Hell with English names

Keighley News has a short account of the Brontë Society in Manchester. Given the frail state of affairs in the Brontë Society we would have eschewed the play on words of the headline: 'Questionable' activities by the Brontë Society in Haworth and Manchester.

The 'Woman Question’ attracted Brontë scholars and literature enthusiasts from around the world to Manchester to mark Jane Eyre author Charlotte’s 200th anniversary.
Speakers presented a variety of papers on the position of women in the mid-19th century including feminist author and keynote speaker Germaine Greer.
The ‘Woman Question’ was a hot topic in the mid-1800s when the Brontë sisters were writing their famous novels.
Speakers explored Charlotte’s response to the issue in her own writing during the conference at the Midland Hotel last month.
Kitty Wright, executive director of the Brontë Society, said the successful conference attracted 120 Brontë scholars and literature enthusiasts from around the globe.
She said: “Delegates heard papers on a fascinating range of topics including Charlotte’s early writing, her time in Brussels and a bold and slightly controversial interpretation of Jane Eyre by Germaine Greer.
“It was a very stimulating weekend and we are already looking ahead to our conference in 2018 to celebrate Emily’s bicentenary.”
The event also saw the launch of a new book published by the Brontë Society to mark the bicentenary, entitled Celebrating Charlotte Brontë and written by Christine Alexander and Sara L Pearson.
The book can be bought from the Brontë Parsonage Museum shop in Haworth.
The Brontë Parsonage Museum will host a talk entitled Charlotte And The Woman Question on Tuesday (September 6) at 2pm. The talk is free with admission to the museum. (David Knights)

More on the Tiny Shoes audioplay in Keighley News:

Visitors to Haworth can put on earphones and get involved in a Brontë-inspired radio production set in the village.
Tiny Shoes allows people to listen to the story of a married woman reflecting on her troubled personal life during a visit to the Brontë Parsonage Museum.
The unique 'audio experience’ is part of the West Yorkshire Playhouse’s new Brontë season, which also includes a new stage version of Charlotte's novel Villette and a rock musical about her family.
Crossflatts woman Emma Adams, writer of Tiny Shoes, was inspired by her time working as a tourist guide at the Brontë Parsonage Museum 25 years ago, while aged 21.
She said: “The main character Carrie was inspired by one woman in particular that I met while doing a guide. She came to visit the Parsonage, we got talking and her story was incredible.
“I had started doing some research into the Brontës and when approached to write this audio drama I thought, ‘wow, brilliant, that sounds ace’. I have a history of doing unusual things such as headphone shows.
“Tiny Shoes is a 20-minute audio experience and very different from a radio play because you are asking the audience to listen in a certain environment.
“When we go to a play, we go into a dark room and what’s happening on stage is important. With this audio drama you go outside the Parsonage and walk down to the graveyard.
“You experience Carrie’s journey. You are in the play. At the same time, it will really work for people as a radio play.”
Emma was prepared to be compared to the Brontës because of her Haworth story. She said: “You have expect it if you choose to use that source of material. It did cross my mind a few times and I thought, ‘Blimey!’.
"You do have to acknowledge them, do your research, be really really aware of them – and then have fun."
“One of the things I wanted to do was reference the novels. When those books came out they really, really shocked people.
“The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, for instance, was an amazing book in which a character leaves her husband because he is being abusive. Absolutely astonishing. Their novels were ahead of their time so people were freaked out but drawn to them.
“I thought it was important to tell a story in Tiny Shoes, not one that is necessarily immediately comfortable. They had transgressive female characters and had the audience going, ‘I still care about you’.
“There may be some people in the audience for Tiny Shoes who go ‘she’s an awful character and I can’t forgive all she has done’ and others who say the opposite.”
Visitors to the Parsonage can buy Tiny Shoes at the cash desk for £3, with a returnable deposit for the equipment. Tiny Shoes is also available at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds, offer download at wyp.org.uk/events/tiny-shoes. (David Knights)

Montana Standard has an article on Montana Repertoire Theatre's Brontë to the Future.

