TLS: Other Wutherings. Emily Brontë at 200 and Town & Country's Real Wuthering Heights

The latest issue of the Times Literary Supplement (July 27) is all about (Emily) Brontë:

TLS
July 27, 2018 No 6017
Other Wutherings
Emily Brontë at 200

“The twentieth century’s favourite nineteenth-century novel” was how John Suth­erland described Wuthering Heights: a view no doubt based partly on the plethora of adaptations for stage and screen, sequels and prequels, poems and songs inspired by the only surviving extended work of fiction by Emily Brontë, who was born 200 years ago. One of them, a musical by Blake Morrison and the composer Howard Goodall, was kiboshed by a rival effort that saw the pop singer Cliff Richard fulfil a long-nourished ambition to play Heathcliff – a surprising choice, you might think, and critics of the production agreed. Rather more successful was Kate Bush’s haunted and haunting song, released in 1978. Robert Potts speaks for many men and women of a certain age (and perhaps younger ones too) when he recalls a “swooping, soaring voice, flowing from a confident eroticism to a trembling vulnerability”. Others paying tribute this week to the strangeness of Wuthering Heights and the violence of its passions include Jacqueline Banerjee, who surveys the flurry of new books released for the bicentenary; Dinah Birch who, re-reading the work with Emily Brontë’s earliest critics in mind, finds the question it puts to all readers “has not lost its force”; and Michael Stewart, the author of a Heathcliff-inspired novel (itself “stomach-churning” in its violence), who also conceived the four “Brontë Stones” in and around the famous sisters’ homes in Thornton and Haworth – “the landscape that surrounded them and offered them a place of solace, but also at times must have felt like divine punishment”. (Alan Jenkins)

Includes (open article):

No Coward Soul is Hers
Jacqueline Banerjee on the lives and afterlives of Emily Brontë. 

Including reviews of:
Wuthering Heights (HQ 2018 edition). With a foreword by Michael Stewart

This is a grand inducement to reread the novel (the new HQ edition is in good print with no academic frills).

Ill Will - Michael Stewart

In his own novel, Stewart attempts to supply some of the details that Emily so effectively but tantalizingly omitted in hers. He has done his research, and complements his dark reading of Brontë’s work with details that both reference and support it.

Emily Brontë - A Life in Twenty Poems - Nick Holland

Without subjecting the poems to detailed critical analysis – which is not his purpose here – Holland provides helpful contexts for them, and insights into them.

Emily Brontë Reappraised - Claire O'Callaghan.

 It is an informally written, no-nonsense reappraisal. There is something admirable about cutting through the thickets of Brontëana and refusing to speculate about things that can never be known, although it does lead her to give short shrift to the idea of “Emily-as-mystic” in her final chapter. This is almost inevitable: an important aspect of O’Callaghan’s reappraisal is to portray her subject as one of those “strong, gutsy women” who are valued in society today, no less of a proto-feminist than her more out­spoken sisters

Emily Jane Brontë and Her Music - John Hennessy

To begin with, Hennessy is on firm ground. His first chapter provides a brief social context and a masterly discussion of the changing cultural scene in England during the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, especially as these would have impinged on the family at Haworth, and especially as regards music: he has even looked into the archives of their father Patrick’s previous incumbency, Thornton Chapel, to see what instruments and music were available for use there. Hennessy then examines in detail the music to which Emily herself would have been exposed, and which she would have played. (...)
In the fourth and by far the longest part of his Emily Jane Brontë and Her Music, he has itemized and discussed every single piece of music known to have been owned by the Brontës – a Herculean task, since it ranges from the thirty-seven pieces of sheet music in the two youngest Brontës’ “Parrish Collection” to their brother Branwell’s flute book, taking in several other volumes on the way. 

Embrace
Cartoon by Ella Baron
“It was not the thorn bending to the honeysuckles, but the honeysuckles embracing the thorn.” (Wuthering Heights)

Subscriber Articles:

Words that outlive us by Michael Stewart
Stones on the Brontë trail

Unquiet numbers by Blake Morrison
How Cliff Richard kiboshed a poet’s Heathcliff

Beyond all reason by Dinah Birch
Wuthering Heights – still baffling, still strange

Cathy comes home by Robert Potts
The magnificent weirdness of Kate Bush

In a rather different way, Town & Country Magazine's Summer Issue is also devoted in part to Emily Brontë's bicentenary with pictures by Agata Pospieszynska and an article by Justine Picardie:

Photography by Agata Pospieszynska and styled by Charlie Harrington. In the cover: Cibele Ramm wears a silk organza cape, matching dress and organza dress, all Chanel, and calf-skin boots and matching chaps, Hermès. With special thanks to the Brontë Parsonage Museum
Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is a novel that is exceptional for its shape-shifting afterlife, as well as the pulsating emotion within it: for this is a haunting story that has not only possessed the imagination of countless readers, but also inspired myriad artists and authors to create their own responses to the original narrative. Quite aside from the numerous screen adaptations, Wuthering Heights has proved to be fertile territory for dozens of other writers, including Virginia Woolf, Daphne du Maurier, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes; and its tumultuous power has also stirred musical versions – from classical opera to Kate Bush’s unearthly debut single.
Yet for all the extraordinary force of the novel, the young woman who wrote it remains one of the most mysterious figures in the pantheon of great writers.(...)
Not that this has stopped us from attempting to follow in Emily Brontë’s footsteps: and here I must confess to being one of the legions who have visited her home in Haworth – now the Brontë Parsonage Museum – and followed the footpath from there onto the windswept moors, walking up to Top Withens, the ruined house said to have been the inspiration for Wuthering Heights, the fictional Earnshaw family home in the novel. I first went as a young woman, and have returned in the course of researching several of my own books. And I was fortunate to accompany the artist Cornelia Parker in 2006, when she was creating works that included magnified images of the ink marks on Emily Brontë’s blotting paper, and a lock of her hair (most probably cut and plaited by her sister Charlotte, after Emily’s death). Cornelia also conceived the recording of a séance at which I was present, where two psychic mediums explored the Parsonage after dark; she had asked me there as an observer, rather than a participant, and yet it remains one of the eeriest encounters of my life. This was not because of any supernatural manifestations (though the silent relationship between the living and the dead has long fascinated me, and the boundless love that endures, even when we are separated by death from those we hold most dear). Rather, it was the experience of wandering alone through the quiet house, without the daytime crowds of tourists that flock to the Parsonage, and seeing the relics of the family that once lived here: the little books created by the Brontë children, in such tiny handwriting that they are impossible to decipher without a magnifying glass; the toy soldiers that inspired their earliest imaginary worlds; gloves, shoes, dresses and jewellery (some containing interwoven locks of their hair); drawings, manuscripts, letters and writing desks; brass collars from their dogs, engraved with their names; and all the other lovingly preserved objects, including the piano that Emily played, and the black horsehair sofa upon which she had allegedly died.