In order to prise an “extremely rare, immensely significant” piece of Brontë family memorabilia out of private ownership, the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth has launched a crowdfunding campaign to support the acquisition.
One of Charlotte Brontë’s ‘little books’, written in 1830 when she was 14 years old, has remained in private hands since it left the Haworth property after the Brontë sisters passed away. Five of six manuscripts are believed to remain, with the Brontë Parsonage Museum currently possessing four. (...)
“This extraordinary manuscript slipped through our fingers in 2011 so we are especially determined to make the most of this second opportunity to bring it home to Haworth,” Kitty Wright, executive director of The Brontë Society, noted.
“It is expected to sell for at least £650,000 and we’ve been working hard for many months applying to trusts and foundations. This is the final and public phase of our campaign and we urge lovers of literature everywhere to support us now, so that we can go to the auction with a competitive bid and prevent the little book from disappearing into a private collection.” (...)
The Young Men’s Magazine was a series of six tiny booklets produced by Charlotte Brontë, of which five are known to survive. The item up for auction is the fifth in the sequence and would complete the museum’s collection – as it currently holds the other four.
The book, which measures around 35mm x 61mm, consists of 20 pages and comprises stories called A letter from Lord Charles Wellesley, The Midnight Song and Journal of a Frenchman [continued]. It has a brown paper cover and contains more than 4,000 hand-written words in a folded and stitched magazine. (David Styles)
Next November 3rd, The Unthanks will perform in Dublin (the following day in Cork) as part of their Brontë tour.
The Irish Examiner explores the
Wuthering Heights legacy:
‘Wuthering Heights’ as alive today as when it was published in 1847.
With the performance of her poems by English folk group, The Unthanks, Emily Brontë comes home. For Emily Brontë is a teller of folk tales.
Long, long ago, when I was studying English literature in Trinity College Dublin, the accepted wisdom was that nobody knew what inspired Emily Brontë’s work.
What had happened that a creature like Heathcliff was unleashed after Cathy across Victorian drawing-rooms?
We knew it was thrilling. I first read Wuthering Heights when I was about 13 and at peak Heathcliff hormonally.
There was a power cut and I read it secretly, by a guttering candle, because I had an excuse not to do my homework.
Once read, never forgotten.
Wuthering Heights, published in 1847, is an extraordinary tale of obsessive passion on the wild moorlands of West Yorkshire. Reading it again, this week, I was struck by the powerful challenge it lays down to British colonial society, in the disruptive force of the black-haired stranger child — Gypsy, Irish, or changeling? — who is adopted in Liverpool and brought to Wuthering Heights.
The novel has spawned imitations and artistic responses, including Kate Bush’s chart-topping song of the same name.
I’ve had a fascination with all things Wuthering for most of my life.
I even wrote a master’s thesis that contained a chapter on Brontë. (Read more) (Victoria White)
Ruth Wilson is in the
Financial Times:
Most of her best-known roles have been on television, from the cool, defiant Jane Eyre that made her name in 2006 to the warped rationalism of Dr Alice Morgan in the enjoyably bonkers Luther. (Lorien Kite)
She is one of
Harper Bazaar's Women of the Year 2019:
"I seem to switch between characters who are massive extroverts, like Mrs Coulter and the Fool, or are very introverted with vast internal emotional landscapes, like Jane Eyre or my granny," she acknowledges. (Charlotte Brook)
The new Apple TV+ series
Dickinson is reviewed on
The New Yorker:
This program is a curious creature! Its existence a perplexity! Absurd but sincere, pop but abstruse, “Dickinson” pulses with tender attention to the tropes of teen soaps. Wrought on the level of speculative fan fiction, the show—one of many new offerings from Apple TV+—imagines the young Emily Dickinson coming of age in antebellum Massachusetts, like a figure in some emo Brontë fever dream. (Troy Patterson)
The New York Review of Books reviews Celia Paul's
Self-Portrait:
If this chapter reads like a foundational myth of female “becoming,” ripped from the pages of Charlotte Brontë or Elena Ferrante, it’s no surprise. Girlhood seems to be one of the few periods of a woman’s life where her creativity can exist wholly without shame: unbound, feverish, selfish. (Zadie Smith)
Crime books expert Barry Forshaw is interviewed by the
Camden New Journal:
Enough of the past, what about the future of crime fiction? He confesses he’s a tad worried.
