The tip-top point of our lives

Keighley News reports an upcoming and musical alert. Next October 8, in Ponden Hall:

The poetry and music of Emily Brontë will be brought to life in a historic house linked to her work.
Haworth soprano singer Charissa Hutchins, speaker Alexandra Lesley and pianist Gordon Balmforth will give a recital on Monday, October 8 at Ponden Hall, near Stanbury. (...)
The recital comprises a selection of Emily's poems from the very early 'High Waving Heather' to 'The Prisoner' of late 1845, and ends with a short extract from Wuthering Heights.
They will be coupled with songs and piano solos. Manuscripts for all but one of the pieces were owned by Emily. The programme has been devised by John Hennessy, author of the recently-published Emily Jane Brontë and Her Music.
The recital will be at 11.30am. Tickets cost £12.50 and must be booked in advance by calling 01535 648608.  (David Knights)

More Brontë alerts from the Parsonage for the upcoming days. Including a new audio installation for and by children. In The Telegraph & Argus:

Sounds like Heathcliff in an innovative new attraction at the Bronte Parsonage Museum in Haworth.
Keighley schoolchildren have created an audio installation inspired by the anti-hero of Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights.
The Outsider, which can be heard at the museum from October 25 to January 1, features sounds recorded by children from several schools.
They worked last year at the Parsonage with artist and researcher Rachel Emily Taylor, exploring ideas of a ‘ contemporary Heathcliff’.
Taylor recorded the children reading poetry about being in the landscape, which has been shaped into an audio installation of ‘clock chimes’.
The chimes are reminiscent of various scenes from Wuthering Heights, as well as the children’s feelings about aspects of their own lives.
The chimes include Lockwood’s four-hour journey between Wuthering Heights and the Grange, the routine of the contemporary classroom, the strictness of Heathcliff’s treatment, and how the children felt out on the moors.
The launch of the audio installation coincides with the October half-term when the museum will host family activities and the annual Museums at Night.
Wild Wednesdays will adopt the theme Monstrous Masks on October 24 and 31 from 11am to 4pm, when children can make masks inspired by Wuthering Heights and transform themselves just in time for Halloween.
A spokesman said: “Whether it’s the eerie face of a ghost waif at the window, or Heathcliff at his most diabolical, faces can be scary things in Emily’s writing!”
There are more chills at the museum’s monthly Late Night Thursday on October 25, tying in with Museums at Night and featuring Spooky Storytelling. (David Knights)

The Times quotes Charlotte Brontë on prudish censorship:

Why a string of asterisks plainly denoting a word should be considered less offensive than the word itself is a mystery. As Charlotte Brontë wrote: “The practice of hinting by single letters those expletives with which profane and violent people are wont to garnish their discourse, strikes me as a proceeding which, however well meant, is weak and futile. I cannot tell what good it does — what feeling it spares — what horror it conceals.” (Ben Macintyre)

On the 208th anniversary of the birth of Elizabeth Gaskell, Claire Harman reviews in The Guardian, Mrs Gaskel & Me by Nell Stevens:

Readers of Bleaker House, Stevens’s 2017 dashing debut, will recognise the tone and the ingenuity of this, and imagine they recognise the heroine too, at a different stage of her young adult life. Bleaker House was a fictionalised memoir about “Nell” going to the Falkland Islands to write a novel; Mrs Gaskell & Me is about “Nell”, a love-sick postgraduate, struggling to write a thesis about Gaskell. She weaves her story of thwarted scholarship and thwarted love (for an unresponsive friend called Max) through that of Gaskell leaving Manchester for Rome in 1857, just before the publication of her controversial Life of Charlotte Brontë. Gaskell was fleeing possible critical backlash against her book and successfully forgot her troubles (for a while) among the artists and writers who had gathered around the American sculptor William Wetmore Story – including Harriet Hosmer, the Brownings, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Charles Eliot Norton. Rome remained Gaskell’s ideal, and those months of freedom and excitement “the tip-top point of our lives”.

The Irish Times also publishes a review:

The narrative alternates between Stevens and Gaskell, and Gaskell’s story is told in the second person: “You hurled your biography of Charlotte into the world like a grenade, and ran away just as fast as you could.” This could have been massively grating; it’s a testimony to the charm and skill of Stevens’s writing, as well as what feels like genuine intimacy between her and her subject, that it never is.
The Charlotte in question was, of course, Gaskell’s friend Charlotte Brontë. In 1857, just before the publication of the biography, Gaskell left Manchester’s dark satanic mills for the sunny, exciting streets of Rome, where she joined a vibrant community of artists and writers and met a younger man, the American Charles Eliot Norton, who would become hugely important to her. They saw each other constantly in Rome, and remained in regular contact afterwards. (Anna Carey)

Female First has some autumn destinations for you:

Haworth, Yorkshire Dales
Known as the home of the rugged moorland that inspired Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, this picturesque place has been described as the village that time forgot, with its myriad of antiques shops, alleyways and cobbled streets.
This Yorkshire Dales destination can be enjoyed whatever the weather. Moody skies only add to the drama of the moors and the Brontë waterfall is a wonderful sight come rain or shine.

