Adapting the Brontës to the social media era is an inspired idea

Keighley News reminds readers of the fact that Making Thunder Roar, the temporary exhibition at the Brontë Parsonage Museum for Emily Brontë's bicentenary, is closing soon and looks forward to what 2019 will bring in terms of Brontë-related events.

Flagship exhibition Making Thunder Roar, featuring celebrities’ and academics’ responses to Emily’s work, will end on January 1.
Until that day visitors can also see a recreation of Emily’s lost Wuthering Heights manuscript, and listen to an audio installation inspired by Wuthering Heights’ dark hero Heathcliff.
The Brontë Parsonage Museum will close at 5pm on January 1 for a month so that staff can carry out important conservation and cleaning work.
They will also prepare new exhibitions to mark the 200th anniversary of Patrick Brontë being appointed the minister for Haworth parish.
Making Thunder Roar, which opened last February, was designed to shed light on a woman who is regarded as one of the greatest writers in English literature despite very little being known about her.
A museum spokesman said: “What we do know survives as fragments of information from the people who knew her best, while years of fascination by her biographers have introduced speculation and myth to fill the gaps in our knowledge.
“The exhibition invited a number of well-known Emily admirers to share their own fascination with her life and work.
“Specially-commissioned contributions from Maxine Peake, Lily Cole and Helen Oyeyemi amongst others resulted in a thought-provoking selection of Emily’s possessions, writing and artwork as well as some of the well-loved household objects she used daily.
“These personal responses to Emily acknowledge the gaps in our understanding about this intriguing writer, but also encourage fresh perspectives on her life and work.”
On show in the museum since last March has been a new handwritten manuscript of Wuthering Heights created through a project led by artist Clare Twomey.
Clare invited more than 10,000 visitors to the Brontë Parsonage Museum during 2017 to help recreate Emily’s original, and long-lost, manuscript for the famous novel.
The project captured the imaginations of visitors from around the world, aged six to 90, who each wrote a line.
The final line was written by HRH The Duchess of Cornwall on her visit to the museum last February, and the completed manuscript was bound, along with the names of everyone who participated.
The last display due to end on January 1 is The Outsider, an audio installation created by artist and researcher Rachel Emily Taylor with children from Keighley schools.
In 2017 the children explored ideas of a ‘contemporary Heathcliff’, and were recorded reading poetry about being in the landscape.
The Outsider shaped these readings into ‘clock chimes’, reminiscent of Lockwood’s four-hour fictional journey between Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange, the routine of the contemporary classroom, the strictness of Heathcliff’s treatment, and how the children felt out on the moors.
The Outsider can be experienced within the historic rooms of the Brontë Parsonage Museum.
Continuing until March 31 will be the new Emily Brontë Song Cycle, entitled Shall Earth No More Inspire Thee, created by composer and pianist Adrian McNally who put music to Emily’s songs.
Folk singers Becky and Rachel Unthanks, who perform as The Unthanks with Adrian, recorded the songs. They are available to visitors as an audio experience.
Visitors play the recording through earphones as they follow Emily’s footsteps to nearby Penistone Hill to witness the dramatic landscape that inspired all three Brontë sisters.
Although the museum is closed between January 2 and February 3, the audio experience will still be available to collect from the museum shop.
Devotion, a historic Brontë movie from 1946, will be screened at Haworth’s West Lane Baptist Centre on January 14 at 1pm. (...)
Next year’s events to celebrate the Brontë father’s bicentenary will begin on February 2 with Winter Wander Through Patrick’s Haworth.
A museum spokesman said: “In 2019 we are marking the life and legacy of the Rev Patrick Brontë, the inspiring and unconventional father of the famous sisters and a remarkable campaigner and reformer in his own right.
“Join our museum guides as they uncover stories and secrets of the village Mr Bronte would have known in this brand new storytelling walk.
“You might run into local characters like John Brown or Aunt Branwell, or even visiting health visitor Mr Babbage, as they share the stories of the indomitable Mr Brontë.”
The “insightful and fun-filled” walk lasts approximately 45 minutes and will begin and end outside the Old School Room, Church Street. Sensible footwear is recommended. (David Knights)

Yorkshire Evening Post also features The Unthanks' Emily Brontë project.

