Readers whose editions of Jane Eyre are worn from repeated perusals may find two recent critical works about Charlotte Brontë worth a look. Miranda K. Pennington and John Pfordresher each see Brontë as anticipating modern feminism, though Pfordresher remains at an academic remove. By contrast, Pennington uses Jane Eyre essentially as a life manual. (...)
In part because of Jane’s evident backbone, Pennington takes as her main premise that Brontë’s protagonist is emotionally relevant in 2017. Then Pennington adds a few pinches of personal attitude and makes Jane and her creator, along with Charlotte’s sisters, Emily and Anne, into behavioral role models. In this way, Pennington combines long-term, deep knowledge of a biographical subject with a certainty that life lessons may be drawn from that subject in the here and now. Her approach is eye-opening, personal, and engaging. (...)
Pfordresher begins some interesting arguments, but doesn’t fully develop them. He maintains, for instance, that Brontë disliked women of color and offers a discussion of Bertha (the madwoman in the attic) to prove this point. However, the more compelling finding may be that Brontë herself related strongly to Bertha even while portraying her unsympathetically. This interior struggle in Brontë’s writing is exactly what Pennington writes about and finds most germane. By comparison, readers may find Pfordresher’s more familiar approach somewhat colorless. He notes that the death of Brontë’s mother and widowhood of her father infiltrate virtually all of her fiction, but leaves one longing for an acknowledgment of the strains the sisters experienced in other family interaction — such as with Branwell. For one thing, he famously removed himself from his painting of the siblings. Pfordresher’s notion that Branwell is the model for Rochester at least provides a welcome (if unconvincing) foray into a less well-trod area. Is this the “secret history” to which he refers?
Nevertheless, both critical approaches are reminders of just how compelling and different was Brontë’s authorial voice. A result of reading either book will be a strong urge to pick up Jane Eyre once again. Even from a high-desert vantage point, there’s simply no turning away from what West Yorkshire and its people meant to the creative psychology of Charlotte Brontë. (Patricia Lenihan)
Pacific Standard interviews Aline Brosh McKenna on her
Jane Eyre graphic adaptation (with Ramón K. Pérez),
Jane:
Tell me a little bit about how this book got started for you.
I always loved the story of Jane Eyre, it was a big touchstone for me in my early teenhood. I wanted to do some sort of homage to it but I never quite figured out what it could be. And then I adapted a graphic novel [Rust] for Archaia a few years ago, and it just hit me that this would be a wonderful way to adapt sections of it. Because [my version] isn't all of the Jane Eyre story, it's really just the Rochester section—that found a new spin on this character that I loved.
Jane Eyre is, in many ways, a story about the restrictions placed on women in the 19th century. What was it about the story that inspired you to adapt it for the modern day?
I think the essence of Jane Eyre is that she is good, moral, and pure in an impure world. That's the most important thing about the character that I clung to throughout the story. [In terms of what I adapted,] I was compelled by the haves and have-nots of being in the big city, and Jane who doesn't have a lot of money, and wants to be an artist. She comes to the city and has to live within her means but nonetheless develops a relationship with one of the wealthiest men in the city. There's a lot of obvious wish fulfillment there, but also just the social realities that we're dealing with, as opposed to the social realities that the [1847] Jane is dealing with.
So you were interested in a story about Jane bringing the 1 percent down to Earth?
Exactly. Bringing her moral perspective to the 1 percent. (Read more) (Interview by Katie Kilkenny)
The designer
Hannah Nunn shows her home in Hebden Bridge in
The Yorkshire Post:
Her refurbished flat looks lovely and is also the perfect location for photographing her growing range of homeware. She and photographer Sarah Mason have just completed a shoot for her latest design, Charlotte’s Garden, which was commissioned by the Brontë Society to celebrate the bicentenary of Charlotte Brontë’s birth. It is made up of the flora in bloom around the Brontë Parsonage in late April, as Charlotte’s birthday was April 21.
Like the rest of Hannah’s designs, which include lighting, wallpaper and fabric, it has appealed to a national and international market.
