The Brontë Street Map

On Yorkshire Day, we have still some Emily Brontë bicentenary celebrations:

A press release from Royal Mail with all the details of the Brontë-inspired addresses in the UK:

As the bicentenary of Emily Brontë’s birth approaches, new research from Royal Mail unveils that almost 8,000 UK addresses have been inspired in some way by the iconic author and her sisters, their lives and their collective works.
Two per cent (over 5,500) of the nation’s house names have a link to the family and their work in some way, ranging from ‘Wuthering Heights’ in the West Midlands to ‘Eyre Court’ in North London.
The austere Edgar Linton, brooding Heathcliff and pragmatic Jane Eyre are the most cited characters within Brontë-related addresses, with well over 3,000 delivery points looking to classic figures within the sisters’ novels as muses for the nation’s street and house names.
The BD postcode area - which contains the birthplace for the Brontë children - has the largest number of linked addresses. However, many smaller market towns, including St. Albans, Wallington and Borehamwood, contain a particularly large proportion of addresses related to the family, in relation to their size.
There are over 700 British streets and houses that directly use the family moniker, ranging from ‘Brontë House’ in Kent to ‘Brontë Walk’ in Bridlington, Yorkshire.
Over 700 British streets and houses directly use the Brontë family name, including ‘Brontë Gardens’ in Exeter and ‘Charlotte Brontë Drive’ in Droitwich.
The eternal love rivalry between Edgar Linton and Heathcliff prevails in the nation’s addresses, as the two are the most popular characters from the sisters’ novels to feature in British addresses.
Jane Eyre is a similarly popular figure, with over 200 ‘Eyre’ Roads, Mews and Streets spanning the country.
Some of the sisters’ less well-known works, including ‘Agnes Grey’ and ‘Villette’, have served as inspiration for house names. Ten ‘Villette’ houses span the nation, along with the ‘Agnes Grey House’ estate in Scarborough, Yorkshire.

Check out the complete list here.

The Telegraph & Argus makes a summary of the weekend events at the Parsonage, highlighting the screening of Lily Cole's Balls:

Lily Cole rendered her audience speechless during the Haworth premiere of her latest film.
The awestruck reaction to the screening was a highlight of a weekend of events devoted to Emily Bronte’s 200th birthday.
Social activist and model Cole created the eight-minute film in her role as the Brontë Society’s creative partner during Emily’s bicentennial year.
Filming in Liverpool, she focused on Wuthering Heights anti-hero Heathcliff, a foundling, to explore links between London’s Foundling Hospital and Emily’s novel.
Brontë Parsonage Museum head of communications Rebecca Yorke said the film prompted an excellent discussion afterwards involving both Cole and Foundling Museum director Caro Howell.
Rebecca said: “Balls is a very moving film, short and hard-hitting. While it was playing you couldn’t hear a pin drop.”
Rebecca described the weekend of events, which lasted from Friday to Monday, had been a success.
She added: “It’s been a really brilliant weekend with lots of visitors and new audiences from across the world and our own doorstep.
“There have been younger visitors too, and it’s been really exciting to work with so many different
artists.” (...)
The Brontë Parsonage Museum will celebrate its own 90th birthday on Saturday, August 4, when local people are invited to join staff for a celebration.
Organisers want to recreate a photograph taken when the museum first opened in August 4, 1928, when crowds packed the cobbled street outside the Parsonage.
The first 90 visitors through the door on Saturday from 10am will pay what they would have paid in 1928, just 6p. (David Knights)

The London Post and FAD Magazine also talk about Lily Cole's film.

The Yorkshire Post:

 This week I have been on a pilgrimage. It’s one I often make in honour of the greatest women to come from my home city of Bradford and indeed the whole of Yorkshire, the Brontë sisters. No? Well name me three others who have had more influence over generations of young women in their home county and beyond.
Rather than head to Haworth, as thousands do every year, I chose this week to tread less familiar cobbles on another Main Street just a few miles away, leading to a tiny terraced house in Thornton, where 200 years ago this week the most talented of them all, and certainly the most enigmatic, Emily Jane Brontë, was born.
It was once an unloved, uninviting warren of bedsits, its tarnished plaque proclaiming it to be the birthplace of all three famous sisters and their infamous brother virtually unnoticed for years. It is now a bustling coffee shop named after the woman whose bicentenary we celebrate this week and where this column was written in front of the same fireplace beside which Emily entered the world on July 30, 1818. For me walking in their footsteps is always a thrill. But hers in particular. (Christa Ackroyd)

The newspaper also celebrates Yorkshire Day and mentions the Brontës as one of the things to be proud of in Yorkshire.

Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph:

Emily Brontë remembered on her 200th birthday
It’s difficult to imagine the rugged beauty of the Yorkshire moors without thinking of Heathcliff and his beloved Cathy in Emily Brontë’s only novel, Wuthering Heights. (Lori Pierce)

The Telegraph (India):

 Emily's 200th birth anniversary observed
One of the greatest books in English literature - Wuthering Heights - was discussed on Monday at literary events in Britain and many other parts of the world to mark the 200th birth anniversary of its author, Emily Brontë.
This tale of dark passion set against the background of the windswept Yorkshire moors has been adapted into film on many occasions but never more memorably than in the 1939 version, with Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff and Merle Oberon as his Cathy.
One admirer, Swati Sharma, quoted a remark made by Cathy in the novel: "He shall never know I love him: and that, not because he's handsome, but because he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made out of, his and mine are the same." (Amit Roy)

 ABC (Spain) joins together two quite different authors, Emily and Jane Austen:

Tal día como ayer, el 30 de julio de 1818, vino al mundo Emily Brontë, la autora de Cumbres borrascosas, una prodigiosa novela que narra el amor imposible entre el salvaje Heathcliff y la bella Katherine (sic). El libro ha inspirado trece versiones cinematográficas, entre las que destacan las de William Wyler y Luis Buñuel.

Also Clarín (Argentina), Blogger by the Sea, Echoes from the Vault...

Echo (Germany) mentions a recent event in Wiesbaden (Germany):

Mit Grüßen nach Haworth – Caliban Literaturwerkstatt erinnert an Emily Jane Brontë zu deren 200. Geburtstag
Drei Schwestern, Pfarrerstöchter, im frühen 19. Jahrhundert aufgewachsen in einer abgelegenen Moorlandschaft bei Yorkshire, werden zu erfolgreichen, 200 Jahre später noch viel gelesenen, dutzendfach verfilmten Autorinnen, sterben jung, zwei von ihnen unverheiratet mit tragischen Liebesbeziehungen, die dritte schwanger, kurz nach der Hochzeit. Die Biografien der Schwestern Brontë meint man eher als viktorianischen Roman selbst, denn als Teil der
Dass sie jedoch genau so der Realität nacherzählt sind, zeigte Rita Rosen in einem informativen wie anregenden Abend anlässlich des 200. Geburtstags von Emily Jane Brontë. Gemeinsam mit den „Literaturfreunden im Dichterviertel“, Heidrun Hirsch, Hiltrud Hauschke und Reinhard Wedekind, versetzt sie das Publikum aus der Caliban Literaturwerkstatt nach Haworth am 30. Juli 1848: Es ist Emily Janes 30. Geburtstag. Zu Wort kommen die Jubilarin und ihre Schwestern Anne und Charlotte, sowie deren späterer Ehemann Arthur Bell Nicholls. Was wie Tagebuchaufzeichnungen, von kurzen Dialogen unterbrochen, klingt, erweist sich als geschickt montierte Fiktion. Da wird erzählt vom Leben und Schreiben, vom familiären Zusammenhalt, von gemeinschaftlich verfassten Fantasiegeschichten und ihrem ersten Gedichtband, veröffentlicht unter „Currer, Ellis und Acton Bells“. Selbst Jahre später will der Londoner Verleger Smith kaum glauben, dass Frauen, und gleich mehrere, so schreiben und rät vorsorglich zum Beibehalten der männlichen Pseudonyme. War den Gedichten noch wenig Popularität beschieden, erreichten sie bereits zu Lebzeiten mit ihren Romanen beachtliche Erfolge.(Bärbel Schwitzgebel) (Translation)

El Universal (México):

De Emily Brontë a J.K Rowling
En 1970 tenía 12 años cuando vi con mi madre la película Cumbres borrascosas, basada en la novela de Emily Brontë. Me impresionó Timothy Dalton, que interpretaba a Heatcliff, un espíritu extremo; y con Anna Calder Marshall, Catherine en la cinta, descubrí la locura, el gozo y el sufrimiento de la pasión amorosa. Luego leí el libro, que me dio mi padre, con fascinación. Y hoy, que se conmemora el bicentenario de la escritora inglesa, me uno al aplauso. (Adriana Malvido) (Translation)

A French radio programme. France Culture's La Grande Table d'Été:

Emily Brontë a 200 ans
Table ronde autour d'Emily Brontë à l'occasion du bi-centenaire de sa naissance, auteure à qui on doit un unique roman, "Les hauts de Hurlevent", un des livres les plus connus de la littérature anglo-saxonne.
Avec Christine Jordis, écrivaine, journaliste, critique littéraire, éditrice française, spécialiste de la littérature anglaise  et Catherine Lanone, professeure à l’Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3, spécialiste de littérature britannique du XIXème siècle
Emily Brontë est née le 30 juillet 1818 et décédée le 19 décembre 1848.  De sa très courte existence, elle laisse derrière elle un roman adulé, Les hauts de Hurlevent, qu’elle fait publier en 1847 soit la même année que Jane Eyre écrit par sa sœur Charlotte, qui l’éclipsa quelque temps.
Les hauts de Hurlevent, roman tragique et passionné, a inspiré de nombreuses adaptations au cinéma, télé, musique….  Mais de son auteure, on sait peu. On peut également lire ses poèmes et quelques lettres, mais le mystère demeure…

