macabre world of the Opéra Populaire of 19th century Paris. 

La Nouvelle République (France) announces the screening of Jane Eyre 2011 and Wuthering Heights 2011 at the Semaine du Cinéma Britanique in Blois (January 2013):

Par ailleurs, on appréciera deux adaptations récentes des grands romans des sœurs Brontë.
En effet, pour Les Hauts de Hurlevent, on en était resté à la version de 1939 de William Wyler, réunissant rien moins que Laurence Olivier, Merle Oberon et David Niven. Quant à Jane Eyre, la mouture 1944 de Robert Stevenson n'était pas trop desservie non plus par son casting : Orson Welles, Joan Fontaine, et une petite débutante nommée Elisabeth Taylor !
Et bien cette semaine britannique nous offrira deux versions dignes de leurs aînées et ne datant que de 2011. (Translation)

The Haber Turk (Turkey) reviewer begins by reviewing Anna Karenina 2012 and ends up talking about Wuthering Heights 2011:

Bu da bir anlamda “Uğultulu Tepeler”in (“Wuthering Heights”, 2011) stilize, açı simsarı, az diyaloglu ve öznel dünyasının tam ekranla ‘Andrea Arnold’ gözünden kavranışının, burada biçimci, nesnel, tiyatro estetiğini benimseyen ve sinemaskop formatında bir başka ‘sıkışmışlık’la farklı tabanlardan ‘postmodern 19. yüzyıl yasak aşkları’nı portrelediğini belirtelim. Bu sayede ‘kostümlü drama özlü tutku’ların üst üste böylesi radikal elbiseler giyebilmeleri sevindirici. Wright ile Arnold’un isimleri de bu konuda ‘kostümlü drama’ tarihinde özel bir yere not edilecek. Zira burada türün içinde yapılanlara ne kadar geçmişe gitsek de gerçek bir karşılık bulamıyoruz. (Kerem Akça) (Translation)

BlackBook features Wuthering Heights 2011 on its best-of-the-year-list; Les Soeurs Brontë (in French) posts about how Christmas could be celebrated at the Brontës's home; Bookish Whimsy reviews Emma Tennant's Adèle: Jane Eyre's Hidden Story; Stupid Stuff posts about Wide Sargasso Sea.

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Wuthering Heights at the English Library

New Wuthering Heights editions in town:

Wuthering Heights
Emily Brontë
Penguin English Library
ISBN: 9780141199085
Paperback : 06 Dec 2012

"May you not rest, as long as I am living. You said I killed you - haunt me, then"

Lockwood, the new tenant of Thrushcross Grange on the bleak Yorkshire moors, is forced to seek shelter one night at Wuthering Heights, the home of his landlord. There he discovers the history of the tempestuous events that took place years before: of the intense passion between the foundling Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw, and her betrayal of him. As Heathcliff's bitterness and vengeance is visited upon the next generation, their innocent heirs must struggle to escape the legacy of the past.

The Penguin English Library requests the pleasure of your company.
Welcome to the Penguin English Library - 100 of the best novels in the English language. These are books to collect and share, admire and hold; books that celebrate the pure pleasure of reading.

And of course there are the lazy alternatives if the real thing is too much for you:

Wuthering Heights In Plain and Simple English (Includes Study Guide, Complete Unabridged Book, Historical Context, Biography and Character Index)(Annotated)
By BookCaps
Published: Dec. 10, 2012
ISBN: 9781301772810

Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights” is considered one of the greatest novels ever wrote. It also can be difficult to understand--it is loaded with themes, imagery, and symbols. If you need a little help understanding it, let BookCaps help with this study guide.
Along with chapter-by-chapter summaries and analysis, this book features the full text of Brontë's classic novel is also included.
BookCap Study Guides are not meant to be purchased as alternatives to reading the book. 

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Pre-Modern Heights

Andrew O'Hehir lists his top ten films of the year on Salon and Wuthering Heights 2011 is his number one, without a doubt:

I suppose Scottish director Andrea Arnold’s ravishing widescreen reimagining of Emily Brontë’s classic novel won’t launch any national debates about slavery or torture – although I would argue both those issues are obliquely addressed, among many others – but when it came time to finalize this list I realized it had burrowed into my unconscious in a way no other movie did, even in this amazing year. If there’s an element of Terrence Malick-like cinematic abstraction and landscape photography to this “Wuthering Heights,” it feels more pre-modern than postmodern, as if it’s trying to dig backward through all the costume-drama adaptations to the physical, elemental truths of life and love on the frigid moors of Yorkshire. As a visual and sensual out-of-body experience (mention must go to Robbie Ryan, Arnold’s amazing cinematographer), no other movie released this year comes close. 

