Fiction mirrors the times

We Are Green Bay reviews a local production of Polly Teale's Brontë.

Seeing “Brontë,” you are a fly on the wall in the lives of a family that is like no other in the world of creativity.
You see the churning dynamics of three sisters, their errant brother and their widowed father.
Along the way, you see characters that two of the sisters created in their novels. In your mind appears a kind of reality that books imbue. In one scene, a character even comforts her creator. Imagine.
You hear the sisters weigh the role of writing in their lives. They wonder, why? – why and how do they write?
You are in a time long past, generally the 1840s, when death knocks often on the front door. The father will see none of his six children live to age 40.
“Brontë” is a little/giant play.
Little: Cast of seven, two hours, condensed stage, with a main set piece a table strewn with books and instruments of writing by pen and ink.
Giant: Lives and thoughts of a literary family whose impact still ripples 180 (or so) years after their initial impact. [...]
Now, you have to listen closely because there is much pith in the words and situations. But in ways the play and production are wondrous as director Stephen Rupsch leads the company to solid accomplishment.
The “show” is visual, too, as executed by scenographer April Beiswenger of the faculty. Branwell Brontë’s portrait of his sisters is recreated and split in three (Charlotte, Emily and Anne singled out) and projected in the background. Projections are layered over as the story progresses. Some images are stills of the countryside and places in the lives of the Brontës. Some images are motion pictures, including a symbolic white dove rising in flight.
There are snippets of music and sounds, too.
Just as Charlotte Brontë takes charge in the family, so does Marissa Helchen in that role. There’s no messin’ with Charlotte, her strength, her smarts and her will. Helchen taps that aura in dealing with the critical Emily (Janie Janczakowski), common sense Anne (Samm Dick) and exasperating Branwell (Ben Wylie), while giving deference to dad (Will Fischer). Figures from novels are kind of haunting as they drift in and out – Bertha (Jackie Vinopal), Cathy (Mercedes Danforth) and Rochester and Heathcliff (Ben Wylie, doing triple duty). Weaving through in the second act as n-n-nervous and quaking males in Charlotte’s life is Tanner Witthuhn.
“Brontë” is a rare kind of play. It takes a certain kind of commitment to consider presenting the think-minded drama and then pull it off with certainty. This production is admirable. It gives the intellect and imagination good scrubs. (Warren Gerds)

JSTOR Daily tried to disentangle the question why 'Victorians Loved Hair Relics' with the help of Deborah Lutz, author of The Brontë Cabinet.

Lutz reminds us of the passage in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) when Heathcliff switches his rival Linton’s hair from the locket around the dead Catherine’s neck and replaces it with his own. “Rather than gathering a memento of Catherine for himself, Heathcliff sees to it that a material fragment of his body will go down into the grave with Catherine’s corpse, to intermingle with her flesh.” The notion of the “good death” merges here with the palpable eroticization of death. Of course, Heathcliff’s plans are foiled by Nelly Dean, who twines Linton’s lock around Heathcliff’s—opening “the possibility of a postmortem storm of jealousy.”
Fiction mirrored the times. (Matthew Wills)

The Straits Times (Singapore) features Sara Collins and her novel The Confessions Of Frannie Langton.

Could a black woman be the heroine of a Gothic romance? Why not, asks writer Sara Collins, who is of Jamaican descent.
Born in Kingston, raised in the Cayman Islands and sent to a British boarding school when she was 11, Collins was obsessed with Charlotte and Emily Brontë's Jane Eyre (sic) and Wuthering Heights as a teenager.
She longed for a novel in which someone like her - a black Caribbean woman - had a place in the genre she loved. She could not find it, so she created it. [...]
It also has something of an antecedent in Wide Sargasso Sea, the 1966 novel in which Dominica-born writer Jean Rhys gives a voice to Jane Eyre's "madwoman in the attic", the Creole first wife of Jane's love interest Edward Rochester.
Though Rhys issued a post-colonial challenge to a British classic, Collins has long been troubled by the problematic nature of Wide Sargasso Sea. "It doesn't engage with the black characters as fully developed human beings."
The stereotypes it employed were ones she tried to undercut in her own book. (Olivia Ho)

Refinery 29 recommends the forthcoming novel When the Ground Is Hard by Malla Nunn  as one of 'The Best YA Books Written By Black Women That You Haven't Read Yet'.