Livres Hebdo (France) is more concerned with the Brontë Stones project

Quatre poèmes gravés dans la pierre en l’honneur des auteures des Hauts de Hurlevent et de Jane Eyre ont été inaugurés en juillet à l’occasion du Bradford literature festival, qui s’est déroulé du 30 juin au 9 juillet en Angleterre.
En juillet, le Bradford literature festival a inauguré quatre poèmes gravés sur pierre en hommage aux sœurs Brontë. A cette occasion, et pour commémorer le bicentenaire de la naissance d’Emily Brontë, auteure des Hauts de Hurlevent, le festival a commandé l’un des poèmes à la chanteuse britannique Kate Bush qui s’était fait connaître grâce au succès populaire de sa chanson Wuthering Heights, inspirée par le roman. Quarante ans plus tard, elle réalise un nouvel hommage à l’écrivaine dont elle partage la même date d’anniversaire du 30 juillet. (Translation)

The Independent, and many other newspapers tell us that a poll has been made to choose the greatest Yorkshire men and women:

Funnyman Michael Palin has been named the greatest ever Yorkshireman, according to a poll.
A poll of 2,000 Brits saw nearly three in 10 select the Monty Python legend as the best export from the northern region. (...)
The poll was conducted by the energy supplier npower to celebrate Yorkshire Day on 1 August.
Commercial director at npower and proud Yorkshireman Andy Wiggans said: “Yorkshire Day is a reason to celebrate everything brilliant about the UK’s biggest county, and there is no shortage of legendary Yorkshire folk to pick from with a list like this.

The Brontë sisters came fourth on the Yorkshirewomen list.

Writers choose favourite romantic literary characters in Clarín (Argentina):

Florencia Bonelli se inclinó por la obra de Jane Austen, sobre todo Persuasión y Orgullo y Prejuicio, aunque dice que el libro que le cambió la vida fue El árabe, de Edith Hull. Pero no eligió a Mr. Darcy como su favorito, sino a Edward Rochester de Jane Eyre, la novela de Charlotte Brontë. (...)
Gabriela Margall también apuesta  por las novelas del siglo XIX: Persuasión, de Austen, y Jane Eyre, de Brontë. Pero también le hace lugar a la nueva expresión del género: Irresistible, de Lisa Kleypas. Como personaje, sin dudarlo apuesta por el señor Darcy, de Orgullo y Prejuicio. (Susana Reinoso) (Translation)

Paste Magazine lists YA novels in need of a TV adaptation:

Bruiser by Neal Shusterman
As for why Jeff Davis would be the best guy in Hollywood to take on Brewster, Tennyson, Brontë, and Cody’s utterly wolf-free story in Bruiser, well, anyone who watched Teen Wolf closely knows just how central masculine tenderness was to the whole show, and just how skilled Davis is at portraying tough dudes whose high emotional acuity only makes their strength the greater. It’s hard to imagine anyone better than Davis to make Brewster’s story matter. (Alexis Gunderson)

BBC Culture lists books to read this August:

Nell Stevens, The Victorian and the RomanticNell Stevens begins her PhD studies at Kings College London in 2013. Her thesis, on the Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, probes questions of women’s choices and social limitations. In 1857 Gaskell left her minister husband in Manchester upon publication of her controversial biography of Charlotte Brontë and took off for Rome with her two daughters. During her months-long sojourn in an artistic circle there, which she called “the tip-top point” of her life, she became enamoured of Charles Eliot Norton, a US critic 17 years her younger. While researching and writing about Gaskell, Stevens juggles an on-again, off-again love affair with Max, a former Boston University classmate now living in Paris. As she explores Gaskell’s life and questions her own future, Stevens creates a delectable literary conversation. (Jane Ciabattari)

The Times in praise of the anticlimax:

That the film was none the worse for its low-key ending, and arguably made more famous by it, suggests that other films and books might have been improved by less melodrama and more ambiguity. As Sherlock Holmes never said at the end of any of his adventures, “You can’t solve them all, Watson.” So think what we might have been spared, for example, if the Death Star had merely been put out of commission for a fortnight. Or contemplate the possible sequel had Jane Eyre concluded, “Reader, we had a cosy supper and then I went back to my hotel.”

Bonnie Greer talks about William Wyler in The New European:

Known as ‘40 Takes Wyler’, he was, quite simply, a perfectionist. Laurence Olivier, who in the 1930s did not see the value of film at all, was outraged when Wyler told him to do the same thing more than 20 times. Olivier, one of the titans of the stage, asked “why?” Wyler calmly replied: “Because what he was doing was wrong.”
Wyler was right and the film, Wuthering Heights, helped make Olivier a movie star. I can still remember the first time I saw it and him as I sat with my late mother, a vintage movie fanatic, watching it on afternoon television all those decades ago.