The writer Stacy Gregg chooses Wuthering Heights as one of the best books she never wrote in The Stuff:

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
Originally I think I picked this book up because I love the Kate Bush song, but then I fell in love with Cathy and the moors and the dark, miserablism of Emily Brontë's romantic perspective. I have a personal theory that people are divided into two types in life: Heathcliffs and Lintons. I'm definitely a Heathcliff – hardy and stoic, willing to suck it up and never complain and I have little time for the Lintons of the world who contract tuberculosis from a simple walk in the winter rain and then fall upon their death beds, floccillating and whining. Die already. (Jay Kristoff)

The Quint (India) interviews the writer Shweta Bachchan-Nanda:

Her interest for writing was extremely personal and was not known by even close family members. “I didn’t really share it with anyone so nobody really guided me in that sense. But I was always a reader and have especially enjoyed the classics like Charles Dickens, the Bronte sisters, but my favourite is Jane Austen,” she said excitedly. This is just the beginning for her and she looks forward to writing more, and is already working on her next book. (Nandakumar Rammohan) 

And IWMBuzz talks with an Indian TV actress, Sonarika Badhoria:

So what does love mean to her? “I am a hopeless incurably romantic. I have grown up on Wuthering Heights, The Bridges of Madison County and watching Dil Toh Pagal Hai, Kuch Kuch Hota Hain. However, in today’s time that level of love is rarely found. You seldom get unconditional love in current times.”

This letter to the editor in The Times makes us smile:

With two lovely children added to the collection and named after prominent female authors (the Brontë sisters), my librarian-husband has installed in them a love of reading, specifically the gothic novel, and the Dewey decimal system. (Arlene Lauder)

The Hindustan Times (India) has an article about World Heart Day:

Authors like the Brontë sisters, Charles Dickens, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Leo Tolstoy, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Haruki Murakami; chick-lit writers like Sophie Kinsella have given us enough food for thought on the topic of love. (Saumya Sharma)

A late journalist and Brontëite of the Las Vegas Review-Journal:

Daniel Bach said his sister devoured every kind of writing there was, from pulpy sci-fi to Shakespeare. At the time of her death on April 20, 2016, she had shelves lined with thousands of books, and an old foot locker with some romance novels stashed away in it.
“She had 15 copies of ‘Jane Eyre’ from different eras,” Daniel Bach said. “She had 10 Kindles, and they were completely full.” (Henry Brean) 

Newtuscia (Italy) celebrates belatedly Emily Brontë's anniversary:

Autrice di 188 poesie e di numerose opere giovanili, Emily scrisse solo Cime tempestose, indiscusso capolavoro. Al suo apparire fu accolto come scandaloso, colossale, ma anche violento, gradevole, amorale, cupo, volgare nel linguaggio, sconnesso, confuso, incoerente, terrificante, inumano e del tutto privo d’arte. È comunque potente, coinvolgente e non si può negare che turbi gli animi. Nessuno sembrava leggere la storia raccontata da Emily: tra le pagine del romanzo tutti cercavano qualcos’altro che corrispondesse alle loro aspettative. Nessuno sembrava capirne niente. La stessa Charlotte, discutendo con l’editore del romanzo della sorella, alludeva ad un suo strano e cupo potere capace di produrre scene che, più che attrarre, stupiscono. Le critiche scoraggiarono Emily rendendola insicura riguardo a opere successive (pare stesse scrivendo una seconda opera della quale però non si ha nessuna traccia). I recensori si preoccuparono di avvertire i gentiluomini di non farlo leggere né a mogli né a sorelle, tantomeno alle figlie adolescenti. (Gaetano Alaimo) (Translation)

We don't totally get this reference in the Croatian magazine Prvi, but we guess it is not good:

“Ne bih nikada odjenula haljinu na volane. Ne, ne mogu ja to. To je jednostavno toliko ženski kliše, ono u stilu Jane Eyre. To je dijametralno suprotno od onoga što se meni sviđa. Ja sam, ono, Berlin, underground, crno, koža, dugačke jednostavne linije, minimalizam… E, ali isto tako sam rekla da ne volim cvjetni uzorak pa sam prošlo ljeto kupovala sve u cvjetnom uzorku! (Duška Jurić) (Translation)

El Periódico (Spain) describes the film Lady Macbeth like this:

Lady Macbeth es una original combinación entre una novela con aroma clásico tipo Jane Eyre, una trama de cine negro como El cartero siempre llama dos veces y drama erótico en la línea de El amante de Lady Chatterley. (Eduardo de Vicente) (Translation)

Il Sicilia explains the Bronte (in Sicily)-Nelson-Brontë connections:

L’ultima curiosità riguarda, invece, il legame di Bronte con le sorelle Charlotte, autrice di “Jane Eyre”, Emily di “Cime tempestose” e Anne di “Agnes Grey”. Per scoprirla bisogna tornare di nuovo a Horatio Nelson e alla grande eco che ebbe in patria il suo essere diventato Duca di Bronte. Fu questo il motivo per cui Patrick Brunty, padre delle scrittrici, nutrendo grandissima ammirazione per l’ammiraglio, decise di modificare il suo cognome in Brontë, con la dieresi sopra la “e” affinché gli inglesi non ne storpiassero la pronuncia. (Giusi Patti Holmes) (Translation)

The RCF radio programme Au Pied de la Lettre (in French) recommends

Il y a 170 ans jour pour jour, le 24 septembre 1848, Branwell Brontë succombait à la maladie. Le frère terrible, artiste maudit, a pourtant inspiré ses sœurs, Anne, Charlotte et Emily - les deux dernières, à qui on doit "Jane Eyre" et "Les Hauts de Hurlevent" comptent parmi les plus grands noms de la littérature anglaise. Quel rôle exactement a joué Branwell Brontë dans la création de ces œuvres ? Dans les années 50, Daphné Du Maurier s'est emparée de la question et a écrit "Le monde infernal de Branwell Brontë" que les éditions La Table Ronde rééditent cette année.

Animal Político (México) reviews To Walk Invisible;  Charlotte's Library reviews My Plain Jane.