RadioTimes announces the broadcast tomorrow, March 31st 10.00 PM, on ITV (one hour later on ITV+1) of the
Perspectives episode about the Brontës:
Series 3-3. Perspectives: Sheila Hancock - The Brilliant Brontë Sisters
As a young girl, like many others, Sheila Hancock adored the romance of the Hollywood film Wuthering Heights. But years later she realised that Emily Brontë’s original story was a much darker affair exploring “the wild extremes of human obsession”.
Keen to learn more about the three spinsters who wrote books that she describes as “shocking, erotic and moving”, Hancock briskly dispels the myth that Emily, Charlotte and Anne never experienced the emotions they expressed so powerfully in their novels. These were not isolated, uneducated country girls who imagined love in order to write about it, she argues, and their writing was the only way for their voices to be heard.
But what touches her especially is learning how, after Emily and Anne died, a grief-stricken Charlotte continued their tradition of circling their dining table reading their work out loud to each other – but now she did it all on her own.
The actress explores the work of the 19th-century literary family, setting out to discover what inspired them to write such epic novels seemingly worlds apart from their own lives. On a journey that begins in the West Yorkshire village of Haworth, where the trio created most of their famous stories, Sheila makes a discovery among Charlotte's love letters to her married tutor Constantin Heger. She also heads to London's National Portrait Gallery to view the only surviving painting of the sisters all together, and visits the final resting place of Anne. (Jane Rackham)
Director ... Gareth Williams
Executive Producer ... Sarah Murch
The Guardian talks about the moderate success of the TV series
Call the Midwife in the US:
Set in 1950s east London, Call the Midwife has a distinctly different kind of British sensibility that is more loose and gritty than the escapist Downton. The comical images of midwives administering nitrous oxide to women in labor are something of a shock to US viewers schooled in images of a prim, Brontë-influenced British countryside. (Amanda Holpuch)
The
Yorkshire Evening Post interviews the new director of the West Yorkshire Playhouse, James Brining:
“When I was doing my A-levels I read all the time: poetry, Jane Eyre,” he says, “and I remember my nan said to me: ‘What are those books for? You can’t put books on your feet, lad.’
“In other words, get a proper job!” he laughs. Then he imitates a thick Leeds brogue: “She’d then say something like: ‘Get a job int’ bank. Mrs Rooks’s grandson’s got a job int’ bank at Halton Moor. You need to do that, lad!” That was her careers advice.” (Rod McPhee)
Financial Times takes a walk (literally) with Tara Fitzgerald:
Tara Fitzgerald arrives for our walk wearing a black woollen coat she later tells me she bought in Chelsea Girl 25 years ago. The sleeves are now six inches too short and her only other protection from what turns out to be unremitting rain is a long burgundy scarf. The star of Brassed Off, Sirens and the television series Waking the Dead is, however, perfectly dressed to audition for a windswept moor scene in Wuthering Heights. (Only later do I learn that the actress’s great-aunt, Geraldine Fitzgerald, appeared alongside Laurence Olivier in the famed 1939 film version.) (Jeremy Taylor)
Not the only Brontë connection of Tara Fitzgerald's as she starred in the 1996 BBC adaptation of
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and was Mrs Reed in
Jane Eyre 2006.
The Times 'recommends'
Jane Eyrotica by Karena Rose:
"Whenever you feel like criticising any one," Nick Carraway's father famously told him, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had." Advice that we should bear in mind before giving The Great Gatsby Unbound a drubbing? No, let's not. The book in question, by "F. Scott Fitzgerand and Karena Rose" is, heaven help us, an erotic retelling of the classic novel; if you missed those references to "cushioned lips" and "swelling breasts" in the original, you're in luck. Don't miss Jane Eyrotica by Rose (in collaboration with Charlotte Brontë, of course). Oy vey.
The
Wall Street Journal devotes an article to the curious case of Mary MacLane:
Mary MacLane was a genius. Or so she is swift to tell the reader in her 1902 memoir, "I Await the Devil's Coming." "You may gaze at and admire the picture in the front of this book," MacLane writes. "It is the picture of a genius—a genius with a good strong young woman's-body." MacLane compares herself to literary powerhouses like Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot and the once well-known diarist Marie Bashkirtseff. "They are all geniuses. And so, then, I am a genius—a genius in my own right." This grandiosity may border on farce, but many of her contemporary readers might have been inclined to agree. (Rachel Hurn)
The Australian reviews
The Railwayman's Wife by Ashley Hay:
Ani is offered a job by the Railways in meagre recompense for her loss, and she accepts, even though it is at Central Station in one of a network of lending libraries, hard by those machines that took the life of her spouse. There she reconnects with the novels and poems - from Jane Eyre, a work whose moralism and focus on the interior development of a young woman echoes this antecedent work, to the war poetry of Siegfried Sassoon - that first drew her to the railwayman. (Geordie Williamson)
Shang-Ting Peng writes in
Leeds-The City Talking about things she found weird after living in Leeds for several years:
I came to Leeds almost four years ago, this is the land of mysteries for me because I had never even been to the UK previously, the only image I had of this place is the foggy and windy scenery I imagine after reading Wuthering Heights at a young age.
Feministing remembers Adrienne Rich:
My re-reading of Rich’s work brought me to this quote I wish to share with you:
Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you…it means that you do not treat your body as a commodity with which to purchase superficial intimacy or economic security; for our bodies to be treated as objects, our minds are in mortal danger. It means insisting that those to whom you give your friendship and love are able to respect your mind. It means being able to say, with Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre: “I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.” (Syreeta)
El Cultural (Spain) reviews
Great Expectations 2012:
El arranque, embaucador, es apenas un espejismo. Cámara en mano, con determinación “realista”, pareciera que Newell buscara el pulso de Andrea Arnold cuando filmó sus Cumbres borrascosas (2011). Es decir, conjugar en presente indicativo un relato decimonónico como si se escenificara por primera vez. (Carlos Reviriego) (Translation)
Good Choice Reading interviews the writer Nicole Grotepas:
Who is your literary hero?
Tie between Jane Eyre and Ender Wiggin! They both have a strong moral code and
they honor it. Jane wavers, but she never gives in, and would rather be homeless than
compromise her integrity.
Coffee, books and lipgloss talks to another writer, Amy Harmon:
Books I Love? I'm pretty old school, I confess. Growing up, I loved Jane Eyre. I still do. It had everything - the brooding, sexy, leading man, the brave heroine, the forbidden love, and most of all, a happy ending. That's why I don't love Wuthering Heights. It doesn't have a happy ending. Life is full of bitter, tragic endings, so books need happily-ever-afters.
Lynn News remembers the performance of
The Full Brontë by the Scary Little Girls in the
Breckland Book Festival (Swafham Library, 7:30pm);
Edmund Prestwich posts about the poem
Wuthering Heights by Sylvia Plath;
Dilettante Artiste reviews
Wuthering Heights. Finally,
Hathaways of Haworth posts some pictures of still snowy Brontë country but with budding spring:
Visitors to Haworth will find the cobbles have been relaid and though work continues around it the Brontë Parsonage is also open. A lady dressed in Victorian clothing will be around on Mainstreet to give directions to the Parsonage.
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