The play begins with during the Brontes' lifetime – they were born in the early 1800s and lived through the mid portion of that century.
It then fast-forwards to the future, where characters like Jane of "Jane Eyre" and Catherine tell their stories with contemporary spins, said director John Kenneth DeBoer, an associate professor of theater at UM.
He said the script follows the novels' darker feeling of gothic romance and brooding that's just below the surface. When it flashes forward to the future, "there's a clash there." He said brooding desire for contemporary teens is more on the surface. The contemporary versions of the characters "share quite a bit."
DeBoer said enjoys the way Dean "writes really powerful female characters who are honest with their emotions and also tend to pursue desire in a really active way," he said. "I think he's really great with snappy dialogue and with tempo and rhythm and pacing."
"The way his writing reads on the page of tells you how it's going to have to be performed on the stage, and as a director that's something I really appreciate," he said.

Los Angeles Review of Books takes a look at schools in literature:

Mrs. Goddard’s school in (Jane Austen's) Emma is harmless, benign, but hardly a place of stimulation or development, and the schools in Dickens’s and the Brontës’ works are far worse. [...]
Villette, perhaps my favorite Charlotte Brontë novel, renders the school from the point of view of a teacher frustrated by the sheer ignorance and lack of curiosity of her students. One is struck, reading Villette, by the paradox of the tightness of the school’s social constrictions and yet the fact of its being a place where a young woman of little means might meet a man of extraordinary character and intellect. Brontë’s protagonist, though she is a teacher rather than a student, is engaged above all in a struggle for her own autonomy, one in which the school’s owner is as much an enemy as the obtuse bourgeois schoolgirls who stare at her so blandly across their desks. (Jenny Davidson)

A bookish anecdote told by Mexican writer Carmen Boullosa is quoted by T13 (Chile).

Yo me acuerdo que mi librero, cuando yo era jovencita, por supuesto que tenía a Donoso, García Márquez, Cortázar, Reinaldo Arenas. Muchísimos varones en español. Y tenía muchas autoras de otros idiomas: Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, Anaïs Nin, Emily Brontë, que habían alcanzado el prestigio literario para llegar al inocente librero de una jovencísima escritora. (Translation)

Yesterday saw the launch of a previous unpublished story by Beatrix Potter, The Tale of Kitty-in-Boots, and on Interlochen Public Radio Maureen Corrigan states that,

In its own quaint way, Potter's landscape is every bit as Gothic as the Brontës'.

According to an interview in The Telegraph, actor Richard Coyle is the actual star of Franco Zeffirelli's Jane Eyre.

When he heard that Franco Zeffirelli was filming an adaptation of Jane Eyre near his parents’ house in Derbyshire, Coyle auditioned as a non-speaking extra. “I was the footman, and a coach passenger, and one of the horse grooms, and all sorts,” he says. “I’m all over that film. It’s hilarious.”
He soon talked his way into a speaking part. “I basically made a nuisance of myself,” he explains. “I started talking to all the actors, and to Zeffirelli one day. I was saying, ‘Look, I’m going to be going to drama school, have you got any advice?’ Zeffirelli took a shine to me, and said, ‘I’ll give you a role. I want you to be running along here, and I want you to shout this line’… And that was my first on-screen line, in anything.”
Can he still remember the line? “I can indeed. ‘Mr Rochester, your house is on fire, sir.’ It’s not a bad first line for a career.” (Tristram Fane Saunders)

And on to another adaptation of Jane Eyre as Chron looks at the best ratings of films starring Michael Fassbender on Rotten Tomatoes:

84% Jane Eyre (2011)
Cary Fukunaga directs a fiery and elegant adaptation, while Mia Wasikowska delivers possibly the best portrayal of the title character ever - though Fassbender is no slouch as the aloof Rochester.

Bustle looks at the history of some of the key elements of a marriage proposal.

Pope Innocent III declared that there had to be a waiting period between wanting to get married and being able to do it legally "so that if legitimate impediments exist, they may be made known". (Impediments, as we all know from Jane Eyre, usually consisted of there being previous wives and husbands still living.) (JR Thorpe)

Patricia Park has written an article on the exhibition Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible for Catapult in which she mentions her novel Re Jane.

