Chaos into Creativity: Reflections on The Brontë Chamber Music Series with Courtney Caitlin Phillips

An online alert for today, August 18:

Online Monthly Talk: Chaos into Creativity: Reflections on The Brontë Chamber Music Series with Courtney Caitlin Phillips

Zoom, Tuesday 18 August 2026, 18.30 UK time

Composer Courtney Caitlin Phillips wrote an 8-piece chamber music series for each of the Brontë sisters’ novels, including Charlotte’s unfinished Emma. Though its April 2020 live premiere was cancelled due to the pandemic, she was thrilled to resurrect her work and celebrate the legacy of the Brontës in a world premiere of her compositions at the Kilkee Brontë Festival in Ireland in September 2025. She is now delighted to be able to share her work with the Brontë Birthplace, Thornton. Her talk will include some brief, personal vignettes of how she was first introduced to the Brontës, how her connection to them has deepened over the years, and how they continue to inspire her creativity. She will also share excerpts and analyses of the chamber music series, show how each piece connects with its respective novel, and reveal a few Easter eggs hidden in the scores.

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'Nevertheless my best'

The New York Times features Charlotte Brontë's Book of Ryhmes, saying it shows that 'At 13, Charlotte Brontë Already Knew How Good a Writer She Would Be'.

Few teenagers would want the world to read their poems. At 13, Charlotte Brontë collected her verse in a humble anthology that already hinted at her ambition to become an author at a time when few women wrote for a public audience.

Written in the winter of 1829, the poems in Brontë’s “Book of Rhymes” were written in tiny script to fit on scraps of paper no larger than playing cards that were hand-stitched together with a carefully written contents page. The writer of “Jane Eyre” probably didn’t intend to publish her juvenile poetry, writing in the inner cover “Sold By Nobody and Printed By Herself.” Now, about 200 years later, the anthology will be available to the public for the first time.

This week, in time to celebrate the 209th anniversary of her birth, the Brontë Parsonage Museum in England published the collection of 10 poems, transcribed alongside images of their original ink-smudged pages. The anthology contains a long-form poem on the beauty of the natural world, an attempt at an epic, and a verse called “A Thing of Fourteen Lines — Commonly Called a [Sonnet?]”

The anthology shows Brontë’s deletions and rearranged stanzas, showing lines crossed out and rewritten. In preserving her ink-stained edits, the little manuscript also shows an aspiring author already grappling with character and perspective.

“They chart her development as a writer,” said Ann Dinsdale, the Brontë Parsonage Museum’s principal curator. The original manuscript, which was lost for at least a century, will also go on display at the museum, in Haworth, in northern England.

Brontë, showing an early ambition, cataloged her early poems and stories, first written at age 10 and numbering 22 titles by the time she was 14.

The existence of the poems was known thanks to a biography of Brontë, written by the Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell and published in 1857. Gaskell wrote of a catalog of early poems and stories by Brontë, first written at age 10 and numbering 22 titles by the time she was 14.

These juvenile works, including “A Book of Rhymes,” were later treasured by collectors. Records show that “A Book of Rhymes” came up for auction in New York in 1916 — but then it vanished. It reappeared in 2022, where it was the headline item at the New York International Antiquarian Book Fair.

Sold by an anonymous private collector, the anthology fetched $1.25 million at an auction that year, held on the 206th anniversary of Brontë’s birth. Friends of the National Libraries, a British nonprofit, raised that amount with donations from nine donors, including the Garfield Weston Foundation and the estate of T.S. Eliot, to stop the book from again disappearing into another private collection. It was then donated to the Brontë Parsonage Museum, which is based in the parsonage where the Brontë family lived and wrote in the 19th century.

From their home in Haworth, the Brontë siblings — Charlotte, Emily, Anne and their brother Branwell — produced tiny magazines that contained elaborate worlds: Their imagined readers were a set of toy soldiers that they played with, making up adventures. The children gathered any scrap of paper they could find, writing on sugar bags and bounding their books in scraps of wallpaper, Dinsdale, the museum curator, said. They wrote to scale for the toy soldiers, but by making the text so small, they also kept the prying eyes of adults from looking into their little world.

Brontë wrote “A Book Of Rhymes” in the voice of two of the toy soldiers, the Marquis of Duro and Lord Charles Wellesley, and imagined them setting off on an expedition through a Canadian forest where “branches mingle over head / casting a solemn shade / oe’r the lone pathway which I tread” or on an exiled journey through the biblical Babylon.

Brontë wrote in the introduction: “The following are attempts at rhyming of an inferior nature, it must be acknowledged, but they are nevertheless my best.”

The young Brontës’ early work reflects what they were reading at the time, Dinsdale said. She added that they were encouraged by their father, Patrick Brontë, a priest who also studied bird life, who would take the children on long walks over the moors around their home. He encouraged Charlotte to observe the natural landscape, which became a signature of her writing, Dinsdale said.

Long before her characters would muddy their skirts in the bucolic landscapes of her novels, teenage Charlotte Brontë captured the natural environment in her poems “Autumn, a Song” and “Spring, a Song.”