The Emily Brontë song cycle is however a departure in some respects, Barnsley-born McNally feels, “in that [the Brontës’] story is perhaps so unique that it doesn’t really fit anywhere”. The band didn’t seek any guidance from the Brontë Society in which of Emily’s poems to set to music. “We were sat looking at the complete works of Emily Brontë and there are rather a lot of poems in there,” McNally says. “On closer inspection a lot of the poems fit into maybe half a dozen categories and that many of them are almost like practice runs for her ultimate poem about nature or whatever, so the object really is to find the best one of that genre. She had so few poems published in her lifetime [under the pseudonym Ellis Bell] that I’m sure she would probably be horrified if she could imagine that one day all her poems would be read. I’m sure some of them weren’t meant for prying eyes at all, they were just missives to herself or in preparation for the poem she was really going to write, so I think the standard goes up and down but we are privy to every word she ever wrote and what writer would want us to see everything they did, whether they were intended for our eyes or not? “It was fun looking through them. Certainly we weren’t Brontë aficionados in any shape or form prior to this project; I think that stood us in good stead, had we been so and been aware quite how highly she’s regarded, she’s still revered internationally and people are still fascinated by her to such an extent, that I’m sure had we been conscious of that in the beginning I’m sure we would probably have been frozen within the creative process with fear and intimidation. I think it’s helped us that we’ve been able to come and look at hear poetry afresh.”
The idea was that McNally would compose on Emily Brontë’s five-octave cabinet piano, which sits in the Brontë Parsonage in Haworth. Because the parsonage is a working museum, he had to work after it had closed for the day. He found it an atmospheric experience, “not least because the house is silent and because it’s full of stone walls and open doors the sound of the piano really rings around the place”. “The people that were with me for security reasons and spend all of the day in there at work were really quite taken with it, I think it was probably more atmospheric for them than it was for me to hear what I was playing ringing out around the place. It was a bit of a challenge for me in having to create in their presence as well; I was monitored constantly because everything in there is so valuable, it was for my own interest that were anything to go missing or get broken that week that they’d know it wasn’t me.
“Mostly I’m arranging traditional songs, with this I was actually tune-writing which meant I had to use my voice which is not something that’s easy when you’re first starting the creative process in front of other people. But I was given a bit of a way out of that in that I wrote all the music in the song cycle in my first night on the piano. I came completely unprepared with a blank page because I wanted to be informed by the instrument, and limited by it. On the first night I came away with about 20 iPhone recordings, just of music without trying to put any of it to poetry, then I spent the rest of the week trying to find which poems that we’d shortlisted would go with which bits of music.
“I did a lot of that at a different, Brontë-related house, Hummanby Hall, a couple of miles away, which is now run as a B&B and was where I was staying. They put me there because it was where Emily based the other house in Wuthering Heights on, Thurcross Grange, and they happened too have a beautiful German upright piano which I was able to work on during the day and try to put some of Emily’s poems to the piano then I’d go back into the parsonage in the evening and road-test what I’d worked on during the day. “I was also staying in a room with a replica of the box bed where Emily and her sisters used to scribble their thoughts away when they went to Ponden Hall which they used to do because apparently the library there was superior to their own. That was atmospheric too because when you pull back one of the panels which reveals a tiny window that looks out onto the reservoir and which was the window that Emily was supposed to have been inspired to write the bit in Wuthering Heights about Cathy’s ghost coming through the window to visit Heathcliff in the night. It was not the most restful night I’ve ever had but I was glad to have had the chance.” Emily Brontë was herself a music teacher and McNally believes there’s a musicality in her writing. “There is an amount known about her love of music and folk songs. Her poetry is extraordinary, it does feel with some of her poems that they were either intended to be songs or that she imagined that they might be. With some of her poems she sticks so religiously to rhythm; some might say in a modern poetry context it’s kind of childish or basic because poetry now takes so many different forms and we’re encouraged to think that rhyming is not necessarily the right way to go, it’s all about breaking the rules. “Some of Emily’s poems conform so rigidly to the fluidity of the rhythm she’s using that they’re ideal for turning into songs and it’s almost like she was mindful of that in the way she wrote.” McNally is sceptical about attempts to lionise Emily and her sisters Charlotte and Anne as heroes for the modern age. “We deal with a lot of folk song and the perception is that we’re trying to modernise them and bring them into relevance to today, whereas more often than not we’re only looking to pinpoint and bring out the truth and beauty in a piece of work that was there all along and is universal. It’s not to be modernised, it’s just that it’s timeless,” he says. “It takes a little while to see because a lot of Emily’s work is so entrenched in the language of its day, that takes a bit of getting over, certainly when I read Wuthering Heights it took me 50 pages to get used to the language before that stopped being the most overtly present thing to me, so you need to settle with that. We tried to find poems that weren’t as entrenched in the language of the time for them not to feel like museum pieces. “I think the most enduring thing about Emily’s poetry is how little moral compass she offers the reader, it’s so devoid of moral compass that it’s really quite brave and refreshing to read her work, perhaps because she didn’t expect some of her poetry to be read by other people. She wrote with such an honesty. We’re known for not shying away from dark material but we’ve been completely out-darkened by Emily. She’s so relentlessly darks that it seems to me that she had no self-consciousness about that and no concern for the reader whatsoever. That’s really quite refreshing and brave and why I think her work will endure.” The Unthanks perform the Emily Brontë Song Cycle at Leeds Town Hall on Friday December 21. The album is available from the band’s website or the Brontë Parsonage Museum. www.the-unthanks.com (Duncan Seaman)

