Emily, written and directed by Frances O’Connor, is a ‘speculative biopic’: a heavily altered version of Emily Brontë’s life, centred on an imaginary relationship with William Weightman, her father’s curate at Haworth from 1839 until his death from cholera in 1842. There is some historical evidence to suggest that Weightman had a relationship with the youngest Brontë sister, Anne; but O’Connor’s film goes with feeling – some people find it difficult to believe that a virgin could have written Wuthering Heights – rather than fact. In interviews, O’Connor has defended her decision, which I think is interesting, through the lens of popular feminism, which I think is not: ‘There’s always a gap between who women really are and who they’re supposed to be.’nterest in the lives of the Brontë sisters – in who they ‘really’ were – is seemingly inexhaustible, fuelled in part by frequent adaptations of their most popular works. O’Connor’s movie, which contains multiple references to the visual motifs of Wuthering Heights (a face at the window, a white nightdress, an impassioned ghost in the night), is beautifully filmed, with a compelling central performance from Emma Mackey; still, it’s difficult to watch without a sense of déjà vu. It’s hard to take seriously a scene in which a woman in a corset sits down at a desk, takes up her quill, and spells out the title of one of the most famous novels in the world.Admittedly, I may be too easily inclined to feeling like a cog in the Brontë machine. Over the past six years, I’ve taught various Victorian literature modules at many different British universities, always on short-term or hourly-paid ‘teaching track’ contracts (i.e. no research). It doesn’t matter what your specialisms are: if you’re a Victorianist with a heavy teaching load, especially if your work relates even tangentially to gender, you’ll spend a lot of time marking essays on Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and ‘strong female characters’. This is frequently a pleasure: discussing the novels with students often reveals something real among the overdetermination, helps me see the texts clearly again. The fact remains, however, that I neither chose nor expected to devote quite so much of my working life to the Brontës, and yet here I am. They got me. [...]In the movie’s version of Charlotte, so entirely in the thrall of convention, I can’t recognise the writer of Jane Eyre and Villette: O’Connor alters the chronology to suggest that Charlotte only began to write novels after Emily’s death. (In fact, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights were published the same year.) [...]It wasn’t teaching that was the enemy of freedom or thought for Emily, but rather the institutions in which she had to work, an experience shared by her sisters, even if they were more resilient. Still, the appeal of feeling persists. The stifling school corridors of Emily are an easy image to set up as the opposite to what counts, in O’Connor’s terms, as Emily’s ‘real’ life: the freedom of the moors, writing late into the night, sex. These are the images that have compressed the Brontës into a recognisable and strangely impenetrable commodity. (Helen Charman)
Frances O’ Conners’ [sic] “Emily” was a powerful display of the harrowing love that Emily Brontë herself wrote and fantasised about. My mother having read the books in her youth claimed the film to be “a beautiful imagining of what their lives could have really been like”, highlighting the depth of writing and cinematography that went behind shooting this drama. The writing has been complimented with beautiful shots of the Haworth moors in Yorkshire, giving the actors and directors just over six weeks of shooting time whilst they were there in April 2021. Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” breaks the binaries of love, deconstructing the normalised perceptions we have surrounding it and instead replacing it with something much more grotesque and unsettling. The beautiful language is something that links the Brontë’s, which is certainly seen in Emily’s famous line “whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same”. To read, watch or listen to the Brontë’s is to communicate with the past, the present and the future. (Megan Lovell)
Jusqu’à inspirer un tube à la chanteuse Kate Bush. Mais comme le remarque Lucasta Miller, biographe des Brontë, le film de Wyler fait l’impasse sur les aspects les plus perturbants du livre : la violence de classe, le sadisme, que souligne le cinéaste japonais Kijû Yoshida en citant Georges Bataille, et l’origine de Heathcliff, ce personnage « noir comme le jais et le feu ». Il est ainsi rappelé que Liverpool fut un port négrier et que les débats sur l’abolition de l’esclavage faisaient rage quand Emily Brontë écrivait son roman. Bien plus qu’une histoire d’amour, conclut avec justesse le documentaire, « les Hauts de Hurlevent » contient tout ce qui minait la société victorienne. Et c’est ce qui en fait un vrai et grand roman du scandale. (Elisabeth Philippe) (Translation)
[Sidney Babcock, the longtime curator of ancient Near Eastern antiquities] sees “She Who Wrote” — which assembles objects from nine institutions around the world — as part of the Morgan’s long history of exhibitions on women writers like Mary Shelley, Charlotte Brontë and Emily Dickinson. (Jennifer Schuessler)
Hardwick is most famous for the essays collected in Seduction and Betrayal (1974), a series of pieces on women in literature first published in the NYRB (a magazine she helped found) in the early 1970s. Her topics included writers and fictional characters: the Brontës, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Dorothy Wordsworth, Hedda Gabler and Hester Prynne (hence ‘Xavier’). Hardwick’s great subject was women – their subjection, their stoicism, their self-reliance – but she wrote about them with a sort of fatalism, a fatalism that characterised her treatment of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. . . (Joanne O’Leary)
Wevill was in despair; according to her journals of March 20, 1969, she asked Hughes why he couldn’t commit to a life with her, to marriage and their family. In the years since Plath’s 1963 suicide, Assia and Shura had often lived with Hughes, while she cared for his children with Sylvia, Frieda and Nicholas. But it always ended badly. “‘It’s Sylvia—it’s because of her,’” Wevill records him telling her: “Ted drunk—stroking my shoulder. The terrible talk in the ‘lounge’ of the Elm Hotel.” [1] The next day, Wevill went to Haworth, the village up the road where the Brontës lived and wrote and died, and bought Seconal sleeping pills from the druggist. Two days later, she dragged a mattress into the kitchen and killed herself and Shura in London flat. (Emily Van Duyne)
Their love was like Heathcliff and Cathy’s, if Heathcliff and Cathy had moved on and suffered awkward reunions at cocktail parties.Janine Beacham
Heathcliff in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering HeightsHeathcliff is the absolute worst. Yes, he has an intense relationship with Cathy but, after overhearing Catherine tell Nelly that she plans to marry their rich neighbour, Edgar Linton, Heathcliff runs away instead of speaking with Catherine. Upon his return several years later, he dedicates his life to destroying the lives of those around him primarily because he didn’t get the girl. And for those who still think that he’s just misunderstood, never forget that his wedding present to his wife Isabella was to murder her dog.Edward Rochester in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane EyreWhen they first meet, Rochester pointedly treats Jane as an equal rather than her employer. However, this is undermined by his behaviour towards Jane when his aristocratic houseguests come to visit. After intentionally hurting Jane by feigning an interest in marrying Blanche Ingram, Rochester eventually declares his love and proposes to Jane. The problem? He’s already married, and his wife is locked up in his attic.To make matters worse, when his lies become apparent, he tries to convince Jane to abscond to Europe with him knowing that this would destroy Jane’s reputation thereby preventing her from ever finding employment or a respectable husband. In this era, the loss of both of these options would leave Jane destitute if dumped by Rochester. (Maria Butler)
The Woman Question is the title of a special Brontë-themed evening marking the centenary of women gaining the vote.Sussex Express presents an event at the end of September at the Charleston's Small Wonders Festival:
The Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth will host the September 28 event as the latest entry in its monthly Parsonage Unwrapped programme.
The 7.30pm event focuses on what it would be like to be a working woman in the 19th century when the Brontë sisters were writing.
A spokesman said: “The Brontë sisters knew from a young age that they would have to earn a living and were educated to become governesses and teachers.
“The Brontë servant Martha Brown had barely left her teens before she began working as a servant to the Brontë family.
