Britain’s Novel Landscapes: The Brontës

iNews reminds us of the fact that the episode of Britain’s Novel Landscapes with Mariella Frostrup on the Brontës is finally on tonight.

Britain’s Novel Landscapes with Mariella Frostrup

9pm, More4

In the final episode of the series, literary expert Mariella Frostrup explores Yorkshire and the dramatic landscape that inspired the world-famous Brontë sisters – Charlotte, Anne and Emily – to write some of their much-loved novels. She delves into their life stories and the harsh realities of the past, and discovers how a dramatic landslide may be the key to Emily’s depiction of the moors in Wuthering Heights, and how the high child mortality rate in the Brontës’ home town of Haworth might have influenced Jane Eyre. (Gerard Gilbert)

The New York Times takes a look at London stages and pauses to examine Wise Children's Wuthering Heights.

The eclectic impulses behind this production are evident from its cast, which brings together dancers, performance artists and a “Hamilton” alum to tell the corpse-strewn story of the foundling, Heathcliff (Ash Hunter, the veteran of the aforementioned musical), and the ill-starred Catherine (Lucy McCormick, a maverick talent who moves between self-devised work and plays such as this one). Juggling several roles is the charismatic Sam Archer, an actor-dancer whose nimble movement very explicitly keeps Rice’s take on this 1847 novel from seeming earthbound: It’s always helpful to have a performer on hand capable of soaring at any moment.

Rice’s freewheeling approach to the material won’t suit the purists. It’s surprising to find the Yorkshire moors — a setting crucial to the novel — brought to three-dimensional life by an assemblage led by the arresting Nandi Bhebhe, who seems to be wearing a crown of sticks and twigs and has a retinue of similarly attired human plants. Elsewhere, the convolutions of the plot are confronted head-on. “How is anybody expected to follow this?” asks the resident narrator, Lockwood (one of Archer’s several roles), only for Bhebhe to chip in with an awareness that “no one said this is going to be easy.”

Rice’s goal is to ease a path through a labyrinthine novel by bringing her total-theater aesthetic to a music-heavy production that announces the characters’ fates on a chalkboard, a choice that taps directly into the association many will have with this novel from their student days. A trim or two wouldn’t go amiss, and there are times when the reinvention seems reckless, not revelatory.

But I won’t soon forget a fierce-eyed McCormick haunting the action from beyond the grave like an ongoing premonition of doom, and Katy Owen’s chirpy Isabella Linton all but steals the show: a figure of audience-friendly fun amid the landscape of mortality that, as with “The Chairs,” we come to realize is our shared lot. (Matt Wolf)

Always Time for Theatre reviews it too.

The Spectator proves how some of the best books in literature have broken one of Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing.

Perhaps I overreacted because I was preoccupied with the dramas of Storm Eunice, but when I read this weekend that the first of Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing is ‘Never open a book with weather’, I thought how silly rules of writing can be. If Leonard’s Rule 1 were enforced, out would go the first scene (and the name?) of The Tempest; same with Macbeth. You would have to jettison the first sentence of Nineteen Eighty-Four, ‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen’, or of Jane Eyre, ‘There was no possibility of taking a walk that day… the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre and rain so penetrating…’, or of Bleak House, ‘Implacable November weather’ (followed by the second paragraph, ‘Fog everywhere’). Weather is often the best way to open a novel or play, because it sets a scene and a mood and usually places human figures in its landscape. Without it, many more paragraphs would have to be expended explaining where we are, what time of year it is and what sort of people are depicted. Not for nothing are ‘It was a dark and stormy night…’ the only words of Edward Bulwer Lytton that anyone remembers. (Charles Moore)

City Weekly features writer M Dressler.

The concept for the Last Ghost series in particular came both from the kind of literature Dressler grew up on, and a visit to the California coast. "When I was growing up, I loved gothic narratives," Dressler says, "things like Henry James, Shirley Jackson, Jane Eyre. Then I got lucky, because I had a moment a few years ago traveling on the coast of California, zoned out in my writer's space, and I thought, 'Even if you died here, you wouldn't want to leave.' And it was all there, poof. ... It took me a little while to find, but it combines everything I love." (Scott Renshaw)

Irish Echo interviews author, art historian and curator Margarita Cappock.

What book changed your life?

“Wuthering Heights” by Emily Brontë is a masterpiece and has stayed with me since I read it in school. It is a book I have read several times and still love to this day. (Peter McDermott)

Wuthering Heights 1939 makes it to number 5 on a list of 'The 15 Best Laurence Olivier Movies, Ranked' compiled by Slash Film.

5. Wuthering Heights

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, if you were looking for a brooding leading man, Laurence Olivier was your first choice. He puts his classical theater training to good use by appearing in a number of period costume dramas at this time, with the moody drama "Wuthering Heights" chief among them. He plays the mercurial Heathcliff, whose love for Cathy (Merle Oberon) is so raw and passionate that it destroys them both. 

This iteration of the classic Bronte novel deviates significantly from the source material, removing the framing structure that shows the damage of their toxic relationship to the next generation. And while this robs the story of narrative closure, it allows it to devote all its attention to the main event — the dynamic between Cathy and Heathcliff. "Wuthering Heights" was a massive success, earning eight Academy Award nominations, including one for Olivier as best actor (his first of an impressive 11 competitive Oscar nominations). (Audrey Fox)

MovieWeb reviews The Sky is Everywhere.

The film knows that this is destructive, though. The greatest aspect of The Sky is Everywhere is its clever awareness of the often unhealthy patterns and tropes of romance novels and films. Lennie has self-admittedly read Wuthering Heights 23 times, and has modeled her ideal relationship off of the characters of that romance, Heathcliffe [sic] and Cathy, the Edward Cullen and Bella Swan of the 19th century. Wuthering Heights, like Gone With the Wind, Twilight, 50 Shades of Grey, and countless other romances about dark, brutal, and mysterious men, have somewhat distorted romantic relations into a toxic and often chauvinistic mess. Feminist critic Samantha Ellis penned "How Heathcliffe Ruined My Love Life" for The Telegraph, brilliantly dissecting the problems with this 'tall dark and handsome' trope. (Matthew Mahler)

The New Indian Express has an article on a 'dream library' named Wuthering Heights.

Welcome to Wuthering Heights Academic Library and Digital Research Centre at the 12th hairpin bend of Kuttiyadi Ghat road on the Kozhikode-Wayanad border. Nasrullah Mambrol, an English teacher at NAM College Kallikandy, is the man behind it.

“I read ‘Wuthering Heights’ in 2010 during my PG days. I fell in love with the novel so deeply that I read it eight times. I had planned to name my house after the work of Emily Bronte,” says Nasrullah. However, when the 33-year-old decided to set up the library, he found the name suited it better.

“Last September, I wrote a Facebook post about my dream nest sandwiched between trees, with a stream nearby and deers quenching their thirst from it. It has books scattered around, with people coming from far and wide living amid them,” said Nasrullah. [...]

“We’ve approached the National digital library and state library council to associate with the project. We’ll need at least Rs 50 lakh in first phase. I don’t know from where I can generate it, but I’m chasing the dream,” said Nasrullah, who started www.litrariness.org — a blog recommended by 200 universities around the globe. Nasrullah plans to open Wuthering Heights on December 19, the 174th death anniversary of Bronte. (Amiya Meethal)

The latest episode of the Jane Eyre Files podcast has a special guest: Michael Jayston, who played Rochester in the 1973 adaptation.