In case you haven’t noticed, the world is Brontë mad

We were wondering what had happened on Wednesday when the future of Red House was debated by Kirklees Council. According to Dewsbury Reporter,

Kirklees Council says “conversations are ongoing” over the future of the site in Gomersal following enquiries from what it describes as “interested parties”.
And campaigners fighting to stop parts of the site from being turned into housing have been assured that no final decision will be taken until all potential opportunities to retain the building have been exhausted.
The revelation came after supporters in Huddersfield Town Hall presented a petition calling for the museum, which has connections to Charlotte Brontë, to be given over to the Red House Heritage Group.
Kirklees Council closed Red House almost three years ago as part of a reaction to Government austerity cuts.
It turned down three asset transfer requests and announced in September this year that the building and grounds were to be put on the market.
In a hard-hitting and impassioned address Caroline Goodwill exhorted members to stand up for people who had signed the petition – and who wanted action on the former museum.
She said: “We are not expecting you to reopen Red House but we the Red House Heritage Group wish to take it over in some form or another and work with Kirklees to save and develop this wonderful heritage resource.”
She referred to the 17th century house as “a perfect time capsule” that demonstrated how the Industrial Revolution had happened and underlined the importance of the wool trade to the borough.
She also underlined Red House’s connections to Charlotte Brontë, calling it the second most important Brontë site globally after the family parsonage in Haworth.
She added: “In case you haven’t noticed, the world is Brontë mad.
“Would another five or six houses on the Red House site make such an important difference to the housing stock? Is it worth destroying this national and international site?”
For the council Clr Graham Turner said the decision to close Red House had been very difficult.
Three applications for the museum to be the subject of a community asset transfer missed the relevant criteria to move forward – one by just a single point. All were rejected.
But he pledged to look closely at any new bids.
“I will promise you this evening that we will not sell the building until we have exhausted all the potential opportunities to either retain the building without a large subsidy or complete a successful asset transfer, or by it being taken over by an alternative charity or public body.
“Any positive outcome can only be achieved if any interested parties talk to us.” (Tony Earnshaw)

We hope that he means it and that it is true, but to us, it does sound like they will sell it in the end as they have always meant to do.

Still in Brontë country, The Telegraph and Argus reports that Keighley public library is at risk of being closed, too.

Councillor Rebecca Poulsen (Cons, Worth Valley) was referring to concerns that the town's library might face the chop under planned £1.05 million cuts to Bradford's Museum and Library service.
The Council announced the cuts earlier this year, and is soon to start a public consultation into how the cuts will impact services.
Officers have said the Council aims to keep all its libraries and museums open, but the budget cuts would require major changes to the way they operate.
In Keighley concerns had been raised that the town would lose its Carnegie library after a number of online rumours. The Council has proposed the facility on North Street could become a community hub - retaining the library service and including other services and facilities.
Cllr Poulson represents Haworth, where the Brontë sisters wrote their most famous works, and on Tuesday raised a motion calling for greater protection of the District's libraries.
She said: "It would be a disgrace, it would degrade Keighley in the eyes of the world, if there was no library in a town just three miles down the road from where so many famous novels were written." (Chris Young)

And now for something constructive (as opposed to the destruction above) as Keighley News reports that a bridge over the River Worth has been rebuilt after 35 years.

It lies just below Ponden Reservoir, with the source of the River Worth only a few hundred yards past Ponden Hall at the top side of the reservoir.
[Ponden Hall owner Richard Trainer] said there had been a bridge at the site for many years, and he and Barbara had long planned to revive the crossing.
He said: “When Barbara’s sister died in February we thought the bridge would make a suitable memorial.
“It’s on all the old maps. In the old days, workers would go across the bridge to get to the mill. They used to have a vegetable patch on the other side.
“The bridge fell down about 35 years ago and was never repaired. I think when Ponden Hall became a shop they didn’t want people playing on a rickety old bridge.
Richard said the bridge had attracted a lot of interest in recent weeks.
He added: “It’s a nice addition to what we have here. We have a campsite, bed-and-breakfast, and we have a café that’s open four days a week.
“We have parking at the mill and we are the closest to one of the Brontë sites, so we get a lot of people coming for walks. The bridge gives them another place to go for a walk.
“The bridge leads to a picnic area. It’s quite popular – stable and childproof. Children are often playing and collecting things along the river.” (David Knights)