“The evening will explore the working lives of the women of the Parsonage, and how they operated within the constraints and expectations of the age.”
The museum will hold its monthly Brontë Treasures night on the same day, at 2pm, when a curator will offer unique access to treasures from the Brontë Society collection.
The third monthly event, Late Night Thursday, will be on September 20 when the museum will open till 8pm so that visitors can avoid the crowds.
After 5.30pm, entry is free to local people providing proof of residence in the BD22, BD21 and BD20 postcode areas or living in Thornton.
All three events are held monthly, as part of the Brontë Parsonage Museum’s year of celebrations for the 200th anniversary of Wuthering Heights author Emily Brontë’s birth.
This month the museum is also hosting the Brontë Festival of Women’s Writing, which features workshops on writing crime and historical fiction, advice on writing online, and a performance by leading point Patience Agbabi.
The museum will host free talks on October 2 – at 11am and 2pm – entitled Critical Responses to Wuthering Heights.
Visit bronte.org.uk/what’s-on for information on all events. (David Knights)
I am Heathcliff takes place at Charleston on Friday, September 28 (4pm), as part of the Small Wonder short story festival.Vulture asks Jemima Kirke for her favourite books:
Heathcliff, the brooding anti-hero of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, has gone down in history as the epitome of romantic love – thanks in part to cinema and theatre .
Yet that is so far from what his creator intended, it is in fact a misreading of the book, as the foreword by author Kate Mosse to a new collection of short stories, explains.
I am Heathcliff, the opening event at this year’s Small Wonder festival, dissects the influence Heathcliff and Brontë’s novel has had on literature. This collection of specially commissioned stories inspired by Wuthering Heights and curated by Kate Mosse celebrates the bicentenary of Emily Bronte’s birth. It is a collection that takes a long, hard look at the reality that was Heathcliff through a range of mostly contemporary stories.
Wuthering Heights by Emily BrontëBustle on new classics:
I’ve been looking for Heathcliff ever since. My copy is all warped and sticky from all the tears I’ve shed over it.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the classics. Give a novel written by Jane Austen, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, or the one of the Brontë sisters, and I’ll happily read it — and then talk anyone’s ear off who will listen to me talk about its many merits. But the truth is, sometimes I just want to read a book that feels more relatable, one in which the setting, the politics, the people, and even the fashion is more recognizable. (Sadie Trombetta)and books about books:
If you have a thing for literary's leading ladies, you'll fall head over heels for How to Be a Heroine [by Samantha Ellis], a tribute to the likes of Lizzy Bennet, Scarlett O'Hara, Jane Eyre, Franny Glass, and more. A captivating exploration of the book world's most iconic female characters, and the women who wrote them into being, this engaging analysis will make you think about the many ways your favorite literary heroines influenced, empowered, and inspired you. (Sadie Trombetta)Maya Salam's Gender Letters in the New York Times quotes an 1855 article on the NYT:
“The world would soon be depopulated if it were filled with persons of great intellectual stature,” warned a 1885 New York Times article that called out Emily Brontë, Emily Dickinson and Jane Austen as examples of “literary spinsters.” The good news for these “female brain workers,” according to the piece: They are more likely to live longer than married women with many kids.Not Emily, though.
Wycoller Country Park in Colne is famous for its association with the Brontë sisters who referred to many of the nearby landmarks in books such as Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. It has many footpaths leading to local beauty spots which include Bank House and Wycoller Beck. The site also includes the Atom Panopticon and Wycoller Hall. (Natalie Parker)San Francisco Chronicle reviews the audiobook edition of The Victorian and the Romantic by Nell Stevens:
“The Victorian and the Romantic” is exactly that. Its strongest portions explore a trip Gaskell takes to Rome just as her biography of her deceased friend, Charlotte Brontë, is published. The love between Gaskell and Norton, which begins in Italy and lasts a lifetime without ever being marked with as much as a kiss, leaves us longing for the story of it never to end. (Meg Waite Clayton)Houstonia Magazine recommends the local performances of The Moors:
Take touchstones of English literature such as Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights and layer on plenty of dark comedy trappings, and you’ll get Jen Silverman’s The Moors. Says MU Artistic Director Jennifer Decker: “I was sold as soon as I realized there was a side story with an ill-fated love affair between a pet Mastiff and a lost moor hen, a rock power ballad, a murder plan involving an ax, and a brother who may or may not be imprisoned in the attic. That kind of weirdness is right up Mildred’s Umbrella’s alley.” (Morgan Kinney)Bookriot says goodbye to summer with a Jane Eyre quote:
“It was dry, and yet warm with the heat of the summer day. I looked at the sky; it was pure: a kindly star twinkled just above the chasm ridge. The dew fell, but with propitious softness; no breeze whispered. Nature seemed to me benign and good: I thought she loved me.” (Emily Westrom)
Un chef d’œuvre franchit les frontières et touche des sensibilités et imaginaires que rien ne disposait à la rencontre. Les Hauts de Hurle-Vent, par son tragique et son absolu, fait partie de ces créations qui nous investissent à chaque lecture. Pourquoi ce retour vers ce classique anglais ? L’occasion d’y revenir, bien sûr mais aussi de faire connaître le beau roman de Maryse Condé, La Migration des cœurs (1995) qui, sans masque, le dédie à son illustre devancière :Letralia (in Spanish) about women as authors:
« A Emily BrontëQui, je l’espère, agréera cette lecture de son chef d’œuvre.Honneur et respect ! »A l’occasion du bicentenaire de la naissance d’Emily Brontë (1818-1848), les éditions Robert Laffont dans leur collection « Pavillons Poche » ont réédité son unique roman dans la traduction de Frédéric Delebecque, avec une préface inédite de Lydie Salvayre (Prix Goncourt 2014). C’est l’occasion de (re)lire le roman anglais et de faire, peut-être, découvrir celui de Maryse Condé. Deux romans dont la lecture emporte loin du quotidien pour nous plonger dans des univers mêlant passion et connaissance. (Read more) (Translation)
Nombres de la talla de Virginia Wolf o las hermanas Brontë han permitido que el camino que les toca emprender hoy a otras escritoras no sea un campo de minas, como lo fue a lo largo de la historia. (Rafael Bailón Ruiz) (Translation)El Sur de Acapulco (in Spanish) quotes W. Somerset Maugham:
El escritor británico W. Somerset Maugham, malhumorado y escéptico como buen inglés de entre guerras, escribió algunos ensayos, en realidad prólogos compilados de manera posterior, en donde explica la novela de una forma que me parece precisa: considera que las más grandes no lo son por perfectas, Moby Dick, El jugador o Cumbres borrascosas; obras que son clásicas no por sus virtudes, sino por sus defectos. (Adán Ramírez Serret) (Translation)Vogue (France) mentions the Loewe edition of Wuthering Heights; Owlcation suggests a Jane Eyre discussion with extra cupcakes; The Eyre Guide visits Haddon Hall and The Brontë Babe Blog reviews Rita María Martínez's book of poetry The Jane and Bertha in Me.
As we boarded the train to Leeds, to check out Haworth, where the Brontë sisters wrote their classics and are buried, we realised we had just scratched the surface of Scotland. There is so much more to see on a future visit. (Ahmad Faruqui)Coincidentally, Christopher Fowler explores the North of England:
‘Can I ask – have you ever had a proper job?’I explained that I’d been a journalist and had run a film company before becoming a writer, and she cut me off. ‘No, a proper job.’‘Like what?’ I asked.‘You know,’ she replied. ‘Lifting.’True, I hadn’t done any lifting except at the gym, but I knew a bit about books. I knew that Thomas De Quincey, John Braine, Charlotte Brontë and Alan Bennett were all from the North, as were Margaret Drabble, Beryl Bainbridge and Jeanette Winterson. Bainbridge’s novels, like ‘Young Adolf’, based on the myth that Hitler once worked at the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool, brought hilarity to death and darkness. [...] Forget about the Brontës; I’ve always admired David Nobbs, John Braine, Winifred Holtby, Alan Sillitoe, Stan Barstow and Keith Waterhouse, who mixed dark and light together almost without thinking.The Telegraph and Argus tells about a new project at Keighley railway station.