“Meantime the rushing stream which roars along / its black waves foaming in high majesty” she writes in a poem called “A Bit of a Rhyme.”

The verse is imperfect, but an already reflective Brontë knew this, writing in the introduction: “The following are attempts at rhyming of an inferior nature, it must be acknowledged, but they are nevertheless my best.”

The Brontë Parsonage Museum partnered with a local publisher and asked the musician, author and poet Patti Smith to write the foreword. In it, she writes that Brontë’s teenage writing transported her back to her own childhood, when imagination offered her an escape from reality. The poems show a cleareyed writer determined to wield invention “as a benevolent weapon,” Smith writes.

“It is not simply a handful of juvenile verses,” she adds, “but the manifestation of an ambitious dreamer.” (Lynsey Chutel)

A contributor to The Daily Aztec discusses whether comic books can be considered literature.

Can comic books qualify as literature?

Literature is commonly defined as “Written works, especially those considered of superior or lasting artistic merit. Books and writings published on a particular subject.”

Now, I like the first definition because it talks about how a written work leaves a lasting mark on the reader and the audience. Novels such as Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, Animal Farm by George Orwell, and many many more.  These pieces of literature are frequently recognized for their timeless messages and use of language that captivates readers in every read-through. (Luis Zavala)

The Brontë Sisters UK uploads a video about Charlotte Brontë's unfinished novel The Story of Willie Elin. The Behind the Glass podcast concludes its second season with an episode interviewing Graham Watson, author of The Invention of Charlotte Brontë.

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Cabin Fever Symptoms: Looking Out of the Window in your Zooms while your hands are in your pockets

The Telegraph mentions the petition to make the English GCSE syllabus more diverse:

Over 250,000 people signed a petition this week urging exam boards to overhaul the choice set texts, which currently include works by Shakespeare as well as 19th century writers such as Charles Dickens, George Elliot and Charlotte Brontë. (Camilla Turner and Ewan Somerville)

The Conversation uses data analysis to study Charles Dickens's novels, finding curious similarities like the use of the 'his hands in his pockets' phrase:

Importantly, it is not only Dickens who depicts such everyday behaviour. We find examples in other 19th-century fiction, too:

Mr. Earnshaw vouchsafed no answer. He walked up and down, with his hands in his pockets, apparently quite forgetting my presence; and his abstraction was evidently so deep, and his whole aspect so misanthropical. Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights. (Michaela Mahlberg and Viola Wiegand)

The Los Angeles Review of Books's Avidly channel posts an approach to Wuthering Heights as a cabin fever novel:

I can’t recall when I last read it, but it was a long time ago. I remember thinking of Emily Brontë’s novel as a tale of love—love lost and love lingering, strange love (necrophiliac, incestual), but love nonetheless. But reading this book today, I don’t see love. I see the effects of sheltering-in-place.
Wuthering Heights documents the detrimental effects of staying too long in constrained spaces and remaining too long with the same house-mates. Nearly every character in this novel is trapped: due to weather, illness, class and gender positions, fear of the world beyond, and more. This is a novel about loneliness and anger, narcissism and madness, the surge of imagination and dreams of revenge, desires for human connection and the pull of the natural world. This is a novel about cabin fever. And in May 2020, we know something about that. These days, Emily Brontë’s haunted and haunting tale from 1847 rings eerily familiar. (Jessica Pressman)

Birmingham Live recalls the Brontë chicken incident on Coronation Street:

Viewers will be reminded how Geoff forced Yasmeen to eat her pet chicken Charlotte Brontë,  who she lovingly looked after in the garden. (Sanjeeta Bains)

The nine circles of Zoom hell in Varsity:

As you’re joining the call, you face the good old mind-gymnastics of thinking about where on earth you’re meant to look. Your mind wanders as you ponder this conundrum: will you look at the host? The other members of the call? You ask yourself if looking out the window will be too Jane Eyre-wannabe? God forbid you attempt the ‘looking-at-no-one-in-particular’ approach, your eyes glazing over. 5 minutes later you wrench them back into focus, only to find that you’re looking directly at yourself. I’ve looked like that ... the whole time? Do you think people can tell I just looked at myself? (Georgina Buckle & Maria Pointer)

The Trinidad and Tobago Sunday Express recalls a recent act of cultural barbarism:

Many Caribbean book lovers were saddened by the demolition in early May of the historic Jean Rhys house in Roseau, Dominica. The childhood home of the author of Wide Sargasso Sea and other classic novels, which was estimated to be 150 years old, was bulldozed to build an office block.

