The Yorkshire visionary who inspired female entrepreneurs

Keighley News features the Brontë Festival of Women’s Writing, which begins in ten days.

Leading novelists and poets will be in Haworth this month to take part in the Brontë Festival of Women’s Writing.
Sarah Perry, Rachel Joyce and Deborah McAndrew are among those leading sessions between September 22 and 24.
The festival, the seventh to be organised in the village by the Brontë Society, promises to be an inspirational weekend for readers and writers alike.
The weekend kicks off on the Friday with a free event exploring self-publishing and self-promotion.
Laurie Garrison, the founder of the Women Writers School, will share her experiences with Yorkshire-based author of The Companion, Sarah Dunnakey, and Helen Taylor, who launched a crowdfunding campaign to publish her debut novel.
Two workshops will be held on the Sunday at the atmospheric Ponden Hall in Stanbury, entitled Writing For Stage and Writing For Radio.
They will be led respectively by playwright Deborah McAndrew, who recently adapted The Tenant of Wildfell Hall for Bolton Octagon, and novelist Rachel Joyce, whose latest novel The Music Shop was broadcast on Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime.
Only a few places remain for the workshops, but there is a chance to hear both writers talk about the Brontës with the Yorkshire Post’s Yvette Huddleston on Saturday September 23 at 2.30pm.
Fans of Waterstones’ 2016 Book of the Year The Essex Serpent will have the opportunity to hear author Sarah Perry in conversation with Adelle Stripe on the Saturday evening.
The ‘word-of-mouth sensation’ was also selected for this summer’s Richard & Judy Book Club and tickets are already selling well.
Brontë Society audience development officer Lauren Livesey, who organised the festival, said: “Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë were pioneers of women’s writing and continue to inspire contemporary literature in limitless ways.
“Our festival continues to grow and we are thrilled with this year’s vibrant programme of events.
“New for 2017 is a writing workshop devised especially for girls aged 12 to 16 led by Hebden Bridge’s Liz Flanagan, author of Eden Summer.
“Interest in this event was high and tickets have already sold out, but anyone interested should contact the museum to be added to our waiting list.”
The Brontë Festival of Women’s Writing is supported with funding from Arts Council England. (Richard Parker)

A columnist from The Yorkshire Post salutes 'the Yorkshire visionary who inspired female entrepreneurs'. And who is she?

But there was a time when the concept of a woman asserting her right to be financially independent was regarded as a threat to the fabric of society. Anyone supporting this view faced vitriolic abuse. As the number of self-employed women continues to rise, we must pause and remember a quiet revolutionary from Yorkshire. A short walk from Scarborough Castle, you will find the last resting place of Anne Brontë, who stunned Victorian society by arguing that a woman had the right to leave an abusive husband and earn her own living. Anne Brontë ought to be the patron saint of all self-employed women. Her novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, was branded “coarse and brutal” when it first appeared in 1848, and it retains the power to shock. In the novel, Anne’s heroine Helen Huntingdon, leaves her abusive husband to protect their young son, and goes into hiding as a tenant at Wildfell Hall. Helen is determined to become financially independent, so she, in effect, establishes a micro-business to support herself as a single mother. At Wildfell Hall, she earns a living as an artist. In many Victorian novels, ruin awaited any woman who had the temerity to leave the marital home. But Helen doesn’t crumble. She flourishes. This vision of an independent woman overcoming heavy odds to support herself financially was a challenge to the social conventions of the early 19th century. Anne, who died shortly after the novel was published, suffered a severe posthumous punishment. A chorus of critics dismissed her as the least talented of the Brontës. Today, we have a more enlightened estimation of the novel and its author. Anne’s views have become mainstream. A study from Oxford Economics and notonthehighstreet.com found that Yorkshire is leading the charge in female labour force participation, with many business women, like the fictional Helen Huntingdon, earning a living in the creative industries. [...]
When Anne wrote The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, she could not have foreseen the radical changes that were coming . But by offering a powerful fictional role model, she provided inspiration for future generations. As the novel’s 170th anniversary approaches, we should salute its role as a defence of a woman’s right to be economically independent, and take pride that it was written in Yorkshire. As the Brontë society has shrewdly observed, Anne’s apparent mildness hid a fury for justice. (Greg Wright)

Vox reviews The Glass Town Game by Catherynne M. Valente.

