Hard-Edged Intelligence

The Guardian's Poem of the week is R Alcona to J Brenzaida (aka Cold in the earth) by Emily Brontë:

Reading R Alcona to J Benzaida out of context, without the fantasy or juvenilia labels, was a corrective to my prejudice. As the commentator says here, the imaginary setting allowed Emily to express herself through different personae. None of the poems reads as an exercise in pastiche or “fake” fantasy verse. The current poem is dated 3 March 1845. Twenty-seven was not too young for a Romantic poet steeped in the literature of her time (Byron, Shelley, Scott) to have acquired mature imaginative power and a mastery of technique. She may have begun the Gondal poems earlier and revised them over time. She’s writing partly from imagined experience, of course, but might those metaphors of weaning and deep-drinking towards the close indicate a personal experience of grief, the early loss of her mother? (...)
Emily Brontë’s romanticism had a hard-edged intelligence. It’s not surprising she was admired by Emily Dickinson – the greater poet, but one whose footsteps cross those of the English Emily at times. Both women were intense but pragmatic painters of the unaccommodating Earth.
This year marks 200 years since Emily Brontë’s birth. She was born on 30 July 1818, and I hope it’s not too late to wish her poems many happy new readers and returns. (Carol Rumens)

Apollo Magazine reviews the short film Balls by Lily Cole:

‘But where did he come from, the little dark thing?’ In Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff is a foundling, picked up – so the story goes – off the docks in Liverpool. Taken in by the Earnshaw family, he grows up on the Moors, volatile and solitary, a shade darker than everyone else. The great romance of his character stems from his lack of origin. Is he a monster, or the residue of events in an unknown past?
In Balls, a short film on display at the Foundling Museum, model-turned-filmmaker Lily Cole imagines Heathcliff’s beginning by intertwining his story with those of two young women who gave up their babies to the Foundling Hospital in the 19th century. The film, commissioned (in collaboration with the Brontë Parsonage Museum and Rapid Response Unit) to mark the 200th anniversary of Emily Brontë’s birth, is set in present-day Liverpool. (...)
In her sensitive handling of these archival stories, and by staging them in a contemporary setting, Cole juxtaposes past with present, asking her viewers to consider the progress of women’s rights in the last 200 years – and to recognise the distance still to go. Society still polices women’s bodies: in Northern Ireland, for example, women still do not have the right to decide not to be pregnant; to a lesser extent, though clearly retrogressive, a male member of the Brontë Society, which runs the museum, resigned in protest against Cole’s appointment as a ‘creative partner’, citing his opposition to her work as a model. (Harriet Baker)

iNews talks about the temporary return of the Pillar Portrait to the Brontë Parsonage Museum:

The NPG has already returned the only known surviving portrait of Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë together to its original home at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth.
The painting is on display as part of the celebrations marking the 200th anniversary of Emily Brontë’s birth.
Dr Nicholas Cullinan, Director of the National Portrait Gallery, said: “We hope that sending portraits ‘home’ in this way will foster a sense of pride and create a personal connection for local communities to a bigger national history; thus helping us to fulfil our aim of being truly a national gallery for everyone, in our role as the nation’s family album.” (Adam Sherwin)

Fairfax County takes part in The Great American Read and also

want[s] you to vote in a series of polls from the same list to determine Fairfax County’s favorite book.

Jane Eyre vs The Count of Montecristo and Wuthering Heights vs Their Eyes Were Watching God are now competing.

El País (Spain) interviews the writer Jessa Crispin:

A los 15 años, la escritora Jessa Crispin (EE.UU., 1978) ya había experimentado el placer y el dolor de la autolesión, se había nutrido de las hermanas Brontë y había leído todo lo que había caído en sus manos. (Almudena  ) (Translation)

Süddeutsche Zeitung (Germany) reviews the novel Lykkelige familier by Christina Hesselholdt:

Eine klare Geschichte ergibt sich nicht daraus, es handelt sich eher um eine talking cure in der Gruppe. Die Figuren sind in ihren Vierzigern, schon von Krankheiten und dem Tod der Eltern betroffen. In Kopenhagen lebende Intellektuelle, die in den Ferien durch England reisen, um die Häuser von Wordsworth und seiner Schwester Dorothy, der Brontë-Schwestern, von Virginia Woolf und Sylvia Plath zu besuchen. (Marie Schmidt) (Translation) 

Altinget (Denmark) defends the humanities studies:

At møde jævnaldrende, der gladelig brugte en hel nat på værtshus med at diskutere, hvorvidt det gav mening af foretage en marxistisk analyse af Wuthering Heights, eller om Madame Bovary egentlig ikke først og fremmest var en fortælling om kedsomhed, og dermed også i sig selv kedelig. (Johanne Thorup Dalgaard) (Translation)

Marie-Luce reviews Wuthering Heights 1939.