“The first two rolls of wallpaper went to a lady in America and she was thrilled because she’s a Brontë fan,” says Hannah, who began her making career when she moved to Hebden Bridge after art college and a seven-year spell in Wales. (Sharon Dale)
महाराष्ट्र (in Hindi) has an article on Emily Brontë (unfortunately with a drawing of Charlotte Brontë).
The Irish Examiner visits Brontë country and York:
Geoff Power visits the North Yorkshire landscape that inspired the Brontë sisters and Bram Stoker, and visits the medieval town of York, a haven for anyone with a sweet tooth.
The mist that exhaled slowly from the remote Upper Heights fanned across the gully that separated Stanbury and Howarth (sic) Moors.
We leaned into the wind as the path twisted uphill towards a distant blackened ruin. We had to pinch ourselves; it was early January and, incredibly, we were alone on this famous stretch of land.
For it was here that the Brontë sisters carved tragic incident and character out of a barren and beautiful landscape – unchanged for thousands of years. In the 1840s, Charlotte, Emily and Anne hitched up their dresses and strolled across this desolate moorland and, in the process, gathered ideas for their much-loved novels and poetry.
A Scarborough heritage walk in
Scarborough News:
Leaving the market, head north up Cross Street, and continue into Auborough Street, swinging right into Castle Road, with The Scarborough Arms and Wilson’s Mariners’ Homes ahead. Castle Road swiftly leads to St Mary’s Church. Beyond the car park’s walling, you’ll find Anne Brontë’s grave near Church Lane. (Maureen Robinson)
The Guardian's best UK theatre this week includes:
Jane Eyre
The days when adaptations of classic novels made for dull theatre are long past. Sally Cookson has been leading the charge and her version of Charlotte Brontë’s novel is a pleasure: witty, theatrically inventive yet also faithful to the spirit of the original novel and its psychological underpinnings, as Jane’s conflicted thoughts and inner confusions are given voice by the ensemble.
Hull New theatre, 18-23 September; touring to 21 October. (Lyn Gardner and Judith Mackrell)
This letter published in
The Telegraph & Argus is worthy of attention:
I AM very pleased the Visitor Information Centre in Haworth is being taken on by the Brontë Society – i.e. Parsonage – and it’s very easy to blame the council.
Haworth has thrived on the back of the Brontës. It’s also easy to overlook that the Brontës were born in Thornton, a village that has long been forgotten.
If the Visitor Information Centre can be taken on, what hope is there for the Brontë house in Thornton, where Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne were born?
The Brontë house at Thornton was the only place that all the siblings and parents lived together in harmony, as spoken by Patrick Brontë himself.
Andrew Duxury, Riddlesden
The Times's Pedant on English prepositions:
NM Gwynne, in Gwynne’s Grammar, warns that “to give the wrong preposition is illiterate, as ‘different to something’ is wrong and ‘different from something’ is correct”. Again, no explanation or evidence is offered for why a construction used by many great writers should be counted “illiterate”. (One example will do, from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre: “Mr Rochester, as he sat in his damask-covered chair, looked different to what I had seen him look before; not quite so stern — much less gloomy.”) (Oliver Kamm)
The Circleville Herald interviews the author
Amy Randall-MacSorley:
Favorite books! My bestest present ever was the year my grandmother bought boxes of Nancy Drew books at an auction and gave them to me. Heaven! I grew up reading everything I could get my hands on. My favorites include Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, The Stand by Steven (sic) King, Fountainhead by Ayn Rand, Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein, Neither Wolf nor Dog by Kent Nerburn, so many, many more. I can’t pick one!” (Jennifer Bahney)
Knoxville News-Sentinel reviews the novel
If the Creek Don't Raise by Leah Weiss:
The first person Kate meets is the preacher’s sister, Prudence: “The charcoal lids of her eyes are sunken. Her neck is creased with grime, her nails caked to the quick with dirt, her shapeless dress little more than a rag. One shoe is tied with a strip of cloth to keep the sole from flapping. This is poverty the likes of which I’ve never imagined except in the books of Dickens and the Brontë sisters,” Kate says. (Tina Chambers and Chapter16.org)
Time lists all the references seen in Darren Aronofsky's
Mother!:
The isolated house and toxic relationship between Him and Mother is reminiscent of the sort of romance on the moors the Bronte sisters excelled at conjuring up. The heroine takes abuse because of her desperate devotion and is constantly being told to calm her nerves. (After all, women in Victorian times were always being labeled “hysterical.”) (Eliana Dockterman and Eliza Berman)
More on
Mother!. Jennifer Lawrence is quoted in
CineSerie (France):
La comédienne a fait un rapprochement entre le film et les romans victoriensprésentant des parcours de femmes qui se font peu à peu ôter leur dignité. Jennifer Lawrence lisait d’ailleurs Jane Eyre de Charlotte Brontë au moment du tournage. (Kevin Romanet) (Translation)
Ellen Margulies has a
Wuthering Heights Stockholm syndrome in
Tennessean:
Oh, Mother Nature, you moody beast. First, you slap a little winter on the tail end of summer. (Things got so gloomy there for awhile I found myself roaming across the moors searching for Heathcliff.)
Hyperemesis gravidarum in
The Huffington Post UK:
It is thought that the author Charlotte Brontë might have been suffering from it when she died in 1855 after four months of pregnancy with intractable nausea and vomiting, apparently unable to tolerate food or water. (Rosie Newman)
Filmmaker Magazine interviews the director Clio Barnard:
Filmmaker: You worked with Brazilian cinematographer Adriano Goldman, who has recently shot the Netflix series The Crown. How did the two of you come together on this film? (Tiffany Pritchard)
Barnard: Initially I wanted Mike Eley, who worked with me on The Selfish Giant, but he wasn’t available. With Adriano, part of the reason I wanted to work with him was because he wasn’t from Yorkshire, and I knew he would bring an outsider’s eye to this. I also loved how he filmed Yorkshire in Jane Eyre — that felt like the Yorkshire I know, not the romanticized version that you often see.
Lettera 43 (Italy) on literature and rock:
Non meno celebre un altro amore sfortunato, quello di Kate (sic) e Heathtcliff nel romanzo ottocentesco di Emily Brontë, Cime tempestose. Kate Bush, affascinata dal romanzo, ne trasse una canzone - Wuthering Heights (1978) - che deve il suo successo alla particolare voce quasi da soprano dell’artista e all’atmosfera da fredda brughiera della musica grazie ai notevoli arrangiamenti in forma di ballata e alla chitarra di Ian Bairson. (Annalisa Terranova) (Translation)
Télérama (France) recommends
Wuthering Heights 1970:
Les Hauts de Hurlevent (1970). Une adaptation méconnue, hyper-romantique – et très gothique ! – du classique d’Emily Brontë, où le beau ténébreux Heathcliff est incarné par un futur James Bond (Timothy Dalton, alors tout jeunot). ( Cécile Mury, Pierre Langlais and Samuel Douhaire) (Translation)
The Huffington Post (Québec) reviews
Lady Macbeth:
Ce qui crée la modernité du film, c'est que William Oldroyd choisit le même parti pris que Nikolaï Leskov: celui de raconter une histoire forte dont on suit le déroulement dramatique avec anxiété et malaise. Pour détourner l'attention, il choisit un décor romantique, une comédienne au regard triste et doux, un paysage qui rappelle Les Hauts de Hurlevent entre la passion et la folie. Ou Les Sœurs Brontë, le film d'André Téchiné en 1979 avec Isabelle Adjani, Isabelle Huppert et Marie France Pisier, même atmosphère de plaines et de vent. William est avant-gardiste. Sa force, c'est de ne ressembler à personne. (Menou Petrowski) (Translation)
A
Wuthering Heights-lover and model in
La Crónica de Salamanca (Spain);
Smart Bitches, Trashy Books reviews
Villette (spoiler, she didn't like it).
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