Passengers can now learn more about a town’s rail history as they wait for a train.Interpretive posters outlining the impact of railways on Keighley have been installed in the waiting rooms on platforms one and two of the town’s station.Behind the project is the Keighley Station Partnership (KSP), a group dedicated to improving information provided at the site. [...]Keighley BID officer, Phil Walker, said: “Keighley Station is a ‘destination gateway’ to Brontë Country and there has long been a need to provide information on what the town has to offer to visitors arriving from Leeds, Bradford and Skipton, as they walk up the long ramps to the forecourt.“We hope these imaginative posters, and others yet to come, will do that and Keighley BID has been happy to provide eight new poster cases to fulfill this need.” (Alistair Shand)We have several reviews of the film adaptation of The Guernsey Literary And Potato Peel Society.
When Juliet arrives from London, she is regarded with awe simply because she is the author of a book about Anne Brontë. When the book lovers discover she is planning an article about them, their attitude changes. They’re harbouring some painful secrets which they don’t want to share.As in Ealing comedies, the community is far stronger than any individual. The mildly eccentric members of the literary society remain remarkably loyal to one another. The war, meanwhile, is presented as an inconvenience. The members of the Potato Peel society are so busy discussing Brontë and Charles Lamb’s Shakespeare stories that they manage to keep the outside world at bay. (Geoffrey Macnab for The Independent)
It's 1941, the Channel Island of Guernsey is under German Occupation and a group of friends are caught out after curfew. In desperation, they tell the patrol that they're returning from a meeting of their reading club, figuring the Germans will fail to find anything subversive in the act of reading Emily Brontë and Charles Lamb. (Sandra Hall for The Sydney Morning Herald)
THE PLOT: Post-war London. Juliet (Lily James) is an avid reader and an even more passionate writer. Her latest book on Anne Brontë wasn’t exactly a bestseller. Still, her publisher Sidney (Matthew Goode) has confidence in her cheerful approach to life. Juliet is contacted by Guernsey resident Dawsey (Michael Huisman) about tracking down a Shakespeare book. He relates a brief story about his book club, The Guernsey Literary And Potato Peel Pie Society and how it gave them hope during the German occupation. Intrigued, Juliet heads to the small island in the English Channel to find out more. There, she meets the other members of the Society including the bitter Amelia (Penelope Wilton), who objects to Juliet writing about their wartime experiences. However, this is a story that needs to be told… (Gareth O’Connor for Movies.ie)
Shaffer and Barrows’ short, breezy novel wasn’t aiming for Brontë to begin with, but it’s received soapier treatment still in the slick hands of co-writers Don Roos (some way from “The Opposite of Sex”), Thomas Bezucha (“The Family Stone”) and Kevin Hood (“Becoming Jane”). (Guy Lodge for Variety)Actor Ben Hardy tells Digital Spy about BBC One's new Woman in White miniseries.
"What really struck me about The Woman in White is just how ahead of its time it was – especially the actual themes of the piece."They're more relevant now than they were when we filmed it, actually – this idea of these two women living freely within the strict structure of Victorian society and a heinous patriarch coming and spoiling everything."It feels very current and the pacing as well... I read the book in a couple of days and it was 600 pages, which I couldn't do with Charlotte Brontë!"This is more modern in terms of pace, and hopefully a modern audience will respond to it." (Morgan Jeffery)Critictoo (France) highlights 6 roles played by Toby Stephens, including his Mr Rochester in Jane Eyre 2006.
Jane Eyre (2006)
Avant de devenir le capitaine Flint (voir plus bas), on peut dire que le rôle le plus emblématique de la carrière de Toby Stephens sur le petit écran était sans aucun doute celui de M. Rochester dans cette adaptation de Jane Eyre avec Ruth Wilson en tête d’affiche.Célébrée comme étant l’une des meilleures adaptations, l’acteur incarne ce mythique personnage de la littérature, l’exemple type du héros byronien, aussi passionné qu’imparfait. (Carole) (Translation)
4. JANE, THE FOX, AND ME BY FANNY BRITT“ Hélène has been inexplicably ostracized by the girls who were once her friends…Fortunately, Hélène has one consolation, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Hélène identifies strongly with Jane’s tribulations, and when she is lost in the pages of this wonderful book, she is able to ignore her tormentors. But when Hélène is humiliated on a class trip in front of her entire grade, she needs more than a fictional character to allow her to see herself as a person deserving of laughter and friendship. Leaving the outcasts’ tent one night, Hélène encounters a fox, a beautiful creature with whom she shares a moment of connection…Before long Hélène realizes that the less time she spends worrying about what the other girls say is wrong with her, the more able she is to believe that there is nothing wrong at all.” (Chelsea Hensley)According to Electric Lit,
The Best Book Is the One You Can’t Remember Partly or wholly forgotten books can be much more valuable than the ones that are fresh in our minds [...]Books have a strange relationship with memory. I have sometimes been convinced that a certain book contains a lengthy, rapturous, intricately-detailed description of a place, or a clear yet careful elucidation of a complex idea, only to go back and find a scant couple of sentences. On the other hand, there are entire chunks of books that my memory elides (did anyone else forget the whole second half of Wuthering Heights?). (C.D. Rose)El País (Spain) features writer Gerald Murnane.
¿Posmodernismo? “En absoluto. Se escandalizaría si le dijera cuántas obras consideradas maestras no he leído y cuántas otras de las que nunca ha oído hablar me influyeron”, dice. “Tras Emerald Blue, en 1995, decidí dejar la ficción y me dediqué a trabajar para mi exclusivo placer sobre mundos imaginados. Tenía la ambición de traspasar el paisaje de la novela y entrar en otra dimensión ficticia, como hicieron las hermanas Brontë y Proust”. (José Luis de Juan) (Translation)Tes discusses school assemblies:
I give a lot of assemblies now and I’m always aware of the privilege of having the (almost) undivided attention of several hundred busy people. I, therefore, try my best to be interesting. Over the past few months, I’ve talked about the Sudan expedition of 1885 and the battle of Trafalgar; I’ve quoted poetry from Henry Newbolt, Charlotte Brontë and TS Eliot; I’ve drawn lessons from the films Strictly Ballroom and War Games; I’ve told the story of the (almost) elimination of polio; and I’ve even proved that there are infinitely many primes (although I think I lost a fair section of the audience in that one). (James Handscombe)Burgh Vivant posts about Britsburgh Literary Society's recent Evening with Jane Eyre. The Echo posts about Wuthering Heights.
