'We’ll never really know Branwell properly'

The Brontë Parsonage Museum opens again tomorrow, February 1st, and fully launches Branwell's bicentenary celebrations with the opening of the exhibition Mansions in the Sky: The Rise and Fall of Branwell Brontë, curated by poet Simon Armitage. The Huddersfield Daily Examiner has an article about it.

The life of the only Brontë son, would-be poet and portrait painter Branwell, is being explored in a newly-opened exhibition, curated by Huddersfield poet Simon Armitage, at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Howarth [sic].
Hot on the heels of the Sally Wainwright television drama, To Walk Invisible, which was screened over Christmas and also focused on the brother of the famous novelists, the exhibition features letters, drawings and personal possessions, mostly taken from the museum’s collections.
The title of the exhibition, Mansions in the Sky: The Rise and Fall of Branwell Brontë, comes from a letter that the ambitious 19-year-old Branwell wrote to the poet William Wordsworth. With the letter he enclosed one of his own poems, expressing the hopes and dreams of a young romantic intent on building ‘mansions in the sky’. Wordsworth never responded. The letter has been loaned to the Parsonage Museum by the Wordsworth Trust. [...]
Simon, the Marsden-born writer, now Professor of Poetry at Oxford University, has enjoyed considerably more success with his work than the hapless Branwell. Such is his standing in the literary community that he was asked to write a new series of poems to enhance the exhibition.
As well as selecting the objects on display, Simon has written a poetic response to each item. He explained: “Most people know Branwell either as the ne’er-do-well brother of the Brontë family or as the shadowy absence in his famous portrait of his three sisters. We’ll never really know Branwell properly, all his light and shade, but in putting together events for his bicentenary I feel as if I’ve been privy to some of his hopes and dreams, especially the ambitions he had for himself as a Romantic poet among the Yorkshire moors.”
The exhibition, which runs until January 2018, also includes a dramatic recreation of Branwell’s bedroom, imagining how it might have looked in the late 1830s when he had ambitions to become a portrait artist. Designed in collaboration with the production team of To Walk Invisible, the installation presents an unmade bed, floor splattered in paint and ink and half-completed artworks all around. Branwell’s poem that he sent to Wordsworth is played in a continuous loop, adding to the sense of frenzy and chaos in the room – a metaphor for the turmoil in the mind of Branwell himself. (Hilarie Stelfox)

Coincidentally, yesterday the Brontë Parsonage Museum tweeted the following:

#BehindtheScenes Day 20. #SimonArmitage copies out his new poems in the quiet of Mr Bronte's bedroom #Branwell2017 #Bronte200 pic.twitter.com/crAqjQ7SEt

— Brontë Parsonage (@BronteParsonage) January 30, 2017

Travel Pulse lists some of the reasons why you need to visit Britain in 2017:

Visit England recently announced that 2017 is to be the Year of Literary Heroes and with it being the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen’s death, the 20th anniversary of J K Rowling’s first novel, the 125th anniversary of the first Sherlock Holmes publication and with the five year Brontë 200 celebration well underway, it set me thinking about how travel agents can convert these and other literary connections into a profitable UK travel experience. [...]
The Brontës
Again, you may have seen some of their novels on Masterpiece Theatre and to get the best out of a literary tour of the north of England, you need to bring together the Brontës in Haworth, William Wordsworth and Beatrix Potter in the Lake District, James Herriot (All Creatures Great and Small) in the Yorkshire Dales and Victoria (currently on Masterpiece Theatre) and entirely filmed in Yorkshire. (Paull Tickner)

Belgian TV Viewers can watch Cary Fukunaga's Jane Eyre tonight at 9.20pm on La Trois. Focus Vif gives it 3 stars out of 5.

Ecrit par Charlotte Brönte (sic) au milieu du XIXe siècle, Jane Eyre n'a cessé d'inspirer les cinéastes, du Jacques Tourneur de I Walked with a Zombie à Franco Zeffirelli (pour une adaptation qui réunissait Charlotte Gainsbourg et William Hurt). La lecture qu'en propose aujourd'hui Cary Fukunaga (Sin Nombre) se révèle tout à fait captivante, qui souligne le tempérament de cette héroïne romantique, une jeune orpheline engagée dans une relation tumultueuse avec l'ombrageux maître de la maisonnée où elle est employée comme gouvernante. Classique, la mise en scène de Fukunaga vibre d'une énergie puissante, transcendée par l'âpreté du cadre -les landes anglaises- et plus encore par le jeu des acteurs, que l'on ne saurait mieux qualifier, dans le chef de Mia Wasikowska et Michael Fassbender, que d'électrisant. Une réussite. (Jean-François Pluijgers) (Translation)

While French viewers will have the chance to watch the 2006 BBC miniseries on Numéro 23, as reported by Le Monde.

« Jane Eyre » : une femme égale un homme
On se demanda longtemps, dans les cercles littéraires londoniens, qui pouvait bien être l’auteur de Jane Eyre, qu’un certain Currer Bell publia en 1847. Puis on en vint à subodorer qu’une héroïne faisant preuve d’une telle indépendance d’esprit (au point de se déclarer égale à son mari) devait être le fruit de l’imagination (décadente) d’une femme.
De fait, au-delà de sa structure apparente de conte, mi-Cendrillon mi-Barbe-Bleue, le roman de Charlotte Brontë met en scène une jeune femme qui sait mener sa vie par elle-même et se faire confiance, en dépit d’une situation sociale peu enviable.
Dans cette version de la BBC, Jane Eyre est interprétée par Ruth Wilson, que l’on retrouve dans The Affair, dont Canal+ Séries diffuse actuellement la troisième saison. Martine Delahaye
Jane Eyre, série adaptée du roman de Charlotte Brontë par Susanna White pour la BBC. Avec Ruth Wilson, Toby Stephens, Lorraine Ashbourne (GB., 2006, 4 x 60 minutes). Sur Numéro 23, les mercredis 1er et 8 février, à partir de 20 h 55. (Martine Delahaye) (Translation)

Journalist Habibe Jafarian writes about her love for books for The Millions.

The “book” that I wished to marry, the man of my dreams, had to be someone like my brother, Hossein, the person that most resembled a combination of fictional characters like Thomas Fowler of The Quiet American, Prince Bolkonsky of War and Peace, and Rochester of Jane Eyre. Men who were stubborn and hard to pin down, who were jaded and proud, and who even possessed more than a touch of arrogance. (Translated by Salar Abdoh)

A columnist from Trinidad and Tobago Newsday has selected her 'favourite biographies of women', such as

Charlotte Bronte: A Writer’s Life by Rebecca Fraser – “If men could see us as we really are, they would be amazed,” wrote Brontë, who is most famous for her novel Jane Eyre. The author strives to place Charlotte’s life “within the framework of contemporary attitudes towards woman, and addresses how attitudes and perceptions of Charlotte have (or haven’t) changed since the Victorian era. (Debbie Jacob)

There's a quote from Jane Eyre among 15 other 'Fabulous Feminist Quotes By Women Authors From Books I Have Enjoyed Reading' selected by Women's Web and another quote from Jane Eyre as well as one from Wuthering Heights on a list of '12 romantic wedding readings from books' selected by Perfect Wedding. A second year English and Philosophy student has written a blog post on Wide Sargasso Sea for the University of Nottingham. The Brussels Brontë Blog has a post on Iranian translations of Villette and The Professor.