'A love-song of a woman who never loved'

Los Angeles Review of Books features Julia Copus’s This Rare Spirit: A Life of Charlotte Mew.

Mew was an inveterate — to borrow her heroine Emily Brontë’s spelling — “whacher” of people. Withdrawing binary judgments of good or evil, her poems manage to balance their sympathies, not least in her most “famous,” breakout poem, “The Farmer’s Bride,” published when Mew was already in her 40s and born, as Copus illustrates, at least in part of contemporary debates about marriage and divorce. Copus links Mew to Brontë in other ways too, deriving meaning from the former’s discussion of the latter in an essay in Temple Bar magazine. In that piece, Mew notes that Brontë “knew nothing of the passion which breathes and burns in every line,” and that her poems were “a love-song of a woman who never loved.” Copus further marshals Mew’s comments on Brontë when it comes to the matter of Mew’s attire, her pointedly androgynous wardrobe, noting that Mew described Brontë’s “masculine genius” as “purely spiritual, strangely and exquisitely severed from embodiment and freed from any accident of sex.” Where Copus most abruptly departs from previous discussions of Mew’s life, including Penelope Fitzgerald’s biography Charlotte Mew and Her Friends (1984), is on the matter of that “accident of sex.” [...]

Her only real faith, clear from the poems and Copus’s perceptive reading, appears to have been another Brontë-esque one, that death “was not a problem because it was the end of problems”; in an early poem death is figured not as gothic nightmare but as benevolent companion: “(Show me your face, why the eyes are kind!)” (Declan Ryan)

Big Issue North features Wise Children's Wuthering Heights.

“With this in mind, I decided to treat Wuthering Heights not as a romance but as a revenge tragedy,” says Rice, who ponders now whether calling it a cautionary tale might be an even better description. “Be careful what you seed!”

If revenge is what Rice is trying to achieve, she’s having fun doing it. The former artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe, a bitter parting in 2018 led her to founding Bristol-based theatre company Wise Children. It was named after Angela Carter’s Shakespearian last novel, which was also a meaningful first production for Rice, who brought joy and anarchy to the stage in abundance. A handful of projects and one pandemic later, Wuthering Heights offers the same riotous stage innovation, with the Yorkshire Moors themselves “like a wild and ancient Greek Chorus” joining in on song and dance.

“I love them!” says Rice, who’s done away with judgemental maid Nelly Dean and instead employed the Moors as narrator. “They are as cool as they are hot and bring a fresh perspective to this story.”

Beyond that, the artistic director insists she’s been “super faithful” to the text – telling the whole story, including that of young Cathy and Hareton, who inhabit the rarely explored second half of the book. She continues to find it compelling and contemporary.

“Catherine is one of the most complex characters in literature and, in her, I see myself and friends at different times in our lives. She clearly has some undiagnosed behavioural issues, and we all found these exciting to explore. She was also in a system that gave her no freedom to express herself or her needs.

“In many ways Wuthering Heights is a lesson in female repression and Catherine cannot bear it. She describes her blood jumping in her veins and I, for one, cheer her on as one of the first punk rockers in our culture,” says Rice, whose female protagonist stomps around the stage in Docs and belts out heavy metal numbers.

“Her and Heathcliff’s relationship is not for the faint hearted but, my, it is powerful,” adds Rice, who cries every night as she watches Lucy McCormick and Ash Hunter bring the vibrant characters to life. “I live their pain, their grief, their despair and their anger.” (Antonia Charlesworth)

York Calling reviews the production.

Emma Rice’s vision has compassion as well as violence and hatred; it gives us hope in the power of kindness. What did I expect to see? I expected to be shocked by the unusual, to be surprised by the innovative and I wasn’t disappointed. (Angie Millard)

BuzzFeed lists Jane Eyre 2011 as one of '76 Of The Best Movies To Stream On Amazon Prime Video In November'.

Okay I feel guilty already. As an English major, I should not be saying this, and your high school teacher will not be pleased either BUT if you are assigned this Charlotte Brontë classic for class and don't have time to read, you can probably just watch this movie. This is the most recent adaptation of the oft-adapted novel about a young governess who falls in love with her employer only to realize he has something much more problematic going on in his attic. While the novel is well worth a read, if you aren't down for a 500-page saga, this Mia Wasikowska/Michael Fassbender film is nearly as good. The sprawling landscapes, marvelous acting, and Oscar-nominated costumes make the whole experience lush and literary. (Matthew Huff)

Bookish questions to biographer Claire Tomalin in The New York Times:

Who is your favorite fictional hero or heroine? Your favorite antihero or villain?

My favorite heroine must be Natasha in “War and Peace” — joined of course by Emma, Elizabeth Bennet, Anne Elliot, Marianne — well, that’s enough. We all enjoy heroines who don’t always behave themselves.