Films de Culte (France) has also included the film on its top ten. Like East Bay Express:

[Wuthering Heights] evidently struck some viewers as drastically dour, but for us, Andrea Arnold's rethinking of Emily Brontë's tragic romance illuminates dark corners, and updates that 1846 novel in unmistakable fashion for 21st-century audiences finally ready to put 19th-century racism and intolerance in a box and bury them forever. Director Arnold and writer Olivia Hetreed see fit to make their Heathcliff a newly freed slave stranded in the Yorkshire Moors through an ostensible act of kindness. It is Heathcliff's beloved Cathy, however, who wears the chains, shackled to her family's menfolk and her rich husband in turn. The setting is as chilly and forbidding, with just as many expressive emotional overtones, as Cary Fukunaga's sterling Jane Eyre adaptation last year. Although both films were first released in the UK in 2011, Wuthering took longer to reach us. (Kelly Vance) 

Not the same opinion as The Australian:

Then there were the unnecessary remakes of films that were better handled the last time (Total Recall, Red Dawn, Wuthering Heights)[.] (David Stratton)

The New York Times talks about the Buddenbrookhaus (the museum devoted to Thomas and Heinrich Mann) in Lübeck, Germany:

In some ways the Manns are perfect for a gossipy, confessional era. The brothers are like a German version of the Brontë sisters with a dash of Cain and Abel, nonviolent but still rivalrous. The family history includes prosperity and power, a fall from grace, sibling strife, suicide and scandal. “The Blue Angel,” adapted from Heinrich Mann’s novel “Small Town Tyrant,” is a cinema classic that made Marlene Dietrich a star. (Nicholas Kulish)

MSN's Videodrome talks about some films that will leave the NetFlix Instant Service with the new year:

Joan Fontaine is the ostensible star of the "Jane Eyre" (1944), playing the meek orphan hired by a brooding aristocrat to be governess to his young ward (Margaret O'Brien), but it's Orson Welles who dominates the drama with both his dark, electric presence and his influence behind the scenes of the production. The handsome production, one of the romantic classics of the forties, is credited to director Robert Stevenson but Fontaine herself maintains that Welles had a considerable hand in the production. (SeanAx)

Now some websites that quote Charlotte Brontë. First no less than Scientific American in an article about psychology and sharing joy:

Great literary figures have long known that happiness grows in sharing. In one of her letters, Charlotte Brontë observes “Happiness quite unshared can scarcely be called happiness; it has no taste.” (Emma Seppala)

The quote comes from a letter to W.S. Williams (March 19, 1850) and coincidentally it is also quoted on Deseret News in an article about new year's resolutions.

The Sun (Nigeria) publishes the obituary of Nnenyin Alison Attah, former First Lady of the Akwa Ibom state:

It was Charlotte Brontë who wrote in Jane Eyre that “prejudices are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilized by education; they grow there, firm as weeds among stones”.
Perhaps, realizing the truism of Brontë’s postulate,Nnenyin as First Lady of Akwa Ibom State devoted time to pushing the frontier of literacy, by helping toimprove the reading skills of the Akwa Ibom child. (Godwin Nzeakah)

The Inland Valley Daily Bulletin talks about T.S. Elliot's visit to Claremont:

On Dec. 27, 1932, Eliot arrived via train at the Santa Fe depot (still in use) in Claremont. It's lucky he didn't disembark in Pomona and wonder where the college was.
Hale and Paul Havens, a professor with a car, picked him up.
"My husband," Lorraine Havens remembered, "loved to tell how he greeted the famous poet at 6:20 a.m. as he descended unshaven from the Santa Fe railway car."
They drove to the home of Mary Eyre, a Scripps professor who lived at 1132 N. College Ave. (home still standing), which had been lent to him for his stay.
(Oh, if only he had been driven to the home of Jane Eyre! He might have competed with Mr. Rochester for Jane's affections, with Emily Hale as a fourth member of the love quadrangle. But I digress.) (David Allen)

