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Tuesday, September 20, 2016

Tuesday, September 20, 2016 10:53 am by Cristina in , , , , , , , ,    No comments
Keighley News seems excited about a new take on Villette going on stage this weekend at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds as part of the Brontë season.
A daring re-imagining of Charlotte Brontë’s ground-breaking last novel Villette is being staged in Leeds.
The play, written by Linda Marshall Griffiths, opens at the West Yorkshire Playhouse on Saturday, September 24 and runs until October 15.
Villette is the centrepiece of the Playhouse’s Brontë which offers contemporary responses to the Brontë sisters across performance, dance and music.
The new play is said to remain true to Charlotte’s into longing and loneliness while exploring the kind of woman its central character Lucy might be today and in the future.
A Playhouse spokesman said many people considered Villette to be better, more ambitious and complex than Charlotte’s more famous novel Jane Eyre.
Linda Marshall Griffiths has approached’ novel from a 21st century perspective, focusing on around Lucy Snowe, a brilliant virologist who could play a crucial role in finding a cure for a pandemic virus but is plagued by her a past which torments her at every turn.
As the urgency and burden of her work grow greater, she grapples with the promise and possibility of love and the fear of losing it.
Director Mark Rosenblatt said: ‘This re-imagining of Villette gets to the heart of the original novel but finds a way to connect it with a modern audience.
“It relocates and updates the action to a near-future world, placing Lucy in a position of isolation and distance as the last survivor of her kind - as Charlotte Bronte was the last of her siblings when she wrote Villette.”
The Brontë Season includes a work-in-progress performance of Wasted (October 20-22), a new musical drama about the Brontës; Tiny Shoes, an audio drama available at the Brontë Parsonage Museum and online; readings Brontë letters; panel discussion; and the digital project Know Your Place featuring stories of defiance. (David Knights)
Smithsonian recommends visiting the exhibition on Charlotte Brontë at the Morgan Library, with special emphasis on the manuscript of Jane Eyre.
How did Charlotte Brontë go from scribbling in secret to one of England’s (and literature’s) most famous names? Look for the answer in a passage in Jane Eyre, in which her famously plain heroine tells her husband-to-be that she is a “free human with an independent will.” That bold declaration is at the center of a new exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York—one that celebrates the author’s 200th birthday with a look at the forces that turned her into a writer.
Brontë has been at the center of literary legend since her first published novel, Jane Eyre, appeared under a pseudonym in 1847. The book was immediately loved and loathed for emotions that flew in the face of convention and courtesy, and the identity of its author became a much-contested question. But even after Brontë was discovered to be the person behind the pen name Currer Bell, myths about her childhood, her family members and the atmosphere in which she became an author have persisted.
The popular image of the Brontë sisters and their brother Branwell—all of whom died before they turned 40—has long been one of Gothic isolation and tragic pathos. But those ideas are far from true, and the Morgan’s exhibition Charlotte Brontë: An Independent Will grounds Charlotte’s brief life in objects from her everyday world. From miniature manuscripts she wrote as a child to her drawings, paintings, letters and clothing, the exhibition is full of clues as to how a parson’s daughter living in Yorkshire could become a worldly and bold author.
At the center of the exhibition is a handwritten manuscript of Jane Eyre, Brontë’s most famous novel, which is in the United States for the first time. It is open to the passage in which its heroine, a poor and plain governess, reminds her would-be lover that “I am a bird, and no net ensnares me.” She refuses to marry Edward Rochester, a wealthy landowner, unless he accepts her as an equal and not a subordinate. That fiery sentiment was echoed by Brontë herself. In an era in which women of her station were expected to be governesses or teachers, she aspired to be a novelist. And even when her work gained fame, she challenged her readers to judge her by her output and not her gender. (Erin Blakemore)
We don't really know what The Guardian means:
Now, in a response to the recent re-establishment of “Brontë Land” on the other side of the Pennines, Wordsworth is leading a comeback for Cumbrian literary tourism, reminding visitors that if it was not for his work, and that of his fellow Lakeland Poets, we might never have felt so strongly about one of England’s most dramatic natural landscapes. (Vanessa Thorpe)
Recent re-establishment? Hasn't it been there for nearly two centuries?

Lithub lists A True Novel by Minae Mizumura among '10 Giant Translated Novels that Make a Mockery of “Subway Reading"'.
This transplantation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights to postwar Japan became an immediate success upon its English translation in 2013, with the New York Times proclaiming it a “fascinating meditation on cultural borrowing and the dislocation of modernity.” The book begins with a prologue featuring the author herself as the main character, and from there it becomes a love story, set amid an investigation into what happened to Japan’s culture after the country was savaged in World War II. This book’s arrival in the States marked the long overdue English-language debut for one of Japan’s most interesting and prominent contemporary authors. (Scott Esposito)
Ghost Cult reviews the music album Realms by Darkher.
The Chelsea Wolfe-esque intonations of project founder Jayn H. Wissenberg arrive early in second track ‘Hollow Veil’: brief opening segment ‘Spirit Waker’ eliciting more of those Wuthering Heights-styled atmospheres. Possessing a fuller and more expansive sound than previously, exquisite drum patterns and sparse yet heady riffs crash into the swells whilst Wissenberg’s blissfully harmonic, touching voice laments in the foreground. (Keefy)
Buzzfeed Books lists '13 Of Your Favorite Books If Their Titles Were Honest'. Jane Eyre's actually name should be 'Always Ask about Their Ex'. Diario Vasco (Spain) features the new film Lady Macbeth and points to the fact that it was shot on the moors that inspired the Brontë sisters. The Guardian tells the poignant story of a young Syrian refugee now living in Germany who enjoys listening to classic audiobooks such as Jane Eyre. The Brussels Brontë Blog looks at translations of The Professor in Russian and Ukrainian. The Brontë Parsonage Blog has a guest poster write about Tracy Chevalier and Jessie Bruton's talk at the Parsonage on September 10th.

Finally, an alert from the Springfield, Missouri:
The Library Center, 4653 S. Campbell Ave.
Springfield, MO
"The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" by Anne Brontë
Books You Always Meant to Read
7 p.m. in the Harrison Room for adults.
A classics book discussion.

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