On the other side of the Atlantic, there are a couple of reviews of The Joffrey Ballet's take on Jane Eyre with Cathy Marston's choreography.

Among the great pleasures of 19th-century novels are their length, their breadth, the deep dives into characters’ lives and into the social fabric of the time. It’s almost suicidal to try to stage these stories in just over two hours. Yet that’s what British choreographer Cathy Marston did with Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 Jane Eyre, in a 2016 evening-length ballet now remounted by the Joffrey at the Auditorium Theatre. It’s an act of love, and of daring—for good and bad, a contemporary feminist take on the story.
Eliminating all traces of costume drama, Marston emphasizes the novel’s bleak universality. Patrick Kinmonth’s painted drops show sloping, intersecting lines suggesting lonely hills, the moors, a distant horizon on a vast open plain. His pared costumes merely hint at the period. Philip Feeney’s score likewise defers to the choreography, as Marston steps outside the bounds of classical ballet to highlight the characters’ distinctive gestures. [...]
Emotionally, Jane is already evolved enough to interact with Rochester on equal terms. In their first duet, they’re clearly dancing one of the novel’s bantering, witty, occasionally combative early conversations. Every subsequent duet fully limns a new phase. When Jane saves Rochester’s life, pulling him from his burning bed, and they dance in their nightclothes, there’s a huge jump in intimacy: intellectual attraction has become fiery desire. The highly athletic, technically difficult proposal scene, near the top of the second act, feels artificial, forced—maybe because Rochester already has a wife: Bertha, the mad Creole in the attic. When Jane, about to be married, finds out about Bertha and tosses her bridal veil aside like the rag it is, their duet is marked by distance and avoidance.
Though the early duets in the second act falter, and the story of Jane’s would-be husband, St. John Rivers, feels cursory, dutiful, Marston returns to form in the final duet, when Rochester’s blindness completely changes the power dynamic between him and Jane. Just before the quiet end, Marston inflects Jane’s usual isolating, self-protective gesture—clasping her own chest or head—to suggest the mutual support between these two. When she stands with her back to Rochester, touching once again her hands to her face, he takes one of them in his and places her other behind his neck, forming a loop, a never-ending circuit of love.
While Marston pretty much nails the love story, her sometimes heavy-handed treatment of the novel’s feminism, embodied in the literal manhandling of Jane by the ten characters she calls the D-Men, comes perilously close to tiresome, their scenes continually hammering home Jane’s victimization. Predictably, she’s a rag doll in their hands at first but increasingly defies them, finally trouncing them all—one by one, action-heroine style—in an unsurprising final confrontation.
A bigger problem, especially since Marston emphasizes Brontë’s feminism, is her treatment of Bertha, who has her own story of abuse by men, a story Jean Rhys tells in her 1966 novel, Wide Sargasso Sea. Rhys not only imagines Rochester’s cruelty to Bertha—a cruelty visible but unacknowledged onstage here—but exposes its source in imperialist, racist beliefs. A baked-in problem, Bertha (Christine Rocas, excellent on opening night) is simply a monster here, as usual. If you’re going to be a feminist, care for all women.
Marston’s feminism feels most genuine when she celebrates female friendship in duets and trios that comfort Jane, give her a community. On opening night, Lucia Connolly danced the dithery, skittery Mrs. Fairfax to perfection, as Cara Marie Gary did the hyperkinetic Adele. As Young Jane, Yumi Kanazawa was touchingly vulnerable and defiantly strong. Greig Matthews made a great moody Rochester, but his partnering of Amanda Assucena’s Jane made me fear for her safety. She brought precise technique and fearless flamboyance to bear on a Jane powerful in every scene, whether standing silently watching or dancing her heart out. (Laura Molzahn on Chicago Reader)

