Emily Brontë 200 (III)

The media response to Emily Brontë's bicentenary is quite overwhelming. We still have some more examples:

BBC Look North Evening Edition. Charlotte Leeming interviews Rebecca Yorke and Patience Agbabi:

Los Angeles Times:

Happy birthday, Emily Brontë!
Happy birthday to Emily Brontë, born July 30, 1818. Despite a short bibliography — she wrote only one novel, "Wuthering Heights" — she's still considered one of the towering figures of 19th-century British literature.
Brontë was born on July 30, 1818, in Thornton, West Yorkshire, England.
After a brief career as a teacher, in 1947 Brontë published what would be her only novel, "Wuthering Heights." The story of a doomed romance between Heathcliff, a complicated and tortured foundling, and his beloved Catherine, who spurns him for a man of higher class, has endured through the years as a powerful reflection on jealousy, love and class. (Michael Schaub)

The Conversation:

Why Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is a cult classic
Nothing about the reception of Emily Brontë’s first and only published novel, Wuthering Heights, in 1847 suggested that it would grow to achieve its now-cult status. While contemporary critics often admitted its power, even unwillingly responding to the clarity of its psychological realism, the overwhelming response was one of disgust at its brutish and brooding Byronic hero, Heathcliff, and his beloved Catherine, whose rebellion against the norms of Victorian femininity neutered her of any claim to womanly attraction.
The characters speak in tongues heavily inflected with expletives, hurling words like weapons of affliction, and indulging throughout in a gleeful schadenfreude as they attempt to exact revenge on each other. It is all rather like a relentless chess game in hell. One of its early reviewers wrote that the novel “strongly shows the brutalising influence of unchecked passion”. (Sophie Alexandra Frazer)

Vox:

Wuthering Heights is a masterpiece of literary genius that is incredibly unpleasant to read
What makes Emily Brontë’s novel great is the way it thinks about abuse.
The cliché about bookish women and the novels of the 19th century is that you have to pick from three authors, and you’re only allowed to love one of them: Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, or Emily Brontë — you have to have one favorite, and whichever one it is says something profound about you.
Of the canonical three, personally, I will go to bat for both Austen and for Charlotte Brontë — witty women and sad men having charged conversations in the drawing room, sign me up. But Emily Brontë — with her child ghosts sobbing at the window and her brutal, violent men; Emily Brontë, whose 200th birthday is Monday — I have never quite known what to do with her.
In part, that’s because Emily’s whole thing is to be elusive, to make you not know quite what to do with her. She left behind very little documentation of her life: there’s a novel, Wuthering Heights, that is considered to be one of the greatest in the English canon, some astonishingly brilliant poetry, and almost nothing else. (Constance Grady)

The Times:

 Yesterday was a double celebration: the 200th birthday of Emily Brontë and the 60th of Kate Bush, who took Brontë’s novel about love on the wiley, windy moors and turned it into four minutes of tortured warbling in 1978. In a feature on Wuthering Heights, the TLS says Bush felt a deep connection to her muse. Not only did they share a birthday but, as Bush noted with perspective, “when Brontë wrote the book she was in the terminal stages of consumption, while I had a bad cold when I wrote the song”. (Patrick Kidd)

Erm, not exactly the same.... furthermore she wasn't in the terminal (or even early) stages of consumption when she wrote Wuthering Heights.

BookRiot posts a response to the infamous Kathryn Hughes piece in The Guardian:

When Wuthering Heights was first published in 1847, it elicited a stream of criticism that finally led James Lorimer, reviewer of the North British Review, to proclaim in satisfaction that “the only consolation which we have […] is that it will never be generally read.” 171 years later, Brontë is firmly entrenched in the literary annals, and Lorimer is only remembered for making one of the most spectacularly erroneous predictions in the history of literature.
Nonetheless, Lorimer continues to have kindred spirits. Journalist and biographer Kathryn Hughes prides herself in being “in good company” in her dislike of this novel. Why anyone would consider a long dead, notably misogynistic old white man good company remains, I confess, a mystery to me. I initially considered countering only the most egregious arguments presented in Hughes’s article, “The strange cult of Emily Brontë and the ‘hot mess’ of Wuthering Heights,”  which ran in The Guardian on July 21st. However, upon reread, it struck me that the entire piece is egregious. So brace yourself, friend, and make yourself comfortable. We’ll be here a while yet. (Carolina Ciucci)

ABC Radio's The Hub on Books (Australia):

Australian author Sandra Leigh Price is an Emily Brontë acolyte and exposes some of the myths about Emily Brontë's life.

RNE's El Ojo Crítico (Spain):

 El ojo crítico - 200 años de la borrascosa Emily Brontë -
Se conmemoran hoy los 200 años del nacimiento de la pequeña de las hermanas Brontë, quien publicó con pseudónimo masculino, Ellis Bell, poco antes de morir a los 30 años su única novela: 'Cumbres borrascosas'. Hablamos con el traductor al español de su poesía completa, Xandru Fernández, en Alba Editorial. (Translation)

Framtida (Norway):

I dag fyller Emily Brontë 200 år
Den 30. juli er det 200 år sidan Emily Brontë, forfattaren bak klassikaren Stormfulle høgder, vart fødd.
li 1818 kom Emily Brontë til verda. Emily vaks opp som den nest yngste av opphavleg seks søsken. Søskenflokken bestod av fem jenter og ein gut. Av alle søskena var Charlotte den eldste, medan Anne var yngst. (Synne Grimen Hammervoll) (Translation)

LubimyCzytać (Poland):

