Highlights for the Emily200 anniversary

Keighley News advances some of the highlights of the upcoming Emily  Brontë 200th anniversary in 2018:

Actress and former model Lily Cole is among high-profile figures enlisted to celebrate Emily Brontë’s 200th birthday.
Social entrepreneur Lily will be joined for the Haworth-centred Anniversary by folk group The Unthanks, poet Patience Agbabi and artist Kate Whiteford.
They will all play a part in 12 months of activities organised by the Brontë Society and its Brontë Parsonage Museum to mark the bicentenary of the birth of Wuthering Heights author Emily Brontë.
The programme of special events is part of the five-year Brontë 200 Festival and follows years devoted to the bicentennials of Charlotte and Branwell Brontë in 2016 and 2017.
Lily Cole, actress and social entrepreneur will follow in the footsteps of .. and point Simon Armitage to become creative partner at the Brontë Parsonage Museum.
In a new partnership with the Foundling Museum, she will explore the connections between the origins of Emily’s anti-hero Heathcliff and the real foundlings of 1840s London.
She will also consider gender politics and women’s rights, in the year which marks 100 years since women got the vote.
Lily said: “Wuthering Heights is one of my favourite books and I have long been fascinated by its enigmatic writer, Emily Bronte. The fact that Emily had to change her name - to Ellis Bell - in order to publish the novel intrigues and inspires me.
“I am excited and honoured to be given the opportunity to work on a project to commemorate the legacy of one of England's most important, and mysterious, writers.”
Poet and performer Patience Agbabi who will be the Haworth museum’s Writer in Residence, land artist Kate Whiteford will explore Emily’s connection to the Yorkshire landscape through her pet hawk Nero, and award-winning band The Unthanks will will compose and perform a song cycle based on Emily’s poems.
Jenna Holmes, who leads the contemporary arts programme at the Brontë Parsonage Museum, said: “We know very little about Emily, but from the work she left behind, we know that she was a talented writer, artist and musician.
“We wanted to celebrate her immense creativity by commissioning exciting new work from artists who we knew would do her legacy justice.”
Also working with the Brontë Parsonage Museum next year is teenage author and vlogger Lucy Powrie, who, in the new role of Brontë Society Young Ambassador, will during 2018 present an online book club via her youtube channel, lucythereader.
Lucy said: “I'm so excited to be working with the Brontë Parsonage Museum on the Brontë Book Club for Emily’s bicentenary celebrations. Hopefully it will encourage lots of young people to read the books for the first time, and fall in love with them just as I have."
Other celebrations include a new exhibition, Making Thunder Roar: Emily Brontë, which will open on February 1, when the Brontë Parsonage Museum reopens after its winter break.
The show invites a number of well-known Emily admirers to share their own fascination with the author’s life and work.
There will be specially-commissioned contributions from Maxine Peake, Sally Wainwright, Caryl Phillips and Helen Oyeyemi, in a thought-provoking selection of Emily’s possessions, writing and artwork as well as some of the well-loved household objects she used daily.
Visitors to the Brontë Parsonage Museum will also have the opportunity to see the iconic portrait of Emily with Charlotte and Anne, The Brontë Sisters, which was painted by her brother, Branwell Brontë.
The painting will return to Haworth for a special three-month loan from the National Portrait Gallery, London.
Brontë Society executive director Kitty Wright said: “Emily’s bicentenary is a particularly exciting chapter in our five-year bicentennial festival and we look forward to celebrating this most enigmatic of the Brontë siblings with audiences in Yorkshire and across the world.
“The year 2018 will also see us enter the Arts Council’s National Portfolio for the first time and we look forward to building on the partnerships we have developed during our celebrations of Charlotte in 2016 and Branwell in 2017.” 

El Comercio (Spain) also features the anniversary:

Una de las principales onomásticas del año entrante es el aniversario de Emily Brontë y se edita, ya en librerías, un texto fundamental y fundacional para entender la fecha: 'El sabor de las penas', (Alianza) de Jude Morgan. ¿Quiénes fueron aquellas tres hermanas solteronas, encerradas en la rectoría Haworth, obsesas textuales hasta la médula, enfrentadas sin compasión a los inhóspitos páramos de Yorkshire y en constante viaje imaginario, hacia dentro, ajenas a lo real y con solo paz y aliento en la escritura? Emoción, desgarro, coraje... todo nos transmite el texto de Morgan: penalidades, sí, pero la fuerza privilegiada de la imaginación como elemento de salida a todas ellas; la vida interior como única vida. (Diego Medrano) (Translation)

The Evening Standard talks about the upcoming London theatre year:

 ‘What we won’t be doing is Dickens and Brontë and Forster because you see it all over the TV and we don’t need to at the Almeida.’ (Rupert Goold, artistic director of the Almeida, quoted by Johanna-Thomas Corr)

The Spectator and Tiny Tim:

Of course, it’s hardly surprising that Dickens — and many other 19th- and early 20th-century novelists — would use Tiny Tim in this way. At that time, any physical or mental impairment was seen as a burden — something that should be hidden and pitied — or a signal of retribution. Just think of Rochester going blind in Jane Eyre, or Louisa M. Alcott ensuring Beth dies of some unknown disease. (Selina Mills)

The Guardian asks writers about the book that made them feminists:

Jeanette Winterson
I was at Oxford in 1980 studying English. There were only four women on the course – the Brontës, George Eliot and Jane Austen. Virginia Woolf was not taught – and because I had been plodding through English Literature in Prose A-Z since I was about 12, at the Accrington public library, I hadn’t reached W.

And The Journal Sentinel lists the best of Wisconsin 2017 theatre:

Jane Shaw (composition and sound design, “Jane Eyre,” Milwaukee Repertory Theater): While covering the waterfront from traditional spirituals to jagged Modernism, Shaw made the set a percussive instrument and utilized some strong cast voices in channeling Jane’s tension, between duty and desire as well as tradition and freedom. (Mike Fischer)

New Seattle bars on Seattle Magazine:

Alchemy (West Seattle). With a candlelit Brontë-ish atmosphere—highlighted by black and white décor, velvet-covered chairs and a giant wooden table—you might expect large glasses of red wine here. ( A.J. Rathbun, Chelsea Lin and Michael Rietmulder)

Did you know that Eminem and Kimberly Ann Scott were the Heathcliff and Cathy of hip hop? According to TheMusic;

But, in marrying and divorcing each other twice, the couple became the Heathcliff and Cathy of hip hop.

Elbakin (in France) reviews The Glass Town Game by Catherynne M. Valente.