Never a false step in Wise Children's Wuthering Heights

We have several reviews of Wise Children's Wuthering Heights today. The Times gives it 5 stars:

Published in 1847, the year before she died, and set on the Brontë siblings’ beloved Yorkshire moors, the novel is commonly read in adolescence, when one’s sensibilities may be particularly susceptible to its intoxicating highs and lows.

The director Emma Rice
did just that, and Brontë’s book left a lasting mark on her. The latest production by her company Wise Children is her adaptation of it, and it’s a corker — superbly cast, delivered with gusto and evincing the kind of rough-hewn yet fluid and economical theatrical invention (including live music, dancing, puppetry) that enhances the story’s dark, grim grip and locates pockets of welcome humour within it. Lasting nearly three hours, this intensely absorbing show (a co-production with the Bristol Old Vic, the National Theatre and York Theatre Royal) deepens as it unfolds.

The performance commences with the crack of a whip and a mad cackle that together signal a storm. There is certainly no dearth of tempestuous feelings in the saga that follows as Rice and a 12-strong ensemble trace, with sometimes startling clarity, a legacy of elemental desire and monumental pain spanning two generations. Their take on the haunted bond between Cathy (played by the abrasively charismatic Lucy McCormick as a lifelong wild child) and the foundling Heathcliff (Ash Hunter, whose telling characterisation is like a resolutely unforgiving bruise) works as a compelling and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny romantic melodrama. Yet enjoyable as it is as a knowing period piece, Rice’s astute script and staging are also shot through with thorny, relevant ideas about gender, class and racial divides. [...]

Perhaps Rice’s most inspired decision was to have a handful of actors embody the moor itself. Led with warmth and generosity by Nandi Bhebhe, “The Moor” is chorus and narrator, helping us to keep track of who’s who in Brontë’s convoluted plot and acting for several characters as a sounding board.

And it is Brontë’s characters — abused or abusive, needy and conflicted — who count the most here. Plaudits to Sam Archer (agile and droll), Tama Phethean (brutish then pathetic), Witney White (vibrant) and especially Katy Owen (utterly delightful as Cathy’s hyper-silly sister-in-law and Heathcliff’s mewling male offspring) for making strong impressions in multiple roles. But then everyone involved is reaching for the heights in this emotionally epic entertainment. (Donald Hutera)

Daily Mail gives it 5 stars too.

A giggly, ungodly ragamuffin wanders on to the stage, opens a clothbound book and cracks a whip — expertly — breaking loose a hellish storm.

Once again, director Emma Rice has thrown away all the rulebooks and harnessed the beating heart and slippery soul of Emily Bronte's unwieldy gothic monster, Wuthering Heights, in a wildly imaginative, exhilarating piece of theatre.

Gone is the housekeeper narrator, Nelly. 

Instead an all-singing, all-dancing chorus sounds every note of the novel, raising it into the realms of Greek tragedy and making a magnificent character of the Yorkshire Moors — which stretch from the haunted, forbidding crags of Wuthering Heights to the sunlit pastures of Thrushcross Grange.

Led by Nandi Bhebhe, majestic in a crown of twigs, the Moors howl up a hurricane, warning: 'Be careful what you seed.' 

Lucy McCormick's compelling Catherine dominates the first half, torn between two lovers: the soulmate of Ash Hunter's brooding, untameable Heathcliff but drawn to the softness of pampered, pampering Edgar Linton (Sam Archer).

Words pour out of her until finally, as a Tina Turner-like rock goddess, she sings: 'I am earth, I am sky.'

The story emerges with remarkable clarity. Characters are introduced, their names chalked on slates which become gravestones on their deaths.

Rice finds comedy where there was none: a character arrives in a deerstalker, blown in by the storm, leaning at an acute angle to suggest the hurtling wind.

A skull with ears fixed on the blade of a scythe becomes a hilariously savage puppet hound. 

As Heathcliff's wife, Isabella, Katy Owen flits with elastic daintiness; as her son, she is reborn as the lisping sibling of Just William's Violet Elizabeth Bott.

Inevitably perhaps, with Catherine gone, the intensity slips in the second half, but with young Cathy finding happiness, Rice embraces sunshine and hope.

Just as the books fastened at the ends of bendy sticks conjure the quivering birds on the Moor, so Rice has given glorious dramatic wings to Wuthering Heights. (Patrick Marmion)

The Fix Magazine gives it 4 out of 5 stars.

Her interpretation of Emily Brontë’s novel of love, revenge, class and greed is no exception; this is a relentlessly entertaining piece, delivered with such brio that it easily masters a potentially onerous three hour running time.

The ingenuity of Rice’s presentation is clear from the moment Mr Lockwood, a new tenant at Thrushcross Grange, negotiates a windswept Yorkshire Moor and pays a visit to his landlord Heathcliff (Ash Hunter), who resides at the eponymous stately home. A large screen in the background depicts dark clouds and changing conditions, a live band provide a faultless and unremittingly moody sense of drama, a manoeuvrable set of doors brilliantly, and economically, denote the shifting between locations, and manipulated branches and sound effects nicely evoke the ferocity of the storm. [...]

Elsewhere, McCormick is fantastic as the increasingly unhinged and yearning Catherine. As well as a dynamic singing voice – the second act momentarily turns into a music gig as she belts out some Courtney Love style angsty rock – her manic, heavily kohl-eyed expressions convincingly depict her character’s descent into madness. Also, the live band are a performance highlight; Sid Goldsmith on guitar, Nadine Lane on drums and percussion and Renell Shaw on bass provide a soundtrack – one moment a subtle, simmering backdrop, the next a high-register production number – that never makes a false step. (Scott Hammond)

What'sOnStage is less enthusiastic, giving it 3 out of 5 stars.

It ticks off the classic Rice tropes that those of us who admire her have fallen for, puppetry, gender, and colour-blind casting, songs, some unexpected production choices. Yet it lacks the originality of her best works: the transcendence of A Midsummer Nights Dream, the unexpected chocolatey sweetness of Romantics Anonymous, the sheer love breaking beyond the buttoned-up society of Brief Encounter: here nothing takes you by surprise or throws a different perspective on the piece. Rice may be a victim of her success, doomed if she doesn't vault ever higher poles. For completists, it feels inessential. For those new to her work or wanting to watch a stage production that ticks off every narrative beat, this may read better.

What Rice does do very well is bring the elemental wildness of the novel to the stage. The love story of Heathcliff and Cathy, brought together by erotic force, broken apart by class and society is big on atmosphere and in act one particularly there are moments she is supported in this by Lucy McCormick's Cathy, bringing the wide-eyed edge of her Post Popular character to one of literature's most famous wild children. With her doe-eyes and unruly hair, she brings a sense of innocence and danger to all her stage work, and she plays it up to the hilt here, a girl lost in a world of love and eroticism slightly beyond her comprehension. When she grabs a microphone and wails like a banshee, wind machine throwing her hair back, we see the theatre that Rice at her best can produce. There just aren't enough of that here.

Brontë's novel is a tricky ask for actors, requiring them to age from childhood into middle age and adapt from fire to curdled middle-aged disappointment. Ash Hunter's Heathcliffe is thrilling in the first half, an orphan thrown into a class that he can't quite break into until spurned by love and family he returns a gentleman avenger. However, in the second half, he struggles to show the vulnerability beyond the ice-cold revenge, the man who "cares too much, and yet cares not at all." Whether it's Brontë's writing or the production as a whole, the second half of hauntings and a slight tinge of madness doesn't quite land. (Kris Hallett)

The Stage gives it 4 out of 5 stars:

The production doesn’t overlook the abusive nature of Heathcliff’s relationship with Cathy, persisting even after death with his insistence that she never rest – he essentially forces her to haunt him – but it shies away from the full horror of this, as if a little too susceptible to the romantic power of Emily Brontë’s novel.
Nor can the production fully counteract the novel’s imbalance, the hole that Cathy makes in the narrative after she expires, but it ultimately doesn’t matter. After the theatrical drought of the past year and a half, Rice’s particular brand of theatrical magic is incredibly welcome, like wine after a period of abstinence. (Natasha Tripney)

Offaly Express and other Irish news outlets feature Pauline Clooney's novel Charlotte and Arthur.

