Unbelievable excited about Jane Eyre

The Spectator asks, 'Is Jane Eyre colonialist?' and uses it as an excuse to criticise the Brontë Parsonage Museum's approach to this subject.

This week marks 179 years since the first publication of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre in 1847, something which will be celebrated in Great Britain with little more than a small London theatre production. The occasion may be being noted more enthusiastically in China, where the book has been newly added to the national curriculum for 14- and 15-year-olds, with the strange aim of indoctrinating schoolgirls into becoming compliant brood-mares for the demographic good of the Chinese Communist party. [...]

Western commentators have derided the CCP’s actions, mocking their totalitarian and prescriptive attempt, ‘to help [children] establish a value system’ by reading a 200-year-old text and interpolating utterly irrelevant political messages into it. But are 21st-century establishment authorities here in Charlotte Brontë’s original homeland of England really any different?

Brontë Parsonage Museum, the registered charity which manages the family’s old rural rectory home, is currently pretending Jane Eyre – and all the sisters’ literary output – is not about love in the time of communism, but love in the time of colonialism. Running until January, the museum has organised a special exhibition, ‘The Colonial Brontës’, trying desperately to link the sisters to the subjugation of Africa. How were they linked to it, though? Did they own shares in sugar-plantations, or have a secret Jamaican slave hidden in the attic? No, explains the museum’s website, they wrote some stories on little bits of paper when they were children [...]

When writing their own schoolgirl stories set in the imaginary colonies of the Glass Town Federation, the girls made use of racial stereotypes about its likely inhabitants – such as Charlotte’s disgraceful aspersion that they would probably have black skin: ‘The Chief was quite black and very tall; he had a fierce countenance and the finest eyes I ever saw.’ If you can’t cope with extreme language like this, the Museum website contains the following ‘CONTENT WARNING: This page includes excerpts from written works containing outdated terminology.’ Presumably, that means ‘black’ being written without a capital B. 

If you are still dubious that a 13-year-old writing a story set in Africa featuring a black man is highly relevant to the sins of British colonialism, the museum’s curators explain how, ‘The 18th and 19th centuries in England were more racially diverse than many audiences realise.’ Heathcliff from Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, for example, is described in the book as ‘a dark-skinned gypsy in aspect’, but the orphan’s mysterious origins in Liverpool, then a major slaving-port, have long led some literary scholars to speculate that he may really have been black or mixed-race. The museum, however, has a different, more demented, theory: maybe he was actually based on Frederick Douglass?

Where’s the museum’s evidence? There doesn’t seem to be any.

But, if visitors want to know more about the Brontës’ ‘connections’ to slavery, the museum suggests buying the following books from its gift shop: Our Island Stories: Ten Walks Through Rural Britain and Its Hidden History of Empire; The Whole Picture: The Colonial Story of the Art in Our Museums and Why We Need to Talk About It; and Black and British: A Forgotten History by David Olusoga, none of which are about the Brontës at all. When you go to the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool, do you reckon the staff there try to flog you a copy of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall for no reason, or does this kind of thing only go in one direction?

Attempts to link the family to slavery know no bounds, as demonstrated by the academic behind the current ‘Colonial Brontës’ exhibition, Professor Corinne Fowler, back in 2017:

‘The Brontë sisters’ school was just a few miles from the Dentdale home of a notorious slave-owning family called the Sills. The Brontë sisters knew about the Sills family, who worked more than 30 enslaved Africans on the grounds of their [foreign] estate.’

One of Fowler’s previous books is called Green Unpleasant Land: Creative Responses to Rural Britain’s Colonial Connections, and she has previously sat on the ‘Rural Racism’ taskforce, whose remit evidently extended back into the distant past when almost everyone in the English countryside was white. Except Frederick Douglass, obviously.

If the Chinese really want to know how to go about twisting the meaning of classic books for naked political ends, they should commission Professor Fowler to set their curriculum. (Steven Tucker)

Well, we now know that colonialism is not an approach dear to Mr Tucker's heart but we also know that journalism isn't either as the first rule of it is to answer the question asked in the headline and, after trudging through that not-so-groundbreaking article, we still don't know whether Jane Eyre is a colonial novel or not. We are also pretty sure that Jane Eyre is not a book that Mr Tucker reads frequently so we'll leave him with a quote from it that he may like to take to heart:

Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs.

Speaking of Jane Eyre, Stylist interviews Aimee Lou Wood.

If you could only reread one book for the rest of your life, which would it be?

The Staying Alive poetry collection by Neil Astley, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë or Tao Te Ching by Laozi – I’d maybe even cheat a little and do The Complete Works Of Shakespeare. [...]

Are there any book-to-screen adaptations you’d absolutely love to be part of?

