Not defined by their deaths

Have you seen the clips from To Walk Invisible yet? Daily Express quotes Sally Wainwright speaking about the production.

“I recently watched the 1970s drama serial about the Brontës, and they all spoke extremely correctly, posh and stiff, as if they’d been to drama school,” she told Radio Times. “Certainly they would have known correct grammar, but they would most definitely have had a Yorkshire accent and used local phrases.
“We’ve got books that have dialect in them, but we don’t know how accurate they are, so I’ve had to be quite inventive with the use of language, because I desperately wanted to get away from making it sound like just another period piece.”
She added: “The BBC approached me about five years ago to do something for the bicentennial of Charlotte’s birth in 1816. They wanted a biopic, and it could have been a full series, but I wanted to focus on the Brontës as mature adults, so I chose the three-year period leading up to Branwell Brontë’s death in 1848.
“The tragic aspect of the Brontës – three of the siblings died within ten months of one another – has always been a draw, but in this film I really didn’t want them to be defined by their deaths.” (Shaun Kitchener)

The Yorkshire Evening Post features The Kings Arms pub in Haworth after its £180,000 renovation.

A traditional pub in the Brontë family’s home village will pay tribute to the literary sisters after undergoing a Victorian makeover. The Kings Arms in Haworth has returned to its 19th-century roots after a major £180,000 renovation project, and will serve a food menu inspired by Charlotte, Emily and Anne’s typical diets in the 1800s. [...]
The pub now boasts Victorian-themed decor, food and drink inspired by the period and a selection of real ales named after the writers. Staff will wear authentic outfits based on 19th-century fashions, including tweed waistcoats. The director of the Kings Arms’s owners the Bridgehouse Pub Company, Andrew Clough, was raised in Haworth, and he has appointed former Airedale Heifer licensee Adrian Hawker as manager. “I know the Kings Arms well and have seen first-hand what great potential it has. It lost its way in recent years but this renovation has taken it back to its roots of being a proper traditional pub for locals and visitors to the village,” said Mr Clough. The Brontë-themed beers will all be brewed locally at the company’s site in Keighley, and the seasonal menu will include wild boar stew and mini Yorkshire puddings. (Grace Newton)

The University Times has an article on Gothic horror.

When discussing gothic romance with PBS’s Charlie Rose in October 2015, actor Tom Hiddleston described it as having “a kind of brewing melancholy that stirs the soul”. Dr. Murphy observed that this was a very educated way of stating the difference between what she classed as a “contained Gothic” and an “original Gothic” – the former describing Crimson Peak and other modern work, the latter in reference to works such as Dracula or Frankenstein. Both of these are Gothic horrors of almost mythical proportions, but what is perhaps most surprising about this topic is to see the likes of Jane Eyre mentioned alongside these titans of horror and literature alike. Murphy explained that Jane Eyre is a Gothic text at heart, with aspects of multiple other genres within it. This could perhaps classify it as a “contained” or “popularized” Gothic text, which is tailored in the more extreme elements and mixed with elements of other genres in order to make it more universally accessible. This ”hybrid Gothic” is the precursor to more modern works of the same nature, most notably the Twilight series of books and films. (Stephen Smith)

The Guardian has an article on UK-China cultural relations and recalls the fact that,

The UK has been using culture as a soft power tool in China for a number of years. This year, for example, the Royal Shakespeare Company embarked on its first major tour of China and the British Library has organised exhibitions with literary treasures such as Shakespeare’s First Folio and Charlotte Bronte’s fair copy manuscript to Jane Eyre. (Mark Brown)

The Irish Times shares a curious tidbit from 1940s Italy:

Another reason for the popularity of Irish theatre in the 1940s was that the publication and/or staging of French and British texts was prohibited by the Italian Copyright Agency on June 6th, 1940. Italian theatres had to find an alternative – and find one they did. As a result of the ban, “English language authors who had hitherto had little or no association with Ireland suddenly began to be presented as Irish”. Such names included Eugene O’Neill, George Kelly from Philadelphia, who rejoiced in an Irish surname, and even Emily Brontë – all were “presented as Irish”. (Catherine Dunne)