What was to become Charlotte and Arthur, the novel, started life as a PhD subject. But - following the guidance of her advisor to ‘get it out before someone else writes the story’, Pauline left the academic programme just before lockdown and turned her attention full-time to the novel. [...]

Pauline, whose mother is from Banagher, noted that the couple’s wedding and Irish honeymoon has received scant attention from biographers.

“We have six letters she wrote from Ireland, so using those six letters, and what Arthur wrote, I put an itinerary together of those trip,” she said.

The book imagines the honeymoon trip from Charlotte’s point of view, to reveal something about who she was. The author also juxtaposed the idea of the honeymooners taking a trip around the country, including Cork and Trinity College in Dublin, with the reality and poverty of post-Famine Ireland.

“They spent nearly a week in Banagher with his relatives,” said Pauline. She says that the work of Alan Adamson, a Canadian academic with links to that family, provided her with invaluable biographical material with which to flesh out the story.

“I dip into a bit of Irish history at the time as they travel around. As Arthur was an alumni of Trinity, they visit Trinity when in Dublin, the Book of Kells and the Long Room feature in teh book. I’m not sure if they went to the Botanic Gardens, but I couldn’t resist a visit.”

Charlotte’s happy marriage was to be cut short by her death from pregnancy complications the spring after her honeymoon.

Arthur cared for the Brontë patriarch, Patrick, after her passing - her three siblings had predeceased her - but returned to Offaly after Patrick’s death, when he didn’t get the Haworth Parsonage incumbency he had expected.

He married his cousin Mary-Anna - ‘she always had a romantic fondness for Arthur’, believes Pauline - and lived out his days as a small farmer in Banagher, even while the Brontës’ reputations grew in the years after their deaths.

“The sadness of it is that he’s not buried with Charlotte, he’s buried with Mary-Anna in the churchyard of St Paul’s in Banagher,” said Pauline.

The Portlaoise native describes her novel as ‘a real labour of love’. “In one sense, there’s a relief as well that I’ve done it and it’s out there now and I should really move on,” she said.

Pauline says the reception from friends and fans, particularly in Newbridge and Portlaoise, has been extremely supportive.

“I’m also getting some nice responses from people who are Brontë enthusiasts. One of the first reviews said that it is addressing a gap in their story which has never been fictionalised before, and barely documented.” (Laura Coates)

The Times reviews The Life of the Mind by Christine Smallwood.

(When Dorothy hears people singing Wuthering Heights at a karaoke night, “it sounded like feral cats being raped — in a fun way”.). (John Self)

The Concord Insider reviews Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno Garcia.

This book embodies the strongest gothic characteristics usually seen in works from the likes of Emily Brontë, Bram Stoker, and Shirley Jackson. Garcia Moreno gives a fresh take to the genre by imbuing the story with additional unsettling evils not rooted in the supernatural: racism, classism, and the ghosts of colonialism. 

The New York Times looks back on the birth of The New York Times Book Review in 1851 recalling the time when

The second half of the 19th century was filled with riches: [...]

“Villette,” by Charlotte Brontë, was hailed as “a first class work.” (Tina Jordan)

The Telegraph and Argus reports that the Brontë Parsonage will look purple at night for a week for a good cause.

The Rotary Club of Haworth & Worth Valley has teamed up with Haworth Parish Church and the Brontë Parsonage Museum to throw a special light on Haworth during World Polio Day this Sunday.

The Rotarians have gained permission from their partners to bathe both the Church and the world-famous home of the Brontës in the campaign’s colour of purple during every evening for a week when their floodlights are switched on after World Polio Day.

When Rotary and its partners launched the Global Polio Eradication Initiative in 1988, there were 350,000 cases of polio in 125 countries every year.

Great progress against the disease has been achieved since then. Today, polio cases have been reduced by 99.9 per cent, and just two countries continue to report cases of wild poliovirus: Afghanistan and Pakistan. And Rotarians worldwide remain committed to the end.

Ian Park, the Immediate Past President of the Rotary Club of Haworth & Worth Valley, said: “Up until July there were just two cases of wild poliovirus reported in the world, one each in Pakistan and Afghanistan which is amazing given the political situation in that part of the world.

“We want to play our part in raising awareness of the continuing campaign to eliminate this awful disease and we’re grateful to Haworth Church and the Parsonage Museum for their help.” (Mark Stanford)

The Carmen Mola affair in Spanish literature continues being discussed and the Brontës mentioned as writers who hid behind pseudonyms in newspapers such as Financial Times and El sol de México.

Finally, news from the Brontë Society fundraising campaign towards securing the Honresfeld collection:

Our #JustGiving campaign to #SaveTheHonresfieldLibrary is almost half way there, thank you so much. If you can help us cross the finishing line, you can do so here: https://t.co/XJeonvIWFV Thank you all for your support.

— Brontë Parsonage (@BronteParsonage) October 21, 2021

Read More

Brontë Society Gazette. Issue 71

The latest issue of The Brontë Society Gazette is now out (Issue 71. January  2017. ISSN 1344-5940).

ARTICLES

Letter from the Editor by Belinda Hakes
Letter from the Chairman by John Thirlwell, Chairman of the Brontë Society
Articles of Association of The Brontë Society by Jan Lee, John Thirlwell
The Brontë Society Bicentenary Conference 2016 by Bob Gamble
White Rose Awards
William Scoresby, Jr. Scientist, Explorer and Vicar of Bradford by Sarah Fermi
The Legacy of Maria and Elizabeth Brontë by Mary Robinson Adamson
Bicentenary events in Brussels organised by the Brussels Brontë Group by Mary Robinson Adamson, Brontë Society member and Parsonage Museum volunteer
Brontë Society acquires Charlotte Brontë envelope at auction
Charlotte Brontë at the Morgan Library and Museum. New York: Charlotte Brontë - An Independent Will 
The Brontë Staircase by Imelda Marsden
The Brontës in Beverley by Belinda Hakes
New Responses to the Brontës: Andrew McMillan on Branwell
Membership News: 
   Members' survey / To Walk Invisible / Tips to hep you get the most out of your membership / Dates for your diary by Linda Ling, Membership Officer / In Memoriam: Katherine M. Reise
Looking for Jane Eyre's mad woman in the attic: a visit to Norton Conyers in North Yorkshire by Marina Saegerman
Percy Smith 1882-1948: Artist, Calligrapher, Letterer, Typographer, Etcher by Marion Delf.
Tracking the Brontës at Kirkstall Abbey 1152 Club by Val Crompton
Typhus and Typhoid 

Read More

X-Files: Charlotte Brontë and Jean Rhys through Helen Duncan

Another good reviews of Claire Harman's new Charlotte Brontë biography in The Guardian:

Some life stories are so canonical that they don’t bear retelling, so much as demand it. That’s why every 20 years or so, we want – and get – a new biography of Charlotte Brontë, that patron saint of every bookish brown mouse who has ever screamed silently to the world “one day you will notice me and be dazzled by my sun”. The tale of how a poor, plain, provincial girl turned a lifetime of material and emotional lack into the thrilling art of Jane Eyre and Villette is so consoling that it is impossible not to ask for it again and again.
Each retelling, of course, gives us a slightly different Charlotte Brontë, one who Janus-like faces back to her own time while also speaking to the biographer’s own. Elizabeth Gaskell writing in 1857, two years after Brontë’s death, was determined to rescue her friend from any suggestion of constitutional “coarseness” – many critics had condemned Jane Eyre as an unladylike book, even a wicked one. (...)
In the pragmatic 1990s, Juliet Barker worked hard to clear away the consequences of Gaskell’s well-meaning gothicisation by rebuilding the Brontës’ story on solid historical grounds. In particular Barker challenged her portrayal of Patrick Brontë as a storybook ogre. Charlotte too was transformed from a sequestered tragic heroine into a chippy spinster who carefully stage-managed her rise to literary fame by persistently pushing herself and her work, even the duff stuff, before the public.
Writing to celebrate the forthcoming 200th anniversary of Brontë’s birth, Claire Harman pursues a golden mean. Her protagonist is both fervent dreamer and cool realist, imaginative artist and clear-eyed professional. (...)
As a highly experienced biographer, Harman has too much integrity to suggest that this idea of her subject as a proto-modernist is entirely fresh. Nor does she even hint that she has uncovered any new documentary sources about her. Instead, she wisely concentrates on rounding out and deepening aspects of the author’s life that have been previously scanted or skewed. Particularly fine is Harman’s reading of how the tortuous, sexless love affair between Héger and Brontë could ever have been allowed to reach such heights – or depths. Previous biographers have tended either to castigate Héger as a married flirt who led Brontë on, or they have painted her as a disordered spinster, randy with celibacy, quite capable of spitefully destroying a man who refused to make love to her. (...)
Harman’s sane, unshowy retelling is exactly right for the bicentenary next April. It never insults the reader’s intelligence by pretending that it has new, startling truths to impart. Instead it gathers up the best of what has been written before and deals tactfully and decisively with the sillier aspects of Brontë mythology. The result is a retooled classic biographical narrative, shipshape and serviceable for the next 200 years. (Kathryn Hughes)