Jane Eyre! Which is happening, and I’m unbelievably excited about. (Abby Allen)

Belfast Telegraph has a short video clip on how 

The famous Bronte sisters’ links to Co Down are to be brought to life in the former church near Rathfriland where their clergyman father preached as a young man. (Claire Dickson)

Verily recommends '5 Underrated Classics to Read Before Seeing Sense and Sensibility' and one of them is

02. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë

Even more shocking than her sister’s work, Jane Eyre, Anne Brontë cemented herself in literary history with this novel about a single mother’s surprising independence among Victorian society. You’ll love this book’s equally moody setting in a mansion that seems to take a life of its own if you’re already a fan of Austen’s Northanger Abbey. And with quite an unusual main character and subject matter for a novel of this time, this work is perfect if you’re looking for something a little more unconventional than a typical ingenue caught in a boy-meets-girl. (Eliza Monts)

Collider recommends '3 Best Movies to Watch on Netflix This Weekend' and one of them is

'Emily' (2022)

One of the most underrated period dramas currently available to stream on Netflix, Emily follows the brief yet breathtaking life of English writer Emily Brontë as she fights societal expectations on the journey to writing her masterpiece, Wuthering Heights. Emma Mackey stars as the titular character, for which she earned a nomination for Best Lead Performance at the 2022 British Independent Film Awards.

A stunning portrayal of one of the most important and all-too-short lives in literary history, Emily will provide the perfect historical escape this weekend. The film was Australian actress Frances O'Connor’s directorial debut and starred the likes of Amelia Gething, Alexandra Dowling, Fionn Whitehead, and Oliver Jackson-Cohen alongside Mackey. Don't miss Emily on Netflix. (Jake Hodges)

Filmhounds gives 2 stars to Wuthering Heights: The House Of The Damned.

However, the film’s brilliantly melodramatic title doesn’t tell the whole story. Wuthering Heights: House of the Damned is a po-faced reimagining of the story as a supernatural slasher, picking and choosing bits of the story to put the novel’s overarching narrator Mr Lockwood, through hell. If only it was Edgar Allan Poe-faced. While the idea’s intriguing, playing it entirely straight leaves it wanting.

The new owner of Thrushcross Grange, Lockwood (Ross Townsend-Green), has an unfortunate first meeting with the owner of Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff (Sky Cheema), and through a series of unfortunate incidents (missing horse, dog bite, classic moors fever) he ends up spending more and more time there overnight. It’s a dreamy if window-breaking encounter with a phantom wrapped in billowing veils that piques his interest. But the increasingly delirious Lockwood’s attempt to discover the recent history of the Heights and the fate of Heathcliff’s son soon merges with bloody visions of the past, and more frequent appearance of a mysterious woman in grey…

Remember the craze for zombie parodies of classics? Well now it’s phantoms with a fondness for sprinting behind you whenever you turn around. Terrorised throughout is Townsend-Green’s hapless squire, who really isn’t cut out for buying a large estate on the Moors. The actor really puts his all into it, screaming, sobbing, quaking and putting his foot in it from the moment he rides up—with the air of Gary Oldman’s Dracula swanning around London—to when he ends up… Well, that would be spoiling the extraordinary denouement a long 1 hour 45 minutes later.

This Heights is huge—seriously massive—apparently with ghosts in every room, ready for Lockwood to stumble in on. Townsend-Green’s game performance is the only source of amusement in the story’s reframing, which could have been as giddy as Dickens’ A Christmas Carol or an all-out comedy. Ultimately, it struggles under the weight of its ominous, solemn tone and its repeated reliance on ghostly jump scares. You don’t expect Heathcliff to break out in a tap dance, but Cheema, who certainly looks the part across two timelines compared to some castings, has to hit out serious lines one after the other until things go impressively off the rails at the end. 

There may be a cheer at the fate that befalls Nellie Dean, one of literature’s most infamously unreliable narrators, but many other opportunities are missed. The gruff manservant Joseph’s constant exasperation that Lockwood has to stay yet another night is gold, but not capitalised on at all. 

Just as Fennell’s take chose the themes it could concentrate on (sex and then a bit more sex), so writer Liana Failla and director Becca Hirani have a particular focus. They find a way to tie up the book’s themes, albeit with a big dose of ocullty-weird, and it is a pleasant change to see an ‘adaptation’ take interest in the mirroring second generation of the novel’s characters that so often don’t make it to film.

‘You can catch anything on the Moors, sir’, opines Hareton (like most other characters, a little off from their traditional representation) to Lockwood at one point. There’s no danger catching a lick of pace, sadly. You can see the strong bones of the idea, where Failla ties neatly into Brontë’s plot points and (not to everyone’s taste) takes definitive advantage of some of the book’s most enigmatic scenes. It’s brilliantly shameless how a little extra slant of horror is added at both ends of the ol’ devil’s life. If only, though, the treatment had a bit of ingenuity in its scares and humour.

Sorry, Heathcliff, but it’s not an essential sacrifice this Halloween. (Matt Goddard)

A contributor to Her Campus discusses 'Why Some Romance Book Tropes Don’t Work in Film'.

Speaking of the tangible romantic experience, an adaptation that manages to subvert this was Wuthering Heights. Although the original was not written with romance as its main plot; Fennell’s adaptation gets away with unconventional scenes and sexual exploits as the reimagined setting and costumes presents a theatricality that borders on avant-guard. 

Unlike in The Deal, the characters become less human than they were in the source material. This ends up making the eccentric promiscuity digestible as they are no longer the characters from the book. The movie was controversial, which means you either loved it or hated it, and lovers of Brontë’s original work usually align with the latter. [...]

Romance adaptations are horrendously difficult to perfect as directors must observe the current climate and sacrifice elements of the book that no longer reflect healthy boundaries. Depending on how they are directed, and whether they make it over the top, such as in Wuthering Heights to justify it, or remove the dubious content entirely, like in Off Campus, the product will not satisfy all those who consume it. (Lottie Latimer)