All the best friendships start with a mutual taste in literature. Malla Nunn’s When the Ground Is Hard revolves around a shared copy of Jane Eyre. Adele is one of the most popular girls at her Swaziland boarding school, but when her best friend Delia ditches her for a new girl, Adele has to room with Lottie, a poorer girl who doesn’t pray and is shunned socially. Adele wants nothing to do with Lottie until the two girls from entirely different worlds get to know each other through Charlotte Brontë’s words. They join forces to take on bullies and judgmental teachers, and when a boy goes missing, they must solve the mystery together. Adele and Lottie’s friendship prevails through the complicated power dynamics and racial politics of Swaziland. I’m already rooting for them. (Kathleen Newman-Bremang)

Locus has interviewed author Jasper Fforde.

“Every series begins with a standalone. That’s how it seems to work. I innocently create this huge world that then seems very expansive and a good canvas to lay out more stories on. It seems a bit of a waste using those worlds for just one story. I write books using something I call ‘the narrative dare.’ That’s how I kick off – I just have an idea, and I dare myself to see it through. The Eyre Affair is about Jane Eyre being kidnapped out of Jane Eyre – out of the original manuscript. Everybody’s copies of page 210 have gone blank, and somebody has to get her back. That is essentially the narrative dare. I start off with that premise, and then I go, ‘How is this going to work? What is the world like where Jane Eyre can be kidnapped out of Jane Eyre? What is the mechanism by which this happens? Who gets her back?’ Suddenly this world starts appearing, and I write this bizarre, quite rich backstory to give credibility to that one rather daft idea.
“The dare just pops into my head. Some of them relate to other ones. Jane Eyre being kidnapped out of Jane Eyre relates to the Nursery Crimes series, because in both series I’m taking characters out of context. People know those characters already, so I’m moving the furniture around in their heads – the Three Bears and Humpty Dumpty and Jane Eyre are well defined, but I mess with them in a silly way. (Francesca Myman)

Slash Film reviews the film Pet Sematary, based on a novel by Stephen King.

In many ways, Pet Sematary is King’s modern-day take on the Gothic Novel, completely with dire prophecies, ghostly happenings, and even a mad woman in an attic – the terrifying Zelda Goldman – recalling Bertha Antoinetta Mason from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. (Chris Evangelista)

The Slate features the exhibition The Fashions of Fiction: from Pamela to Gatsby put together by the Fashion Archives and Museum of Shippensburg University.

Source

The collection, “The Fashions of Fiction: from Pamela to Gatsby,” explores the role of clothing and character in classic literature, according to Director Karin J. Bohleke.
The pieces of literature in which the exhibit is centered on are Pamela, The Great Gatsby, Ourika, The Age of Innocence, Jane Eyre, Cranford and Madame Bovary.
The exhibit includes donated pieces from the 18th through 20th centuries. (Hannah Pollock)

Coincidentally, Scoop (New Zealand) announces a new exhibition at the Waikato Museum showing '43 costumes from 25 films'.

Waikato Museum is bringing a slice of Hollywood to Hamilton with the opening of the international touring exhibition Cut! Costume and the Cinema.
Created by Exhibits Development Group out of the United States in cooperation with Cosprop costume house in England, Cut! Costume and the Cinema showcases five centuries of fashion and style as worn by some of Hollywood’s biggest names.
Waikato Museum is the exclusive New Zealand venue for the exhibition, which features 43 costumes from 25 films starring the likes of Johnny Depp, Keira Knightley, Kate Winslet, Natalie Portman, Scarlett Johansson, Nicole Kidman, Robert Downey Jr and Daniel Craig.
Visitors will be up close and personal with Captain Jack Sparrow’s outfit from Pirates of the Caribbean, gowns from Phantom of the Opera, Sherlock Holmes’ bohemian suit, Jane Eyre’s wedding dress as well as a feast of royal attire. [...]
Cut! Costume and the Cinema opens at Waikato Museum from 13 April to 21 July 2019. Admission fee applies. Waikato Museum is open daily from 10am to 5pm.