The St Helen's Reporter reviews Jolien Janzing's Charlotte Brontë's Secret Love novel:

In a superb translation by Paul Vincent, Janzing recaptures this little-known and intriguing chapter in Charlotte Brontë’s life and her secret love affair with the man who would inspire her to write The Professor, Villette and Jane Eyre.
Taking us deep into the heart and mind of one of England’s best-loved novelists, Janzing explores the people, the emotions and the experiences that would form the bedrock of both the woman and the writer. (...)
Imagination and knowledge are harnessed with impeccable precision to weave an extraordinarily insightful and credible story packed with wisdom and empathy, and offering a dazzling portrait of two geniuses in the making.
A captivating encounter with the remarkable Brontës… (Pam Norfolk)

The Sydney Morning Herald has a review of The Women's Pages by Debra Adelaide:

As every author knows, books are protean creatures that change in the writing, and the best result from the alchemy of ideas, hard work and magic. Debra Adelaide's fourth novel began with her passion for Wuthering Heights and evolved into the story within a story of a contemporary woman writing a novel about an older woman forging an independent life. A short story before it became a novel, it is about a web of births, deaths, marriages and separations, as well as the creative process itself.
Adelaide can't remember when she first read Emily Brontë's only novel, published under the pseudonym Ellis Bell a year before she died aged 30. "It might have been when I was at school, but it wouldn't have been a school text because we didn't read anything interesting like that. "It's one of those novels you can endlessly reread but not feel you've got your head around," she says. "It has such an intriguing structure and what has always interested me is not the novel itself so much but how it's been received by the reading community in the century and a half since it was published in 1848.
"People have an idea it's about Cathy and Heathcliff and their wild, passionate romance that commences in childhood when they escape from home each day and run across the moors. But in fact when they're older they almost never see each other."
The misconception comes partly from the many "awful" films of the book, including the most famous with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon, which focus on the love story and ignore all the other narrators. There have also been innumerable spin-off novels, mostly bad romances. Obsessed by the subculture, Adelaide has seen them all. (Susan Wyndham)

The Yorkshire Post talks about the current musical installation Linger by  Ailís Ní Ríain, Linger:

The contemporary arts programme at the Brontë Parsonage Museum is a wonderful thing. Presenting a range of responses to the work and lives of the famous literary family, from artists and writers living and working today, it continues to refresh the lasting legacy of the Brontës’ extraordinary creativity.
The latest artist to feature in the programme is Irish contemporary classical composer Ailís Ní Ríain who has created a music installation for the museum, Linger, consisting of six new piano pieces composed for and performed on Emily Brontë’s piano. Each piece reflects the essence of a different room in the Parsonage and invites visitors to stay a while in contemplation.
The project, Ní Ríain explains, is two-fold. One aspect is the installation in six rooms of the Parsonage and the other, launched alongside it, is a 13-track CD which Ní Ríain describes as “a kind of Brontë concept album”, including the six compositions and other original work featuring performances by leading new music improvisers Seth Bennett, Sylvia Hinz and Kelly Jayne Jones.
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall – considered to be one of the first feminist novels, way ahead of its time, and controversial for its candid portrayal of addiction through the protagonist’s husband’s alcoholism – provides the inspiration for an additional four soundscape pieces, extracts of the text of the novel read by an actor and a song performed by Bradford-born singer-songwriter Tasmin Archer who had a huge hit in 1996 with Sleeping Satellite.
“I wanted one song on the album and everyone thought I would go for a classically trained singer but I wanted Tasmin and eventually I managed to track her down,” says Ní Ríain. “I wrote the song Safe at Last for Tasmin – it is taken from the scene in the novel when the main character and her child leave her alcoholic husband – and she sings it brilliantly.”  (Yvette Huddleston)

Mallory Ortberg's Texts from Jane Eyre is published this month in the UK. The author presents her book in The Guardian:

'Heathcliff whr r u': literary classics by text message
To text or not to text… that was never the question. But what if Hamlet or Jane Eyre had got their hands on a mobile phone? Mallory Ortberg introduces her series of literary masterpieces reimagined for the 21st century (...)
Take Jane Eyre. Mr Rochester is an impulsive, intensely brooding, by turns romantic and terrifying figure; I’m convinced he is also the type of person who would regularly text in all caps and send message after message without waiting for a reply.

Stage designer Cecilia Carey discusses her work for the NYT's Wuthering Heights adaptation on WhatsonStage:

I was excited to try something really different for Wuthering Heights as it is such a well known novel. The presence of nature felt hugely significant in Steph Street's adaptation and we also needed an arena for these adrenaline fuelled teenagers and ‘chorus' to shift in and out. Black ‘soil' was integral to the barefoot cast feeling the ‘ground' and the effect on their movement.

Lyndsay Lohan is the new Bertha Mason, according to Vanity Fair:

Imagine we are all Jane Eyre. Rattling around the haunted heath house that is America, pining after our own Mr. Rochester—some sense of love, justice, fairness, freedom. Who, then, is our mad Bertha, laughing in the attic of our American life, setting small fires, tearing at wedding veils in the whispery dark of the night? I’ll suggest it’s Lindsay Lohan, fiery mistress of the nightclub. (Richard Lawson)

Apparently anything with a Hall on the name suggests Brontë according to this article in the Yorkshire Post:

Names often conjure up images and Dowthorpe Hall just south of Skirlaugh in the East Riding sounds like something out of a Jane Austen or Brontë sisters novel, or if you’re from around these parts either Winifred Holtby or Val Wood. (Chris Perry)

The Irish Post talks about the premiere of the latest James Bond film, Spectre. The controversial figure of Kevin McClory is recalled:

A distant descendant of the Brontë sisters (via his paternal grandmother), McClory bore a few Heathcliff-like features himself. The son of two Irish theatre performers, he was an enigmatic, Machiavellian character determined to succeed somehow in show business. (Stephen Martin)

CityJournal discusses the legacy of Trollope:

During his lifetime, his reputation was overshadowed by that of Dickens, Eliot, and Thackeray, who were honored as the great novelists of the day. The Brontës, Hardy, and, of course, Austen, were also up there in the pantheon of notable nineteenth-century writers. (Melanie Kirkpatrick)

Cuepoint on the musician Carrie Brownstein:

We can add prose writing to Brownstein’s already lengthy list of accomplishments: she writes like a punk rock Brontë sister, with the gloomy mists of Washington and Oregon her tragi-romantic backdrop instead of the bleak Yorkshire moors. (Jennifer Boeder)

Entertainment Weekly reviews the New York performances of the stage adaptation Thérèse Raquin by Helen Edmundson:

It’s while her character is largely wordless that Knightley brings Thérèse’s inner life most vividly to the forefront with her unsettlingly intense gaze and sharp-angled physicality – her passion can’t be fully restrained by her buttoned-up, Brontë-sister exterior. (Stephan Lee) 

Also in The Sydney Morning Herald we find a review of Noonday by Pat Barker:

Inserted into the mix, channelling the dead, is a hugely fat, half-charlatan but not entirely fraudulent medium, Bertha Mason (apparently named after Rochester's first wife, the "madwoman in the attic" of Jane Eyre). She takes up many pages, but held little interest for me until I discovered she was modelled on someone real, Helen Duncan, in 1944 the last woman tried under the Witchcraft Act of 1935. (Anne Susskind)

It's a shame that this scene has not been included in the new X-Files series. Brian Phillips on Grantland:

Mulder does not audition for, and does not win, the role of Mrs. Fairfax in a community theater adaptation of Jane Eyre.