This powerful love letter, from author Charlotte Brontë to Prof Constantin Heger, is displayed in the British Museum and penned in intricate handwriting. (...)Katherine Clements, author of The Coffin Path, talks about the folklore of the Yorkshire moors in Foyles:
They don't do them like that anymore! This well-preserved love letter, from Charlotte Brontë to Prof Constantin Heger, boasts an old fashioned wax stamp. (Jessica Rach)
The Yorkshire Moors can be a dangerous place. On a summer’s day, tourist-friendly areas such as Brontë Country or the North Yorkshire National Park might seem like tamed landscapes, but the weather can change in an instant, bright sun replaced by driving rain, hail or fog. Lose your way and you might find yourself in trouble. Today we worry about accidents, injuries and the ill effects of exposure, but in the past people were concerned with more than just the elements. The moors were seen as ungodly places, the dwelling of devilish creatures and the blanket bog considered a path straight down to Hell. (...)Yorkshire Post mentions a property sale just on the way to Top Withens:
Over the centuries, such beliefs have stayed alive through literature and film. From Conan Doyle and the Brontës, to Tolkien and JK Rowling, our folkloric past continues to inspire, as much a part of our cultural heritage as it is part of the landscape that inspired it. Even today, off the beaten track it’s still possible to experience a sense of isolation and menace in the vast inhospitable landscape of the moors. Next time you go for a ramble, spare a thought for the travellers of the past and their journeys fraught with supernatural peril.
It’s the bicentenary of Emily Bronte’s birth this year and the Bronte Parsonage Museum in Haworth is paying tribute with an exhibition: Making Thunder Roar. It features Emily’s writing, art and possessions, along with personal responses to her work from well-known fans, including Maxine Peake, Lily Cole, and Helen Oyeyemi. Westfield Lodge is on the Brontë Way Emily’s admirers are especially ardent and, along with a pilgrimage to the parsonage, they will no doubt make their way to Top Withens. The remote, ruined farmhouse is said to be the inspiration for the Earnshaw family home, Wuthering Heights, the bricks and mortar star of her famous novel. The walk from the parsonage to Top Withens takes you past Westfield Lodge, a 2,500 sq ft farmhouse and a mini holiday village with 20 self-catering apartments. It’s now for sale with Blacks Business Brokers offering a live-work opportunity with exceptional views over Bronte country and the moors that inspired the world’s most famous literary sisters.Financial Times reviews the novel The Hoarder by Jess Kidd:
Ghost stories rely as much on setting as on the paranormal visitation being described, and crumbling country houses such as Bly in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw or Thornfield in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre positively invite all the terrible conjurings that flit through their pages. It’s a far harder task to transplant the supernatural to modern London — but in this, her second novel, Jess Kidd has neatly managed to adapt this rich tradition in a riveting contemporary story. (Zoë Apostolides)Rolling Stone (Germany) reviews Kate Bush's debut album, The Kick Inside:
Hier zeichnete [David] Gilmour allein für die Produktion verantwortlich. Eine erstaunliche Zurückhaltung. Das Gitarrensolo in „Wuthering Heights“ spielte ein anderer, Ian Bairnson vom Alan Parsons Project. Es spricht für die Gelassenheit Bushs und Gilmours, dass dieses Solo gar das Stück beendet, die Sängerin es sich im Fade-Out nicht zurückerobert.The production Boy by Anna Ziegler, as performed by the None Too Fragile Theater company (Cleveland) is reviewed on Scene:
„The Kick Inside“ war natürlich Pop, vielleicht noch Art-Rock, sicher Ausdruckstanz, aber auch britische Literatur- und Geschichtsstunde; „Wuthering Heights“ basierte auf dem Roman von Emily Brontë. (Sassan Niasseri) (Translation)
The actor David Lenahan embodies the wriggling, squirming presence of young Samuel so well—even as he encouraged to act like a little lady by his therapist (inviting the boy to cross his legs demurely and read Jane Eyre). (Christine Howey)And the play The Divide (Old Vic, London) gets another review in The Times:
Soween’s crushes on other girls, her interaction with bullies, her conservative mother (Thusitha Jayasundera from Doctor Foster) and the liberal parents of Giella, the girl she and her brother love, is not that far from the sort of Brontë sisters novel that Soween secretly, illicitly reads. The show carries a charge of sexual discovery and self-discovery. (Dominic Maxwell)Naples Daily News reviews the performances of Lucy Simon's musical, The Secret Garden:
"The House Upon the Hill" is dark and dreary — think Wuthering Heights 2.0 — with an equally disturbed master, Archibald Craven (Larry Alexander). Mr. Craven, Mary's uncle, is haunted by the ghost of his wife, Lily (Karen Molnar), who died after giving birth to their son, Colin (Liam Hutt). (Shelby Reynolds)iSubscribe lists the greatest(?) literary heroes(?):
Heathcliff in Wuthering HeightsA couple of reviews of the Québec performances of Hurlevents by Fanny Britt:
The original guy you love to hate, all women know that going after a man like Heathcliff is only going to ever end in tears. But oh, he’s so wild, so tragic, so handsome; if only he could be tamed… and following countless film and television adaptations, an even one musical, it has become woefully clear that he can’t.
C’est un huis-clos comme on les aime, familial, un peu angoissant, où les langues se délient et les secrets sortent au grand jour… Tout commence par un résumé rapide des Hauts de Hurlevent, œuvre phare de l’auteure britannique Emily Brontë, joliment amené via un cours universitaire où Marie-Hélène (Catherine Trudeau) enseigne la littérature victorienne. Puis, musique, alors que le titre du roman projeté en grandes lettres blanches dans l’obscurité se transforme en Hurlevents, dans un début de pièce très cinématographique.
Ce huis-clos se passe dans une colocation d’étudiants, un soir de mai où le vent fait rage – comme dans la lande du Yorkshire où les sœurs Brontë ont vécu au 19e siècle. Émilie, Isa et Édouard reçoivent à souper leur professeure de littérature. Pendant la soirée, Catherine, la sœur d’Émilie, fait une apparition surprise… On rit beaucoup pendant les dialogues, on frissonne aussi pendant les noirs récurrents, tandis que le vent hurle et que les personnages arrivent un par un dans cette nuit de tempête.
Dans son très beau texte, Fanny Britt fait une transposition libre de l’histoire de Catherine et Heathcliff des Hauts de Hurlevent dans un Québec contemporain, en même temps que son trio de personnages féminins rappelle les sœurs Brontë. Des allusions à leurs vies ainsi qu’à leurs œuvres parsèment la pièce, plus ou moins subtiles. La pièce est très réaliste au départ – à l’image de la scénographie, en apparence banale jusqu’à ce qu’on aperçoive le plafond – puis part ensuite dans une mise en scène plus libre et créative. (Marie Pâris in Voir) (Translation)
Depuis la parution initiale des Hauts de Hurlevent en 1847, on dit que les temps ont changé, mais aimer ne semble pas plus simple à notre époque qu’à celle de Catherine Earnshaw et Heathcliff, les héros d’Emily Brontë. (...)La Diaria (Uruguay) mentions the previous film by Guillermo Del Toro, Crimson Peak:
Les aficionados des soeurs Brontë et les étudiants chargés de se plonger dans leur legs littéraire s’amuseront à débusquer les clins d’oeil, émouvantes allusions et astucieux parallèles, mais l’essentiel n’est pas là. Avec Hurlevents, Fanny Britt se sert de son engouement pour un récit qu’elle considère comme intemporel afin d’étudier son époque, et plus précisément les notions de vengeance et de pardon. (Christian Saint-Pierre in Le Devoir) (Translation)
En 2015, tal vez saturado con su poco afortunado proyecto de la serie televisiva de vampiros poco convencionales The Strain, Del Toro estrenó el primer pifie de su carrera: La cumbre escarlata, un melodrama gótico sobrenatural inspirado alevosamente en la obra de escritoras como Emily Brontë y Daphne du Maurier, no era una mala película (sobre todo en relación con el panorama del cine fantástico estadounidense), pero en comparación con su propia cinematografía resultaba una obra menor y la única que no estimulaba mucho a verla nuevamente. (Gonzalo Curbelo) (Translation)Blasting News (in Spanish) and Le Monde (in French) review the film Fifty Shades Freed:
Cada vez que Anastasia y Christian hablan de sus problemas, incluso aquellos a los que la mayoría de las personas ponen los ojos, son tratados con la misma seriedad generalmente reservada para las adaptaciones de Jane Eyre. (Joaquín Astorga) (Translation)
Les rêves de prince charmant d’un lectorat majoritairement féminin et les fantasmes d’une sexualité pimentée se trouvant soudain réconciliés dans la figure de Christian Grey, homme d’affaires très beau, très riche, très mystérieux ; mâle alpha absolu et sorte de Heathcliff à l’ère capitaliste. (Murielle Joudet) (Translation)Le Télégramme interviews the singer Nolwenn Leroy:
Etes-vous plutôt roman, BD, polar... ?