Suffolk Libraries interviews the author Jo Jakeman:

Brandon King: Where did your inspiration for Sticks and Stones come from? I took a creative writing course with Curtis Brown Creative. I was re-reading Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre at the time and was talking to my course tutor about the type of men women fall for in classic novels, and that’s when the characters started to come to life.
It’s no accident that the antagonist in Sticks and Stones is called Rochester – the name of the man who Jane fell in love with and who locked his ‘mad’ wife in the attic. I turned that classic on its head so the wife, Imogen, locks her husband in the cellar. From there I wondered what Phillip Rochester would have to do to make a woman like Imogen do something so against her nature, and the picture of Phillip as an abusive man took shape.

The daily reading of Wuthering Heights in El Punt Avui (in Catalan); Mummy is Reading posts about Alexa Donne's Brightly Burning;

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The Staircase (Pulp Version)

The Queen Anne staircase was sold off from Blake Hall in Mirfield, West Yorkshire (left)

 and in Long Island (right) 

©rossparry.co.uk

The news of Blake Hall staircase that was located in Long Island by Imelda Marsden have become national. You can imagine what part of the story is the one that the Daily Mail loved it. The ghost, of course:

Fellow Brontë enhusiast Hilary Wainwright said: 'The staircase represents a slightly more unusual connection between Mirfield and Anne Brontë.

'Some will know she worked as a governess at Blake Hall for nine months in 1839 and she depicts her experiences there in the first half of Agnes Grey, renaming the hall 'Wellwood' and the Ingham family the 'Bloomfields.'
'That house was demolished in 1954 and, although the interior parts were dismantled and auctioned off, their fates were lost in the mists of time.
'With one exception. Due to a short article in the Mirfield Reporter back in the 1960s, the wonderful Queen Anne staircase, hand-carved in burled yew, went to a London dealer.
'He then sold it to Allen and Gladys Topping, an American couple he met at Kensington Antiques Fair in 1958 and they installed it in their house on Long Island, New York.
'The story goes that Mrs Topping saw a ghost on the stairs in 1962. Was it Anne? Who knows?
'Having checked this much out, our 'Miss Marples of Mirfield' made inquiries abroad but things did not look promising.
People seemed to think that the house had been lost in one of the many hurricanes that occur so commonly there.
'The breakthrough came when a keen local librarian suggested contacting the Quogue Long Island Historical Society and they tracked down the exact location of the house and contacted the current owner. (Annabel Grossman)

The Huddersfield Daily Examiner gives more details of this fascinating (ehem) ghost story:

The figure, her hair in a bun, was dressed in a long, full skirt with a tri-cornered shawl. Her demeanour was described as “pensive.”
Mrs Topping’s dog Mr Wyk became agitated and backed away and when she spoke gently to calm the animal the figure disappeared.
Mrs Topping, whose husband founded hardware firm Topping Bros in Manhattan, seemed convinced Anne’s ghost had been exported 3,000 miles with the staircase.
In 1966 she told a newspaper, the Toledo in Ohio, that at the moment the figure vanished she mentally asked who it was and was told “Anne Bronte.”
Mrs Topping, who had visited the moors around Haworth to walk in Bronte footsteps, added: “Since then I have not seen her again. But I often feel her presence.
“I hear footsteps and, occasionally, rappings and other noises. Mr Wyk hears them too and his ears go up and he trots to the stairs.
“But Anne – if, indeed, it is Anne – apparently does not wish to reveal herself anymore. She seems content just going up and down the stairs.” (Martin Shaw)

Pocket Books 7, 1939.
Cover by  Isador N. Steinberg

The New Yorker has a fascinating (now for real) article about paperbacks, pulp covers, pocket books and the evolution of mass market books in the US:

For it was one thing to reprint literary classics, like “Wuthering Heights” (a big seller for Pocket Books) or the tragedies of William Shakespeare (which de Graff regarded as a loss leader). Selling classics and critically acclaimed best-sellers for a quarter was a way of democratizing culture, which has been an impulse in American life since the days of the Library of Useful Knowledge and before. (...)
[Paula] Rabinowitz’s quite valid point is that when we look back on the mass-market-paperback phenomenon it’s hard to keep the Emily Brontës separate from the Mickey Spillanes. In the same year that Signet published “I, the Jury,” it also published reprints of books by James Joyce, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, and Arthur Koestler. Paperback publishers made no effort to distinguish classics from kitsch. On the contrary, they commissioned covers for books like “Brave New World” and “The Catcher in the Rye” from the same artists who did the covers for books like “Strangler’s Serenade” and “The Case of the Careless Kitten.” (Louis Menand)

The Telegraph & Argus reviews the new edition of Chris Firth's  Branwell Brontë's Barber Tale (Electraglade Press):