Some Crimson Peak, of course:

I suggest you think of it less as a standard entry in the "haunted house" drama such as Thir13en Ghosts (either version), The Haunting, or The Shining, and think more Emily Brontë, even Alfred Hitchcock, than Stephen King, though there are thematic resonances with the works of all three. (James Scott in Free Times)

La historia está llena de referencias que no son sino el imaginario colectivo-cultural que hacen de Del Toro un autor completo. Encerrada en esta cinta hay referencias a Hitchcock (Rebecca, Notorious), al cine de Roger Corman, la literatura de Charlotte Brontë, al mito vampírico más clásico y por supuesto, la auto referencia a la obra misma del mexicano, principalmente Cronos y El Espinazo del Diablo. (Alejandro Alemán in El Universal) (Translation)

Mientras escribían “La Cumbre Escarlata”, Del Toro y Robbins tomaron inspiración de las novelas “Cumbres Borrascosas”, de Emily Brontë, “Grandes Esperanzas”, de Charles Dickens, “Rebecca”, de Daphne du Maurier, y “Dragonwyck”, de Anya Seton. (Hidalgo Neira in ReporteIndigo) (Translation)

A Bíborhegy nem horror, annak nem elég félelmetes. Guillermo Del Toro (Hellboy, A Faun labirintusa) valójában egy csodaszép, ugyanakkor néha meghökkentően gótikus románcot készített, amelyben nem azért vannak szellemek, hogy ránk hozzák a frászt, hanem hogy a múlt bűneire emlékeztessenek. Gondolja azt, hogy a Jane Eyre rémálomszerű verziójára váltott jegyet, és hagyja, hogy a túláradó érzelmek által keltett gyilkos örvény, illetve és a hihetetlen látványvilág elragadja. (Varga Dénes in Origo) (Translation)

 Traditionally, the gothic story is a generational statement couched in camp. Early gothic novels were obsessed with secret family relationships (often incest, an evergreen trope of the genre since Matthew Lewis’ 1796 thriller The Monk) or with childbirth and moral inheritance in a swiftly changing world (Frankenstein). Later novels tackled psychological trauma as much as plot twists: Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Turn Of The Screw, and Dracula built a forensic profile of the damned. (Genevieve Valentine in A.V. Club)

Cumbres Borrascosas, Rebeca, Jane Eyre, La casa Usher de Corman-Poe, los fantasmas japoneses, ¡hasta la macheta carnicera de Joan Crawford en Lucy Harbin!, Guillermo del Toro lo ha reunido todo en su mejor película desde El espinazo del diablo. (Eduardo Galán Blanco in La Voz de Galicia) (Translation)

Cualquiera que disfrute de las novela góticas del siglo XIX, como Cumbres borrascosas, encontrará algo con qué deleitarse. (Concepción Moreno in El Economista) (Translation)

La cumbre escarlata tiene cierto parentesco con Cumbres borrascosas, sobre todo en la ambientación: un páramo desolado, el viento constante, negros nubarrones, la constante caída de las hojas de los árboles, la casa oscura y misteriosa, mucho romanticismo. Me recordó esa única novela de Emily Brontë llevada varias veces a la pantalla. (Lucero Solórzano in Excelsior) (Translation)

Soft Revolution (Italy) posts about Jane Eyre:

Jane Eyre è un libro pieno di paradossi. Sia l’autrice che la protagonista escono dal canone della donna sottomessa vittoriana, la prima pubblicando i suoi romanzi sotto falso nome, la seconda trovando la propria indipendenza come una donna economicamente e sentimentalmente autonoma – almeno per un po’. (Marta Corato) (Translation)

Al-Ahram (Egypt) interviews an Alexandria college professor, Jaidaa Gawad Hamada:

Hamada doesn’t have a favourite writer or a most cherished book. However, she has moods or a predisposition to read particular books at particular times. “Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is probably one book I never grow tired of." (Ameera Fouad)

Avvenire (Italy) talks about the Balthus Rome exhitibion;  Leonardo (Italy) sings the many beauties of Wuthering Heights. A Syrian refugee in Germany who loves Wuthering Heights in Berliner Zeitung. The Times interviews the singer Kirsten Adamson and mentions Wuthering Heights. The Times's Magazine discusses if Victoriana will really a trend for autumn this year, Jane Eyre gets a mention.

And finally, this is arguably the greatest (Brontë) blunder ever:

Consequently, intellectually endowed women like the Brontë sisters — Charlotte, Emily and Anne — circumvented these conservative attitudes by adopting pen names.
Jane Eyre was first published in 1847 under Charlotte’s pen name, Currer Bell. Subsequently she adopted the pseudonym Jean Rhys. (Joyce Nyairo in Daily Nation (Kenya))

Read More

Kick Ass Heroine

The Telegraph & Argus talks about the acclaimed current Parsonage exhibition, The Silent Wild:

Late June at the Parsonage saw the installation, preview and opening of The Silent Wild, the latest addition to our successful Contemporary Arts programme.
Yorkshire-based artist and curator Diane Howse has collaborated with a team of creatives to produce a unique and thought-provoking artistic response to lives and legacies of the Brontë family, and we’re thrilled that it’s now in place.
The exhibition examines how the silent processes of reading and writing – conjuring the silent shapes of the written word on a page – have the power to conjure whole worlds of sound, noise and commotion, which echo down the years. (Read more) (David Knights)

The Haworth Parish Church has to postpone the building work closure as we read in Keighley News:

Haworth Parish Church this week announced its three-month closure – originally intended to take place from this summer onwards – will not happen until next spring.
It had been hoped all the arrangements to complete the repair and refurbishment of the north-facing roofs would be in place in time for the church to be closed from this month until September.
However, custodians of the Main Street building confirmed a number of factors have led to the programme needing to be put back until next year.
Following a series of discussions with funding agencies, contractors and the church’s architects, Haworth Parochial Church Council has taken the decision to instead complete the rebuilding works from April to June 2016.
The Rev Peter Mayo-Smith, rector at Haworth Parish Church, said: “It has been unfortunate we couldn’t undertake the repair work this year.
"In the end, it was not going to be practically possible to complete the work before the worst of the winter weather arrived. (Miran Rahman)

Marie Claire lists 'kick ass' heroines, including Jane Eyre:

At first glance you might not think of mousy Miss Eyre as a ‘kick ass’ heroine, but look again. This fiercely independent young woman stands her corner, values herself and ultimately, gets her man, but only when she knows that she is his financial, intellectual, and emotional equal. What makes me love Charlotte Brontë’s most compelling character is this quote: “I can live alone if self-respect and circumstance require me so to do. I do not need to sell my soul to buy bliss. I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at price I cannot afford to give.” If that’s not a 'kick ass' attitude, albeit wrapped in sturdy Victorian prose, then I’m... (Kate Griffin)

On the other hand The Hindustan Times puts together 'forgotten literary classics for a rainy day':

Every book lover knows their Brontë sisters, or do they?
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë is practically on the ‘must read’ list of any bookworm while Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is the novel that readers usually begin their literary journey with.
Anne Brontë, the lesser known of the Bronte sisters, failed to get the recognition that is enjoyed by Charlotte and Emily. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall thus qualifies not only as a forgotten classic but also a literary work by a ‘forgotten’ author.
The novel, when released under the pseudonym ‘Acton Bell’ in 1948, was actually an instant success which was followed by a drop in its sales after its author’s demise.
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall holds the distinction of being one of the very first works of feminist fiction and follows a unique narrative pattern (okay, no spoilers) which is sure to make you wish for more rainy days ahead. (Simar Bhasin)

Do you remember the case of the missing staircase which was finally located in Long Island (with the ghost of Anne Brontë included)? Well, it is now on the market. Keighley News also reports more properties on the market as this shop in Main Street, Haworth.