The trope of children who get lost in their own imaginary world is a classic of the portal fantasy genre, and probably most thoughtfully handled in Pamela Dean’s Secret Country trilogy. (Dean’s children find themselves riddled with guilt at the difficulties they put their characters through, like Dickens coming face-to-face with Little Nell.) Glass Town Game is a sterling addition to the genre, with a new twist: It’s dealing with historical people who actually existed, and who would grow up to create more and more ever-suffering fictional characters.
It just never explicitly mentions that fact. It never even mentions the name Brontë.
“It’s my hope that a kid could read it and just love characters named Charlotte, Emily, Anne, Branwell,” said Valente when I spoke with her this June. “And then when they grew up a little bit, and saw Jane Eyre on the bookshelf, and saw Wuthering Heights, they’d be like, ‘But that’s my Emily, that’s my Charlotte! I know those people!’ And that it would help them to read the Brontës in a way that was personal, where they knew something about their lives and their adventures.”
Valente’s portrait of the Brontës — all three stubborn and determined as befits a middle-grade hero, wildly literate as the historical Brontës were, but still recognizably children — can certainly stand on its own, but it also meshes nicely with our pop-cultural understanding of them as adults.
Valente’s 12-year-old Charlotte has a will of steel and a sensible outlook on life that is married to a romantic soul in a way that will be familiar to anyone who has read Jane Eyre. She is riddled with insecurities about taking over as the oldest of the siblings now that her older sisters are gone. Valente’s 8-year-old Anne has the youngest child’s terror of being left behind and the beginnings of her adult counterpart’s distaste for romantically wicked men. And her 10-year-old Emily is just wild enough to swear (she works up the nerve to say hell, and her siblings gasp), and is filled with fantastic visions: “Ice filled Emily’s mind, ice that went on and on forever and never stopped. It looked so clean to her, like a perfect lace tablecloth. Until her great wild roaring ships tore the lace to pieces, their sails clanging with icicles, their cannons full of fire.” (...)
For all the Brontës, The Glass Town Game functions as a kind of stealth origin story that doubles as a fantastic romp: how did these ordinary children in the middle of nowhere grow up to be so extraordinary? How did they accomplish so much?
The answer, Valente posits, is: magic. But if you’re a Brontë fan, you always suspected as much. (Constance Grady)

The Times shares an extract from the memoir Dear Cancer, Love Victoria by BBC presenter Victoria Derbyshire.

Friday, November 27.  This afternoon I try to wash my hair. A mundane task becomes a nightmare. When I start to rub shampoo in, it begins to get matted. The more it mats, the more hassled yet determined I become to de-mat it. As I lean over the bath, I can see long hairs slipping from my head into the plughole, while the rest of the hair continues to tangle. When I stare into the mirror, I look like Mr Rochester’s wild wife from Jane Eyre — hair sticking out, uncontrollable. I wrap a towel round my head and consider how much hair is falling out after just two chemo cycles, while wearing the cold cap. It’s depressing. Then, a positive to counterbalance the negative — but if I hadn’t worn the cap, it could have been worse.

Cookbooks and kids in Los Angeles Times.

You may have bestowed the stacks, hoping that the bug to cook would take hold like the one to read, the culinary equivalent of giving copies of Madeleine L’Engle or Charlotte Brontë. (Amy Scattergood)

Coming Soon praises the new Gothic horror film The Lodgers.

Like all worthy Gothic horror movies, there’s more than a nod to Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw (and the 1961 film adaptation The Innocents) as well as Brontë Sisters novels like Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, with its family secrets, tormented characters and lived-in, haunted feel. And like every great picture in this enduring sub-genre, location is key. (Chris Alexander)

Observer discusses whether Wonder Woman is a positive role model or not.

Of course, the vengeful female lead is nothing new. From the ancient Greeks, whose goddesses often acted with rage and spite, to Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth, the angry, ambitious female protagonist is archetypal. But classic literature also abounds with positive depictions of strong, intelligent females who were drivers in their own lives and the world, and had loving and compassionate hearts: think Antigone, Demeter, Juliet, Jo March, Elizabeth Bennet, Jane Eyre. (Heather Robinson)