The extraordinary voice of Lucy Snowe

The York Press reminds readers that this is the last weekend that Villette is on stage at the West Yorkshire Playhouse.

"This re-imagining of Villette gets to the heart of the original novel but finds a way to connect it with a modern audience," says director Mark Rosenblatt, the Playhouse associate director.
"Linda has taken a big bold step with the novel, using a distinct new setting as a way to release the novel's passion and turbulence for a contemporary audience. Relocating and updating the action to a near-future world, Linda has found an extraordinary new way to imagine Charlotte’s Lucy Snowe as an isolated and distanced woman fighting for a place in society. Linda makes Lucy the last survivor of her kind, as indeed the grieving Charlotte Brontë was when she wrote Villette."
Linda, who moved to York from Hebden Bridge seven months ago, recalls a conversation with Mark. "We were talking about things and he said, 'What do you think of Villette?', and I said, 'I love it'. I read it again and loved it even more," she says.
"Often people love Jane Eyre more, but I think in many ways Villette is better. It's a book with an unreliable narrator; a structure that George Eliot followed. Jane Eyre is another one too. It's a similar story: a woman writing after losing all her family; Branwell, Emily and Anne had all died, so Charllotte had survived this terrible thing, and that's all in the book, as are ghosts."
Linda introduces cloning into her interpretation of Villette. "I don't think I have abandoned the book," she says. "It feels very close to the book. It has the extraordinary voice of Lucy Snowe and that's something that I've written boldly in my play.
"It's an imagined world that I'm writing about so it's all up for grabs. You want it to be fun, with magical technology in there, so you have to make it a bold play, in the way that Charlotte was bold." (Charles Hutchinson)

More things happening this weekend: Andrea Arnold's new film is American Honey but News Four (Ireland) alerts readers to the fact that her take on Wuthering Heights can been seen this Sunday too.

Arnold’s impressive but bleak 2011 adaptation of Wuthering Heights screens in the Irish Film Institute on Sunday. (Eric Hillis) 

The screening will take place at the Irish Film Institute, October 16th at 15:10h.

The Telegraph mentions the film as well:

Her 2011 adaptation of Wuthering Heights was a rain-lashed, elemental spell of a film in which an outcast (and unambiguously dark-skinned) Heathcliff seeks solace in a love affair with his adoptive sister. (Robbie Collin)

A previous screen adaptation of Wuthering Heights, Jacques Rivette's Hurlevent,  is also in the news today as Yahoo! Movies reports:

Charles S. Cohen’s Cohen Media Group has acquired North American distribution rights to 10 features by French New Wave driving force Jacques Rivette for release by the Cohen Film Collection, Charles S. Cohen, CMG chairman and CEO, announced Thursday. [...]
The titles include 1984’s “Love on the Ground,” with Geraldine Chaplin and Jane Birkin, Emily Brontë adaptation “Wuthering Heights” (1985) and maybe the two most acclaimed of Rivette’s later films, “The Gang of Four,” about four young female drama students, and the four-hour “The Beautiful Troublemaker” (aka “La Belle Noiseuse”), starring Michel Piccoli as a painter newly-inspired by his young model (Emmanuelle Béart), which was reworked by Rivette in a two-hour version, “Divertimiento.” (John Hopewell)

And Kate Bush's musical approach to the novel is mentioned in a BBC article on '12 more songwriters worthy of the Nobel Prize in Literature'.

Ever since Kate Bush’s youthful breakthrough with Wuthering Heights in 1978, her lyrics have had a consciously literary character. Whether she is channeling Emily Brontë or James Joyce, or spinning purely from her own imagination, from 1985’s Cloudbusting to 2005’s King Of The Mountain, Bush is an extraordinary, vivid storyteller. (Arwa Haider)

The Sundance Times wonders about the British equivalent of the 'Great American Novel'.

Thinking about the Great American Novel got me wondering: do we have such a concept back home? It seems to be a peculiarly American idea and a British version is not something that has ever crossed my radar, but a study was performed not long ago to see if such a thing could be found.
82 book critics were asked to vote. The catch was that not a single one of them was from the UK.
What they came up with didn’t surprise me, because it was packed to the brim with the classics. Topping the list were Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens and Virginia Woolf, with first place going to Middlemarch by George Eliot, a study of a Victorian town and how the community shapes the destinies of its characters. If any novel were to capture a moment in time and the people living within it, I will admit that Middlemarch is a strong choice. [...]
When I was a youngster, you see, she told me that reading is the surest way to open the mind and expand the intellect; she was determined I be familiar with all the classics by the time I was grown. On that basis, I waded through what seemed like a never-ending pile of thick tomes.
Of course, what I actually wanted to read was Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and Roald Dahl. While I could understand the words, I didn’t comprehend the plots of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre.
At that age, the subtleties were somewhat lost on me. I recall, at age six, being startled by an assertion in Black Beauty that the ostler hadn’t had a drink for five years – wasn’t he awfully thirsty by now? (Sarah Pridgeon)

Musical Toronto finds a Brontëite in Gemma New, Steeltown’s Hamilton Philharmonic Music Director.

The three books that you read that made an impact on you in your formative years?While growing up I enjoyed a range of books: fantasy (J. R. R. Tolkien, Phillip Pullman, J.K. Rowling or Brian Jacques), non-fiction (I loved National Geographic, or books like The Theory of Everything by Stephen Hawking) and I also loved English novels by authors like Jane Austin [sic], Thomas Hardy, and Emily Brontë.

The Huffington Post finds treasures in old books including a

Postcard of Haworth Church and Sunday School in 1939.
Printed and published by Walter Scott. This picture is the actual view from the Brontë Parsonage. Pretty cool! (Louise Verity)

See the picture here.

Keighley News tells the story of a TARDIS replica made 'by James Hogg, Romana Hogg, Stephen Hogg, Anna Richards and Mark Davis using recycled wood from the set of the recently-filmed Brontë drama To Walk Invisible.' Book by Book posts about Wuthering Heights.