J'aime depuis toujours les romans anglais de la fin du XIXe et du début du XXe comme ceux de John Meade Falkner (« Le Stradivarius perdu »), de Montague Rhodes James (« Histoire de revenants d'un antiquaire ») et aussi de Mary Shelley, Walter Scott, Washington Irving, les sœurs Brontë, Oscar Wilde, Jane Austen, en n'oubliant pas dans cette liste mon intérêt pour le Gothique américain avec Edgar Allan Poe, dont j'ai adapté deux poèmes dans mon dernier album, et surtout Edith Wharton : la nouvelle « Kerfol et autres histoires de fantômes », qu'elle situe dans un château près de Quimper est juste fascinante. (Translation)
DireDonna (Italy) has some Valentine recommendations:Per chi sogna l’amore romantico per eccellenza, l’impeto e la passi Cime Tempestose di Emily Brontë. (Francesca Gastaldi) (Translation)That's Magazine describes as 'excellent' Ruth Wilson's 2006 performance in Jane Eyre. Alison's Wonderland Recipes has created a Wuthering Heights inspired roast goose with potatoes. Acompáñame (in Spanish) posts about Jane Eyre. Finally, La Vanguardia's (Spain) cultural supplement includes a couple of articles on the Brontës reviewing recent Spanish editions of The Brontë Cabinet by Deborah Lutz and The Taste of Sorrow by Jude Morgan.
one di storie senza tempo, largo ai grandi capolavori del passato, come la storia, struggente ed eterna, di Heathcliff e Catherine in
Helena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo’s Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls (Particular Books, £20) is a collection of 100 potted histories of women who have helped their fellow females to travel one step further along the path to equality.Best Books read by Irish writers in 2017 in The Irish Times:
Each biography is accompanied by a stunning full-page portrait and alongside the household names (Elizabeth I, the Brontë sisters, Hillary Clinton) are a 19th century warrior called Lozen, Japanese empress Jingu and Italian Formula One racer Lella Lombardi. Parents will learn nearly as much as their offspring. A simple idea, brilliantly executed. (Emma-Lee Potter & Charlotte Heathcote)
I love how Lyndall Gordon thinks and I love the clarity and reach of her writing, combining imaginative audacity with scholarly scruple. Her Outsiders, a collection of portraits of George Eliot, Emily Brontë, Virginia Woolf, Olive Schreiner and Mary Shelley, builds into a lucid meditation on how certain writers become lighthouses for each other. (Joseph O'Connor)
[My] highlights were Another Country by James Baldwin, The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth, The Captive Mind by Czeslaw Milosz, Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe and Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys. (John Kelly)New Republic reviews The Collective Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick, selected by Darryl Pinckney:
Hardwick gave herself some breathing room, herself arguing about the available published evidence of literary greatness, and not necessarily women’s abstract capacity to achieve it, though her dismissiveness of Austen, the Brontës, and George Eliot is unequivocal. (Michelle Dean)The Village Voice talks about the film series Goth(ic) at the Metrograph in New York:
From Frankenstein to Heathcliff, the monthlong “Goth(ic)” portrays the movies’ handling of the sinister literary genre. (...)Wuthering Heights 1939 will be screened on December 23 and December 24.
Instead of writing a “realistic” novel, or an unserious fantastical romance, Walpole tried to do both: How, he wondered, would real people react to ludicrous or fantastic events? Countless authors, from Mary Shelley to the Brontë sisters to Bram Stoker, spent the next 150 years attempting to answer that question. (...)
Indeed, the Gothic movement on the page was largely pioneered by women (Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, Charlotte and Emily Brontë), and has always been concerned with marginalized people. (Morgan Leigh Davies)
Shortly thereafter, she purchased five acres in Marin County that had been a chicken ranch. Honoring her friend the Irish folklorist Ella Young who often dressed like a robed Celtic Druid, and another lesbian writer, Emily Brontë of Wuthering Heights, Gidlow christened this neglected property below the Muir Woods National Monument, Druid Heights. (Gil Troy)Real Simple recommends the Classical Comics take on Wuthering Heights:
John M. Burns' beautiful watercolor artwork tells the heart wrenching story of Heathcliff and Catherine in this visual retelling of Wuthering Heights. Though the book was shortened to fit, it uses much of Brontë's original text and dialogue. (Hannah Norling)Dagens Nyheter (Sweden) chooses books for children:
Men ibland saknar man de vanliga människorna, och jag tänker allt oftare på Charlotte Brontë som skrev ”Jane Eyre” för att visa att en bok kunde ha en hjältinna som inte var strålande vacker. (Lotta Olsson) (Translation)Le Point POP (in French) talks about Alfred Hitchcock and Rebecca 1940:
Signé par la romancière britannique Daphne du Maurier (dont Hitchcock a déjà transposé au cinéma La Taverne de la Jamaïque, édité l'an passé en vidéo par Carlotta), ce récit gothique, dans l'esprit des sœurs Brontë, baigne dans une atmosphère victorienne. (David Mikanowski) (Translation)9Colonne (in Italian) reviews Vite che sono la tua. Il bello dei romanzi in 27 storie by Paolo DiPaolo:
A volte, anche solo una visione o un gesto. Altre volte, una storia che somiglia alla tua. Da Tom Sawyer al giovane Holden, da Jane Eyre a Raskòl’nikov e ai personaggi di Roth, la magia dei grandi libri, guide strane, insolite, spiazzanti: tutto questo in “Vite che sono la tua. Il bello dei romanzi in 27 storie” di Paolo Di Paolo (Laterza). (Translation)Las Provincias (Spain) talks with some writers about their first readings:
Además de los cuentos de toda la vida, incluía relatos más desconocidos que pertenecían a la tradición rusa, a la nórdica... Tenía también cuentos de hadas, de 'Los Cinco', 'Los Hollister'... Recuerdo la ocasión en que me regalaron 'Estudio en escarlata'. Y luego estaban todos los libros de mi madre de la colección Reno: 'Rebeca', 'Cumbres borrascosas', 'Jane Eyre'... En mi casa no había una gran biblioteca, pero todo lo que había, lo leía. (Pilar Adón) (Translation)Twilight Time reviews Wuthering Heights 1970. Quirky Cat's Fat Stacks reviews the Manga edition of Jane Eyre.
What the Brontës MadeBachTrack reviews very positively both John Joubert's Jane Eyre opera premiere and the performance of the soprano April Frederick:
Even those who think they know all there is to know about the Brontë family will likely be surprised by many of the documents and artifacts included in “Charlotte Brontë: An Independent Will,” currently on view at New York’s Morgan Library. Many of these revelations have to do with size and scale, with the contrast between the breadth and depth of Charlotte Brontë’s imagination and her physical delicacy, between the forcefulness of her and her siblings’ prose and the neat, astonishingly miniscule handwriting (not unlike Robert Walser’s microscript) in which she, Emily, and their brother Branwell penned their early work.
