Stiff, solemn and retrochic

The Guardian links what seemed impossible to link. The alleged photograph of some Brontës that the Daily Mail published the other day and the (in)famous heilness cover of The Sun :

Eighty-five years before the little girl in the kilt showed off for the camera at the instigation of her Nazi-sympathising uncle Edward three small, plain women sat stock still for a photographic portrait. Photography was a novelty in the late 1840s, just as home movies were in the mid-1930s, and its subjects were similarly warned about accommodating themselves to the demands of a new technology. While the princess jigs and jogs, the three women sit poker straight, for fear of blurring the long exposure. As a result, they look so stiff and solemn that they appear to be practising for death. Some, such as the Yorkshireman who bought the image on eBay for £15, are convinced it is the only known photograph of the Brontë sisters – Charlotte, Emily and Anne. (Kathryn Hughes)

The writer Joanne Briscoe tells her (literary) history in The Independent:

By 17, I was clearly mature: blasted by life’s experiences, bent low but still determined. So I began the adult masterpiece that was Roxanne. Roxanne was a quite remarkably beautiful schoolgirl. But also a semi-genius, unusually sensitive and, on later perusal, a raging snob. Her English teacher was in love with her, but they couldn’t have sex in a hotel as Roxanne’s author – by chance the same age as Roxanne – didn’t know anything about that. So the work was abandoned at the moment the heroine was waiting in bed for her Heathcliff, who seemed to have the first name “Mr”. Roxanne wore a nightie and a peach-coloured cardigan. Truly. No wonder Mr never ravished her.

Syl Saller defends the importance of women-only prizes in literature in The Guardian:

There is also a more subtle bias. Charlotte Brontë wrote more than 150 years ago, “to you I am neither man nor woman – I come before you as author only”. Yet in some ways nothing has changed. Eleanor Catton, the author of The Luminaries, which won the Booker prize, told the Guardian: “In my experience and that of a lot of women writers, all the questions coming at them from interviewers tend to be about how lucky they are … The interviews seldom engage with the woman as a serious thinker, a philosopher.”

A pity these Chinese students visited Howarth and not Haworth according to the Wharfedale & Airedale Observer:

They also enjoyed trips to York Minster and Castle Museum, Howarth and the Brontë Parsonage Museum, the National Coal Mining Museum, and West Yorkshire Sculpture Park. (Jim Jack)

 Haworth is much better.

This is what retro chic looks like, according to Cosmopolitan France:

Le 18 juillet, elle assistait à la projection du film Paper Towns (La face cachée de Margo) dans lequel joue sa copine Cara Delevingne et pour l'occasion, la petite soeur de Kim Kardashian a fait fort avec une robe magistrale qui donnait une allure d'héroïne sortie tout droit d'un livre d'Emily Brontë. (Translation)

We rather think not.

New York Times reviews the latest episode of Poldark:

While closing his mine, Francis scrawls “resurgam” on a post (trivia, it’s Helen’s epitaph in “Jane Eyre”). It means “I will rise again.” This probably won’t happen. Grim. (Sarah Seltzer)

Movie News Guide talks about Crimson Peak:

“Crimson Peak” will hold mystical, gothic touch to it. “Crimson Peak” movie is being compared to “Jane Eyre” and has something in common with “Jane Eyre” in Wasikowska. (Mradula Mahajan)

El Diario (Spain) reviews The Miniaturist:

En ella se pueden encontrar pinceladas de otros personajes célebres de la literatura como puede ser la Jane Eyre de Charlotte Brontë. (Carmen López) (Translation)

At night, my little lamp and book reviews The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.