Emily Brontë – autorka jednej powieści
Nie ma chyba na świecie czytelnika, który nie słyszałby o „Wichrowych Wzgórzach”. Powieść autorstwa jednej z sióstr Brontë była wielokrotnie przenoszona na ekran. Z okazji dwusetnej rocznicy urodzin Emily Brontë postanowiliśmy przypomnieć Wam te najważniejsze ekranizacje. (Translation)

Frankfurter Rundschau (Germany):

Emily Brontë
Soll Emily Brontë eine gemeine Liese gewesen sein und nicht das genialische Naturkind, als das ihre Schwester Charlotte sie darstellte? Sie steht jedenfalls im Zentrum des diesjährigen britischen Sommers. (Judith Von Sternburg) (Translation)

Il Piccolo (Italy):

Dopo duecento anni continua a vivere il mondo fantastico di Emily Brontë
“Mia sorella era innamorata della brughiera, la sua mente sapeva trasformare in un Eden la valle più tetra affossata sul fianco livido di una collina. Lontana da Haworth si sarebbe...  (Roberto Bertinetti) (Translation) 

Also in Il Piccolo an article about the Brontë pseudonyms. Librópatas (Spain) explores when the novel first was translated into Spanish.

Also Revista Arcadia (Colombia) publishes three Emily poems, Delo (Slovenia), Nuus (Hungary), VRT (Belgium), Youm7 (Egypt), Yancuic (México), Siempre! (México), La República (Ecuador) ...

And blogs: writergurnly,

Playbill announces that the musical about the Brontës, Wasted! has already been cast:

Wasted, a new rock musical about the lives of the Brontë sisters, will have its world premiere this September at the Southwark Playhouse under the direction of Adam Lenson (The Rink).
Featuring music by Christopher Ash, book and lyrics by Carl Miller, Wasted is told through the lens of a rock documentary. Charaterized as “an access-all-areas account of the struggles, heartbreaks and triumphs of the three Brontë sisters Charlotte, Emily, Anne, and their brother Branwell. Brought up in a remote, poverty-stricken town in Yorkshire, without money or opportunity, they fought ill health, unrequited love and family feuds to write some of the most celebrated literature including Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.”
Natasha Barnes will star as Charlotte Brontë with Siobhan Athwal as Emily Brontë, Molly Lynch as Anne Brontë, and Matthew Jacobs Morgan as Branwell Brontë.
Wasted will officially open September 12 for a run through October 6.
Wasted has musical direction by Tamara Singer, set and costume design by Libby Todd, lighting design by Matt Daw and sound design by Mike Thacker. Movement director is Natasha Harrison, associate director is Grace Taylor, associate set and costume designer is Rachael Ryan, associate movement director is Christina Fulcher and associate musical director is Joe Bunker. (Adam Hetrick)

Also in The Stage and Whatsonstage.

Venture Beat opens an article about AI with a Charlotte Brontë quote:

“The soul, fortunately, has an interpreter — often an unconscious but still a faithful interpreter — in the eye,” Charlotte Bronte wrote. As it turns out, eyes are also pretty reliable indicators of personality.
In a recent study conducted by the University of South Australia, University of Stuttgart, Flinders University, and the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Germany, researchers describe a machine learning model that can predict traits like sociability, curiosity, and conscientiousness from a person’s eye movements alone. (Kyle Wiggers)

The writer Fernanda Eberstadt publishes an account on her post-collegiate life in Vogue:

Three years later, at 21, I was back in New York, a college graduate. All my life I’d been churning out stories, poems, novellas, fantasizing myself a belated Brontë sister, with garbage-strewn Manhattan my remake of the Yorkshire moors.

Newsweek quotes the television personality, Alex Trebek from an interview on Fox News:

Trebek also told OBJECTified’s host about the first book he bought as a University of Ottawa Prep School student in Canada. “I looked at this and I said, ‘My gosh, this book is leather bound, and it’s Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, and it’s only $2. I’ve got to get that book,’” he said. “That was the beginning of a thirst for knowledge and a love of books.” (Meredith Jacobs)

Entertainment Weekly reviews Wrong in all the right ways by Tiffany Brownlee:

Those passages feel like Brownlee reaching across the literary ether to speak to Emily Brontë in some communal understanding of Gothic angst that still pervades and resonates in the lives of teenagers. (Maureen Lee Lenker)

Forbes interviews Beth Gerstein (co-CEO and co-founder of Brilliant Earth):

Jill Griffin:  What are some books you’ve read that have influenced your life?
Gerstein: Thinking Fast and Slow, Life of Pi, Roots, 1984, Jane Eyre, Crucial Conversations, The Second Sex.

The Wrap and the New York Times reviews the theatre production The House that Will Not Stand:

The mother’s definition of “my pie,” for example, tops anything Ludlam ever wrote about the female anatomy. There’s even a crazy aunt in the attic, and Lileana Blain-Cruz’s direction of that character’s entrance on Adam Rigg’s vertiginous set recalls “Jane Eyre” at its most harrowing. (Robert Hofler)

Rounding out the ménage is their ranting aunt, Marie Josephine, who lives restlessly in the attic, like the mad Mrs. Rochester of “Jane Eyre.” And lurking at the edges, like a vulture who has scented carrion, is La Veuve (Marie Thomas), an evil-tongued frenemy of Beartrice. (Ben Brantley)

A beauty queen candidate that quotes Jane Eyre in Brown County Democrat, El Punt Avui (in Catalan) and a new article on Wuthering Heights. Vanessa Counchman Writer interviews Sue Bernard, author of Heathcliff. The Unanswered Questions.