The first thing we see, on entering the gallery, is a glass case containing one of Charlotte Brontë’s dresses and a pair of her shoes, objects that make us acutely aware—more effectively than any description or photograph of these items could—of how diminutive (by modern standards) this strong and resilient woman was. Tiny books and magazines, including a copy of a satirical play about the art of writing, The Poetaster, that Charlotte wrote when she was fourteen, offer a view of the way in which the Brontë children saw writing as an imaginative game; to them, these miniature, handmade volumes—meticulously printed, and in some cases illustrated with watercolors—were, essentially, toys. Included also is the manuscript of a poem that Emily Brontë wrote when she was nineteen, a work of three hundred words, divided in forty-six lines, on a page that is only ten centimeters tall. (Read more)
Joubert's music has frequently drawn on great works of literature, and the choice of Jane Eyre as an operatic subject perfectly suited his wont as a composer to explore the human condition "in line with the Enlightenment idea of theatre as a 'School of Morals'" – an ethos of which Brontë herself would have approved. Woods describes the opera as "a score of translucent beauty, in which the music is not only worthy of the original text but seems absolutely of and from it". Indeed, the wonderfully affinitive word-setting lends a great emotional potency to Brontë's epic drama; the use of speech inflections in the vocal lines, the rhythmic stresses, the musical motifs of the characters: all are meticulously crafted, compellingly drawing the listener in to the progressive psychology of the musical narrative.Do not miss, by the way, April Frederick's blog where she describes vividly her experience creating and performing her role.
Joubert's style is essentially one of diatonic lyricism, but the score's vividly colourful and lush palette made powerful use of syncopation and dissonance in evoking atmospheres of tension and portent as well as illuminating the dichotomies within Brontë's characters, notably in the depiction of the conflicted Jane, through wide leaps and use of the leitmotif 7th in her soprano line. April Fredrick navigated the angularity of the title role with steel in an astonishing and luminous performance; a more impassioned embodiment of the character was hard to imagine. (...)
In the presence of the composer, there was added poignancy in the standing ovation, and a feeling that something of real value had taken place: an important contribution to the repertoire, deserving of a place on the world opera stage. (Pamela Nash)
Joubert’s music is harmonically attractive and his orchestration subtle. There is also wit, with echoes of the operatic music of Janáček, Britten, Stravinsky and Wagner (to name but a few) evident fleetingly, and intentionally so in their contexts. It would certainly bear repeated listening – and indeed some of the scenes for the two protagonists could be excerpted.
The parts of Jane and Rochester are imaginatively written. Jane’s lines start out being rather declamatory where she announces her departure from Mr Brocklehurst’s school. As she grows in self-confidence and her romantic nature is revealed her lines become far more impassioned. April Fredrick captured the development of the character well, and made all the words tell. Her voice is warm and attractive across a wide range and the resolve of the character shone through. David Stout’s brooding Rochester was also impressive, and his incisive and mellifluous voice was shown at its appreciable best. He and Fredrick blended well, particularly in the final reflective encounter with its open ending. The other singers all performed their limited roles well – Mark Milhofer standing out as Richard Mason and the Reverend Rivers in two nicely delineated cameos. Kenneth Woods conducted with aplomb, and the recording is much looked forward to. (Alexander Campbell in Classical Source)
Highlights of Joubert’s score for me included the two interludes that separate the three scenes of Act I. Written in Brittenesque manner. The first was suggestive at times of the role of Grace Poole (not an included character) and the strange noises coming from the top floor of Thornfield Hall; the second, after the fire, provided the perfect transition between speculation as to the destinies of Jane and Mr Rochester, and the forthcoming events in the garden. Indeed, as the attraction between the two main characters blossoms, the tension in the music gives way to a sumptuous obligatory love duet – simple, transparent and highly effective. (Geoff Read in Seen and Heard International)The Wall Street Journal reviews Not Just Jane by Shelley DeWees:
A few years ago, Shelley DeWees realized that the bookshelf symbolizing her love of British literature had some gaps: “I had virtually no idea what existed between Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre; or, for that matter, between Jane Eyre and Middlemarch; or Middlemarch and Mrs. Dalloway. . . . There had to have been other British women writing and publishing alongside [the authors she knew], and I decided to find out who they were, what they wrote about, and why their work was missing from my bookcase and from our cultural curricula.” (...)The Independent talks about the new TV series Good Girls Revolt:
It is highly probable that anyone still reading this piece has never heard of most, or possibly any, of these women, but some might have read (or seen television adaptations of Braddon’s “Lady Audley’s Secret” (1862) or Dinah Mulock Craik’s “John Halifax, Gentleman” (1856). Ms. DeWees is indignant at this state of affairs. To her, it seems unfair that Austen and the Brontës, “a sisterhood of reclusive, scribbling parsons’ daughters,” are still read, when these seven writers are not “canonized.” (...)
She praises Dinah Craik’s very fine novel “Olive” (1850) at the expense of “Jane Eyre” (1847), perhaps not realizing that it was written as a “conservative” response to Charlotte Brontë’s book: The crippled heroine Olive exhibits quiet Christian patience, unlike the almost “heathen” (as she calls herself) Jane. (...)
In my 30 years of specializing in this period, I have in fact read 16 works by these women, and I have learned a good deal. But I have also learned something about what makes Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot—well, Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot. Ms. DeWees doesn’t consider that precisely what she so admires about the women whose work she champions is what dates them. These women were better than average at describing political crises, fashionable causes, and the frustrations of women facing serious social and legal barriers—consequently, as those particular political crises passed and women had more choices and fashions changed, their work was superseded. It no longer speaks directly to us.
Insofar as Austen and Brontë wrote about how to identify the right person to marry, one of the most important decisions we still make, their novels remain timely. But in fact they were not writing solely or even mostly about marriage but rather about the interior struggle to forge an authentic identity in relation to the world. As long as there are women and men involved in that quest, the witty, judicious, profound, passionate voices of these great, great authoresses will speak to us. (Alexandra Mullen)
As a result of the pressure brought to bear by the lawsuits, they also got to participate in writer training programmes, although some women were still so insecure after years of being second-tier staffers that they would turn in their work for review under pseudonyms.Lucy Howard became Emily Brontë. But she would leave Brontë behind. (Hank Stuever)
From Shakespeare’s King Lear and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights to Mr Wormwood in Matilda and Jack Torrance in The Shining, literature is full of terrible fathers. But do writers also make bad dads?Also in The Times Melissa Harrison writes about the year's turning and mentions Emily Brontë, and John Sutherland reviews The Dark Circle by Linda Grant:
John Banville, the Booker Prize-winning Irish novelist, has faced a backlash from fellow authors for declaring that they do, asserting that most would “sell their children” for a good turn of phrase. (Kaya Burgess)
Romanticised as the poets’ disease (Keats, Emily Brontë, Orwell, et al), tuberculosis principally ravaged the unsanitary lower classes, cramped in hutch and hovel housing, sharing beds (...)