Irrespective of whether you accept anecdotal evidence supporting Chris Firth's belief that Branwell invented the character of Heathcliff, not his sister Emily, any decently-written mystery thriller involving that strange family in the parsonage on the hill is likely to prove compulsive reading - especially on a cold winter's day at the darkest end of the year.
In Firth's novel Branwell Brontë's Barber Tale, George MacCraw makes the claim which, in real life, was made by schoolmaster William Oakenshaw in two Halifax newspapers. Chris Firth subsequently supplied material to two linquistic experts to compare Branwell Brontë's style of writing and the style of two editions of Wuthering Heights - the original 1847 version and the amended version that was edited by Charlotte Brontë.
The familiar story of Branwell the waster addicted to opiates and drink, the shame of the upwardly aspiring Brontë family, is reversed in Firth's novel. Branwell is the victim, not the culprit. (...)
The revenge he plots is elaborate, slightly far-fetched, but fully in keeping with the Burke and Hare gothic horror element threading the last 60 pages of this largely enjoyable tale.
I was hoping for stories about encounters with the rest of the Brontë family, but the pastor and his daughters remain in the background. Instead MacCraw's wife Caroline, a less interesting character, provides the romance - until her death in suspicious circumstances in Bradford. (Jim Greenhalf)

The Stir lists 'lovely' literary baby names:

Jane: Like Charlotte Brontë's beloved heroine, Jane Eyre, this name has a lovely, understated moxie.  (Stephanie Booth)

Vox is quite mistaken about the 'class privileges' of the Brontës:

Dickens easily empathized with such children living in poverty, coming, as he did, from a poor childhood himself — a fact which set him apart from many other English authors, like Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters, who enjoyed the social and class privilege of their births. (Brandon Ambrosino)

Autostraddle posts a top ten of queer and feminist books of the year:

10. Texts From Jane Eyre is a compilation, including new material, of Mallory Ortberg’s popular texts from series. The point is less that popular canonical literary characters have phones, and more that depicting them through vapid, hilarious text message means they are dismantled, with a dash of misandry. (Carolyn)

Meta Wagner makes a confession in The Boston Globe:

While I can resist seeing “The Interview,” I wish I were immune to the addictive charms of video, in general. I’d like to claim that I spent this past year reading the literary classics that have eluded me, like “Jane Eyre” and “Wuthering Heights.” But, instead of reading, I spent the year binge-watching “Orange is the New Black,” “House of Cards,” “Alpha House,” “Breaking Bad,” “Scandal,” “Nashville,” “Girls,” and, so far, seasons one through five of “Grey’s Anatomy.” And so did you.

Not the only confession today. Julie Stroebel in The Ottawa Times makes a list of things to do in 2015:

Read more classics. (I've never read "Jane Eyre" or "Little Women.")

Texas Homepage lists the recipients of the 2nd Andrew Raymond Duncan Memorial Scholarships:

Lydia White is a 19-year old sophomore at Southwestern University studying Languages and Dance. She has always enjoyed being a student, and before graduating from Rider High School in Wichita Falls, participated in the Rider Marching Band, Applause, productions at Backdoor and Wichita Theaters, and ballet at Dance, Etc. Lydia identifies with how Charlotte Brontë once described Jane Eyre: "[Her] past life seemed floated away to an immeasurable distance, the present was vague and strange, and of the future [she] could form no conjecture." Nevertheless, she watches for the continued blessings of Jesus Christ in her life as well as the potential adventures that may come to pass near and far. (Summer Rascoll)

Cobertes incorrectes (in Catalan) mentions  the infamous cover of the Penguin 1989 edition of The Professor with the 1853 Wilkie Collins portrait by his brother Charles Allston, in the cover. 

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Nellie's babies

The Herald has an article on Susannah York, who plays Nelly Dean in April De Angelis's adaptation of Wuthering Heights, currently on stage in Edinburgh until Saturday.

In Wuthering Heights, York plays storyteller again in her role as Nellie, the maid who narrates Emily Bronte's windswept classic in April de Angelis's new stage version. "I modelled her on a lovely Scots woman I've known since childhood," York says of her character. "She has this wonderful sense of humour that's quite ironical, and I decided I'd make up stories about her that weren't in the book but which give her some kind of background. There's a line where she says, There are worse than Mr Heathcliff,' so I made up this story that she'd had an unhappy marriage and escaped to work in the house. At the end she says, This is my life.' Cathy and Heathcliff are her surrogate children, and she sort of scolds them, but watches over them as well, and in some way tries to teach them some sense of right and wrong. I suppose Nellie is the conscience of the story; Cathy and Heathcliff are her babies." (Neil Cooper)

South from Edinburgh is Brontë Country, which is the subject of a long article in The New Zealand Herald, with pictures. However, the article is either old or wrong, as it states, for instance, that the Thornton birthplace is still owned by Barbara Whitehead and open to the public, which it no longer is.