“It’s still the most popular genre but the trouble is we are so overexposed now to middle-aged alcoholic coppers, every other book that I’m sent to review is essentially Rebecca or Jane Eyre in which a woman finds she’s married to a man who may be a murderer or committed some crime. Sooner or later people are going to tire of that.”
He believes readers will grow weary of this so-called Domestic Noir because they’ll know that women are never the murderer. He points out it was the opposite with Chandler: it was always the femme fatale. (Stephen Griffin)
Broadway Buzz interviews the actor Bradley Dean who remembers an anecdote from the original production of Gordon & Caird's
Jane Eyre:
Dean's Broadway career spans almost 20 years, and he still thinks about what happened when he took his first bow in 2000. "I was a swing in Jane Eyre," he said. "The only thing I remember about my first performance is that they had two turntables and you had to be very careful walking across them. It was my first entrance as a butler with a bottle of wine and I stepped on the turntable and the wine spilled all over the stage. But I think I ended doing just fine." (Caitlin Moynahan)
Totally underrated period drama heroes in
Cultured Vultures:
Edgar Linton - Wuthering Heights
Poor Edgar might be the most maligned of any hero on this list. He’s the only one I’ve ever heard referred to directly as ‘boring’, but can you blame him for seeming so when he’s been set up as the foil to the completely erratic and terrible Heathcliff? I don’t think so. I’m not necessarily judging anyone who’d prefer Heathcliff to Linton, but I do have to say – there’s plenty of bad boy period drama heroes out there who aren’t also probably clinically certifiable as psychopaths. Just saying.
Linton is a very good soul, gentle and tender, who loves his wife Cathy despite her obsession with Heathcliff, and also loves his daughter very much (also Cathy). He’s a gentleman, brought up in a good house, and unfailingly kind. He’s described as ‘weak’ in comparison to Heathcliff, which is a bit unfair, like saying a human is weak in comparison to the tiger trying to rip their throat out. Edgar doesn’t get the happy ending that a lot of the heroes on this list get, but he never stops trying to make the life of his daughter better, and wants to look after his nephew Linton so that Heathcliff can’t get to him. Far from being boring, Edgar’s only crime is to be Heathcliff’s exact opposite. (Nat Wassell)
Booktrib interviews the writer Maryl Damian:
Your favorite literary character:
is a literary character who influenced me. Her strong moral courage allowed her, penniless, to leave the only home she had ever known and the man she loved in order to live by her moral code.
The evolution of the horror genre on
The Boar:
No longer is the threat of a rain cloud or the peak of a valley enough to satisfy the insatiable bloodthirst of the modern horror reader, and to think that the likes of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre once terrified the weak hearts of the Victorian reader is almost a struggle to believe. (Fey Kapur)
Vogue wants you to buy an ebook reader for quite compelling reasons:
The sheer joy I found in being able to read literally WHATEVER I fancied cannot be stressed enough. How was I to predict that, wide awake with jetlag at 4am, I'd have a burning desire to revisit Jane Eyre?
Women artists in
El Imparcial (México):
Las mujeres han contribuido a las artes visuales desde tiempos inmemoriales, pero pocas veces sus aportaciones han sido reconocidas. Mientras que para el siglo XIX ya había en la literatura autoras tan reconocidas como las hermanas Brontë, Jane Austen o Mary Shelley, en la pintura esto no ocurría. (Gabriel Trujillo) (Translation)
Also in
El Imparcial Wuthering Heights is mentioned in an article about what 'borrascoso' means.