It unfolds as something of a fever dream as Jane (with a sublime performance by Amanda Assucena), envisions her younger self (exquisitely danced by Yumi Kanazawa, who clearly has star quality), and recalls her lonely, abusive childhood as an orphan. Grudgingly taken in by her haughty aunt (played to perfection by April Daly), she is battered and bullied by her spoiled cousins (the excellent Xavier Nunez, Yuma Iwai and Valerie Chaykina), and then sent off to a Dickensian boarding school for orphaned girls (ideally conjured with nothing but wooden stools and slates). Her only friend is Helen Burns (a lovely turn by Brooke Linford), but she soon dies. It is only when she begins to teach the girls that she begins to gain the confidence that will serve her well.
Then comes a life-altering transition as Janes takes the job of governess at the home of Edward Rochester (wonderfully danced and played by Greig Matthews in what is unquestionably a breakthrough performance), the wealthy, worldly, darkly brooding master of Thornfield Hall.
Jane is welcomed by Mr. Rochester’s kind but perpetually nervous housekeeper, Mrs. Fairfax (a spot-on turn by Lucia Connolly). And she is instantly adored by her exuberant little pupil, Adele Varens (an irresistibly playful Cara Marie Gary), who is Rochester’s ward. As for Rochester, who has some very dark secrets hidden in his closet, he is initially quite dismissive of Jane. (In one searing gesture made while seated in a giant armchair, he sharply extends his leg as if to corral her.) But gradually he begins to realize she is a woman with a steely spine. And not only does a certain push-pull chemistry between the two begin to develop, but he also even fends off the insistently seductive moves of the socialite Blanche (beautiful Jeraldine Mendoza), and proposes marriage to Jane instead.
Of course there is no escaping that dark secret: a wife, Bertha Mason (in a riveting, crash-and-burn turn by Christine Rocas), a raging madwoman with suicidal impulses who is kept locked away in an attic room and is cared for by the harried and notably tipsy Grace Poole (an inspired cameo by Dara Holmes). Once that story is revealed, a traumatized Jane runs away into the moors where she is rescued by the Rev. St. John Rivers (the always outstanding Edson Barbosa), who quickly proposes marriage – an offer she instantly rejects, knowing that Rochester is the man who has captured her soul, and that she must return to him.
Bertha’s attempt to burn the house down leaves the madwoman dead and Rochester blind. But Jane is determined to live out her life with him, and the remarkably moving pas de deux that reunites them suggests they are finally clearly “seeing” each other in the most compelling way.
Throughout, Assucena’s dancing is sweeping and flawless, including when she is haunted by memories of being bullied by a group of men in creamy topcoats who torment her and toss her from one to the other with terrifying force until she finally learns to fight back. But it is the easy radiance and complexity of Assucena’s inner life, and the most natural ways in which she embodies Jane’s growth and change and ever-shifting confidence, anguish and confusion, that make the crucial difference. And she and Greig make a most interesting pair.
Marston’s character-defining choreography and dramatic direction give each of the many other dancers in the ballet a highly specific language of movement, and without exception they have become fluent in it, suggesting both the inner psychological landscape and the outer reality. (Note: Three casts will alternate in the leading roles during the ballet’s two-week run, including Victoria Jaiani and Fabrice Calmels, and Anais Buenos and Dylan Gutierrez.)
The sets and costumes by Patrick Kinmonth (who also collaborated with Marston on the ballet’s scenario) are spare but highly effective, with delicately painted curtains to suggest the landscape, and little more than chairs used as defensive weapons and seats of power (or the lack of it).
And as always, music director Scott Speck and his impeccable Chicago Philharmonic musicians are essential in bringing the work to vivid life and ideally synchronizing with the dancers. (Hedy Weiss on WTTW News)