Fala! Universidades (Brazil) vindicates Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall:

A Inquilina de Wildfell Hall é um romance epistolar, no qual possui uma narrativa dentro de outra narrativa. Além disso, o texto mistura dois tempos: presente e passado. A história começa com a produção de uma carta por um jovem fazendeiro, chamado Gilbert Markham. Nela, ele conta a seu amigo sobre o rebuliço da chegada de uma misteriosa dama com seu filho no vilarejo, a Sra. Graham. Além de narrar como ele foi se apaixonando por ela. (Jennifer de Carvalho Soares) (Translation)

De Groene Amsterdammer (in Dutch) interviews the writer Anne van Veen

Mariska van Schijndel: Jane Austen of Charlotte Brontë?   Charlotte Brontë. (Translation)

Página 12 (Argentina) has an article about Anne Carson:

Pero más acá de la historia están los poemas y más acá de los poemas están los versos, y más acá de los versos está la conjunción de, por ejemplo, sustantivo y adjetivo, la forma tan propia y enrarecida que tiene Anne Carson de construir sus frases. Las asociaciones bellas y voladas, con algo de John Ashbery, algo de Wallace Stenvens, pero a la vez tan dramáticas y pregnantes que nos hacen pensar en Emily Dickinson y las hermanas Brontë. (Mercedes Halfon) (Translation)

La Capital (Argentina) interviews the writer and journalist, Florencia Abbate:

Sebastián Riestra: A pesar de que sobre el final te referís a la literatura y nombrás a Virginia Woolf, me quedé con ganas de más. ¿A qué otras escritoras considerás trascendentes para el feminismo? 
En el siglo XIX, las hermanas Brontë también inventaron personajes femeninos que no encajan con las convenciones de género de la época. (Translation)

Knack (Belgium) lists books, docs and podcasts about racism:

Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys
Met Wide Sargasso Sea schrijft Jean Rhys een proloog aan Jane Eyre. De Caribische auteur raakte gefascineerd door de 'gekke vrouw op zolder' uit de beroemde roman van Charlotte Brontë, een personage dat amper een stem maar wel een afkomst kreeg. Die 'gekke vrouw op zolder' is - naast een seksistisch trope uit de Victoriaanse literatuur - de eerste vrouw van Rochester, de man met wie het hoofdpersonage van Brontë uiteindelijk zou trouwen. Rhys vertelt haar verhaal. Hoe ze opgroeide in een weerspannig Jamaica net na de afschaffing van de slavernij. En hoe ze met Rochester trouwde en verhuisde naar het ongastvrije Engeland, waar ze uit vervreemding en isolatie het verstand verloor. (M.M.) (Translation)

La Libre (Belgium) interviews the writer Guillaume Musso:

Et puis, je mène la vie dont je rêvais à 11 ans avec le choc des Hauts de Hurlevent et à 20 ans, quand je lisais Barjavel et Stephen King. (Guy Duplat) (Translation)

A list of good night quotes includes one by Anne Brontë on Legit. 746 Books finds the six degrees of separation between Normal People and Wuthering Heights.

Calmgrove posts an interesting review about one of Charlotte Brontë's unfinished novels: The Story of Willie Ellin. The Brontë Babe Blog also shares a thought-provoking discussion on The Professor: late juvenilia or a mature work?

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Jane Eyre is a forbidden book in Gilead

Prospect reviews Margaret Atwood's The Testaments (beware of spoilers!).

Unlike the other women, the Aunts are allowed to read and write, but still Aunt Lydia knows she is transgressing as she writes her testimony within her private sanctum in the library at Ardua Hall. She is hidden deep within the Forbidden World Literature section, surrounded by her personal selection of proscribed books, including Jane Eyre, Anna Karenina and Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Ardua Hall has one of the few libraries that still exists in Gilead after enthusiastic book burnings: “The corrupt and blood-smeared fingerprints of the past must be wiped away to create a clean space for the morally pure generation that is surely about to arrive.” Are we imagining an edge of sarcasm in her tone? No. Aunt Lydia, we realise, is not an ardent advocate for the regime she appeared to uphold so vigorously in The Handmaid’s Tale. She is spilling her secrets. Knowledge is power, especially disreputable knowledge, though writing things down is dangerous. Who knows what betrayal and denunciations lie in store? (Cathy Rentzenbrink)

Wirral Globe on forgetting passwords.

A recent survey says we consistently forget them and many have panic attacks but mentally compile them - as Eric Morecambe once said - not necessarily in the right order.
My first ever 'strong' code contender was inspired by a security manual ... alas, I could not understand why the following creation was rejected: Oliver Twist, Jack Reacher, Harry Potter, Hamlet, Postman Pat, Jane Eyre, Sooty, Legs Eleven and Moscow. (Peter Grant)

Jane Eyre's Library (in Spanish) shows an old illustrated edition of the novel published both in Spain and Bosnia. Brontë Babe posts about Charlotte Brontë’s unfinished novel Ashworth.

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You could have heard a pin drop

Forbes talks about the power of reading good novels in school:

I've also visited a secondary school in England called Michaela, where the weakest readers stay after school for a kind of book club. The day I was there, the teacher was reading aloud from Jane Eyre while students followed along in their own copies. Even teachers who advocate for having students read whole novels emphasize that the novels should be "high interest," which generally means they should reflect students' own lives and concerns. That would seem to place Victorian novels like Jane Eyre off limits, especially at a school like Michaela, which serves students from low-income families, many of whom are of color. But in that classroom, you could have heard a pin drop. (I was moved to reread the whole novel myself.) (Natalie Wexler)

Cultured Vultures praises North and South 2004 in its fifteen anniversary:

