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Thursday, December 10, 2015

Thursday, December 10, 2015 12:11 pm by Cristina in , , , , , , ,    No comments
Although it was nearly a given, Santa Barbara Independent reports that,
Randall House Rare Books is pleased and proud to have successfully completed negotiations for the sale of two unpublished Charlotte Brontë manuscripts to the Bronte Society in England.
Several sites review the screening of Sally Cookson's stage adaptation of Jane Eyre:
I was unsure what exactly to expect of the National Theatre's production of Jane Eyre, streamed live to the Exeter Picturehouse on Tuesday evening.
However, having caught a preview earlier, I had one word firmly in mind: Experimental.
And with a running time of almost three and a half hours, my second thought was: Long.
Neither of those prospects were filling me with much joy, I have to be honest; following a full day at work I feared my attention might not be up to the task.
But five minutes into the production and those words had been replaced by another: Masterpiece.
What a breathtakingly surprising piece of work. (Echo_Bridget in Express & Echo)
After almost 170 years, Charlotte Brontë's story of the trailblazing Jane Eyre is as inspiring as ever. This bold and dynamic production uncovers one woman's fight for freedom and fulfillment on her own terms. (The Islands' Sounder)
Given the changing roles for other actors, Madeleine Worrall, who plays Jane throughout the play, is therefore the only constant in the whole production.
She is formidable, going from a very believable scared-yet-wronged child to being utterly convincing as a damaged yet resolute young woman. And it is in her scenes with Rochester, her employer at Thornfield Hall, with whom she shares an almost elemental chemistry, that this production really comes to life.
Both their performances reach another level of intensity when they are on stage together, frequently building to displays of soul-baring honesty. It is here too that the play becomes a good vessel for some of the very powerful language of the original novel, lifted at times word-for-word – it works perfectly.
The length of the play in fact works very well with the expanded vision Sally Cookson has for the story, which she explains in a short film at the interval.
Giving equal weight to different periods of Jane's life, with great use of music, actors and atmosphere, a unique view on a classic story has been crafted here. The ending is an ingenious mirror of the beginning, and because of the sheer length and scope of what has come in between, it is incredibly moving to watch.
Over its long runtime, this Jane Eyre transforms into a powerful knock-out punch of a production, one that you're still reeling from, emotionally and intellectually, when the final curtain falls. (Alex Nicholson in Nottingham Post)
It’s not a straight adaptation of the Charlotte Brontë novel, nor a musical, so much as an improvisation on its themes, with extended examination of what made Jane what she was.
It was fascinating to watch Madeleine Worrall’s Jane grow in confidence and courage through a childhood of neglect into an independent-minded young woman determined not to confine herself “to making puddings and embroidering cushion covers.” [...]
The words came last, and at times a rather poor last, patched up with rather un-Bronte banalities. But as soon as Felix Hayes’s Rochester enters, as daunting physically as he is in his grumpy cynicism, the text switches to something like Charlotte’s own words, and it is as if we have switched from black-and-white to colour.
The music by the Bower brothers Benji and Will was rather a mixed-bag too. Before the interval some great songs, beautifully performed by Melanie Marshall, were so well-integrated that the action didn’t miss a beat.
In a disappointingly flat second half that failed to move me, however, there were rather too many tedious passages in which it seemed someone had just told the musicians to fill in for 60 bars without making a noise. (Colin Davison in Gloucestershire Echo)
Sensacine (Spain) interviews film director Paula Ortiz about her latest film La novia, an adaptation of Federico García Lorca's Bodas de Sangre.
Algunas secuencias de La novia recuerdan a las de Romeo y Julieta de de Baz Luhrmann. De hecho, también comparte con ella esas ganas de redescubrir textos clásicos. ¿Era Luhrmann un referente que tenía en la cabeza al rodar la película? A Baz Luhrmann no lo tenía en mente, pero sí que revisé el Jane Eyre de Cary Joji Fukunaga. Un clásico victoriano en el que Fukunaga, uno de mis directores favoritos, imprimía su perspectiva, y hacía algo parecido a lo de Luhrmann. Espero que La novia sirva para abrir el mundo apabullante que tiene Lorca. Hay una generación que conoce su personaje, pero no tanto sus obras. (Xavi Sánchez Pons) (Translation)
Palimpsestes. Revue de traduction (France) uses a French translation of Jane Eyre as an example of a bad translation.
Le deuxième exemple présente un taux de disparition plus marqué. Il s’agit de l’une des traductions françaises de Jane Eyre. Si le premier chapitre est traduit intégralement, les chapitres suivants présentent des omissions, plus ou moins importantes. Il s’agit parfois d’une phrase ou deux, mais souvent d’un ou de plusieurs paragraphes. L’analyse du dixième chapitre, par exemple, révèle l’absence de trois grands passages : une suite de 102 lignes, puis une de 36 lignes, puis une de 140 lignes. (Lance Hewson) (Translation)
Bangalore Mirror discusses the importance of ghost stories.
Then the colonial influence of the Victorian era in England seeped in and the Indian form of ghost stories morphed from being mythological to plain and simple fictional. In England, ghosts proliferated most obviously in fiction - as well as on stage, in photographs and in drawing room scenes. Christopher Marlowe's Dr Faustus, Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights and Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre called upon the gothic culture. (Durba Ghosh)
While the Catalonian edition of El País (Spain) mentions how locations are key to several novels such as
la boira de Londres a l’obra de Dickens, amb les terres ermes d’Emily Brontë, amb les landes de Thomas Hardy, amb el Pacífic de Herman Melville. (Ponç Puigdevall) (Translation)
Chicago Tribune finds a Brontëite in a local cosmetics store manager.
Q: Do you have a favorite book?
A: Any of the Brontë books. I like period books, the classics. (Kimberly Fornek)
The Telegraph analyses with graphs and all the latest poll on the greatest British books, with particular attention to the fact that many of them are by women writers.

Finally, on a personal note, this has made us laugh. From The Rogersville Review:
OH! I did finally achieve some measure of intellectualism this year when I was quoted in a famous literary site entitled “Brontë Blog.” I screamed and jumped up and down. Then I slipped and fell and banged my shin. Ha! So, I was a true Connecticut intellectual for roughly ... say ... five seconds. HA! Yep, life is just exactly the way I want it to be! (Teresa Kindred)

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