Beyond Jane Eyre Strand at the Ilkley Literature Festival

This year's Ilkley Literature Festival contains a whole "Beyond Jane Eyre Strand" section

Mad Women in the Attic?
Date:Saturday 1st October
Time:7:30 pm
St Margaret's Hall

Any diagnosis of insanity is a kind of assertion of power, and, argues Ruth Robbins, Professor of English Literature at Leeds Beckett University, the 19th century novel shows just how often that power was used to control willful women. Join Professor Robbins, feminist academic Elizabeth Wilson and cultural historian Mike Jay as they unravel Charlotte Brontë’s complex approach to women and madness.

Charlotte Brontë in Ilkley walk
Date:Sunday 2nd October
Time:2:00 pm
Meet outside Rombalds Hotel

Includes tea and scones at Rombalds Hotel.
Join knowledgeable local historian Alex Cockshott for a guided walk tracing the visits Charlotte Brontë made to Ilkley and the town as she would have known it in the first half of the 19th century.

Charlotte Brontë's Villette: Guided Reading Group
6-7pm Mon 3, Wed 5, Mon 10 and Wed 12 October
Manor House Museum - Education Room

Following hugely popular reading groups in previous years, Dr Katy Mullin and Hannah Roche, from the School of English at the University of Leeds, offer an expert guide to Charlotte Brontë’s final novel Villette (1853), one of the most compelling psychological fictions of the 19th century. Explore themes including exile, alienation, surveillance and sexuality and discover what makes Lucy Snowe such a fascinating, often frustrating, narrator and unconventional heroine.
The price includes all four sessions, please retain your ticket for each session.
Sessions are timed to ensure you don’t miss other events. Details of what to study will be sent to participants. Copies of the text are available at The Grove bookshop.

Charlotte, the Caribbean and Slavery: Joe Williams and Emily Zobel Marshall
Date:Monday 3rd October
Time:7:45 pm
Ilkley Playhouse - Wildman

Charlotte Brontë, born nine years after the act which ended Britain’s role in the slave trade, was 17 when slavery itself was finally abolished. The issue was part of the national consciousness with numerous links between Yorkshire and the Caribbean, as Joe Williams, historian of African heritage in Yorkshire, has identified. Together, he and Dr Emily Zobel Marshall of Leeds Beckett University unpick Charlotte’s positioning at the time of abolition and reflect on Mr Rochester and Bertha’s Caribbean connections.

Tracy Chevalier in Conversation
Date:Tuesday 4th October
Time:7:30 pm
Christchurch on The Grove

Tracy Chevalier, author of seven previous novels including international bestseller Girl with a Pearl Earring, discusses her latest rich, brutal story At the Edge of the Orchard, set in the swamps of Ohio in 1838, in conversation with James Nash. They also explore Reader, I Married Him, the imaginative short story anthology Chevalier edited in celebration of Charlotte Brontë’s bicentenary, which asked leading women writers including Lionel Shriver, Helen Dunmore and Salley Vickers to take Jane Eyre’s famous words as a springboard.

FRINGE: Tracking the Brontës
Date:Thursday 6th October
Time:9:00 pm
Ilkley Playhouse - Wharfeside

All aboard a whistle-stop tour of places visited by the Brontës, with original songs from Eddie Lawler and soprano Charissa Hutchins. ‘Imaginatively, and beautifully told through stories, photographs and song, all set against the emergence of the railways’ Seven Arts.

The Other Victorians: Women Writers
Date:Saturday 8th October
Time:4:30 pm
Clarke Foley Centre - J.L.A

In the Victorian period 50,000 to 60,000 novels were published. Many were written by women but most of us can only name one or two titles by the Brontës or George Eliot. A large number of other women writers, including Harriet Martineau, Fanny Kemble, Mary Braddon, Ouida and Sarah Grand, experienced spectacular success. Laurie Garrison, author of Science, Sexuality and Sensation Novels, celebrates some of their achievements.

Reader, don't marry him!
Date:Saturday 8th October
Time:8:30 pm
Ilkley Playhouse - Wildman

Love them, hate them, bored by the whole furore? A no-holds barred public discussion where it’s your chance to come clean on how you feel about the Brontës and their leading characters. If your best friend told you she was going out with Mr Rochester, would you worry? Are there times you just want to tell Cathy to stop whingeing and get her act together? Do you secretly prefer Helen from The Tennant of Wildfell Hall? With expert input from author Rachel Joyce and Katy Mullin and Hannah Roche from the University of Leeds.

Uncovering Brontë Country: Ann Dinsdale
Date:Monday 10th October
Time:7:30 pm
Ilkley Playhouse - Wharfeside
The Brontës travelled widely across Yorkshire; we even know that Charlotte came to Ilkley. But where were the local places which inspired their writing? Ann Dinsdale, Principal Curator at the Brontë Parsonage Museum, gives an illustrated talk focusing on northern locations that feature in the novels of Charlotte and Emily Brontë.

Juliet Barker: Brontë Letters
Date:Tuesday 11th October
Time:7:30 pm
Ilkley Playhouse - Wharfeside

Juliet Barker, author of the definitive biography of the Brontës and a former curator and librarian of the Brontë Parsonage Museum at Haworth, draws on her new edition of their collected letters to explore how and why the spinster daughters of a Yorkshire parson came to write extraordinary books which scandalised their contemporaries, but became much-loved classics of English literature.

New Responses to the Brontës

Date:Saturday 15th October

Time:7:15 pm

Ilkley Playhouse - Wharfeside

To mark the 200th anniversary of Charlotte Brontë’s birth and the start of the Brontë 200 celebrations, Ilkley Literature Festival, together with Beverley Literature Festival and Off the Shelf, have commissioned three writers to produce new work inspired by the literary siblings. Guardian First Book Prize winner and Ilkley Lit Fest Poet in Residence Andrew McMillan draws on the life of Branwell; former Monkey Swallows The Universe singer/songwriter Nat Johnson uses song to explore how the three sisters impacted each other as individuals and as writers; while acclaimed playwright Zodwa Nyoni connects Charlotte with a 21st century teenager.

Join us for a performance of these new works followed by a discussion about the Brontës as a source of inspiration.

More information in the Ilkley Gazette.