It’s better than any Dickens adaptation (apart from The Muppet Christmas Carol, but we won’t go there). It’s better than any version of any Victor Hugo novel. It’s better than any Brontë based movie or TV show (and generally you’d have to pry Jane Eyre from my cold dead hands). (...)
Factory owner John is also not really flawed in the same way that a Brontë hero is. (...)
And it is their chemistry, and those performances, that means North and South is PEAK ROMANCE. Another thing that makes North and South a bit different to other costumes dramas – especially Austenish or Brontëish ones – is that John knows he’s in love way before Margaret does. (Nat Wassell)

That's Beijing recommends the NCAP production of Jane Eyre:

An adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s classic 19th-century novel, Jane Eyre tells the story of a young and shy protagonist that works as a tutor for her eventual love interest Rochester. Set in the mysterious setting of an old Victorian manor, the classic love story shows Jane transform the gloomy and overtly serious Rochester into a love-struck gentleman. For fans of classic literature, live theatre and timeless love stories, this is not an event to be missed.

The Irish Times publishes an extract from A Proper Person to be Detained by Catherine Czerkawska

There have been stories about upper-class women in Victorian Britain wrongly consigned to insane asylums, brave stories tackling domestic abuse, such as Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White and Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. 

Catherine Carter continues under the spell of the Oxford Shakespeare Company's Wuthering Heights production. In the Northern Star:

 Today was another fabulous day! Hopefully you remember the play I bragged about a few weeks ago (day 7), “Wuthering Heights.” I loved it so much I went back tonight and watched it again! This time, I bought the program for the production and I was so impressed by the cast! Tyler Conti played Healthcliff, the leading male character; he was most recently featured in a Netflix series, Safe. One of the other cast members, Dominic Charman, was featured in The Imitation Game! It was so incredible to be sitting just a few feet from such fantastic actors and actresses! 

The Guardian interviews Kate Valk as she is preparing to direct Desire by Kate Acker:

The six have just three weeks to animate Desire, a mashup of dialogue, prose and stage directions, in English and French, featuring a roll call of potty-mouthed Shakespearean characters, and a walk-on for Wuthering Heights’ Heathcliff. (Claire Armitstead)

Cristina Bajo in ViaPaís (Argentina) says

Dicen que el escritor no tiene el poder de cambiar a la sociedad. Sin embargo, escritores como Dickens con la constante denuncia que hizo en sus trabajos literarios y periodísticos, las novelas de Charlotte Brontë, de Mrs. Gaskell, de George Eliot sobre el sufrimiento de las clases obreras y el desamparo de sus familias, lograron abrir los ojos de muchos victorianos que comenzaron a exigir la intervención del Estado en la inspección de los organismos dedicados a contener huérfanos e indigentes, y la necesidad de detener el hambre, el ultraje, el abuso de sus escasas fuerzas. (Translation) 

As much as there is social content in Brontë's novel (particularly Shirley), to say that Charlotte Bronë wrote about working-class struggles is quite a bit too much, even for Terry Eagleton.

Today FM discusses the song It's All Coming Back to Me Now by Celine Dion.

This week Mario was joined by Lauryn Gaffney, creator of Big Shot The Musical, for the story behind 'It's All Coming Back to Me Now' by Celine Dion.
She told us about the inspiration for the song coming from songwriter Jim Steinman's love for Wuthering Heights. (Orla Ormond)

This is quite funny in a way. We read in Diário do Grande ABC (Brazil):

Prefeitos denominam estádio que deu nome ao bairro Olímpico, o antigo campo no morro dos ventos uivantes.
No alto do bairro Olímpico, o estádio municipal de São Caetano não estava concluído e ventava constantemente. Os locutores, nas transmissões de jogos, deram-lhe o apelido de “o campo do morro dos ventos uivantes”, lembrando o romance da inglesa Emily Brontë, escrito em 1847. (Ademir Medici) (Translation)

Today's New York Times's Crossword Puzzle includes Anne Brontë. The Daily Mail's Fact Box publishes a Who was Charlotte Brontë? succinct biography. Ken's ebooks posts about Jane Eyre. AnneBronte.org posts the complete text of the unfinished The Story of Willie Ellin by Charlotte Brontë.

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Genius born of hardship and rock

Being (or not) defined by your gender in The Sydney Morning Herald:

In the 19th century, when women were not allowed to go to university, or have a career and remain respectable, they developed strategies in order to be taken seriously. The Brontë sisters, Charlotte, Emily and Anne, first published their writings under the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, and Mary Anne Evans is better known to this day as George Eliot. Only when their success was established did they reveal their gender. Another strategy, still employed today, is to only use one's initials, like J.K. Rowling. (Maureen Matthews)

100 places where the past seems to linger on The Sunday Times:

72. The Brontë Parsonage, Haworth, West Yorkshire. 1820: Home of the Brontë sisters, genius born of hardship and rock.

Cary Fukunaga's works in The Stuff:

Fukunaga is eager to point out he wasn't the first filmmaker to direct an entire series - he cites Tom Hooper's John Adams as an earlier example. But having endured the painful process of reducing Jane Eyre into a two-hour feature, he craves a larger canvas.
"I love David Lean's films, and larger epics just don't have a place anymore in cinemas," he says. (Meredith Blake)

The Guardian reviews the audio drama Get Carter:

