Anne Brontë: first whistleblower on wife abuse

The Sydney Morning Herald also links the #MeToo movement to Anne Brontë, inspired by Samantha Ellis's recent article.

Another reason to celebrate Anne is that readers are casting a new eye on her work in the #MeToo age. Cate Whittaker’s play The Lost Voice of Anne Brontë, which had its world premiere in Sydney, bills Anne as ‘‘the first whistleblower on wife abuse’’. [...]
The interest for contemporary readers is that unlike Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, which make romantic heroes out of seriously flawed and self-destructive men, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall has a heroine, Helen, who is raped by her violent alcoholic husband and assaulted by another man who preys on her vulnerability and the fact that no one will believe her accusations. She runs away from her marriage with her son – an unheard-of solution in those times.
Ellis’ article for The Times Literary Supplement also argues that Agnes Grey could have been a piece of consciousness-raising for oppressed governesses, to show them they were not alone and to encourage them to push for change. But not a single critic saw the novel that way.
Another reappraisal of Anne comes from novelist Tracy Chevalier in her introduction to the Folio Society edition of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. She argues that Anne was the equal of Charlotte and Emily in her writing. When Helen is first courted by the man who makes such a disastrous husband, Chevalier comments ‘‘Reading this section is like watching the proverbial car crash in slow motion, complete with the reader shouting ‘Stop! Don’t do it!’
How was Anne Brontë able to write so accurately about bad marriages and substance abuse, Chevalier wonders. The answer might well be that she had an example of that kind of man right in front of her: her beloved brother Branwell, wrecked by alcoholism and dissipation. She wrote fearlessly and honestly, and we should celebrate that. (Jane Sullivan)

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is also Reader's Digest's alternative to Jane Eyre which, according to them, is one of '13 Beloved Books That Didn’t Age Well'.

Romance readers have praised Charlotte Brontë’s classics for a long time. Jane Eyre is often listed in a long line of favorites. But mistreating—even imprisoning!—a woman isn’t cool, and that’s exactly what the handsome, brooding Edward Rochester does midway through the story. Looking at the 1847 novel through a modern lens recently led The Artifice to call out Jane as a contemporary “bad feminist.”
Looking for a Brontë heroine with a better taste in men and a little more gumption? You’re bound to enjoy one of Anne Brontë’s lesser-known masterpieces, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. (Leandra Beabout)

The New York Times reviews Heathcliff Redux. A Novella and Stories by Lily Tuck.

“Of course I had read ‘Wuthering Heights,’” reads the opening line of “Heathcliff Redux.” “I read it years ago in high school, but, in my late 20s, I decided to read it again.” The unnamed narrator of Lily Tuck’s restrained but remarkably arresting novella is a well-to-do wife and mother in rural Virginia. Her husband, Charlie, breeds cattle on the 400-acre farm in Albemarle County where they live with their 9-year-old twin boys. It is 1963, “still a relatively innocent time — innocent, at least, for middle-class people like Charlie and me,” she reminisces. “We did not do drugs, we did not get divorced, and we did not have abortions or extramarital love affairs, or, if we did, we did not talk about them.”
Hence the relative reserve with which the narrator subsequently details her liaison with Cliff, a rakish, “reckless” horseman — he rides like a Cossack — whom she falls for with the same helpless lust with which teenage bibliophiles swoon over Emily Brontë’s brooding antihero: “It is hard to describe how handsome Cliff was, how sexy and how attracted I was.” (Readers familiar with Tuck’s earlier book “The Double Life of Liliane,” an autobiographical portrait of the author’s childhood and coming-of-age that mixed fiction, cultural commentary and personal memoir, might remember the adolescent Liliane’s attempts to write a novel about her imagined life with Heathcliff during the three years he’s away from Wuthering Heights.) [...]
Punctuating the story of the narrator’s affair with Cliff are quotes from “Wuthering Heights,” extracts of 21st-century critical commentary on the 1847 novel and morsels from Brontë’s biography. These are the means by which Tuck enfolds various misreadings and misconceptions into the fabric of her novella — both those integral to the 1847 story and those surrounding its contemporary reception. Fittingly, Tuck’s novella eventually reveals itself to be more a tale of self-delusion and internal conflict than the grand romance we were initially led to believe. (Lucy Scholes)

L'Adigetto (Italy) interviews writer Viky Keller.

Quali sono i poeti e gli scrittori che hai amato di più?«Amo leggere e, quando trovo un autore che mi piace, tendo a immergermi nella sua bibliografia. Il primo libro che ho letto è stato Piccole donne.
«Il mio gusto romantico ha amato Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf. (Luciana Grillo) (Translation)

Refinery 29 reveals that there are people who 'Get Paid To Find The Best Proposal Spots in Europe' such as

a restaurant with a pretty vista, or a historic building with gorgeous architecture, or even a dramatic moor that looks like a scene straight out of Wuthering Heights. (Whizy Kim)

Il Bo Live (Italy) shares a video of a translator discussing the challenges of translating Wuthering Heights into Italian.