It's a tale which doesn't really start here in Haworth, but about 10km away in the village of Thornton.
I didn't go there myself - too much Nettle Thrasher - but Rev Bronte was curate in Thornton from 1815 to 1820 and it was there that Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne were all born.
The old parsonage where they lived is still open to visitors; these days it is owned by novelist Barbara Whitehead and fellow-writer Bernard Mayston, who proclaim on their website that they are "gradually restoring the interior to the Regency period when it was the home of genius". (Jim Eagles)

But the article is not all wrong, of course, and suggests sites of interest around Brontë Country:

Visiting Haworth - even though the shops are full of Bronte ticky-tack - you almost feel as though you're walking in the pages of one of their novels.
On our first visit we drove across the tops in a howling blizzard, along the way passing the lonely ruins of a huge old house, and I could have sworn I saw a wraith-like figure swirling outside and heard a plaintive voice crying, "Heathcliff, Heathcliff".
Apart from the tower, little remains of the Church of St Michael and All Angels which Rev Bronte preached in - it was extensively rebuilt in 1881 - but the stolid, sombre atmosphere, with two old ladies in dark coats and warm hats silently polishing the brasswork, is very much as I imagine it would have been in their day.
Most of the family were buried in a sealed vault under the church, but in 1964 the locals built a Bronte Chapel on top, and a plaque marks the spot where their black oak pew once stood.
Surrounding the church is the graveyard where centuries of stone memorials - including those of the Brontes' servants Tabitha Aykroyd and Martha Brown - are jammed together, shaded by dark pine trees and green with age. Beyond, across a protective ring of stone walls, are the unchanging moors and a pathway leading to the great grey pile of the parsonage.
Since 1928 this has been owned by the Bronte Society, which has done a magnificent job of preserving the building and furnishing it with the chairs and tables, clocks and beds, diaries and letters, clothes and nick-nacks they used.
As a result you can wander through the kitchen, Rev Bronte's study, Charlotte's bedroom, Branwell's studio and, best of all, the dining room where the young women did most of their writing, looking much as it would have when they were producing their masterpieces.
Upstairs, in a gable added to the parsonage by Rev Bronte's successor, there's a permanent exhibition on the story of this remarkable family.
You could easily spend a day absorbing the fascinating memories of Charlotte, Emily and Anne and their work ... but out in the surrounding countryside there are more sites associated with them still to be seen.
Alongside the path between the church and the parsonage, for instance, you'll spot a brightly painted building which now houses a childcare centre but was once a school where Charlotte taught.
A helpful map of Haworth and Bronte Country, put out by the English Tourist Board, identifies sites like:
* The village of Cowan Bridge, near Kirkby Lonsdale, where what is now a private residence once housed the Clergy Daughters' School which the girls attended.
Conditions were harsh - Maria and Elizabeth both died of tuberculosis shortly after returning home - and the school was portrayed as Lowood in Jane Eyre.
* Roe Head School, near Kirklees, where Charlotte, Emily and Anne studied and Charlotte later taught.
* Blake Hall, near Dewsbury, and Thorp Green, a hamlet close to York, where Anne was a governess.
* St Mary's Churchyard in Scarborough where Anne is buried (the only member of the family not to lie in Haworth).
* Top Withens, a ruined farmhouse at the end of a 10km round-trip walk from Haworth, said to have been the model for Wuthering Heights.
* The ruins of Wycoller Hall, near Colne, The Rydings, in Birstall, and Stonegappe, at Lothersdale, which respectively became Ferndean Manor, Thornfield Hall and Gateshead Hall in Jane Eyre. (Jim Eagles)

Incidentally, the local newspaper of that area, The Telegraph and Argus, reports the rise in TB figures we have seen lately. It seems as if no self-respecting journalist can write about TB without mentioning some of its most famous victims:

All three of the Bronte sisters died young from the illness.

Well, actually it's not quite so sure that Charlotte died from TB. The more widespread theory is that hyperemesis gravidarum killed her.

The Irish Times has an article on Tallaght Library. One of its members, a 13-year-old girl, is really sweet:

Caitríona Ní Cheallaigh (13) is currently reading Shirley, by Charlotte Brontë. She prefers Emily Brontë to Charlotte, though she's "not sure why". Caitríona reads "any chance I get - I read when I go to bed at about 9pm for an hour, and I usually read while Im eating".
As well as the Brontë sisters, she really likes Eva Ibbotson, Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens. (Catherine Foley)

Now for one of the weirdest things ever: a Japanese man who wants the Japanese Governemt to legalise marriage between humans and - erm - cartoon characters. And where's the Brontë connection of that? Well, it opens a can of worms when it comes to Heathcliff and Rochester, according to the Examiner.

Book character lust is nothing new. [...]
I've long hypothesized that what a woman REALLY wants from a man is their unwavering and unswerving devotion. Just take a look at the literary men that lady readers throughout time have swooned over--Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights? Mr. Rochester from Jane Eyre? Again, Mr. Darcy and Edward Cullen? What do these men have in common? They love only one woman and will do anything to get her love in return. If that doesn't light a woman's fire, I don't know what will. (Michelle Kerns)

Filmmaker Margarita Jimeno shows her true colours as a Brontëite in an interview on Spout Blog.

