As this year also marks 200 years since the birth of Emily Brontë, Harrogate Theatre is set to present a great line-up of Bronte-related shows to celebrate.
LipService, Britain’s favourite award-winning literary lunatics, are back with their cult spoof Withering Looks from March 1-2.
We Are Brontë will see two terrific performers combining rigorous physical theatre with anarchic comedy from May 29-30.
Another iconic female literary figure, Jane Eyre, will be the subject Jane Eyre: An Autobiography on March 13 which has been described as “hands down the best adaptation of Jane Eyre.” (Graham Chalmers)
The Guardian lists this week's best TV:
Jane Eyre 1944
An excellent, mist-and-rain-by-the-bucketful Jane Eyre, with a pallid Joan Fontaine in the title role, standing up to glowering Orson Welles as tormented Rochester. Despite the studio sets, it whistles up a gust of authentic Victorian Yorkshire, with moody cinematography by George Barnes. Also features an early appearance by Elizabeth Taylor.
Sunday 4 February, 2.10pm, BBC Two
The Times adds:
Sometimes a film has so much going for it that even though you know it will be an overblown mess, you cannot resist. Indeed, this newspaper at the time thought that this adaptation was “too inclined to the sham gothic lines of an outmoded melodramatic tradition . . . Nobody ever speaks in a natural voice and the musical accompaniment keeps up a persistent commentary in an ominous and tiresome bass.” However, with Joan Fontaine and Orson Welles as Jane and Mr Rochester, a script co-written by Aldous Huxley and direction from Robert Stevenson (Mary Poppins, Bedknobs and Broomsticks), the film has its obvious merits. Despite only having an acting credit, it is rumoured that Welles had a hand in the script, editing, casting and even the sets. (Chris Bennion)
Four Star Film Fan reviews the film. Another Brontë film scheduled for the upcoming days is
Wuthering Heights 2011 on
3Sat (Germany, February 11th, 2.40am).
Some reviews of Fanny Britt's
Hurlevents have been published:
L’auteure Fanny Britt doit posséder une boule de cristal bien précieuse pour avoir visé si juste avec des débats aussi discutés dans les médias, elle qui a commencé à travailler il y a trois ans et demi sur ce projet très librement inspiré du roman «Les hauts de Hurlevent», d’Emily Brontë, un classique britannique du 19e siècle.
La langue qu’elle a créée, habilement débitée par les jeunes comédiens, est crédible, collée à la génération Y. Elle est notamment marquée par un concours que se lancent les colocs sur l’insertion de formule anglaise, une excellente idée qui fournit plusieurs punchs. Cette pièce a donc la qualité de trouver son ton et de camper les aspirations de ces étudiants qui veulent vivre leur amour, tout en respectant la liberté d’autrui. (...)
La deuxième partie tombe dans un univers plus surréaliste, le sort de la plupart des personnages ayant déjà été scellé. C’est là qu’ils apparaissent brièvement habillés à la mode victorienne. Le clin d’œil aux sœurs Brontë fonctionne. Cet éloignement à l’histoire de base nous offre un préambule intéressant au dénouement lorsqu’on apprendra tout le poids que porte Émilie. (Emmanuelle Martinez in Le Journal de Montréal) (Translation)
Marie-Hélène est professeure de littérature et a justement mis au programme de son cours le roman d'Emily Brontë. Les garçons sont rares à s'y être inscrits, mais il y en a quand même, dont Edouard qui est présent pour une nouvelle session. C'est qu'il apprécie particulièrement Marie-Hélène, comme d'ailleurs la colocataire du jeune homme, mais pour d'autres raisons. (...)