Among rogues I rather like Thomas Mann’s Felix Krull. Heathcliff, of course.

What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you most?

I read everything I could lay my hands on as a child (this was during World War II). I was reading Anna Sewell’s “Black Beauty” when war was declared and worried at once about the fate of horses. “Wuthering Heights” and “Jane Eyre,” of course. I read “Sans Famille,” by Hector Malot, a great French novel about a child on his own, published in 1878. Poetry: Ronsard, Yeats, Tennyson, Shakespeare (my dear mother gave me a complete Shakespeare for my 11th birthday, with the poems as well as the plays — and I read and read it).

The Boston Globe reviews Lily King’s collection of short stories Five Tuesdays in Winter.

The opening story, “Creature,” is narrated by Cara, who reminisces about her stint as a live-in mother’s helper with a wealthy family during the summer she was 14. The experience is invested with a fairy tale aura; the house’s posh neighborhood has a “Sleeping Beauty … feel,” her “third-floor turret” bedroom reminds her of Rapunzel’s. “Halfway through Jane Eyre for summer reading,” Cara sees Hugh, her employer’s married son, as a dashing Rochester to her plucky and precocious Jane. Hugh transgresses boundaries in initially exciting but ultimately menacing ways; Cara’s romantic fantasies of a “tender, delicate kiss” come crashing down, and her inner Bertha is unleashed as she fights back. “You become a creature I can’t understand, my mother sometimes said,” Cara tells us, but it’s her channeling that creaturely fierceness that saves her from the predatory Hugh. (Priscilla Gilman)

Both Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights make it onto a list of 5 English literature classics compiled by Diario de Castilla y León (Spain).

3.- Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë

Esta obra destaca por muchas razones, entre las cuales podemos destacar que es considerada como una de las novelas que termino creando la “conciencia del individuo” en la prosa. La gran mayoría de las personas se centra en la historia romántica que hay en la novela, pero lo cierto es que Jane Eyre, que nos cuenta la historia de una joven sin privilegios en Inglaterra a mediados del siglo XIX, se ve forzada a tener que enseñar para poder sobrevivir.  

La novela fue todo un escándalo cuando se publicó debido al trama de Mr. Rochester, por lo que en poco tiempo se convirtió todo un éxito en ventas. Fue publicada por Charlotte Brontë, pero bajo el non de plume masculino Currer Bell.

4.- Cumbres Borrascosas, Emily Bronte

En este libro seguimos la historia de Cathy y Heatcliff [sic], siendo tremendamente popular gracias a la cultura popular. Aunque muchos se centran en la historia de amor, como es normal, lo cierto es que es un relato muy psicológico, el cual plantea circunstancias muy interesantes en una alegoría narrativa entre las circunstancias y los personajes de la novela. (Translation)

El País (Spain) looks into the controversy of Jodie Turner-Smith playing Anne Boleyn.

La polémica no es nueva. En 2011, la directora inglesa Andrea Arnold estrenó una nueva adaptación cinematográfica de Cumbres borrascosas, la novela de Emily Brontë en la que el papel de Heathcliff lo interpretaba un actor negro, James Howson. Acusada por un periodista de incurrir en una provocación “pueril”, al cambiarle el color de la piel a uno de los personajes más célebres de la literatura inglesa, Arnold se limitó a leer en voz alta la descripción que se hace de Heathcliff cuando aparece por vez primera en la novela. Brontë escribió que el pequeño huérfano encontrado en las calles de Liverpool era “negro como el carbón”, pero durante años esa descripción no fue tomada al pie de la letra. La mayoría de los lectores contemporáneos de la novela prefieren imaginarlo con rasgos parecidos a los de Laurence Olivier, que fue Heathcliff en la versión cinematográfica de 1939, dirigida por Wiliam Wyler. Olivier, por cierto, tenía 32 años cuando se puso en la piel de un personaje que empieza la película siendo aún un adolescente, pero esa licencia no molestó en su día a nadie. (Miquel Echarri) (Translation)

The New York Times mourns the death of Quandra Prettyman, champion of Black Women’s Literature.

But she also embraced her role as a voice and mentor for Barnard’s Black students, especially those who did not come from elite backgrounds.

Among them was Ms. Danticat, who was born in Haiti and graduated from a public school in Brooklyn. She remembered Ms. Prettyman as an inspiration, even though she got a C on one of her first papers, for an essay on “Jane Eyre.” (Clay Risen)

Whitman Wire on students who truly enjoy reading, not just for assignments.

Still, she’s always found comfort in reading. She’s fond of coming-of-age novels with a protagonist she can relate to. One of them is Jane Eyre.

“I could relate to the emotions, that I’m not weird for feeling this way, and I’m not alone,” she said. (Emma Foley)

The County Line reviews Villette.