Audio fiction is a day-to-day job at the BBC, of course, and thus can be rather mundane. So I was pleasantly surprised by last week’s 15 Minute Drama: five dramatic interpretations of Angela Carter’s feminist fairytales. This is tricky stuff to put on radio. Carter is so literary and dramatic that an audio version can easily collapse into ridiculousness. But these dramas are made by Olivia Hetreed, who wrote the wonderful screenplay for Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights, and they are fantastic: atmospheric, scary, gripping, wild. Perhaps I’m not such a stick-in-the-mud after all. (Miranda Sawyer)

Doppiozero (Italy) is all about loving chestnuts. Quoting Jane Eyre, of course:

Dicevamo degli inglesi che ne hanno presto capito e goduto i pregi; nella loro letteratura alberi e fiori han sempre un posto di riguardo. L’ippocastano ha il suo nel romanzo di Charlotte Brontë Jane Eyre: è sulla panca circolare sotto l’ippocastano gigante del parco della tenuta di Thornfield che Jane e Mr Rochester si siedono per il colloquio che si crede d’addio e sfocia, invece, in una dichiarazione d’amore. Ma i segreti di Mr Rochester incombono sulle volontà e sui desideri di entrambi, e l’albero scelto come testimone di fede promessa diviene annuncio di una separazione e di una rovina prossima, di un amore che va purificato con un fuoco che non sarà quello della passione. (Angela Borghesi) (Translation)

Our Daily Bread opens an article with a Wuthering Heights (via Joseph) quote. Head to Head, Heart to Heart talks about Charlotte Brontë's responses to critiques as a writer; Redgal Musings reviews My Plain Jane; the Brontë Babe Blog reviews Charlotte Brontë's Emma.

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Unfinished Novels in Italian

New translations of Brontë juvenilia just published by Flower-ed:

I Moore
Charlotte Brontë
Flower-Ed
Traduzione e cura di Alessandranna D’Auria
Collana: Five Yards
ISBN: 978-88-97815-90-7
EPUB +MOBI
ISBN: 978-88-97815-89-1
2017

Di ritorno da Bruxelles per un’esperienza di studio, Charlotte Brontë scrisse Il professore. Era il suo primo vero romanzo. Rifiutato dalla Smith, Elder & Co. perché troppo corto, le fu suggerito di migliorarlo e allungarlo. Di tre tentativi oggi sopravvive solo questo testo che prende il titolo convenzionale di I Moore. Vi ritroviamo i personaggi classici del repertorio di Charlotte: i fratelli in dissidio (John Henry e William) e le signorine frivole a caccia di matrimonio aristocratico. Stavolta sono William Moore e Alicia Wynne a farci sognare un amore faticoso e sacrificato, ma forse, alla fine, semplicemente amore.

Ashworth
Charlotte Brontë
Translation by Alessandranna D’Auria
Collana: Five Yards
ISBN: 978-88-97815-90-7
EPUB +MOBI
 978-88-97815-85-3
2017

Nel 1839 Charlotte Brontë dà il suo addio ad Angria, il lunghissimo ciclo di racconti scritto durante tutta l’infanzia e parte dell’adolescenza. Dopo anni trascorsi a scrivere per il puro gusto di farlo, è ora di fare sul serio, è tempo di scrivere un romanzo da pubblicare. Quel romanzo è Ashworth.
La storia della famiglia Ashworth costituisce un lungo antefatto a quella che sarebbe diventata la travagliata storia d’amore tra Mary Ashworth e Arthur Ripley West, passando per un gioco di corteggiamenti a scapito di Marian Fairburne.
Frutto di una preziosa ricostruzione di fogli sparsi per il mondo, il testo ci consegna, ancora una volta, una storia di uomini dannati e donne frivole, di amori controversi e drammi economici che, alla fine, sono ancora figli di Angria.

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Italian Brontës (II)

The Charlotte and Emily Brontë Bruxelles devoirs have been translated into Italian by Maddalena De Leo:

I componimenti di Bruxelles
di Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë
Cura e traduzione de Maddalena De Leo

Editore: Ripostes
ISBN-13: 9788896933794
December 2016

And the flower-ed publishers releases a couple of Italian translations of Charlotte Brontë's unfinished novels:

Emma
by Charlotte Brontë
Collana: Five Yards
Volume: 2
Traduzione e cura di Alessandranna D’Auria
ISBN: 978-88-97815-81-5
Anno: 2016

Matilda Fitzgibbon è una ricca ereditiera. Ammessa al Fuchsia Lodge, la scuola privata delle sorelle Wilcox, è subito trattata con tutti i riguardi dovuti al suo rango. All’arrivo delle vacanze di Natale, la direttrice Wilcox invia un messaggio al padre dell’allieva, ma scopre, con l’aiuto dell’amico William Ellin, che si è verificato un terrib Emma è l’ultimo romanzo incompiuto dell’autrice resa celebre da Jane Eyre e Villette. Questa rappresenta la prima traduzione in italiano dell’opera e comprende l’appassionata prefazione che lo scrittore William M. Thackeray le dedicò sul Cornhill Magazine nel 1860.
ile malinteso. Un alone di mistero circonda la famiglia Fitzgibbon e le sue ricchezze. Pubblicato dopo la morte di Charlotte Brontë,