Dans le petit appartement, très simplement meublé, d'Émilie et d'Édouard, les conversations vont bon train tout en étant décousues, fragmentaires et rapides, intelligentes et drôles. La pudeur fait que certaines choses sont difficiles à avouer et, de manière très subtile, les dialogues dévoilent quand même sous une forme tout à fait contemporaine un fond idéologique qu'on pourrait croire appartenir à un autre âge et qui agit sur le réel des personnages. C'est que l'amour avec un grand A n'a peut-être ni âge ni époque. Il n'appartient pas seulement à la littérature romanesque et revêt la même quête que l'on soit une jeune fille quasi recluse dans le milieu conservateur et puritain de celui d'Emily Brontë au XIXe siècle, ou un garçon ou une fille du XIXe siècle, en apparence avertis et libérés de ces carcans anciens. (Sophie Jama in The Huffington Post) (Translation)
L’auteure Fanny Britt doit posséder une boule de cristal bien précieuse pour avoir visé si juste avec des débats aussi discutés dans les médias, elle qui a commencé à travailler il y a trois ans et demi sur ce projet très librement inspiré du roman «Les hauts de Hurlevent», d’Emily Brontë, un classique britannique du 19e siècle.
La langue qu’elle a créée, habilement débitée par les jeunes comédiens, est crédible, collée à la génération Y. Elle est notamment marquée par un concours que se lancent les colocs sur l’insertion de formule anglaise, une excellente idée qui fournit plusieurs punchs. Cette pièce a donc la qualité de trouver son ton et de camper les aspirations de ces étudiants qui veulent vivre leur amour, tout en respectant la liberté d’autrui.
Daily Beast makes an interesting point:
In Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, the orphan Heathcliff falls in love with his adoptive sister Catherine; when she marries another and dies in childbirth, he misses her so much that he takes over her parents’ and husband’s properties, forces her daughter to marry his son, and exhumes her corpse. I guess this is sexy, which is why generations of readers have understood the book as a romantic masterpiece, one that is—according to my copy’s back flap—“the most haunting love story in the English language.” Switch the genders, and you have something more like Emily Brontë’s sister Charlotte’s novel, Jane Eyre, where the big reveal isn’t a dead ex-lover, but one who’s very much alive, and insane, and imprisoned by her husband in an attic for decades, because that’s what romantic men apparently do with women crazy enough to expect their love returned. (...)
I want to be extremely clear: I love these books. They aren’t just literary masterpieces. They’re among my personal favorites, books I return to again and again. They’re also about much more than obsessive lovers, telling larger stories about the societies where these characters live. Those stories, along with their magnificently complex protagonists and the many insights that these talented artists embed on every page, give these works their enduring power. I wouldn’t change a word of any of them. (...)
For now, we still consider men’s obsessions romantic and women’s obsessions crazy. Is it at all surprising, then, that we have spent so many years giving crazy men the benefit of the doubt? (Dara Horn)
Monica Quibbits is reading
Jane Eyre and writes about it on
Splice Today:
The book that has stuck with me the most is Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, which I’ve just recently started re-reading because I don’t remember a thing about it. I’m about 50 pages in, and I’m beginning to realize why I don’t remember it. This is my life story. This is what I had escaped. Somehow I’d incorporated it into my consciousness so fully that any knowledge of the novel was eliminated with my own biography… so to help my husband, I’ve decided to become reacquainted with my own trauma.
We love a good
boutade when we see one. In
The Lawrentian:
A Bildungsroman tracks the coming-of-age of a sensitive person seeking the answers to life’s many questions, in the hopes that the answers will lead to his racking up experience. Common Bildungsromans include Candide by Voltaire, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, and The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. However, these pale in comparison to the true Bildungsroman, Naruto. Naruto (in its manga form primarily, as Bildungsroman describes to a literary form) is a comprehensive treatise on the coming-of-age novel, otherwise known as a Bildungsroman.
Entertainment Weekly finds unanswered questions in
Fifty Shades Darker, the movie:
I thought Anastasia’s favorite author was Hardy?