One-hit literary wonders in The Irish Examiner:

Although now considered a literary success, this wasn’t always the case. Upon its release in 1847, the novel was criticised as being depressing and morose — those who studied it for the Leaving or Junior Cert might well agree.
Part of literature’s first family including sisters Ann(scic) and Charlotte, Emily also wrote poetry but Wuthering Heights would be her only published novel, lucky for Kate Bush fans that she at least got around to producing one. (Brian Moss and Lorraine Murphy)

Virginia Blackburn on not having children in The Daily Express:

It is often commented on that our greatest female authors – Jane Austen, George Eliot and the various Brontës among them – never reproduced yet it didn’t stop them creating a few masterpieces.
Why shouldn’t that apply to politics too? Even in these so-called enlightened times women are judged on whether they have pair bonded and reproduced and for a would-be prime minister, Labour at that, to indulge in this is disgraceful.

Midland Reporter-Telegram describes like this the recent Wuthering High 2015:

Teenage soap opera in the fashion of the classic “Wuthering Heights” shows an update wasn’t necessary. (Nancy Adamson)

Le Croix (France) reviews Journal (1987-2012) by Michel Chaillou

Pour cette recherche incessante, exigeante, source pour lui de solitude, il plonge dans les textes de Montaigne, de Sterne, de Diderot, des sœurs Brontë, les mémorialistes du XVIIe siècle, les récits de marins du XVIIIe siècle. (Francine de Martinoir) (Translation)

ABC (Spain) covers the Paris Fashion Week and the Maison Margiela show in particular:

Al comienzo del desfile, presidió un estilo siniestro y minimalista, herencia evidente del fundador ya retirado, Martin Margiela: era una sucesión de vestidos negros pensados para una Jane Eyre del siglo XXI, austera y monacal. (María Luisa Funes) (Translation)

Saarbrücker Zeitung (Germany) reviews Kate Beaton's Hark! A Vagrant!; Marjolein Reads reviews Re Jane by Patricia Park.

Read More

Eliot and Lewes over Jane

More news outlets publish obituaries of Robert Barnard: Keighley News and The Telegraph:

Barnard’s hero Perry Trethowan returned in The Missing Brontë (1983), a reflection of Barnard’s fascination with Emily Brontë, a biography of whom he published in 2000. (...)
Barnard was chairman of the Brontë Society between 1996 and 1999, and again from 2002.

The Halifax Reader (Canada) also posts an obituary.

Margaret Watson gives a detailed synopsis of her talk at the first North Kirklees Literary Festival in The Dewsbury Reporter, The Reporter and Editor Mr WW Yates:

On Saturday I was speaking at a literary festival in Red House Gomersal, where a great deal of history surrounding the Brontë family is stored.
Visitors were eager to know what this area was like in the early 1800s when Patrick Brontë first came here to become curate of Dewsbury Parish Church.
I was pleased to tell them that much of what had been written about Patrick’s stay here had come from the pen of a local journalist, William W Yates.
Willliam was editor of the Reporter for 36 years and in 1897 published a book about Patrick’s life entitled The Father of the Brontës.
The book had been painstakingly researched by William over a period of 20 years and he had interviewed people who had known the Brontës while living in this district.
The book contains not only details of Patrick’s stay in Dewsbury but also details of what Dewsbury was like when he arrived here in 1809. (Read More) 

Robert Crampton tries hard to be funny and unprejudiced on his column in The Times, but we are afraid it feels only just a bit stupid:

Jane Eyre I have read. All of it. I can't remember a word.

The New Jersey Star-Ledger reviews the theatre production A Most Dangerous Woman by Cathy Tempelsman and reveals a crucial scene of the play which features Jane Eyre:

Crucial to the performance is [Geroge] Eliot’s chemistry with [G. H.] Lewes, whose failed open marriage and reputation as a womanizer made him an outcast. Ames Adamson portrays him engagingly, so that he comes across as sensitive and with a lust for life, but far from flawlessly heroic.
Particularly charming is the couple’s first onstage meeting, in which they go tête-à-tête over "Jane Eyre" and end up enacting a fake "women’s novel" in which, as Eliot describes it, ladies weep their sorrows into embroidered handkerchiefs and faint on the finest upholstery. (Ronni Reich)

Flavorwire lists some of the most bizarre literary myths and conspiracty theories. Number one is:

Branwell Brontë, not Emily Brontë, wrote Wuthering Heights
So Branwell goes out drinking with his friends one evening, has a few pints (or whatever they drank in Victorian England), and read parts of his novel in progress to them. Later on, when his sister Emily’s book became well known, those drinking buddies swore they recognized parts of it as the novel their pal had read to them. (Jason Diamond)

The New Zealand Herald discusses the new Bond novel by William Boyd and, of course, if you want to give credibility to literary spinoffs you should mention Wide Sargasso Sea:

And literary continuation is nothing new either. Perhaps the finest example - a novel arguably as good as, if not in some ways better than, the original - is Jean Rhys' 1966 Wide Sargasso Sea.
Inspired by Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, this was the story of the first Mrs Rochester, set in the Caribbean; an extraordinarily powerful work of alienation, delirium and insanity. (Sinclair McKay)

The Yorkshire Post publishes a list of Yorkshire's Hot 100 and remembers how

Anyone who has studied the Bronte sisters’ novels will know that Yorkshire has deep-rooted links with the arts.

Delia Ephron writes on MacLean's about her biographical book Sister Mother Husband Dog (etc):

Nora wasn’t the only Ephron in Delia’s life who demanded secrecy. Her mother, Phoebe, a Hollywood screenwriter, told Delia, “I hope you never write about what happens here.” Her mother was referring to the late-night drunken brawls with her husband. Delia shared a bedroom wall with her mother, whose demented ramblings sounded like the lunatic wife in Jane Eyre except she wasn’t in the attic.

The infamous words of David Gilmour (not the Pink Floyd one) are discussed by The Huffington Post which lists other heterosexual writers who were not afraid to love women writers:

Henry Miller not only had a literary friendship with Anais Nin, an erotica writer who he occasionally collaborated with in and outside the bedroom, but he also listed Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights as one of his must read books. (Beulah Maud Devaney)

Another article in the Canadian edition of the Huffington Post also reacts to Gilmour's words with a list of favourite women writers which includes Charlotte Brontë.

The Globe and Mail reviews Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries:

The books of similar length and scope (Brothers Karamazov, Moby-Dick and, among contemporary examples, Roberto Bolaño’s 2666) and works of Victorian literature (the Brontës, in particular) that have most deeply infiltrated my thinking are often flawed and raw, with raggedy edges that excite the imagination. Scenes from these novels reside alongside my own memories, and I recall their characters as I might old friends – or enemies. (Pasha Malla)

The followers of TV series like Homeland will be amused by this comment on Frontpage Magazine:

In the name of charity, perhaps the appalling ignorance about Islam in Washington, DC, is more real than feigned. Yesterday, Fox News Channel's Bill Hemmer interviewed former CIA and FBI analyst Philip Mudd on "America's Newsroom" about Islamic terrorism in relation to the Nairobi attacks. Mudd stated categorically that "public opinion in the Muslim world does not support terrorism and jihad." Really? Perhaps Mr. Mudd should stick to deconstructing Jane Eyre (he has a BA and MA in English literature) and leave the analysis of the Islamic world to those of us with more relevant, and frankly better, training. (Timothy Furnish) 

This columnist of the Leesburg Daily Commercial remembers how

Unlike some of my peers I was delighted in High School when we were introduced to authors like Shakespeare, Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Pearl Buck, Edgar Allen Poe. I did my book reports and my sister’s and my cousin’s book reports as well because I liked to do them. (Nina Gilfert)