El Colombiano (Colombia) and
RTVE (Spain) recommend the compilation book
Damas Oscuras for Halloween:
En el siglo XIX hubo aún más historias espeluznantes en Estados Unidos y el Reino Unido. Los fantasmas fueron unos de sus grandes protagonistas y no solo fueron los hombres quienes escribieron sobre ellos. La librera Vanessa Díez, de Exlibris, recomendó esta selección de 21 historias escritas por mujeres victorianas. Charlotte Brontë, Amelia B. Edwards y Elizabeth Gaskell hacen parte de este libro. (Valeria Murcia Valdés) (Translation)
According to
Turystyka (Poland), ghosts wander around Wycoller Hall:
Nawiedzona wioska Wycoller. Ukazują się tam duchy arystokratów?
Wsie z otwartą bramą do zaświatów występują nie tylko w horrorach. W Anglii jest ich co najmniej kilka. Należy do nich wioska Wycoller w hrabstwie Lancashire. Górują nad nią malownicze ruiny rezydencji Wycoller Hall, która prawdopodobnie jest pierwowzorem jednej z siedzib pana Rochestera, bohatera słynnej powieści Dziwne losy Jane Eyre autorstwa Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855). W ruinach błąkają się podobno trzy duchy. Do kogo według legendy należą? (Translation)
Deutschlandfunk (Germany) reviews the German translation of Rachel Cusk's
A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother:
Es ist die Literatur, die ihre Mutterschaft zutreffender beschreibt. Cusk zitiert die US-amerikanische Feministin Adrienne Rich, sie liest Emily Brontë, Marcel Proust und die sozialkritischen Romane von Edith Wharton. Immer wieder vergleicht Cusk das Baby mit einem Monarchen, der über sie und ihre Gedanken herrscht. (Julia Friese) (Translation)
El Diario Vasco (Spain) is happy that the Halloween Brexit was avoided:
Supongo que los británicos se dieron cuenta. A tiempo. No por nada son el Reino Unido del monstruo del Lago Ness, los fascinantes vampiros creados por la productora Hammer en los 70, las cumbres borrascosas, la mansión del señor Rochester, el jardín donde Henry James hace aparecer las siluetas crepusculares de los amantes de 'Otra vuelta de tuerca' y el dragón alado y majestuoso de Gales. (Begoña del Teso) (Translation)
Varese News (Italy) lists several nominees to the Premio Chiara:
Beatrice Masini, Più grande la paura, Marsilio
Protagonisti di queste storie sono i bambini. Bambini felici e bambini che non lo sono stati, abusati dagli adulti per troppo amore, come la piccola figlia di Byron, o per troppo odio, come i bambini rapiti, gli scomparsi, gli interrotti. Bambini coraggiosi, che evocano mostri come lo Striglio per combattere ingiustizie, e bambine immaginifiche che hanno tanto letto da poter domare “Le tigri di Mompracem” e trascorrere il pomeriggio con Heathcliff a “Cime tempestose”. In questi racconti c’è l’infanzia per la quale la vita è un’avventura che non deve per forza finire bene o un viaggio che non sempre contempla il ritorno. (Translation)
La Difesa del Popolo (Italy) mentions
Wuthering Heights:
L’adolescenza emana una fascinazione senza tempo: basti pensare a Heathcliff di “Cime tempestose”, di Emily Brontë, che, rifiutato perché trovatello, pur rispondendo a violenza con violenza, resta per sempre incatenato al “Verde paradiso degli amori infantili”, avrebbe detto Baudelaire. (Marco Testi) (Translation)
Elite Daily lists a Charlotte Brontë quote as part of a selection of Instagram quotes.
Broadway World announces auditions for a
Jane Eyre production in Hartford, CT.
Bookshelves of Doom posts an enthusiastic review of
Charlotte Brontë Before Jane Eyre, by Glynnis Fawkes.
Cantonaut discusses his need for a
Jane Eyre of his own.
The Bobsphere reviews Charlotte Brontë's novel.
The Sisters Room posts about one of the treasures of the Parsonage: the Dinner Table. Finally, a couple of Brontë-related posts on Strong Senese of Place:
Thank you so much for the links to Strong Sense of Place! :-)
ReplyDelete