As a writer who spent almost a decade tinkering with her first novel, Re Jane, and is now at work on her second, I could not help but view “Unfinished” through the lens of writing and editing. As they say, a manuscript is never actually finished; it’s wrestled out of the writer’s hands by her editor. I found myself drawing continual parallels between painting and writing. [...]
In Mengs’s painting, the “template” is there: the familiar seated portrait pose, along with markers of class, society, and times: the subject’s dress, the gold objects, the lapdog, even. It’s an artistic approach I understand, as I also leaned on a classic scaffolding for my novel—I used the structure of Charlotte Brontë’s novel, Jane Eyre, to tell the story of a mixed-race Korean orphan named Jane Re. I painted a portrait not of Victorian England or eighteenth-century continental Europe, but the worlds I knew: Flushing, Queens and Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn at the turn of the millennium.
But templates do not a novel—nor painting—make. [...]
It is difficult to nail a character portrait on the first, or even tenth, try. Specific subject details—a facial expression, a verbal tic, a particularly wrought—or laconic—syntax—are what invite us as viewers, as readers, to relate to a character’s journey, but they can also be the most difficult for an artist to capture. The Duchess may very well have undergone a number of iterations, just as my protagonist Jane did—and not just cosmetic ones. Jane’s voice was in my head, but in early drafts I could not translate it to the page. At one point I sent Jane off to a boarding school—hewing closely to the template of Jane Eyre—only to find she came back a little too all-knowing, her dialogue a little too bookish; she had no room to grow. So I, too, had to scrape away that version, among other failed attempts. I brought her back to Queens, and the course of the novel became her journey of “getting out” and discovering her identity along the way. [...]
Similarly, the scaffolding of Jane Eyre—a novel broken down in three volumes—follows an Aristotelian three-act structure. Jane’s narrative is peripatetic, but what happens to her is not random or episodic; there is a purpose to each leg of her journey. Re Jane has a similar structure: Part I is Jane leaving Queens for Brooklyn, Part II is Jane’s travels to Seoul to learn more about her family’s roots, and Part III is Jane’s return home with a renewed sense of self-identity.
As I rounded out the context in which Jane grew up, I found something odd happening: That carefully calibrated portrait I’d created of her was beginning to change. I pushed back the original time period by a decade in order to more accurately reflect the more conservative views of mixed-race children in Korean society. Jane now came of age in the pre-internet era; her New York growing up was one of graffitied subways with broken windows, not of rising condo prices and farm-to-table restaurants. There was a continual back and forth—as Jane’s “background” shifted, so too did her persona, and I found myself continually writing, scrapping, and rewriting anew.

The Irish Times' columnist The Guyliner lists Wuthering Heights as one of his comfort reads.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
Still kind of hoping that one day I’ll reread this and find the older Cathy survives after all.

The Monthly (Australia) has a transcript of the inaugural Boisbouvier Lecture, given by Richard Flanagan at the Melbourne Writers Festival, who quoted Dante Gabriel Rossetti's words on the novel:

Reading Wuthering Heights, Dante Gabriel Rossetti observed, “The action takes place in Hell, but the places, I don’t know why, have English names.”

College Magazine suggests reading it to pass the time during hurricane Hermine.

Curl up by the flashlight with a thrilling novel. The weather outside may remind you of Wuthering Heights, so pick up Brontë’s novel if you want a classic. By the time you finish, you’ll still confuse the family trees from the book and still have no idea when the power will come back. (Celina Pelaez)

Wuthering Heights appears to be Miss Jalisco's favourite novel according to Entorno Digital.

Spenborough Guardian reports that St Saviour’s Church in Brownhill, Batley will be open as part of Heritage Open Weekend on September 10-11 and recalls the fact that,

Charlotte Brontë’s friend Ellen Nussey, who lived nearby, worshipped at the church.

The Edge of the Precipice sums up chapter 24 of Jane Eyre.