Both the Daily Mail and the Daily Beast share their highlight from Isabel Marant's catwalk at the Paris Fashion Week: Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights:

The Isabel Marant show got off to a jumpy start today, when the soundtrack literally jumped -- right at the crescendo of Kate Bush’s "Wuthering Heights" (That song is such a winner with the fashion pack that we all let out a collective sigh when it cut out). (Alice Cavanagh)

Bang Style reviews the new album by Pretty Girls Make Graves, The New Romance:

“Something Bigger, Something Brighter” works as a piece of Gothic fiction, mirroring the darkest images found in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. (Danny De Maio)

24Sata (Croatia) brings up the therapeutic power of novels:

Romani mijenjaju životnu perspektivu, tvrde znanstvenici sa Sveučilišta York. Pogled na svijet očima Jane Eyre britanske spisateljice Charlotte Brontë može vam pomoći da poboljšate obiteljske odnose, dodaju stručnjaci. Čitanje je i svojevrsna psihoterapija jer smanjuje stres učinkovitije od glazbe i videoigara, tvrde britanski istraživači. (Sanja Rapaić) (Translation)

Augmented Reality in a Brontë novel. It's just a question of time. The journalist of Svenska Dagbladet (Sweden) is surprised:

På årets Bokmässa tycks motsättningen mellan det digitala och det analoga, eller om det är ett gemensamt famlande, ställd på sin spets. I en sektion som kallas Molnet finner jag ett seminarium som syftar till ”förhöjd verklighet”: glasögon som kan förvandla papper, video som inkarneras med ögonen. Här vandrar det också unga män, klädda som om de flytt ur en Brontë-roman, och delar ut lappar som visar sig leda till ett ytterst modernt videoverktyg. (Translation)

A new (paranormal/historical romance) author, Harper E. Brooks is a Brontëite according to The Sandpaper;  The Prose of the Powerless shares a Jane Eyre paper by Kaylie Hayter; Picture Me Reading posts a music set list for Jane Eyre; two Celebrate Musicals Week posts devoted to Gordon & Caird's Jane Eyre. The Musical on Regency Delights and Yet Another Period Drama Blog; Covered in Flour has a nice post about Little Miss Brontë's Jane Eyre; grande_caps posts a bunch of new caps from the webseries The Autobiography of Jane Eyre.

Read More

Brontëmania is buzzing this week

Reviews of Jane Eyre 2011:

Muveez:

Using both the vistas of Derbyshire and a strikingly dark tone, director Cary Fukunaga (directing his follow up to the excellent Sin Nombre) brings a darker and angrier interpretation of the story than perhaps anyone before him. It is not quite the revolutionary, modern style the trailers implied, but the slow-burning tension is handled brilliantly. It is at it’s heart a costume drama, and has moments where the pace begins to sag, but it is nonetheless well executed. (James Luxford)

Hertfordshire Mercury:

Elegantly adapted for the screen by Moira Buffini, Jane Eyre condenses the source novel into two hours of yearning and regret.
Wasikowska and Fassbender lead an exemplary ensemble cast including Dench as a bustling maternal figure and Hawkins as a tight-lipped lady of the manor, who can turn a room icy cold with a single withering glance.
Fukunaga's camera sweeps over the foreboding locations, lashing his lead actress with enough wind and rain to match the emotional battering meted out by Mrs Reed and Mr Brocklehurst.

Whataculture!:

It isn’t really my job, though, to say why the movie does not achieve the greatness of the novel; this is practically a given. That Fassbender’s Rochester is nothing like the Rochester I have always imagined isn’t a fair criticism either. But on its own terms the movie needed to have a stronger central relationship and Rochester needed to be more than just a poor sap. After two scenes with Jane, we know how he feels about her. At no point does it  ever feel like he could be dangerous, and the difference in social positions never feels as important as it ought to. The film is certainly worth seeing, particularly for Wasikoska’s Jane, and for the many little details it gets just right. It’s surprising then that it falters when it comes to the dark gothic romance and melodrama for which the story is best remembered. (Adam Whyte)

News Shopper:

Derbyshire has never looked so bleak. Director Carey (sic) Fukunaga has shot it in washed out grey, a beautiful yet ultimately barren landscape where the wind howls and briars threaten every step.
Interiors are just as bleak: you can practically hear the creaking of the old timbers; this is a house in which the chill goes to the bone.(...)
The pace is impressively brisk (even if the running time still clocks in at two hours) but the abridgement does rob it of the emotional punch that its climactic scenes should have.
Nevertheless, this adaptation is a classy and well acted piece and well worth every rain-lashed thunderstorm. (Jez Sands)

Other reviews: Allentown DVD Examiner,  Life On the Breadline, Sew White,

My Daily interviews Jane Eyre 2011's costume design, Michael O'Connor and shows some of the original designs:

What inspired you when you were creating the costumes for Jane Eyre?
"Inspiration came firstly from Charlotte Brontë's novel and Jane's personal struggle. Inspiration also came from artists of the time including Ingres, Winterhalter and Mary Ellen Best also early victorian photographers such as Robert Adamson. i also found looking at original costumes to be very inspiring."  (...)
And when you're working on something like Jane Eyre, how important is historical accuracy?
"Historical accuracy was important to the project because it helped to keep a rule in terms of patterns of costume, making and the technique of making. The fun of projects like Jane Eyre is trying to understand the past. This doesn't mean that it restricts one totally but knowing how something was achieved and why can help with understanding the society of the time."
Lastly, what's your own favourite costume from the film?
"One of my favourite costumes is when, at the end of the film, Jane returns to Thornfield and wears a brown with ribbon print dress which was made from an imported american cotton print fabric based on prints of the time. She wears a bonnet made from a combination of antique and modern straw, fabricated in an openwork design to give it a lightness." (Philippa Warr)

Cinema Blend makes some Oscar nominations predictions. About Jane Eyre 2011:

This is more wishful thinking on the part of those of us who love this movie-- it's a really wonderful adaptation of a spooky and very affecting novel, but doesn't seem to have stuck much in the public consciousness. Both stars Michael Fassbender and Mia Wasikowska have other projects coming this fall, and the best hope for Jane Eyre seems to be Costumes or Cinematography-- a hope I'll cling to as long as I can.  (Katey Rich)

Beauty And The Dirt gives away a Jane Eyre writing set + book.

The Birmingham Mail visits Scarborough:

I started one from Anne Brontë's burial place in St Mary's Churchyard, headed across Scarborough Castle and spent a few hours, walking across the sands. (Jasbir Uthi)

The Telegraph & Argus describes this very Brontë week:

Brontëmania is buzzing this week, with new film adaptations of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, and the opening of a new play about the literary sisters by Skipton-born writer Blake Morrison. (Emma Clayton)

And The Independent analyses the British creative industry looking at the Brontës:

When a Yorkshire parson gave his children a set of wooden soldiers, he can't have known what he would unleash. First, there were games, then there were stories, and then hundreds of handwritten books. There was a kingdom called Gondal, and then a gypsy called Heathcliff, and then a governess called Jane. And then, 154 years after two books were published by two sisters under the names of two men, there was yet another film of Wuthering Heights, and yet another film of Jane Eyre, and yet another play about the daughters of the parson, all in the course of a week. (Christina Patterson)

The Huffington Post reviews the latest Paul Morrissey film, News from Nowhere.

In one of the films more memorable scenes, he asks her what she's reading, and she tells him "Jane Eyre - it's about a girl who's very unhappy, so she marries and older man." Looking away, she follows by asking what he thinks of younger women who wed men much older than them, and the camera panning between them makes for a few terrific frames of discomfort, longing, delivered in silence. (Michael Vazquez)

E Grade needs a classic in The Independent (Ireland):

To keep myself awake I lean backwards towards the 'literature' section and grab a novel. A nice classic to keep my mind occupied is what I need. Wuthering Heights or a biog.

The Jewish Journal is too optimistic when it says:

England in the 19th century had the Brontë sisters, but we’ve got the Ephrons. (Jonathan Kirsch)

The Yorkshire Post talks about the increasing problem of the theft of lead and other materials from churches over England. And Haworth is no exception:

In Haworth, historic home of the Brontës, the parish church and other heritage buildings have been targeted so often that the priest in charge fears that tourism and jobs could be put in jeopardy.