The film starts off with a setup familiar in Gothic fiction, from “Jane Eyre” to “Crimson Peak.” (Rob Thomas)The Globe and Mail reviews the English translation of Pilátus (Iza's Ballad) by Magda Szabó:
This sort of psychological and emotional access is, short of clairvoyance, otherwise unimaginable with another person; even our loved ones we can only know so well, but Jane Eyre tells us everything. (Pasha Malla)Technique explores how it is to learning to love reading again:
Slowly, I have made my way back. I started with long-form journalism and slowly moved forward. I am midway through “Wuthering Heights” (which I basically skimmed when I was supposed to read it in high school) and five chapters into Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.” (Harsha Sridhar)
Jamaica Kincaid: Jag brukade leka att jag var Charlotte Brontë (...)VLT (also in Swedish) also talks about the Caribbean writer:
Jag ville inte att mina föräldrar skulle veta att jag skrev. Jag trodde inte heller att jag skulle lyckas, men jag ville så gärna skriva. Jag hade gjort det sedan jag var liten, bara sju år. Då låtsades jag att jag var Charlotte Brontë och skrev hennes böcker. (Maria Schottenius) (Translation)
I nya "Se nu då", som är Jamaica Kincaids första roman på tio år, handlar det om familjens upplösning. Med långa ironiska meningar och referenser till Jane Eyre, Outkast och grekisk mytologi skildrar hon paret Mr och Mrs Sweet. Han är en uppburen kompositör medan hon "kom med bananbåten". Distansen mellan dem växer, liksom Mr Sweets förakt. (Translation)L'Intellettuale Dissidente (in Italian) puts David Lynch and Emily Brontë together in the same article:
Se per alcuni l’urto creativo prende forma da uno stato di animo malinconico, per altri la fonte della creazione è da rintracciare in un ascolto perpetuo al richiamo operato dall’inquietudine.Can you imagine a Wuthering Heights reimagined by David Lynch?
“Solo gli inquieti sanno come è difficile sopravvivere alla tempesta e non poter vivere senza”.
Quella della scrittrice e poetessa inglese Emily Brontë, si leva come una delle descrizioni più fedeli di tale stato di animo. (Isabella Cesarini) (Translation)
Perquè la Jane del títol no és altra que Jane Eyre, l’heroïna de Charlotte Brontë: “És el millor llibre que he llegit a la vida, i això que només vaig per la meitat”, ens explica l’Hélène, que devora unes pàgines que li serveixen d’escut i consol contra la crueltat dels altres nens. (Xavi Serra) (Translation)Le Temps (in French) reviews The Sacrifice by Joyce Carol Oates:
En quelques chapitres, «Sacrifice» concentre tout l’art de celle qu’on appelle «la quatrième sœur Brontë»: une moraliste à la fois visionnaire et terriblement efficace, capable de partir d’un simple fait divers pour donner à voir les failles et les blessures les plus douloureuses de l’Amérique. (André Clavel) (Translation)Le Devoir (in French) talks about Les Bons Débarras, theatre adaptation of the 1980 film by the director Frédéric Dubois:
Le metteur en scène poursuit : « Ces personnages continuent aussi de nous dire, et c’est extraordinaire, que la poésie est là, à côté de nous, et que si on abdique, on ne la voit plus. On a besoin de poésie ! Manon lit Les hauts de Hurlevent ; elle va y chercher tout un vocabulaire, une manière de voir le monde. Les bons débarras est en fait presque un calque du roman d’Emily Brontë. Ce que cela nous dit, c’est que, s’il n’y a pas d’équilibre entre le quotidien et le sublime, on meurt. » (Translation)Observator Cultural (in Romanian) is happy to present a new Romanian translation of Jane Eyre:
Nu mai puțin celebre sînt Charlotte Brontë și Jane Eyre, eroina romanului ei din …1847. Nu aș fi zis. Dacă stau să mă gîndesc cum arăta literatura română la acea dată, devin visătoare. Dar mă duc cu gîndul la pereții Voronețului și ai Suceviței, la turlele Dragomirnei, la apus de soare, sau la coloanele în torsadă de la Văcăreștii Mavrocordaților, și echilibrez impresiile de moment. Jane Eyre: aproape 600 de pagini ale unui roman, cu o dedicaţie pentru Thackeray! – nu cred că am știut pînă azi; se poate trăi și fără aceast detaliu, se poate trăi fără multe, şi fără Jane Eyre… Dar parcă devine mai luminoasă și de suportat viața, oricum ar fi ea, după lectura unei cărți bune şi încurajaţi de forța, încrederea în bine și frumos, devotamentul, răbdarea și frumusețea lăuntrică ale unei femei precum Jane Eyre. Emană energie pozitivă, cum se spune azi, debordantă. O ediție nouă Jane Eyre (Editura Litera, 2016, o traducere mai veche de Paul B. Marian și D. Mazilu, o alta nouă de Mirella Acsente, în ediția din 2015, de la Editura Corint, ar merita o confruntare, măcar pentru un seminar dedicat traducerilor) se găseşte acum în librării. Într-o colecție, „Cele mai frumoase romane de dragoste“, care poate stîrni zîmbete superioare. Abia aștept să recitesc Roșu și negru,Amantul doamnei Chatterley sau Mîndrie și prejudecată. (Cristina Manole) (Translation)
Perhaps the most classic of cautionary tales about the pitfalls of falling in love with your best friend, in Wuthering Heights everything that could possibly go wrong between childhood best friends and love-interests Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff does. If you’ve only seen the MTV adaptation (ultimate guilty pleasure) then this novel about miscommunications, unrequited love, and violent revenge is definitely a must-read — especially if you’re looking for any excuse to fall out of love with your BFF. (E. Ce Miller)Writer Aliyyah Eniath is interviewed by Livemint and a fan of the novel too:
You’ve done your BA in English literature at the University of the West Indies. Did any of the authors you read there influence you? It’s been 7 or 8 years since that. But I was definitely influenced by some of the work that I studied. When I first read V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas, what it showed me is that you can be from a tiny island like Trinidad, and yet write a book with international appeal. That thought had never occurred to me before. And then, when we studied (Charles) Dickens, Great Expectations was the first book I read that made me envious of the writer. I was really, really envious. I wanted to have been the one who wrote that book (laughs). And then (Emily Bronte’s) Wuthering Heights was just my favourite. You can probably tell that there’s a little of Wuthering Heights in there too. (Vangmayi Parkala)Carlyle Observer mentions the song It's All Coming Back To Me Now in a column about religion.
Jim Steinman said he based the lyrics to “It’s All Coming Back To Me” on Wuthering Heights. He was attempting, he said, “to write the most passionate love song”. (Ken Rolheiser)MercatorNet asked readers to suggest their favourite 'crime reads for the beach' and one of them is
As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust, by Alan Bradley. A unique protagonist, silly to hear but delightful to experience – 12-year-old (post WWII) Flavia de Luce combines the innocent charm of Nancy Drew with the suffer-no-fools savvy of Jane Eyre. Flavia is “banished” to a boarding school in Toronto after her antics in the previous novel, and soon discovers a murder, symbolic and long hidden. The killer is someone she knows, but not everyone (indeed, no-one) is who they appear to be. (Harley Sims, Ottawa, Canada) (Carolyn Moynihan)Glamour gives 16 reasons why Labyrinth is 'the best film ever'.
Bowie made leggings look rudely sexy and that bulge. He was an amalgamation of Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights, a Brothers Grimm fairytale and Mr Rochester from Jane Eyre all at the same time. Hot. (Ella Alexander)HeyUGuys seems to have a broad understanding of what 'recently' means because apparently,
fan fiction has had a long and surprisingly illustrious history, with the Brontë sisters having recently been revealed to have dabbled in the medium themselves, populating their own fantastical worlds with characters from then-contemporary fiction and current affairs (Steven Neish)The Hairpin has a lovely article on a columnist's dad being introduced to classic novels such as Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.The Telegraph and Argus puts emphasis on the fact that 'Bradford district is tourist hotspot', partly due to its Brontë-related attractions. A Chronical of Creighton's Adventures writes shortly about a trip to Haworth. Jezebel's Pictorial has an article on Charlotte's-dress-which-wasn't-a-mistake-after-all. The Telegraph has an obituary on soprano Phyllis Curtin, who 'created the role of Catherine Earnshaw in Floyd’s Wuthering Heights with Santa Fe Opera'. Both Amy Reads Classics and Entre Letras (in Spanish) post about Wuthering Heights. Seeing Dance reviews Northern Ballet's Jane Eyre. Quite Irregular has read Wide Sargasso Sea. En lisant en voyageant writes in French about The Professor. Ranty Runt of a Reader posts about Agnes Grey. Art Eyewitness reviews the National Portrait Gallery's exhibition on Charlotte Brontë's bicentenary while on the other side of the pond, Victorian Musings looks forward to the similar exhibition which will open at The Morgan Library in New York in September.