How, if at all, has reading informed your filmmaking?
It has very much, especially when writing characters. I think here’s where I’m influenced the most. Because you are usually reading into the character’s mind, it has been very helpful when I’m directing actors too. I think human understanding would take at least 3 lifetimes, but thanks to literature you can spend a couple of years and you have a very broad understanding. Of course I’m talking about classic literature, like Bronte, Dostoevsky, Austen, Conrad, Orwell, Steinbeck, Voltaire, etc etc etc. (Brandon Harris)

Categories: Brontëites, Haworth, Jane Eyre, Shirley, Theatre, Wuthering Heights

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A governess would spell Haworth right

Let's begin with a couple of reviews of Other People's Daughters by Ruth Brandon. The first one by The Independent:

Not even Charlotte Brontë's most famous heroine had a story to match the tangled lives of these real-life governesses. (...)
Charlotte Brontë, creator of one of fiction's most famous governesses, Jane Eyre, was herself one, and pressed the experience into fierce creative service. But, as Ruth Brandon compellingly describes in Other People's Daughters, the plain facts were as dramatic and often more traumatic. (Salley Vickers)

And The Telegraph:

Nineteenth-century novels that contain one of these troubled creatures form a genre of their own (think of The Turn of the Screw, Jane Eyre, Agnes Grey, The Eustace Diamonds).
Mrs Pryor, the governess in Charlotte Brontë's Shirley, realised that men saw her as 'a tabooed woman' to whom 'they were interdicted from granting the usual privileges of the sex', and it is this taboo which fascinates Brandon. A tabooed subject, she argues, is 'mysteriously and threateningly desirable. So the governess... today ranks alongside the nun as a sexual fetish: the most powerless of women transmogrified, by an ironic twist of fate, into the dominatrix'. (Frances Wilson)

By the way, The Independent on Sunday apologizes for its Howarth-instead-of-Haworth spelling mistake last week in this article:

We had a headline that managed to misspell the name of one of Yorkshire's most famous towns – revered as the place where the Brontë sisters were brought up and one of the North's greatest literary shrines ("Brontë moor and Inca Mountain. More similar than you think, says Howarth's [sic] twinning group").
"Don't you know or don't you care?" fumes John Metcalfe from Baildon. "It's Haworth, not Howarth. Typical southern ignorance. You probably come from the same school that misspells Middlesbrough 'Middlesborough' and pronounces Newcastle 'Newc-arse-sell". "What's so exciting," snarls Stuart Binns from Northallerton, "about Haworth being twinned with some trendy travel destination like Machu Picchu? I'd rather spend my hols in the Pennines any day."
Sensible choice, Mr Binns. But this was merely a slip – unforgivable, admittedly – for which we apologise. No slight intended. And as for "southern softies", it's worth pointing out that the editor-in-chief of 'The Independent' is Manchester born and bred, and that the editor of this newspaper is a proud Scot. (Michael Williams)

Another book review that mentions the Brontës is from the Baltimore Sun: The Third Angel by Alice Hoffman (an inveterate Brontëite).

There is always someone dead or dying in a Hoffman novel; the metaphor of the mortality and immortality of love is one of her most compelling literary conceits. The ghosts in Hoffman's novels are palpably real, as is the one in The Third Angel. These ghosts evoke and invoke the transitory nature of love; they are breathlessly alive with their eternal, pulsing emotion driving them on, haunting their beloved as well as the reader, just as Heathcliff did Cathy - and generations of readers - on the English moor. (...)
Some critics have minimized the complexity of Hoffman's work by referring to her, with a barely disguised sneer, as a romance writer. Well, Hoffman is a romance writer, but then so were Flaubert, Proust, the Bronte sisters and Jane Austen. (Victoria A. Brownworth)

The Indianapolis Business Journal traces a profile of Jill Long Thompson, who runs for the
Democrat candidacy in the 2008 Indiana gubernatorial election.

As a child, Thompson read the Bronte sisters and dreamed of becoming a professional baton twirler. (Peter Schnitzler)

GulfNews discusses why we are more fascinated by evil, by negativity than by positivity:

Look at literature, the most unforgettable characters are those that personified evil - Macbeth, Heathcliff, Ebenezer Scrooge. Perhaps we remember them because in the end they were redeemed. (Suchitra Bajpai Chaudhary)

Heathcliff's redemption? Maybe in some twisted way... but Macbeth's?

Renata Cordeiro posts a Portuguese translation of the Reminiscences of Charlotte Brontë by Ellen Nussey. What an Awesome Title talks briefly about Wuthering Heights 1939 and La Terrasse writes a review of The Professor:

S. read this recently and was surprised to find how much she disliked it. The problem was the narrator, William Crimsworth, whom she found self-absorbed and xenophobic (not good qualities in a teacher abroad). (Chris)

While William Crimsworth is not our favourite Brontë character for many reasons it should be born in mind that his attitudes, his views of the world are defined by the context in which he was born. Judging a character from a modern-day viewpoint is not wrong per se but judging him solely on that basis might leave us with a confused understanding of him. While William Crimsworth may not have been the most amiable of characters back in the 19th century he had also his good, unconventional points as is the fact that he consents to his wife continuing to work after marriage, for instance.