Just One More Page... reviews The Tenant of Wildfell Hall; badinage posts about Jane Eyre; Le Labo des expérimentations littéraires de Marc Ancel reviews Wuthering Heights (in French); The Squeee continues her Jane Eyre week with a post about North Lees Hall, a review of The Forbidden Innocent and an eyes Eyre quiz;  Maddalena De Leo has uploaded to YouTube a dozen or more short videos of different moments of the recent Brontë Society Conference held in Cambridge.

Categories: Brontë Society, Jane Eyre, Haworth, Movies-DVD-TV, References, Wuthering Heights

Read More

Patrick Brontë: Father of Genius - A Review

Our thanks to The History Press Ltd for sending us a review copy of this book.

Patrick Brontë: Father of Genius
by Dudley Green
£16.00
Publication Date : 01 Apr 08
Imprint : The History Press Ltd
Binding :Hardback
Page :284 pages
ISBN-13: 978-1845886257

As we have written before, the Brontë men have been considerably maligned and mistreated in this century and a half of Brontëana. Branwell, the black sheep of the family, was from the very beginning vindicated by his friends (Grundy, Leyland...)⁽¹⁾ and more recently by biographers such as Winifred Gérin or Daphne du Maurier. Arthur Bell Nicholls, the oppressor husband, is a more marginal figure associated with Charlotte Brontë's final years but has also received some rehabilitation from recent biographers⁽²⁾.

But if a Brontë figure has been misunderstood and ill-treated from the very beginning then that is Patrick Brontë. It is well known how Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Brontë which did so much to rehabilitate the author of Jane Eyre in the Victorian eyes, did so much more to convert Patrick Brontë in a tyrant, irritable and eccentric creature. The effects of such a description can be traced even to our days. It's frequent to see how from time to time a book, an article, a newly-discovered letter serve as excuses to once again vindicate the real figure behind the grotesque Gaskell mask. One of those moments was forty years ago when the pioneering work of Lock & Dixon: A Man of Sorrow: The Life, Letters and Times of the Rev Patrick Brontë was published. That was a huge landmark and an enormous step forward in the knowledge of Patrick Brontë. Another was the 2005 publication of The Letters of Patrick Brontë by Dudley Green who now publishes this new biography which integrates all the new documents and evidence which have been brought to light in the last few decades.

Dudley Green's ambition is clearly stated in the preface of the book:

It has been my aim to present a fair and accurate account of Patrick's life and ministry, based on the considerable documentary evidence which is available. I hope that the picture here presented reveals a kindly and loving father who took a keen interest in his children's development and an able and faithful clergyman who was ever sensitive to the pastoral needs of his parishioners.

In order to do so, Mr Green relies basically on Patrick Brontë's own words. It is through direct quotation from his letters (and from the letters of other members of the family and friends) that this biography usually progresses. When the records are scarce or unavailable, Mr Green tries to base his statements on first-hand sources and avoid speculation. An example of this approach can be seen in the first chapters devoted to Patrick's Irish. Other biographers (Lock & Dixon, for instance) relied almost entirely on the controversial account by William Wright in The Brontës in Ireland which Dudley Green, as others before, considers altogether questionable and hardly reliable. Consequently, his account of these years is less detailed and meticulous than Lock & Dixon's⁽³⁾ but what is lost in the description of the legend is gained in credibility.

The book tries to maintain a balance between the more familiar aspects of any Brontë biography and Patrick's Church of England ministry over 55 years, 41 of them serving as incumbent of Haworth. Therefore the biography is divided into two first parts covering the biographical events from 1777 until 1846, before Branwell's death. The third part: A Varied Ministry devotes several chapters to Patrick's varied personal interests and ecclesiastical campaigns: his literary efforts, his continuous quarrels with the Haworth Dissenters because of the Church rates, his fight for the establishment of a National School and the improvement of the water facilities in Haworth. What this structure allows - without stopping a particular chapter - is for events which expand over several decades to be developed more in depth but it inevitably causes repetitions and reexpositions of quotes or events previously explored⁽⁴⁾.

A final section covers the events from 1847 until his death in 1861. The death of his children, Charlotte Brontë's literary career (and Patrick's pride for it), the problems with his curate Arthur Bell Nicholls over the wedding with his daughter, Charlotte's death, the comission and development of Gaskell's biography of Charlotte and his final years.

This last section reveals that Patrick Brontë's condescension with Elizabeth Gaskell's portrait of himself probably is one of the reasons why Patrick's distorted image still perdurates:

"I have no objection, whatever to your representing me as a little excentric [sic], since you, and other learned friends will have it so; only dont [sic] set me on, in my fury to burning heathrughs, sawing the backs off chairs, and tearing my wifes [sic]..." (Patrick Brontë to Elizabeth Gaskell, 30 July 1856)

He only complained bitterly and vehemently about his alleged denial of meat for his children at the Parsonage⁽⁵⁾.

The book is enhanced by several appendices including an account (based on a previous paper by Ann Dinsdale) of the dismissed nurse from the Parsonage whowould go on to be the source of many, if not all, of the misconceptions about Patrick so eagerly relayed by Elizabeth Gaskell, a chronology, the list of Patrick's curates, a couple of new letters⁽⁶⁾ discovered after his edition of Patrick's letters, extracts from Gaskell's Life, etc⁽⁷⁾...

Dudley Green's portrait of Patrick Brontë shows once more (and for all?) that Patrick was no bigot⁽⁸⁾ but a man firm in his beliefs, not always diplomatic and sometimes a little too impulsive. A loving father who encouraged his children in their endeavours, who was proud of their triumphs and sympathetic in their failures. A fighting clergyman, always at his post, indefatigable in the many battles of his ministry at Haworth.

It can be argued that Patrick's life and virtues are not so different from many other contemporary clergymen and with all certainty without the literary efforts of his daughters, his life would just have been a footnote in a clerical directory. But the fact is that he was the father of the Brontës and a key figure in their world. As we have also said before: Sometimes the boundaries of history are as definitory of an era as the Big History of great men/women and Big Events. And Dudley Green's biography of Patrick Brontë is a shining proof of that.


Notes
(1) Francis Leyland, The Brontë Family (2 volumes) by Francis A. Leyland (1886); Pictures of the past by Francis H. Grundy (1879).
(2) Cochrane, Robert & Margaret, My Dear Boy: The Life of Arthur Bell Nicholls, Highgate Publications 1999; Adamson, Alan H., Mr Charlotte Brontë. The Life of Arthur Bell Nicholls, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2008 (read our review here)
(3) The verbal excesses of Lock & Dixon's book are, happily, not repeated here. In Green's approach there's no room for statements like the following:

Those first days of June 1861, were hot, almost sultry days, and in his bedroom Patrick was murmuring to himself as his mind wandered. What did he see in his imagination as he lay there dying? Was there the preacher galloping along the lanes of Ireland (...)? (Lock & Dixon, A Man of Sorrow, Nelson, 1965, pag 524)

And furthermore we tend to like more the positive title of Green's book: Patrick Brontë, Father of Genius than the more mournful one of Lock & Dixon's.
(4) Some other minor mistakes have to be pointed out. Note 4 in Chapter 8 is missing, a Mr Ramsbottom is rebaptized Mr Robinson in page 157 and figures 33 and 34 are, as a matter of fact, the same figure. The Illustrations are frankly disappointing, not including practically anything not seen ad nauseam in other recent biographies. Lock & Dixon's list of plates were much more exciting.
(5) A fact that is clearly contradicted by Emily and Anne Brontë's diary paper of 24 November 1834: “We are going to have for Dinner Boiled Beef, Turnips, potato’s and applepudding.”
(6) One of them, Patrick Brontë to Bishop of Ripon, 10 April 1855, was first published complete on BrontëBlog and can be read here.
(7) The book also contains a Foreword by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Curiously, Lock & Dixon's biography also features a Foreword by the Archbishop of York. It seems that if you don't have an archbishop you cannot publish a biography of Patrick Brontë.
(8) Some examples quoted by Green: In April 1826, he had to appoint a new parish clerk. Two candidates applied for the position. Considering that those were times of need, Patrick gave the position to the both of them in alternating months. How he didn't hesitate to hire Eliza Brown, sister of Martha Brown, even knowing that she had been a natural mother. Or how he aligned with the Haworth wool-combers in strike in 1846 in spite of his strong and unbending Tory convictions...