El Mundo (Spain) talks about the Spanish edition of Jeremy Musson's Up and Down Stairs:

Otro de los repasos más interesantes del libro de Jeremy Musson es el recorrido por la historia de los sirvientes y señores como 'dramatis personae' para la literatura y el cine y su querencia con el llamado género el de campiña inglesa que cultivaron Austen y las hermanas Brontë. (Eva Díez Pérez) (Translation)

EFE (Spain) reviews El cine español. Una historia cultural by Vicente J. Benet:

Reconoce influencias del cine de terror de la Universal o de "Cumbres borrascosas" en la adaptación cinematográfica de "Eloísa está debajo del almendro", de Jardiel Poncela, del neorrealismo en "Surcos", de Nieves Conde, o figuras transnacionales como Marco Ferreri o Ladislao Wajda que, en cambio, ofrecieron títulos tan identitarios para el público español como "El cochecito" o "Marcelino, pan y vino".

Flavorwire republishes its post devoted to the ten most powerful women in literature which included Jane Eyre; Le Chemin Imaginaire reviews in French The Tenant of Wildfell Hall; Minha Alma Pede Livros (in Portuguese) posts about Wuthering Heights; Las Lágrimas de Alicia (in Spanish) continues posting about Jane Eyre (and all these posts); Krakowskie Czytanie (in Polish) posts about Agnes Grey; Salacious Reads is not convinced with Jane Eyre Laid Bare; colinheke uploads to YouTube a couple of videos of a trip to Haworth in 1991.

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Hypertext and Caribbean Literature

Some recent scholar work centered around Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre:

Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea as a Hypertext of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre: A Postmodern Perspective
Nazila Herischian, Department of English language and Literature, Tabriz Azad University, Tabriz, Iran
International Journal of Applied Linguistics & English Literature, 1(6), 72-82. 10.7575/ijalel.v.1n.6p.72 (2012)

This study gains significance as the findings can shed more lights on the postmodern concept of hypertextuality  to show that there is no originality in literature and any literary work can be the repetition, continuation, or mixture of previous texts. In the case of this study, that is to show, how a twentieth-century literary work like Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea can be the parody of Brontë’s nineteenth-century novel Jane Eyre. Moreover, such a postmodern perspective widens various ways of concentration on the literary works, so that, one could interpret in what ways two texts are united and grafted which results in either parody or pastiche. This study attempts to demonstrate mostly those focused aspects in Wide Sargasso Sea and  Jane Eyre that highlight the concept of hypertextuality, including the analyses of Rochester’s character in the novels, as a Byronic hero in Jane Eyre and an anti-Byronic hero in Wide Sargasso Sea; and also the study of the characters of Jane Eyre and Antoinette Cosway, as women narrator of the novels as well as focusing on the dream texts of the novels. 

And this Caribbean Literature Companion includes an article about Wide Sargasso Sea:

The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature
Michael A. Bucknor, Alison Donnell
ISBN: 9780415827942
Taylor & Francis Ltd
30th November 2012

The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature offers a comprehensive, critically engaging overview of this increasingly significant body of work. The volume is divided into six sections that consider: the foremost figures of the Anglophone Caribbean literary tradition and a history of literary critical debate textual turning points, identifying key moments in both literary and critical history and bringing lesser known works into context fresh perspectives on enduring and contentious critical issues including the canon, nation, race, gender, popular culture and migration new directions for literary criticism and theory, such as eco-criticism, psychoanalysis and queer studies the material dissemination of Anglophone Caribbean literature and generic interfaces with film and visual art This volume is an essential text that brings together sixty-nine entries from scholars across three generations of Caribbean literary studies, ranging from foundational critical voices to emergent scholars in the field. The volume's reach of subject and clarity of writing provide an excellent resource and springboard to further research for those working in literature and cultural studies, postcolonial and diaspora studies as well as Caribbean studies, history and geography.

Includes Writing Gender, Re-writing Nation: Wide Sargasso Sea, Annie John, Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home, and Myal by Rebecca Ashworth.