More Brontë-related music, albeit of a totally different kind. The New Yorker describes Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights as

a goofy but heartfelt tribute to her interpretive dance moves in the song’s glorious freak flag of a video. (Margaret Talbot)

People's World reviews the play Sisters Three.

In Sisters Three Brandli locates the real-life Brontë siblings, who wrote later in the 19th century than Austen did, in the 21st century.
Adapting the Brontës to the social media era is an inspired idea, and Brandli captures the artsy, antsy, angsty anguish that reportedly troubled the three sisters—and their brother Branwell, who is a palpable offstage presence in this clever production. The playwright extrapolates from what is known of the siblings’ real lives in her modern day-set 90-minute one-acter that takes place on a college campus, although it was not clear to me where—but probably closer to New York than Yorkshire.
Dana DeRuyck portrays “EJ”—or Emily Jane Brontë, whose sole novel, Wuthering Heights, was published when she was 29 in 1847, just a year before her untimely death. All of the Brontës died young, which could explain a lot about their agonizing, and Sisters Three captures their “sensibility,” although the witty Brandli and her comedic cast play much of this for laughs.
DeRuyck’s EJ is a mathematical academic at a university, and the onstage props include a canoe and blackboard full of chalk equations intended to try to prove an elusive theorem. EJ is a lesbian who, like Emily’s immortal character Cathy Earnshaw, yearns to consummate a forbidden love. In Sisters Three this is an offstage character who is EJ’s lab assistant and may or may not be gay. Her name is “Heather” – a witty reference to Heathcliff, Cathy’s Wuthering Heights rough-around-the-edges flame.
Anne, who was the youngest of the sisterly trio, is depicted by Kara Hume as a publicist and social media maven who lives by the tweet. Apparently, her PR ventures are not faring too well as she is secretly shacking up in EJ’s small on-campus unit, which is a violation of college regulations. The tall, slim, leggy Hume plays Anne with comic panache, but there is an edge to the character: She may have had an incestuous relationship with her older brother Branwell, who has committed suicide some time before the curtain has lifted.
About 60 percent of the way into Sisters Three the play is very talky. Well, I guess this is to be expected as we are experiencing portrayals of a threesome of literary lights. EJ and Anne verbally spar, and what action there is besides talking involves preparing cupcakes, which are particular favorites of EJ. The small cakes are rather humorously called “Rochesters,” a droll reference to Mr. Rochester, the brooding Lord of Thornfield Hall where Jane is a governess in Charlotte’s masterpiece Jane Eyre.
Almost two thirds into this dialogue-driven dramedy the stage suddenly erupts. Without revealing and ruining exactly what happens, let’s just say that oral dueling gives way to some, shall we say, Errol Flynn-Basil Rathbone type of action, which is actually rather skillfully executed. (Note to Nervous Nellies: Don’t sit in the front row of this pocket-sized theatre.)
Then, enter Charlotte – and all hell breaks loose. Robyn Cohen is high-larious, playing the author of Jane Eyre as an “Eyre-head,” who has escaped from a hippie commune. Given all of Charlotte’s psychedelic, free love, countercultural references one would think Sisters Three was set in 1968, instead of 2018. In any case, Cohen—who has acted opposite Jeff Goldblum, Melanie Griffith and Bill Murray on the stage and screen—proceeds to steal the show with her depiction of a demented if not demonically possessed Charlotte. Her deftly played insane intensity is a joy and sight to behold and by itself worth the price of admission.
The playwright interweaves the rich fantasy life of the Brontës into her comedy-drama. Living in Victorian England, the siblings had to contend with intense sexual repression, which is a recurring theme in their brilliant published works. Despite the fact that by 1837 the UK’s monarch was actually a woman, Britain was still an uptight patriarchal society, and the female Brontës were forced to publish under male pen names. (And Dalton Trumbo and the other Blacklisted screenwriters thought they had it bad!) Yet they were admirable women who, with their literary prowess, became pioneering feminist icons, which filters through at times in Sisters Three, despite its goofiness. Unfortunately, as said, all of the Brontës died young. (Ed Rampell)