The first time she meets Christian Grey, he asks her whether it was Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, or Thomas Hardy who made her first fall in love with literature, and she answers Hardy, which surprises Christian because he would have pegged her for a Jane Austen girl. Sure. And yet, in this movie, while they’re in bed together, Christian asks why she waited so long to lose her virginity and Ana answers, “I was reading Austen and Brontë and nobody ever measured up to that.” Okay, but those were literally the two authors you said didn’t make you fall in love with English literature in the last movie. Did the person writing this movie not see the last one? My guess is they did watch the last one but with something else going on in the background so they were a little distracted during that scene and just caught the gist. (Dana Schwartz)
Brewminate and the 'hysteria' diagnosis in Victorian England:
The ideal of femininity in the early 19th century was ‘The Angel in the House’, who performs her domestic duties, is desirable and yet devoid of desire. In Brontë’s Jane Eyre the archetype of the madwoman is personified in Bertha Mason, a wild and animalistic creature who cannot control her base sexual urges. (Charlotte Wittingham)
The sitters and their artists in
The Guardian:
Kate Paul on Celia Paul
At the moment I’m sitting for her about once a week, for a new painting, and it will be once a week until the painting is finished. It’s a bit like seasons, in a way, and then we’ll have a pause. So there’ll be a spring painting and then an autumn painting. There have occasionally, in the past, been paintings where we’ve listened to a tape of poetry, or there was one painting where I listened to a recording of Jane Eyre. They’ve always had a special mood for me, sort of imparted by what I was listening to at the time. But that’s quite unusual, and in recent years it’s always been silent. I don’t have a problem with sitting still and just thinking. (Interview by Rebecca Nicholson)
Evening Echo interviews Mary Mulcahy, lecturer of Singing, Drama & Theatre Studies:
Best book you read?
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, but from the perspective of a psychological thriller, not a Gothic romance.
Heathcliff is one of the most disturbing characters in literature.
Ensonhaber (in Turkish) talks about
Wuthering Heights:
İngiliz şair ve romancı Emily Brontë yazın kurallarını zorlamasıyla bilinir. 19 yüzyılın önde gelen kadın kalemlerinden sayılan Brontë, büyük bir aşkı merkezine alan Uğultulu Tepeler romanıyla özdeşleşmiştir.
Romanın anlatımındaki özgün derinlik ve güçlü edebi kurgunun yanı sıra kahramanlarının iç dünyasını ustalıkla yansıtan Emily Brontë, Victoria Çağı’nın gerçekçilik arayışı içinde romantik bir aykırılık olarak ün salmıştır. Büyük Britanya’da 1818 yılında dünyaya gelen yazar, aristokrat bir ailede yaşamını sürdürdü.
Kız kardeşleri Maria, Elizabeth ve Charlotte ile özel okullarda eğitim aldı. Eğitim ve sosyal hayatında rahat bir dönem geçiren ünlü yazar, çeşitli okullarda öğretmenlik yaptı. Kardeşlerinin küçüğü Anne ve ortanca kardeşi Charlotte’yle 1846 yılında şiir kitabı yayımladı. Yazarın, büyük yankılamalara sebep olan Uğultulu Tepeler 1847’de okurların beğenisine sunuldu. (Haber Merkezi) (Translation)
Svenska Dagbladet talks about the erotics of hair:
Charlotte Brontë lät exempelvis göra sådana smycken av de avlidna systrarna Annes och Emilys lockar. Historiskt sett var detta bevarande av dödas kvarlevor förbehållet helgon och sedermera även kungligheter. I "Relics of death in Victorian literature and culture" (Cambridge University Press, 2015) åskådliggör litteraturvetaren Deborah Lutz hur det i ett samhälle där gamla sanningar och trossystem är i uppluckring, uppstår en kult kring sådana sekulära reliker och hur påtaglig deras närvaro var i 1800-talets kulturyttringar. (Translation)
Lucy the reader has some Brontë non-fiction recommedations.
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