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Revolutionary Book

On Christmas Day, Female First chooses Jane Eyre as Book of the Day:

The book is revolutionary in showing female strength and intelligence matching the class of the man she was in love with. It is thought to be one of the most influential novels of all time as its themes of sexism and feminism were thought to change the course of literary history. (Lucy Walton)

Parma Today (Italy) talks about books chosen to be read in trips:
I libri dei parmigiani in viaggio? Tra i più amati i classici russi e italiani
„

Bram Stoker con Dracula scelto soprattutto da ragazzi tra i 20 e i 25 anni, mentre tra le parmigiane di mezza età campeggiano Charlotte Brontë con Jane Eyre, Ragione e sentimento di Austen, Cime tempestose di Brontë. (Alice Pisu) (Translation)

Little Rock Books Examiner talks about biopics:

Some of the most memorable biopics include: “The Barretts of Wimpole Street”, about the romance between Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning; “Devotion”, about the Brontë sisters; “Julie and Julia”, about cookbook author Julia Child and protégée Julie Powell; and “Becoming Jane” about the celebrated Jane Austin (sic).  (Jennifer Lafferty)

Devotion? memorable? We can think of some adjectives (a few of them even positive), but memorable is not one of them.

Sabotage Times lists some alternative Christmas songs, including Xmas Breakup by Foe:

Her Christmas tune,’Xmas Breakup’ a desolate Brontë-esque tale of doomed love acts as a welcome counterpoint to the tooth rotting saccharine musical fare you often encounter at this time of year ! (Andy VP)

Crave Online lists the ten best movies of the year:

I saw hundreds of motion pictures in 2012, and my short list for “best of the year” was obscenely long and varied. I had to kill some darlings to get to this point, and cutting wonderful films like Chronicle (which reinvented the power fantasy for a new generation) and Wuthering Heights (as emotionally harrowing an experience you’re ever likely to find) hurt me in ways I can’t adequately explain in words. (William Bibbiani)

And A.V. Club includes Wuthering Heights 2011 as number ten:

Andrea Arnold’s unconventional adaptation of the Emily Brontë classic brings race front and center, keeps the camera handheld and low to the ground, and lends the language a profane edge not usually associated with 19th-century English literature. Yet it’s true to the tortured heart of the novel, using raw performances and beautifully forbidding images of the English moors to re-create Brontë’s unrelenting sense of dread. (Sam Adams, Mike D'Angelo, Noel Murray, Keith Phipps, Nathan Rabin, Tasha Robinson, Scott Tobias and Alison Willmore)

The Playlist includes the film on a list of worthy films that you probably haven't seen:

We were convinced, on walking out of Andrea Arnold's adaptation of "Wuthering Heights" inVenice nearly 18 months ago, that we were looking at film that while it had little chance of catching on with the general public, it was sure to be a critical favorite. In fact, it didn't even manage that; sharply dividing reviewers, it came and went from theaters with only a few critics really shouting from the rooftops about it. But in a way, that just makes us cherish it more. Making last year's Brontë adaptation "Jane Eyre" look like a conservative "Masterpiece Theater" adaptation, Arnold rips her source material apart and starts again, creating a savage, brutal landscape (shot in glorious Academy ratio) that neatly mirrors the characters' cruelties against one another. Unlike the bulk of period dramas, there's little room for repression and subtext. Heathcliff, Cathy and co. are as blunt towards each other as characters of their fledgling age probably would be (this is a world where virtually no one makes it past the age of 25, seemingly), and Arnold's approach of casting relative newcomers pays, for the most part, great dividends, even if it makes the film a little rough around the edges in places. Those who prefer the picturesque when it comes to their costume dramas are likely to be horrified, but "Wuthering Heights" was never a pristine period piece, and even if Emily Brontë never wrote a scene in which Cathy licks blood from the back of a badly beaten Heathcliff (it's sexier than it sounds, trust us), we have no doubt that she'd approve of Arnold's invention, and the film in general.

On the Indiewire 2012 year-end critics poll the film makes it to the 30rd position.

Cassidy Crimson's Blog interviews the writer E.B. Black:

Name your three favorite novels of all time.
These change all the time, but as of right now, I love the novels Fateful by Claudia Gray, Ember by Bettie Sharpe, and Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë.

Al otro lado de la pantalla (in Spanish) and give pause... post about  Wuthering Heights; Facts about All talks about the Brontës; Książki moimi oczami (in Polish) posts about The Professor; Night Dawn Day, Un Café con Neleta (in Spanish) and Just Write Away post about Jane Eyre; La Tripartita (in Spanish) reviews Jane Eyre 2011; grande_caps posts lots of screencaps of Wuthering Heights 2009; Birdbrain(ed) Book Blog reviews The House of Dead Maids by Clare B. Dunkle; Calendar Customs uploads a video with the best moments of Haworth's Scroggling the Holly 2012.