On Mr Porter, Sam Leith recommends '50 Books Every Man Should Read', including

08. Jane Eyre
Ms Charlotte Brontë
Ms Charlotte Brontë was both a great storyteller and an acute anatomist of the human heart. Damaged, secretive, tragic Mr Rochester is a romantic icon for the ages.

Indie Reader reviews Dear Jane by Marina DelVecchio.

Marina DelVecchio’s Dear Jane is the story of Kit Kat, a young girl from Greece adopted into a cold and distant home. She finds solace in books, particularly in the story of Jane Eyre—like Jane, Kit Kat is a troubled girl who finds nothing but unkindness in her upbringing. Inspired, Kit Kat begins keeping a diary of letters addressed to Jane Eyre, connecting her story with that of the fictional heroine and finding the kinship she needs to survive.
Kit Kat’s story, like Jane’s, is an unhappy one. Her life in Greece was traumatic and full of abusive parents and guardians. Her mother was a sex worker, her father disowned her for a time, and she was forced to protect her baby sister, who was never given a name. When her father gives her up for adoption, she travels to American—but, like Jane’s aunt Sarah Reed, her adoptive mother is cold and unfeeling, treating Kit Kat and her trauma as burdens she’s been saddled with. (Melissa Brinks)

The New York Times reviews Elisa Gabbert’s collection of essays The Word Pretty.

In the category of book titles, she disapproves of the “rhythmic sing-songiness” of those like “I Know This Much Is True” and “All the Light We Cannot See.” She adds: “As far as meter goes I think spondees make for the best, snappiest titles: ‘White Noise.’ ‘Jane Eyre.’ ‘Bleak House.’” (John Williams)

Reader's Digest looks at the '14 Craziest Pop Culture Conspiracy Theories of All Time', such as

A woman couldn’t have done that?!
Wuthering Heights wasn’t written by Emily Brontë, but rather her brother, Branwell Brontë? The songs on Hole’s album, Live Through This, were actually written by Courtney Love’s deceased husband, Kurt Cobain? The Harry Potter books weren’t written by J.K. Rowling but by a massive enterprise of ghostwriters? No. No to this demeaning form of misogyny. Scratch the surface of these conspiracy theories and you’ll find some very insecure men who can’t accept the valuable contributions of women. Let’s move along—there’s nothing to see here. (Lauren Cahn)

Aaaand on Backstage there's one more selection of '10 of Film’s Most Brilliant Nanny Performances'.

Mia Wasikowska in “Jane Eyre” (2011)
Intense, introspective and damaged—yes, that’s right Dorothy, we’re not in Mary Poppins territory anymore. Wasikowska brings Charlotte Brontë’s troubled governess into the 21st century. Still waters run deep, especially when those waters are all wrapped up in bonnets and crinolines and presented with Michael Fassbender’s Mr. Rochester. Wasikowska dominates this updated period drama. (Bex Palmer)

Meaww on Jace from TV series Shadowhunters:

The fact that Jace pretty much resembles a ripped Greek-God is surely nothing to complain about. And right from the start, he comes off as a strong, sexy, somewhat damaged shadowhunter - fighting dangerous creatures, and laughing while doing so, even though he knows they could take him out in a snap. It's like the holy trinity for everyone with a soft spot for the brooding, cocky archetypical hero like Edward Cullen from 'Twilight,' or even Heathcliff from the age-old classic, 'Wuthering Heights.' (Alakananda Bandyopadhyay)

Actualitté (France) recommends free etexts of Emily Brontë's work. AIM Digital (Argentina) had an article on 'Emile' Brontë. SoloLibri (Italy) suggests some gifts for Brontë enthusiasts. Classical Music has a new review of John Joubert's Jane Eyre opera. Jane Eyre's Library (in Spanish) shows an old Czechoslovak edition of Jane Eyre. AnneBrontë.org has a post on the anniversary of the death of Emily Brontë yesterday.