December 29th is a Brontë kind of day

In The Guardian. David Barnett tells about walking on the Haworth moors with The Unthanks' take on Emily Brontë's poetry playing in your ears.

It begins with a flock of birds taking raucous flight; and even though there are no crows to be seen above the heather-flecked moors around the Brontë Parsonage at Haworth, it’s difficult to discern whether this is reality, or a fantasy. I’m immersed in the latest heritage project dedicated to the literary family: a unique audio experience that combines Emily’s poetry, folk music and West Yorkshire’s grand landscape to produce something quite incredible.
The Emily Brontë Song Cycle, an audio production pairing Emily’s poems and music by folk group the Unthanks, was commissioned by the Brontë Society, which runs the sisters’ old family home the Parsonage as a hugely successful museum. The last couple of years has seen a number of Brontë bicentennial anniversaries; this year marked marked 200 years since the birth of Emily, best known for her only novel, Wuthering Heights.
Emily is perhaps less known for her poems; indeed, only one – Remembrance – was published in her lifetime [???]. But it was her verse that composer and pianist Adrian McNally and the Unthank sisters Rachel and Becky turned to, eventually turning Emily’s poetry into songs that marry with the landscape that inspired and informed all three sisters in their own ways.
The final product is a hi-tech audio trail that leads people out out of honey-pot tourist trap of Haworth and up Penistone Hill, along dirt tracks that cleave the bleak and beautiful countryside, accompanied by commentary from McNally and the Unthank sisters. Along the way, radio frequency beacons are hidden to keep the music coming, and visitors are given noise-cancelling headphones to insulate them from the outside world, with only the haunting voices of the Unthanks and Emily’s often dark poetry in their ears. It’s an utterly immersive experience – so much so that, as I head up what’s known locally as the Balcony Path, a Lycra-clad cyclist silently barrelling down towards me startles me so badly that I jump. The effect of the music and landscape together creates an almost separate reality, in which even the most mundane modern intrusion feels like a jarring shock.
The music was recorded at the Parsonage, with McNally composing on Emily Brontë’s own piano, a five-octave cabinet piano from the early 19th century. Kitty Wright, executive director of the Brontë Society, called the process a “pleasure to witness”: “[McNally] brought music back into the rooms where the whole family had enjoyed the same piano so many years ago. The link between Emily’s words and the wild surroundings of the moors has an eternal fascination for visitors and we look forward to how the song cycle and listening experience brings a new interpretation to the well-trodden paths around the area the Brontës knew so well.”
The choice of songs is perfectly pitched for the walk, which at a leisurely pace takes around 40 minutes. The trail runs from 17 December to the end of March; a canny move as the route is quieter than in high summer, and all the more atmospheric for the absence of people, save the occasional dog-walker.
As you pass through the churchyard, the first song is Deep Down in the Silent Grave; at the crest of Penistone Hill walkers are invited to listen to High Waving Heather and cast their gaze to the west, and the hillside site of Top Withins, thought to be Emily’s inspiration for Wuthering Heights. And yes, up on those wiley, windy moors, the ghost of Kate Bush does occasionally tap at the window. Her song Wuthering Heights – 40 years old in this year of Emily’s bicentenary – has no doubt brought many a coach-load of visitors to Haworth. But the Unthanks’ songs could be seen as a companion to Bush; they get under your skin in the same way, with Emily’s poetry feeling, at times, like contemporary lyrics. They are, however, even darker than Wuthering Heights, focused on death and loss in a uncompromising manner. But, as McNally notes in the audio trail, although the poems are entrenched in darkness, they offer “a truth and integrity that will endure”.

Apart from The Secret World of Emily Brontë, presented by Lily Cole and to be broadcast on Channel 4 on December 29th, Lily Cole's short film, Balls, will also be broadcast on Channel 4 that day as reported by The Telegraph and Argus.