Wuthering Heights is the inspiration for a novel that explores darkness and dislocation in a 20th-century family.Radio Times lists the films on (British) TV today:
Wuthering Heights has inspired countless sublime and ridiculous spin-offs, ranging from poetry by Ted Hughes to the Cliff Richard vehicle Heathcliff: The Musical. Caryl Phillips’s new novel takes its cue from Emily Brontë’s original, but only at a slant. For him, it functions as a symbolic conduit for ideas of alienation, orphanhood and family dislocation.
The Lost Child is bookended by two scenes that feature the seven-year-old Heathcliff. Left purposefully mysterious by Emily Brontë, his origins are here fleshed out by Phillips, who makes him the illegitimate son of Mr Earnshaw by an African former slave. In the early scene, the boy’s mother is dying of disease in Liverpool; the novel ends with her son being led over the moors by Mr Earnshaw to Wuthering Heights. A central section imagines Brontë on her deathbed, a woman alienated from quotidian reality. Charlotte described her sister being “torn panting out of a happy life”; but this is the Emily of myth, who “lives in two worlds” and yearns for “the bosom of eternity”. If the idea of a black Heathcliff appears to have been inspired by Andrea Arnold’s film of 2011 starring James Howson, Emily’s mystical death-dreams recall her portrayal in the 1946 biopic Devotion. (Read more)
Jane Eyre ★★★Herts & Essex Observer gives more details:
8.30-10.20pm BBC2
Charlotte Brontë's classic gets another screen makeover with Michael Fassbender and winsome Mia Wasikowska. Swoon... (Rose Thompson)
Is It Any Good? Charlotte Brontë's novel is brought to Gothic life by Cary Fukunaga, a second-choice director after Lynne Ramsay turned the film down.And The Carlow Nationalist adds:
Mia Wasikowska, fresh from her breakout turn in Alice in Wonderland, is excellent in the title role, with Michael Fassbender and Jamie Bell also performing well.
Anything Else? The location of Jane's cottage was so remote there was no mobile phone signal. The crew stationed someone at a nearby phone box and equipped him with a walkie-talkie just in case anyone needed anything.
Locals took pity on the man and brought him tea and biscuits throughout the day.
Star Rating: **** (2011)
Charlotte Brontë's novel is brought to Gothic life by Cary Fukunaga, a second-choice director after Lynne Ramsay turned the film down.The Sydney Morning Herald reviews Motherhood & Creativity: The Divided Heart by various authors:
Mia Wasikowska, fresh from her breakout turn in Alice in Wonderland, is excellent in the title role, with Michael Fassbender and Jamie Bell also performing well.
Novelist and columnist Nikki Gemmell observed that as a young woman she realised that none of her favourite female writers such as Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters had children. "I thought that was the path I would choose for myself." However once she had her babies Gemmell also realised that motherhood imposed its own discipline on the writer. "I wasn't faffing around making endless cups of tea." (Rachel Power)Also in the same newspaper an article about the Bausch brothers (Richard and Robert):
Discovering that a beloved author has a sibling writer prompts a similar thrill of pleasure. We race through the houses of Brontë or Mitford, gathering clues that will tell us more about the individual writers and also about the entire family. (Kevin Rabalais)An Emily Brontë poem will be recited in the Poetry in Voice national finals (Canada)
Jeremy Mallette's skills with prose have earned him a trip to Montreal on April 20 to compete in a national championship.More poetry at The Fort Morgan Times:
Mallete, a Grade 12 student at St. Joseph's Catholic Secondary School, is one of 12 students from across Canada who've qualified for the Poetry in Voice National Finals in the bilingual stream. (...)
The two poems that Mallette will be reciting are, "Shall earth no more inspire thee" by Emily Bronte and "L'Automne" by Alphonse de Lamartine. (Sarra Lalonde in Cornwall Standard-Freeholder)
Last Friday night's Open Mic Poetry Night with the River City Nomads was full of laughter and large doses of quiet profundity and raucously irreverent wisdom. Over 35 people filled Bloedorn as 13 poets and readers from Morgan Community College, both faculty and students, and the larger community shared fine, original work — some in free verse, some in formal rhyme — as well as the work of greats like Emily Brontë, Dr. Seuss, and Seamus Heaney. (Rachel Kellum)The Fort Wayne News-Sentinel interviews a local teacher:
I grew up reading 'Little Women' and 'The Secret Garden' and 'The Little Princess.' Then came 'Jane Eyre' and 'To Kill a Mockingbird' and anything by Laura Ingalls Wilder. (Betty E. Stein)Kwasi Kwarteng remember when he was on University Challenge some years ago in The London Evening Standard:
Then we got a starter for ten right, and then another. We answered the bonus questions quite well, and then pulled level. I think we won the round on the last question, when one of our team buzzed and just said, “Wuthering Heights”. I can’t even remember the exact details of the question but the answer is seared into my memory.Huddersfield heritage is celebrated in The Huddersfield Daily Examiner:
Dewsbury, Batley and the Spen Valley are not the most fashionable places today but they are steeped in the rich history of the Brontës, Luddites and Chartists, while the Spen Valley’s woollen industry heritage is evident in the towns of Cleckheaton, Heckmondwike and Gomersal. (Robert Sutcliffe)and here
[Joanne Harris] said: “Yorkshire is amazingly diverse, rich in heritage and culture.Marcus Berkman in The Australian is categorical here:
“My neighbours, among many, are the Brontës; Sylvia Plath; David Hockney; Ted Hughes; Alan Bennett; Bruce Chatwin; W.H. Auden; Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore. (Chloe Glover)
Every song, of course, sounds a little like another song, except possibly for Wuthering Heights.This comment on Le Temps (Switzerland) about economic bubbles is quite exaggerated when says that two of the Brontës (why not the other ones?) were impoverished by the railway shares madness of 1840s:
Ainsi, l’émerveillement de la bonne société victorienne devant le chemin de fer et sa mobilité décuplée n’est pas étranger à l’envolée extraordinaire que les titres de ce secteur connaissent dans les années 1840, sans doute la plus grande bulle financière n’ayant jamais existé et dont l’éclatement fin 1845 appauvrira deux des sœurs Brontë avant d’ébranler l’Europe deux ans plus tard. (Jean-Pierre Béguelin) (Translation)Los Tiempos (México) lists the 17 books to read before you turn... 17:
“Cumbres borrascosas”The Hampshire Chronicle is eager to see the Northern Ballet's performances of Wuthering Heights in Southampton next week. RTCG (Montenegro) announces a screening of Wuthering Heighs 1992 next April 22 in the context of the "Svjetska književnost na filmu" festival. Cai tlin Moran complains about the austerity measures in libraries in The Times Magazine. The Sleepless Reader lists a series of Brontë-related favourite books. The Brussels Brontë Blog reviews a new edition of Path to the Silent Country by Lynne Reid Banks (originally published in 1977).
¿Te encanta el drama amoroso? ¡”Cumbres Borrascosas” de Emily Brontë es para ti! En este libro encontrarás el drama más auténtico y telenovelesco de amor que jamás habías imaginado. (Translation)
Unless explicitly said