And a classic one in a day like today, Anne Brontë's Music on Christmas Morning gets featured on little stars will shine.

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A Bright and Happy Christmas

We would like to wish a very happy Christmas to all readers of BrontëBlog. May you all 'greet with joy the glorious morn', as Anne Brontë would say. And may you find a little Brontë something or other in your stocking or under your tree. If not, remember you can always make a Christmas present to yourself by opening any Brontë book on your shelf.

Most important of all, though - may you spend your Christmas day as you love best in the company of your favourite people (dead or alive, fictional or real).

Merry Christmas!

Picture Source:
Victorian Christmas Card. Buday Archive. England. 19th century.
Victoria and Albert Museum

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Passion in Instability

Digital Spy recommends Wuthering Heights 2011 which will be broadcast next December 29th in the UK (Channel 4):

Far from your bog-standard Brontë adaptation, Fish Tank director Andrea Arnold brings a brutally poetic quality to this dark and often vicious romance. Skins star Kaya Scodelario and newcomer James Howson make less of an impression as the adult Cathy and Heathcliffe (sic) than their junior counterparts, but this is still a haunting, visually stunning and completely distinctive take on a familiar story. (Emma Dibdin)

The Australian talks about summer reads (it's difficult to imagine for a Northern hemisphere-based blog that it is summertime in Australia), including the ones of the Prime Minister Julia Gillard:

Like many politicians, Julia Gillard read Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln this year. Gillard also read Anna Funder's All That I Am, Peter Carey's The Chemistry of Tears and Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights (again). Gillard plans to read Funder's Stasiland, Chris Masters' Uncommon Solider and Peter FitzSimons's Eureka. (Troy Bramston)

Radiovisie announces the broadcast of the radio programme La Donna è Mobile in Klara Radio (Belgium) where the Brontës will be approached from a feminist perspective:

In La donna è mobile portretteert Joanna Van der Heyden in vier dagen 28 vrouwen uit de wereldgeschiedenis in een overvloedig radiofonisch decor met oude klankfragmenten en nieuwe geluidsbronnen. De titel van de reeks verwijst uiteraard naar La donna è mobile uit Rigoletto van Verdi, maar deze als vrouwonvriendelijk beschouwde aria wordt op een eigenzinnige manier geïnterpreteerd.
In elke aflevering van de vierdelige reeks worden zeven vrouwen met elkaar verbonden door één gedeelde passie: politiek, filosofie, kunst en wetenschappen. Leer de politieke belangstelling kennen van Catharina de Grote, Louise Michel of Rosa Luxemburg. Ontdek de feministische boodschap in het werk van de zusjes Brontë en de films van cineaste Loïs Weber.
Reis met Alexandra David-Néel naar Tibet of ga de andere richting uit met Jane Goodall en arriveer in Tanzania. Ontvang daarna van Bertha von Suttner de Nobelprijs voor de vrede en kom met Belle van Zuylen tot de conclusie dat het beter is de struikrovers te verkiezen boven de geregelde troepen.
* La donna è mobile, van 1 tot 4 januari van 17:00 tot 19:00 uur. (Translation)

The Sill of the World interviews the writer Kathryn Ionata:

HK: If you could choose any three authors, dead or alive, to meet with you to discuss literature and give you feedback on your writing, who would they be and why?
KI: I would definitely want Emily Brontë there. The passion she invokes in Wuthering Heights is unparalleled—not just romantic passion, but the story itself has an inherent passion in the instability of the characters. 

A Christmas event in Haworth reported in Keighley News; Girl in the Woods Reviews posts about the upcoming The Mist on Brontë Moor; Nyra Escribiendo reviews Agnes Grey (in Spanish); Dwie poważne damy posts about Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea in Polish; Fée Poussière and Le Loup Il a Un Avis Sur Tout... Heu Il a Surtout Un Avis (both in French) post about Wuthering Heights; Miladysboudoir has visited Oakwell Hall; Initials BB posts about Jane Eyre 1944; UrielArte (in Spanish) talks about Jane Eyre.

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