La storia di Willie Ellin
by Charlotte Brontë
Collana: Five Yards
Volume: 1
Traduzione e cura di Alessandranna D’Auria
ISBN: 978-88-97815-79-2
Anno: 2016

1853. Charlotte Brontë ha trentasette anni e sta affrontando il periodo più difficile della sua vita. È rimasta sola con il padre nella silenziosa canonica di Haworth, villaggio industriale dello Yorkshire, a ridosso della ventosa brughiera. Ha sepolto le ultime due sorelle, Emily e Anne, è continuamente afflitta da malanni e guarda al futuro con incertezza. Il suo destino sembra legato a un’unica decisione, ma prenderla o meno implica ferire se stessa o suo padre. La sua paura più grande, quella di morire da sola, la opprime senza tregua, così Charlotte sacrifica il suo amore filiale e decide di sposare il reverendo Arthur Bell Nicholls, già respinto una volta. In quel momento nei cassetti della sua stanza giace un manoscritto incompiuto, scritto a matita: La storia di Willie Ellin. Questa rappresenta la prima traduzione in italiano dell’opera, la cui importanza deriva proprio dalla sua forma embrionale. Essa lascia scorgere e apprezzare il prezioso momento della prima stesura del pensiero della scrittrice salita agli onori letterari grazie Jane Eyre e Villette: errori, ripensamenti, abbreviazioni, fugaci paesaggi e personaggi che ci sembra di aver già conosciuto, da sempre vivi e vividi nell’immaginario dell’autrice fin dall’infanzia.

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Brontë Pokéstop

The Dewsbury Reporter acknowledges the active fight of campaigners to save museums in Kirklees, particularly the Red House Museum:

Passionate campaigners have told Kirklees Council why they think two threatened museums should be saved from the axe.
Under budget cuts the historic Red House Museum in Gomersal and Dewsbury Museum in Crow Nest Park face closure.
But people have come out in force to oppose the idea before the deadline for residents to share their views with the council ended on Sunday.
Around 1,700 people have put their name to a petition to keep the Gomersal museum open, and the Friends of Red House submitted a report which gave 20 reasons why the site should not shut.
Chairwoman Jacqueline Ryder said: “We were always hopeful that the council will recognise the importance of Red House not just in North Kirklees, but for Yorkshire and, with the Brontë connection, internationally as well.” (...).
Adele Poppleton, Head of Active and Creative Communities said: “We are currently collating the responses but will not have a final figure for the number submitted until the end of the week.
“We will then analyse all the responses, before preparing a report to cabinet, which will be discussed on September 20, 2016.
“At this meeting, the council’s cabinet will look at the responses to the consultation, alongside financial analysis and other information, before making a final decision about the future of the Museums and Galleries service.
“If the decision is made to withdraw the museums service from some buildings, then the council will be inviting expressions of interest from anyone who wants to take over.”

Keighley News reports that the Brontë Parsonage Museum is a Pokéstop:

The computer-generated creatures can be seen milling around the museum as part of the smash-new mobile phone game Pokemon Go.
Brontë Society spokesman Rebekah Yorke said: “The museum is a ‘Pokéstop, although visitors do not need to be physically in the museum to catch Pokémon.
“We are delighted that families and young people might be ‘lured’ up Church Street and encouraged to look around the museum, but will be monitoring how interest in the game develops to ensure the visitor experience is not spoiled for others.” (David Knights)

The Daily Express lists facts about tigers, including this unexpected but very true fact:

9. Charlotte Brontë, author of Jane Eyre, had a cat called Tiger. (William Hartston)

Fastcodesign presents a poster by PopChartLab where you can keep track of your readings:

The poster features 100 literary classics, with covers partly obscured by gold foil. Since the point is to scratch that foil off as you read the books, there's going to be some easy wins here. Pop Chart Lab is no bunch of fools: They know they need to play to the back rows, as well as the balconies.
For instance, Lord of the Flies by William Golding? Every kid has to read that in freshman English class. Same goes for Brontë's Wuthering Heights, George Orwell's 1984, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, and Herman Melville's Moby Dick. (John Brownlee)

The Australian talks about the new film adaptation of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar. One of the actresses and producer of the film is Julia Stiles who is remembered in her role in Ten Things I Hate About You:

In 10 Things I Hate About You — a 1999 teen-movie riff on The Taming of the Shrew, in which Heath Ledger made his US debut — Stiles plays a serious young woman, a rebel with a cause. At home, she’s reading The Bell Jar, chafing against an over-protective father; in the classroom, she’s unhappy about having to discuss Hemingway, and tells her English teacher why. “I guess in this society being male and an asshole makes you worthy of our time. What about Sylvia Plath or Charlotte Brontë or Simone de Beauvoir?” she demands. (Philippa Hawker)

Uncut remembers how Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights song was born:

Her only No 1, “Wuthering Heights” was inspired by a BBC mini-series of Emily Brontë’s Gothic novel. Haunted by the image of Catherine Earnshaw’s ghostly hand outside the window – “Let me in! Let me in!” – Bush wrote the song at the age of 18, shortly before beginning work on her debut album, The Kick Inside. “I was in my flat, sitting at the upright piano at about midnight,” she told her fan club in 1979. “There was a full moon, the curtains were open, and it came quite easily.”
The fact that Bush shared her childhood name (Catherine) with Earnshaw, and a birthday (July 30) with Brontë, fostered a sense of cosmic kinship with the subject of “Wuthering Heights”, a bond acted out when she recorded the song with members of the Alan Parsons Project. (Graeme Thomson)

Bustle vindicates the Bathsheba Everdene character in Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd:

When we discuss early feminist heroines in literature, we always mention Elizabeth Bennett from Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre from Jane Eyre, and Dorothea Brooke from Middlemarch, but very rarely do we talk about Bathsheba Everdene. I think we should. (...)
Her hard work proves triumphant when her farm becomes a financial success. She proves to all the naysayers that a woman can run a successful farm. Bathsheba takes pride in knowing that she can succeed in a traditional male business. Like, Elizabeth Bennett, Jane Eyre, and Dorothea Brooke, she was clearly ahead of her time and unafraid to disrupt the status quo. (Gabriella Gianbanco)

The Irish Times talks abou the Harry Potter saga:

Rowling didn’t invent the school story, after all. Sarah Fielding’s The Governess (1749) or Charles Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby (1838) or Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) all set the scene for what was to become a much-beloved genre in children’s literature. (Claire Hennessy)

 The Waterloo Record describes the musician Eric Burdon like this:

Make fun, if you must, but the Newcastle hellion was a force of nature in the early days of Beatlemania, like Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, tapping into some ancient Id monster every time he unleashed his soulful, gritty vocals. (Joel Rubinoff)

The Denver Post reviews the novel Miss Jane by Brad Watson:

After that, Jane enters her own fungous life cycle, develops her own rituals. Her mother teaches her to cook while her father lets her roll his cigarettes, and Grace takes advantage of having a younger sister whose innocence is boundless. Dr. Thompson gives her books to read — Brontë, Flaubert — and continues explaining Jane’s biology to her. These moments of pure honesty ground the book in the reality of medical conditions that, a hundred years ago, changed lives permanently. (Aditi Sriram)

Outlook India reviews the novel The Gospel of Yudas by K.R. Meera:

A remarkable feature of Meera’s work is how she employs the traditional tropes of romance to tell a sordid tale. Juliet’s infatuation, Cleopatra’s sublimated self-serving passion, Juno’s competitiveness, Heath­cliff’s brooding stance: all come together to present the reader with an unsettling gospel on love. The commandment is clear: thou shalt love only when the taste of blood is beknownst to thee. (Nishtha Gautam)

Stabroek News (Guyana) has a Wide Sargasso Sea reference in an opinion column:

Because of my eclectic ethnic extraction, like the character Antoinette in that novel about identity, Wide Sargasso Sea, “I often wonder who I am and where is my country and where do I belong and why was I ever born at all.” I am certain many Guyanese can identify with this. I have never felt threatened by another person’s race and I hope no one has felt threatened by mine. (Sherod Avery Duncan)

Bernur (in Swedish) posts about a Swedish translation of Emma, the final fragment by Charlotte Brontë. Chocabooks (in Polish) reviews Jane Eyre. Ahiin (in Russian) posts about Wuthering Heights 2009.

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Swedish Emma

Emma, the unfinished novel by Charlotte Brontë gets published in Sweden:

5 Brittiska Klassiker I Ask
Emma - Ett Fragment
Charlotte Brontë
Translator: Gun-Britt Sundström
Designer: Jennie Ekström
Novellix
ISBN : 9789175891323

”Kalla in henne medan jag är här”, sade mr Ellin. ”Har hon känt till den här affären? Är hon invigd? Är hon medbrottsling eller bara ett redskap? Kalla in henne.” Miss Wilcox ringde i klockan, tillkallade Matilda Fitzgibbon, och den föregivna arvtagerskan inställde sig snart. Hon kom i sina ringlande lockar, sitt fina skärp och sin pälskantade klänning, en utstyrsel som tyvärr inte längre kunde gå för sig.

Tidningen Kulturen talks about this edition:

Ett par outtalade teman tycks genomsyra dessa noveller: kvinnan, mystik och giftermål. Graden av mystik skiftar mellan novellerna, men är på något sätt närvarande i alla de fem: Mansfields päronträd och månsken, döden av Woolfs imaginära avatar, Lawrences sol, Horatio Sparkings identitet och Brontës barn. Kvinnan och hennes roll i eller utanför giftermålet är premisserna i de flesta noveller, förutom Brontës. Samtliga noveller är dock skrivna under den viktorianska eran eller under 1900-talets första decennier, vilket innebär att kvinnans ställning är representerad så som hennes liv och möjligheter såg ut då. (Hugo Kuhlin) (Translation)

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Madwomen in the attics of Earthsea

The Guardian reviews The Greatest Books You'll Never Read: Unpublished masterpieces by the world's greatest writers by Bernard Richards. The article centers on unpublished books by women:

Charlotte Brontë left several tantalising fragments when she died during pregnancy in 1855. The Story of Willie Ellin (1853) is partly narrated by a non-human entity that cryptically describes itself as an outgrowth of an ancient burial ground. The victimised child, William Ellin, shares his name with an adult character in a fragment by Brontë called Emma, set in a girls’ boarding school, which WM Thackeray printed in the Cornhill magazine in 1860.
Brontë is at her most astringently witty in Emma, describing her mercenary schoolmistresses as “not much less shallow than the china saucer which held their teacups”. The mystery surrounding a new girl who arrives at the school with trunkloads of luxurious clothes, and whose father subsequently vanishes, may have inspired Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess (1905). The elegant idler Ellin, meanwhile, emerges as a sort of proto-Peter Wimsey as he undertakes to investigate the disappearance – having perhaps, the narrator muses, “something of the amateur detective in him”.
Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1848) inspired a notable 20th-century novel that never was – Adela: A Romance, in which Angela Carter planned further adventures for Rochester’s ward, Adèle. In a 1991 note written the year before she died from cancer aged 51, and described in a memoir by her friend Susannah Clapp, Carter suggested that her renamed Adela would grow up to seduce Rochester (later revealed to be her father), and be reunited in Paris with her mother, a dancer turned Communard revolutionary. (Jenny McAuley)

Day after Day Bustle makes new lists which usually include the Brontës somehow. Even when the list is about New York books:

Re Jane by Patricia Park
In this modern adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s classic novel, Jane’s trying to escape her strict Korean upbringing in Queens, and salvation (her Thornfield Hall, if you will) is a Brooklyn family seeking an au pair. The "madwoman in the attic" is her boss — a women’s studies professor stressing over securing tenure. Jane's search for independence and belonging is set against a background of a city in flux that is taking in 9/11 and its aftermath, and the gradual creep of gentrification. (Lauren Hossack)

The New York Times interviews the writer (and living SF/Fantasy legend) Ursula K. Le Guin:

What books do you find yourself returning to again and again?
Let’s arbitrarily limit it to poetry, which we have so far ignored. Housman, Shelley, Yeats, Hardy, Brontë, Rilke — for starters. 

The Bay Area Reporter explores the figure, mainly his gay side, of Charles Ludlam, author of The Mystery of Irma Vep:

In the case of The Mystery of Irma Vep, by far the biggest commercial success of his career, Ludlam looked to B movies about mummies, vampires, and werewolves, as well as to more upper-crust fare such as Rebecca and Wuthering Heights for this deconstruction-celebration. But while many of Ludlam's plays were shoestring epics, Irma Vep made do with just two actors – albeit playing eight (or more) characters of alternating genders involving 35 quick costume changes. (Richard Dodds)

Lília Azevedo in Diário da Manhã (Brazil) is thrilled with Wuthering Heights:

(...) Emily nos faz sentir com seus personagens como as circunstâncias nos transformar ou fazem aflorar o que temos de melhor ou pior, Catherine fará escolhas egoístas mediante esta situação, a mágoa recíproca entre eles só é superada pelo amor desesperado que sentem um pelo outro e pela compreensão de como se pertencem, para o bem ou para o mal.
Nào estamos falando de uma história melosa (com o perdão do termo), em que os personagens fazem tudo para ficarem juntos e as circunstâncias e os outros só atrapalham. Ao longo da trama outras figuram que compartilham desta história, são arrastadas no turbilhão de sentimentos de Heathcliff e Catherine, da tenacidade egoísta dela, da obstinação dele. Há vingança, ódio, sofrimento em uma história crua e ao mesmo tempo poética. É impossível ler este livro sem parar para pensar na verdadeira natureza dos sentimentos humanos. (Translation)

The writer Carlos Zanón admits to his anglophilia in El Periódico (Spain):

La literatura me ganó no por esos libros odiosos de Los Hollister sino por tropezarme con Lord Byron y su Childe-Harold, los poetas niñatos suicidas, Wilde, Oxford y Cambridge, los educados asesinatos en casas de reposo de Agatha Christie y el revolcarse sobre la colina mojada de lluvia del salvaje Heathcliff y Catherine. (Translation)

Hufvudstadsbladet (Finland) reviews an Uppsala production of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya:

Uppsala stadsteaters föreställning blir min fjärde Morbror Vanja-uppsättning det här året. Efter två finska varianter som lämnat originaltexten orörd och mig tämligen oberörd är det uppfriskande att se en föreställning som faktiskt vågar föra dialog med samtiden. Bearbetningen leker friskt med Tjechovs språk och teman och talar med författare som Emily Brontë – allt sker i en levande svensk översättning av Staffan Skott.  (Isabella Rothberg) (Translation)

lifeboxset (Spain) makes a list of books you should read before finishing college:

Jane Eyre.
El libro perfecto para definir lo que significa crecer. Sigue a Jane en sus cambios de la infancia a la adolescencia y es ideal para esos momentos de fin de la universidad. (Translation)

Fox Home reviews The Brontë Cabinet by Deborah Lutz. Is Show Time has a post on Wuthering Heights and its adaptations. The July update of the Parsonage Garden news is online.

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