Categories: Biography, Patrick Brontë, Review

Read More

Mr Charlotte Brontë - A review

Our thanks to McGill-Queen's University Press for sending us a review copy of this book.

Mr Charlotte Brontë
The Life of Arthur Bell Nicholls

Alan H. Adamson

McGill-Queen's University Press
Cloth (0773533656) 9780773533653
Release date: 2008-02-28
CA $29.95 | US $24.95 | UK £13.99
6X9
216pp
19 b&w photos

The three key men in the Brontë saga have been maligned since their own time until relatively recently. And because Charlotte Brontë's death took place after her marriage to Arthur Bell Nicholls but before she could make it clear whether she would continue with her literary career - though the answer to that riddle is pretty clear to us - Mr Nicholls has been 'fair game' even since before his death.

Most modern biographies try and look at his own acts instead of relying on the clearly biased accounts of 'witnesses' such as Mrs Gaskell or Ellen Nussey or Charles Hale (who actually was a close friend of Mrs Gaskell's). Published in 1999, the Cochranes' My Dear Boy was the first stand-alone biography of him where they vindicated the figure of this Irish curate who married Charlotte Brontë and who, were you to trust some accounts, always took the wrong decisions and made the worst moves.

Now nine years later, Alan H. Adamson provides us with another biography of this seemingly obscure man who hated fame so much that he didn't even bother to try and defend himself from many untruths and falsehoods. Mr Charlotte Brontë is the title of this new biography - a title which we personally find totally fitting. Mr Adamson, apart from a historian, has family connections which link him to Mr Nicholls' aunt and uncle, who adopted Arthur and his brother Alan.

Mr Adamson makes a point of trying to establish as far as possible Arthur's personality and what made him the man he became. This adoption and separation from his parents - who he never saw again judging from the evidence we have - is, according to the author, a key factor in Arthur's psychological makeup, causing him to be wary of strangers, yet - once the ice had been broken - attaching himself passionately and deeply to a happy few.

Mr Adamson differentiates three clear-cut periods in Arthur's life. Facts from the first period, his Irish formative years, are scarce but just enough to have a glimpse of the young Arthur and to gather where he might have got his High-Church, Puseyite religious ideas which brought him so to clash with both the Brontës and with the villagers of Haworth at times. Mr Adamson is able even to fill a gap in Arthur's superior education: the man whose intellect was written down as not so bright because of his taking extra time to complete his studies according to the Cochranes is now the man who took a year off from University in order to teach. The author also makes use of his family papers to try and describe the home and family Arthur would have known. The well-known Cuba House where Arthur grew up is unfortunately - and unbeknownst to us up until now - sadly in ruins these days, as a couple of pictures in the book show.

Short parts of the biography are written somewhat fictionally, such as Arthur waking for the first time in Haworth to the sound of Patrick's gunshots out of his window at the Parsonage. But this might indeed have been the way in which the second - and most brief and well-known - part of Arthur's life began after about a year in Ireland where his whereabouts are a mystery. Mr Adamson's sympathies clearly lie with the young, foreign curate who finds himself in an idiosyncratic northern village. And perhaps to make the reader share this feeling he tips the balance a little too much in painting Charlotte Brontë a little more unsympathetic than she probably was. Her every mention of the Irish curate is scanned for meaning which might or might not have been there. However, we find the quick, stereotyped summary of the Brontës' lives up until that point somewhat unnecessary, as most people coming to this biography will be quite familiar with the Brontë story. Perhaps - for the few people coming from other directions - that summary could have been left to a footnote.

Arthur Bell Nicholls wasn't definitely one for first impressions. Charlotte Brontë was famously not impressed by him, probably due to a natural callousness when it came to her father's curates - and we all know where she ended up. However, Charlotte's lifelong friend Ellen Nussey seems to have liked him at first, as did Elizabeth Gaskell when she met him for the first time after Charlotte's death. Of course, we know where these two ended up as well: profiting from every chance to criticise Arthur and his attitude and to lean toward the exact opposite direction from where he leant. But, as with Charlotte, we find Mr Adamson to be a little too willing to highlight Arthur's good points by looking at these women's so-called faults through a magnifying glass. Elizabeth Gaskell is accused of leaving England after the Life of Charlotte Brontë was published to 'avoid the controversy', ignoring the fact that Mrs Gaskell always fled from England whenever one of her books was published. Ellen Nussey's possible reasons for constantly wanting to print Charlotte's letters against Arthur's wishes are repeated time and time again with more than hints about her just wanting her proverbial 15 minutes of fame. A few other minor, hardly relevant mistakes appear in the book as well, despite Mr Adamson's extensive and aptly-used bibliography.

This interesting second period, which has been looked into ad infinitum, is naturally the less interesting within the biography. Still, it is sympathetic and moving and, for anyone who likes Arthur - as you will after having read the previous pages of the book - and who likes Charlotte it is simply a pleasure to read up until when Charlotte's condition worsens, and a drama to read up until Patrick dies. Oh the struggle to defend Charlotte's reputation, to ward off gossips and to try and lead a normal life. Both dramatic and hilarious the 12-letters-in-10-days exchanged by Patrick and Arthur with Harriet Martineau are, for us, one of the highlights of this period, as Mr Adamson comments them both seriously and inevitably jokingly.

This period ends with Arthur's 'dismissal' by the Haworth board of trustees after Patrick's death. Mr Adamson tries to reach conclusions as to why the trustees voted against him and treats the painful subject in-depth and with compassion.

The third and last period in Arthur's life is his return to Banagher, Ireland, with his Aunt and cousin Mary Anna - who would later become his second wife, although Arthur is supposed to have told her that he had buried his heart with Charlotte - is the most interesting and the one to include most new things. Not only does Mr Adamson pepper the text with lively, vivid anecdotes of family folklore but he also brings us Mr Nicholls at his most charming and relaxed, on his way from Charlotte Brontë's 'dear boy' to the elderly, much-loved particularly by children and animals, 'dear baboo Nick'. But the Brontë connection was impossible to leave behind. He was now great friends with the Brontës' old servant, Martha Brown (who hadn't liked Mr Nicholls at first either), with whom he kept in touch by letter and by her frequent stays in Banagher. He once went back to Haworth even! And his home at the Hill House (now a bed and breakfast called Charlotte's Way) seems to have been a Brontë shrine. Even though the stories of his precious Brontë items stored in cupboards is well-known, many other valuable items were cherished and displayed prominently inside the house. Arthur's life after the Brontës is also the afterlife of Brontë items, which is always interesting to read, despite the cringe-worthy dealings of T.J. Wise.

This biography of Arthur Bell Nicholls reads like a grabbing novel and closes like one, too, with that mixture of satisfaction and sadness which reigns at the end of a good story. Mr Adamson provides us with a perceptive, fresh new approach and in telling the life of Charlotte Brontë's husband poses some very interesting - albeit unanswerable - questions concerning the Brontës themselves. What's more important, it shows - hopefully for once and for all - that Charlotte Brontë didn't marry a monster, but a highly private man who, above all, loved his wife Charlotte Nicholls but who also cared about Charlotte Brontë's literary reputation inasmuch as that was strictly restricted to her books, not her private affairs.

Let us finish with his own words on the controversial subject of Charlotte Brontë's married happiness:

There is also another misconception, which I am told by a Literary Friend, prevails--'that her [Charlotte Brontë's] married life was unhappy'--I should have thought that her own words written from her deathbed had made such a statement incredible but I am told that it exists.
~ Arthur Bell Nicholls to Mrs Humphry Ward, 28 November 1899

Categories: Biography, Books, Review

Read More