An English teacher who hates the classics on Book Riot:

Similarly, the feminist in me just cannot with Wuthering Heights. I often see this hailed as one of the most romantic books all the time. Eye roll. What is romantic about this book? Heathcliff is deeply troubled and abusive. Cathy is simpering and weak. There’s also something a bit incestuous about the vibe. Is that the definition of romance we want to instill in the next generation? (Lily Dunn)

And yet according to Aspen Daily News, Wuthering Heights is not a classic or a romance but a thriller (!).

Thrillers with female heroines are hardly an emerging area in fiction (think “Wuthering Heights,” Emily Brontë), but in the last several years — with the publications of the bestselling “Gone Girl” by Gillian Flynn in 2012 and “The Girl on the Train” by Paula Hawkins in 2015 — it has reclaimed book publishing. (Maura Masters)

Sin embargo (Mexico) features the group Libros B4 Tipos formed by 14 booktubers.

Andrea hace breves intervenciones para hablar de autoras. Su recomendación tiene nombres conocidos como Jane Austen o las hermanas Brontë (Emily, Charlotte y Anne), sin embargo, asegura que a pesar de ser clásicas es necesario seguir leyéndolas porque durante siglos han permanecido relegadas por el género que escribieron.
“Debemos rescatar, por ejemplo, a Jane Austen que siempre la he visto relegada porque creen que solo escribe cosas románticas como si eso fuera un género menor, igual que las Brontë. Porque todas ellas en su tiempo rompieron los esquemas. Necesitamos rescatar a las autoras clásicas y no relegar a escritoras de novelas románticas cuando no es un género menor o algo exclusivo de mujeres“, explica Andrea. (Patricia Ramírez) (Translation)

La opinión de Málaga (Spain) reviews the translated poems of Emily Brontë.

Es esta 'Poesía completa' una oportunidad de descubrir a una autora que supo llegar con sus palabras a los rincones más profundos del alma humana, aquellos en los que se esconden los sentimientos que no queremos compartir, las zozobras que nos atormentan cuando amamos, cuando quieres y no te quieren, cuando la felicidad es un anhelo que está a la vez tan lejos pero tan cerca.
Un universo propio es el que construye Emily Brontë en sus poemas, un mundo que se pasea por ese otro mundo imaginario, Gondal, que un día se inventó con sus hermanas. En la poesía de Emily hay no sólo amor y sentimientos, también se encuentran esos otros elementos tan comunes en la escritura surgida de las islas británicas, una naturaleza bronca, desafiante, convertida en metáfora de los miedos propios y ajenos, pero a la vez florida, verde, exhuberante, como la tierra nutrida por la lluvia. Es el petricor, ese olor único a tierra mojada que es a la vez fin e inicio. Mujer adelantada a su época, como sus hermanas, nunca es tarde para descubrir su poesía, lectura otoñal para recordar a una autora difícil de igualar. (Virginia Guzmán) (Translation)

La casa de El (Spain) finds echoes of the Brontës and Jane 'Austin' (sic) in the graphic novel The Black Holes by Borja González.

‘The Black Holes’ mezcla con acierto el ruidoso espíritu punk con la ciencia ficción, el relato gótico heredero de las hermanas Brontë y la elegancia victoriana de fuerte espíritu femenino que podría estar ideada por Jane Austin. (Santiago Negro) (Translation)

The London Economic carries the story of 'two unrelated students called Bronte Taylor, born one day apart, graduated from the same English Literature course this week'. The accompanying picture shows them both holding a Penguin Books edition of Wuthering Heights. El País (Spain) recommends Adrienne Rich's reading of Charlotte Brontë's works. The Univerity News has just discovered Diane Setterfield's 2006 novel The Thirteenth Tale and recommends it will ' charm your “Jane Eyre”-loving hearts.'