The
BBC has launched a 'year-long campaign to get the nation reading' for 2016 which includes several Brontë items.
Across the year BBC Two and BBC Four will be celebrating the work of famous authors such as the Brontës and Rudyard Kipling, while Radio 4 will explore the work of figures such as Alex Garland, Toni Morrison and Jeanette Winterson. Get Reading will culminate in a Get Reading Weekend as the BBC, working in partnership with UK organisations to inspire everyone across the UK to read something new. [...]
Living Like a Brontë (BBC Two 1 x 60)
Journalist and broadcaster Martha Kearney, columnist and author Lucy Mangan and novelist Helen Oyeyemi travel to Haworth Parsonage, the home of the Brontë sisters, to discover the stories behind their classic novels, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey.
Just two years before these works were published prospects for the three unmarried sisters were looking bleak. Their brother was battling an alcohol-fuelled breakdown, Charlotte was suffering depression and their father was going blind. But by 1847 they were literary stars. How was it that Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë manages such a sudden and miraculous creative achievement, in the face of adversity?
With help from a range of experts, each presenter will explore one of the Brontës in fascinating detail. By re-living the sisters’ daily routines, visiting the key places in their world and immersing themselves in their letters and diaries, and through the sisters’ interactions with each they’ll discover what it was that served as their sources of inspiration.
Brontës at the BBC (BBC Four 1 x 60)
From Jane Eyre to Villette, this programme will dig deep into the BBC’s archive to explore the Brontes’ famous works and discover the fascinating lives these sisters lived during this remarkable period in literary history.
The Brontë sisters are among the most adapted writers in the BBC’s Archives, with each adaptation reinventing the works for a different era and a different TV generation. This archive-based programme will relive memorable performances from actors including Toby Stephens, Ruth Wilson, Timothy Dalton, Ian McShane, Tara Fitzgerald, Corin Redgrave, Claire Bloom and Rupert Graves. Moments from numerous documentaries about the sisters, fronted by presenters such as A.N. Wilson, Muriel Spark, Margaret Drabble, Joan Bakewell and Brian Redhead will also feature, along with a production of Jean Rhys’s Jane Eyre prequel, Wide Sargasso Sea and Sally Wainwright’s gender-swap version of Wuthering Heights.
To Walk Invisible: The Brontë Sisters (BBC One 1 x 120)
BBC One’s brand new drama - To Walk Invisible: The Brontë Sisters, written and directed by the multi-award-winning Sally Wainwright (Happy Valley, Last Tango In Halifax) - brings an original perspective to the life and work of the extraordinary Brontë sisters. Coming from obscurity to produce some of the greatest and most enduring classics of all time, with themes that shook the nation, Charlotte, Anne and Emily remain one the greatest literary mysteries in the world.
The drama revolves around the three sisters’ increasingly difficult relationship with their brother Branwell, who in the last three years of his life - following a tragically misguided love affair - sank into alcoholism, drug addiction and appalling behaviour. Life at home with the Brontës at this time was not a comfortable place to be, and yet from this environment sprang their remarkable literary output.
To Walk Invisible: The Brontë Sisters explores the siblings’ relationship not only with one another, but with their father, a clever and unusual man, who grew up in an impoverished home in rural Ireland, who educated himself, and who was happy to encourage his children - irrespective of their sex - to become passionate about literature and its possibilities. [...]
Programme credits [...]
Living Like A Brontë (BBC Two 1 x 60) - produced by Michael Poole for BBC Bristol Arts
Brontës at the BBC (BBC Four 1 x 60) - produced by Michael Poole for BBC Bristol Arts
To Walk Invisible: The Brontë Sisters (BBC One 1 x 120) - written and directed by Sally Wainwright. Faith Penhale, Head of BBC Drama Wales, is the executive producer and Karen Lewis is the producer for the BBC.
Coincidentally and according to
The Bookseller,
Schools minister Nick Gibb, today (17th November) challenged publishers to make 100 classic books available at low cost, so all pupils have the chance to read them.
Texts such as Great Expectations, Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre should be made available to secondary schools at reduced prices, Gibb said. (Natasha Onwuemezi)
Schools Week quotes him verbatim:
“I want every secondary school to have a stock of classics such as Great Expectations, Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre so that whole classes across the country can enjoy them together.” (John Dickens)
Speaking of the classics, The PanAm Post's
The Canal features
Don Quixote and highlights the fact that
The literary innovations of Zayas, Lafayette, Voltaire, Swift, Defoe, Goethe, Poe, Flaubert, Brontë, Twain, and Cortázar are all difficult to imagine without a certain soldier turned slave turned writer named Cervantes. (Eric Clifford Graf)
And according to
Publimetro (Mexico)
Jane Eyre is one of literature's most powerful women in eight books not to be missed.
6. Jane Eyre, 'Jane Eyre'
Un clásico de Charlotte Brontë que toda mujer amante de la literatura debe leer. Jane Eyre es una novela con uno de los personajes femeninos más complejos, fuertes e inspiradores. Esta es una de las primeras novelas feministas y un clásico que te cautivará. (Translation)
Booktopia Blog interviews Debra Adelaide, author of
The Women's Pages:
Congratulations, you have a new book. What is it about and what does it mean to you?My novel The Women’s Pages is based on a short story of mine that introduced two characters in a multilayered story about loss, silences, relationships between mothers and daughters, and above all about the power of the written word.
It’s based loosely on Wuthering Heights, which presents numerous themes big and small, but particularly for me is very much about storytelling, given the novel’s many intriguing narrative layers. I’ve not rewritten that extraordinary novel by any means, but simply responded to its elements and especially leapt into some of its most compelling imagined spaces, such as the unspoken, untold, age-old story of the mother and daughter dynamic. Wuthering Heights features only absent, silent, missing, dead or dying mothers: The Women’s Pages is partly about finding or restoring mothers to a narrative. (...)
Unlikely Scenario: You’ve been charged with civilising twenty ill-educated adolescents but you may take only five books with you. What do you take and why?
Wuthering Heights, of course: this is a no-brainer given the context of my new book, but also because it is one of those novels that can bear endless re-readings, and one that for all its mysteries and even frustrations, has the capacity to speak across the generations. And then the characters are so bold and wild and wilful and out there, which I imagine might strike a chord. And finally because it can and should be read aloud, so I imagine sitting down reading this novel to commence the civilising process with some sense of community and even ritual.
The Huffington Post includes the recent discovery of a couple of unpublished manuscripts by Charlotte Brontë on a list of recent literary finds.
Broadway World announces that the National Youth Theatre's production of
Wuthering Heights is closing soon.
Bustle has selected the cover artwork created by Ruben Toledo for a Penguin edition of
Jane Eyre as one of '18 Modern Redesigns Of Classic Book Covers That Will Make You Want To Read Them Again'.
Deutschlandradio Kultur (Germany) features
Wide Sargasso Sea. The Brontë Sisters continues reading Claire Harman's biography of Charlotte Brontë and not agreeing with it: today's case in point is whether Charlotte ever used - or not - opium/laudanum.
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