Channel 4 will show Balls, the Wuthering Heights-inspired short film by social activist and model Lily Cole, on December 29.
Cole created the eight-minute movie in her role as the Brontë Society’s creative partner during the 200th anniversary year of Emily Brontë”s birth.
In focusing on Wuthering Heights anti-hero Heathcliff, a foundling, she also teamed up with the Foundling Museum in London.
She explored the mid-19th century links between London’s Foundling Hospital and Emily’s novel, in which heroine Catherine Earnshaw’s father adopts young Heathcliff after finding him on the streets of Liverpool.
Balls was premiered in Haworth during a special weekend to celebrate Emily’s 200th birthday, and received an awestruck reaction from literary enthusiasts.
At the time, the museum’s head of communications Rebecca Yorke said: “Balls is a very moving film, short and hard-hitting. While it was playing you could hear a pin drop.”
Cole’s film was screened for visitors to the museum until the beginning of December, along with a display of objects from the Foundling Museum Collection.
In late 2017 the Brontë Society announced Lily Cole as one of its high-profile creative partners for this year, to help celebrate the bicentennial of Emily Brontë’s birth. [...]
At the time, Cole said she had long been fascinated by Wuthering Heights and its “enigmatic” writer, adding: “The fact that Emily had to change her name – to Ellis Bell – in order to publish the novel intrigues and inspires me.”
Although Cole’s efforts for 2018 were to focus on weighty subjects like foundlings, gender politics and women’s rights, her inclusion divided Brontë Society members with one, Brontë biographer Nick Holland, announcing he would resign at the “disgraceful” decision.
Cole considered following Emily’s lead and making Balls under a pseudonym, but her film went on to receive critical acclaim.
David Wilson, director Bradford City of Film, this week said Balls was among several TV and film projects that during 2018 had received significant support from Bradford Film Office.
He said: “Once again Bradford has proved its film friendly credentials with a significant number of UK TV dramas and some very prominent feature films choosing to use locations in the city..
“We continue to win the confidence and the friendship of some of the major producers and directors along with the crews who make magic happen on our screens.
“With a good number of enquiries for next year already under way and international collaborations in development, we have much to celebrate in 2019, the 10th anniversary of Bradford as a UNESCO City of Film”. (David Knights)

We sincerely wish that the people and news outlets which were so quick to criticise and judge the Brontë Society's decision would, if not apologise, then comment on it and admit that it was the right choice. Balls has been a success after all. As we said at the time, the Brontës wrote under pseudonyms knowing that critics would judge their works beforehand if they knew their real identities, so let's make it our goal for the year that will mark the 173the anniversary of the publication of their poems (when they first chose their noms de plume) to stop judging people for their gender or what you may think about them and let's focus on the results. We would also like to congratulate the Brontë Society and Lily Cole for being so brave in the face of such negativity.

December 29th will also mark the second anniversary of the first broadcast of To Walk Invisble. The Globe and Mail has an article about it:

The TV film is gorgeously made but is not a mere costume drama. It is anchored as much in the mud and rain of the landscape as it is in the slowly burning literary genius of its three Victorian heroines. Often with dramas about literary figures, there is a narrative flaw in depicting what the artist creates and how it is done. Not here. The claustrophobic atmosphere in the Bronte household, incandescent with the force of the stories and poems the women create, conveys everything. (John Doyle)

Coincidentally, too, December 29th is also the day Patrick Brontë and María Branwell got married.

Fanpage (Italy) recommends 101 books to read in 2019, including

Cime tempestose (Emily Brontë): scritto nel 1857 [sic], si tratta di uno dei romanzi più esemplificativi della narrativa romantica d'oltremanica. Le sue atmosfere cupe e drammatiche, i personaggi vittima della loro insoddisfazione, la natura che urla prepotentemente la propria supremazia: Emily Brontë ha scritto un libro eccezionale, che è ancora oggi uno dei principali esempi di scrittura femminile "nera". (Translation)

Esquire (Spain) tells a behind-the-scenes anecdote of Wuthering Heights 1939.

Cumbres borrascosas
Como solía ocurrir en Hollywood, esta historia de amor gótico entró en la órbita de Samuel Goldwyn envuelta en una nube de incertidumbres. Supuestamente, el productor Walter Wanger pensó en hacer una versión cinematográfica protagonizada por Sylvia Sidney y Charles Boyer. Laurence Olivier quería que la protagonista femenina fuera su prometida, Vivien Leigh, y consideró que la elección de Merle Oberon era un disparate. David Niven no tenía ningún interés en participar. Pero ‘Cumbres borrascosas’ arrancó ríos de lágrimas entre los espectadores americanos, las mismas que derramaron el director y sus artistas para llevar a la pantalla la romántica historia de Emily Brontë. (Iván Iglesias) (Translation)

YourTango recommends The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters if

you're a fan of Gothic literature or you can't get enough of Jane Eyre, you'll swoon for this scary tale of a wealthy family whose fortunes aren't what they once were. To make matters worse, the county estate where they live seems to be the center of a curse sure to lead them all to ruin! Spooky! (Rebecca Jane Stokes)