Hero-Writers vs Victims

The Oregonian announces some of the local theatre productions scheduled for 2017  Including a Polly Teale Brontë production in Hillsboro:

What could be more ambitious than a biographical play tracing the triumphant and tragic life of English novelist and poet Emily Brontë? How about corralling her sisters, brother and father all in the same story in a single evening? Hillsboro's Bag & Baggage Productions nabbed the Pacific Northwest premiere of "Brontë," British scribe Polly Teale's courageous undertaking. Naturally, center stage belongs to the three Brontë sisters, who were subtly subverting male publishing paradigms from their famous home near the West Yorkshire moors. (Lee Williams)

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a very interesting essay on how the perceptions about how writers create are changing (and not necessarily for the best):

Over the past few years, I have noticed a growing resistance in my literature students to the concept of imagination, and a concomitant certainty that everything an author writes is a cry from the inmost heart. Delving into this particular pedagogical dilemma, I look first to the past: Several years ago, I read Trysh Travis’s essay "Heathcliff and Cathy, the Dysfunctional Couple," published in The Chronicle in 2001. It is an incisive look at how the culture of popular psychology permeates contemporary reading experiences in profound, perhaps unalterable ways. Travis sees this in the pervasive language of self-help, rehabilitation, and recovery that her students use when talking about texts. The title refers to her students’ belief that if only Emily Brontë’s classic couple had had access to some form of therapy, they might have been able to make a success of their relationship.
Travis is fascinated by the ways in which popular psychology, whether talk shows or 12-step programs, shapes our contemporary understanding that all forms of unhappiness, disappointment, and failed romantic liaisons are quasi-medical conditions that not only can but should be fixed. What struck me most powerfully in her sharp, unsettling piece, however, was the fate of Wuthering Heights and texts like it. Did the advent of "recovery culture" mean that current and future generations might simply be losing the ability to understand authors like Brontë on their own terms? That a Brontëian world in which people cannot be "fixed" — in which fixing, as a human tendency, is not a "thing" and does not exist — might now be inconceivable to most Americans? (...)
You think I jest, but this is my fear: that my students’ reductiveness is not about refusal but rather inability. That Poe, Dickinson, and other 19th-century authors are now illegible to them, newly resident in Emily Brontë’s dysfunctional moors. They are not breathtaking hero-writers for whose existence I am daily grateful: They are victims, period. None had therapists, modern medicine, or legislative justice at their beck and call, and thus they were forced, effectively, to write of death, doom, sorrow, and loneliness. Alas! (María Carla Sánchez)

Inside Times encourages inmates to read:

I know that many people worry that there can be a snob value with books yet this shouldn’t be the case at all. You need to read what you enjoy; it doesn’t matter if it is a classic; for example Jane Eyre (one of my favourites I have to admit); a Jane Austen or even a Dickens. However, it is far more important to read what you enjoy and absorb the story, an article in the paper or even a comic – it is all down to reading whatever you have chosen to get lost in. (Lucy Forde)

Digital Spy quotes Tom Hardy about the new TV series Taboo:

"It came about from doing [BBC One's 2007 miniseries] Oliver Twist and playing Bill Sykes," Tom tells us. "To be bluntly honest, I wanted to play Bill Sykes, Sherlock Holmes, Hannibal Lecter, Heathcliff, Marlow [from Heart of Darkness]... just every classical character in one." (Morgan Jeffery)

His Wuthering Heights 2009 Heathcliff can be seen today on the French TV channel Numéro 23, (20.55 h).

Psychology Today wonders why women put up with infidelity:

Do we live in a way vicariously through our husbands' careers, their personalities, their lives, and perhaps even their affairs? Are we fascinated by the "Other woman?" If we think of the novels on this subject written by women it may give us some insight. Charlotte Brontë hides the mad Creole wife in the attic at Thornfield in Jane Eyre just as Daphne du Maurier makes the dead Rebecca linger on in the elegant rooms at Manderley and in the young heroine's imagination. These "other women" come almost to seem the heroine's own obsession, part of her own longings and desires. (Sheila Koehler)

5 Minutes for Moms has some goals for 2017:

If you’ve never read Jane Eyre, how? And this is your year! You’ll love it–it actually is worth all the hype. Other possibilities: Tess of the D’Ubervilles, Anna Karenina, Les Miserables, Tale of Two Cities. (Elizabeth)

AnneBronte.org talks about the Branwell Brontë bicentenary.