Finally, Justine Picardie, author of Daphne, has posted on her blog about last Friday's event at the Brontë Parsonage Museum. She promises more... soon, we hope:

(...) What made it even more emotional (for me, at least) was that the Parsonage had brought out the original manuscripts of Branwell Bronte's poems that Daphne had purchased from Symington, and later donated to the Parsonage (or perhaps returned them to their rightful home, given the shady circumstances under which Symington had acquired them). Added to which, one of Symington's nephews was in the audience last night, and afterwards, he told me a story that I had never heard before, about Alex Symington's murky involvement with a forged Bronte letter... So the story I told in "Daphne" had a sequel last night...

Categories: Books, Haworth, In the News, References, Talks, The Professor, Translations

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It's grim up there... but the truth is out there

The Herald talks about a new ITV show, Melvyn Bragg's Travels in Written Britain, which will be premiered next April 6:

The saying might be that "it's grim up north" - but it's not for novelists as the north of England has been named the best possible literary backdrop available in British literature.
The region - loosely defined as the land either side of the high Pennines, extending north to the Scottish Borders - was the winner in a survey carried out for a new ITV show, Melvyn Bragg's Travels in Written Britain.(...)
Voters cited the perennially successful Catherine Cookson novels, Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte and Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte as some of the most memorable books set in the north of England. Both the Bronte sisters lived in Haworth, in Yorkshire, and were schooled in Lancashire.(...)
Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice was also voted the favourite book set in Britain, followed by four more classics: Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Rebecca and Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. (...)
The survey of around 2500 people was carried out to mark Bragg's television show, the first part of which is broadcast on April 6. During the one-hour programmes, Bragg also takes a look at the contrasting works of Scots authors Sir Walter Scott and Irvine Welsh. (Phil Miller - Reproduced with the permission of The Herald, Glasgow © 2008 Herald & Times Group)

Today we have a wide stock of Brontë references: Margaret Atwood writes in The Guardian about Lucy Maud Montgomery's Anne of the Green Gables saga and Jane Eyre makes an appearance:

Judging from what we know about the lives of orphans at that time, including the many "London street Arabs", as Marilla calls them, that were being sent to Canada by the Barnardo homes, a statistically accurate Anne would have continued to be poor and neglected. However, through luck and her own merits, Anne is rescued by the Cuthbert siblings, thus joining a long line of redeemed fictional Victorian orphans, from Jane Eyre to Oliver Twist to little Tom the chimney sweep in Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies.

The Scotsman reviews Other People's Daughters: The Life and Times of the Governess by Ruth Brandon:

THE MOST FAMOUS GOVERNESS IN literature is undoubtedly Jane Eyre, but as Ruth Brandon points out in this slightly misfiring study, her fate as the eventual wife of her employer was hardly the traditional lot of the Victorian governess. For most, it was a lonely job with long hours, little pay and scant appreciation of their efforts.
Brandon's approach is to look in detail at the lives of six governesses: Agnes Porter, Mary Wollstonecraft, Claire Clairmont, Nelly Weeton, Anna Leonowens and Anna Jameson. Of these six, perhaps Wollstonecraft is the most well-known, although Leonowens was the model for Deborah Kerr's governess in the film version of Leonowens's life, The King and I, and Clairmont was the step-sister of Mary Shelley, who also bore Byron a daughter.
In that sense, then, Wollstonecraft, Clairmont and Leonowens are as atypical of the governess experience as Jane Eyre was. (Read more) (Lesley McDowell)

The Times once again mentions the Heathcliff/Rochester inside Gordon Brown:

It's as bad as trying to find a Gordon Brown. Despite castings in the UK and global searches she can't find anyone to play him, “which is annoying as you don't know how long he'll be PM. The problem is he has very old-fashioned looks, Heathcliff or Rochester, tight breeches, muddy lanes, high collars, lambchop face. I've just found an odd-job man in Bulgaria who might fit the bill actually.” (Tim Teeman)

The New York Times Travel Spring 2008 Guide devotes an article to Taipei and discovers yet another set of the-Brontës-of (insert pertinent city/country):

Chu T'ien-hsin and her sister [Chu T'ien-Wen] are a bit like the Brontës of Taiwan. They're big time novelists and short-story writers. (Taipei's dailies publish literary supplements, so high brow short stories reach an unusually large audience.) I wanted to talk to Chu about her novella "The Old Capital", which came out in English last year. (Douglas MacGray)

TV Blink makes a very unlikely comparison: X-Files's Fox Mulder and Heathcliff:

During the clip reel of the nine-season show, “X-Philes” cheered for sci-fi Heathcliff Fox Mulder and savvy strawberry Sno-Cone Dana Scully. (Chad Rooney and Julieanne Smolinski)

The Eloy Enterprise's editor uses a Jane Eyre quote for the title of the article:

"Your self-love dreads a blunder," a certain Mr. Rochester told a literary heroine, Jane Eyre, once upon a time. (Lindsey Gemme)

Now for the blogosphere: neon epiphany posts about different Jane Eyre adaptations. Her favourite is Jane Eyre 1973. GirlDetective has seen Alan Stanford's adaptation of Jane Eyre at the Guthrie Theatre and is not at all thrilled:

I understand that details of the story must be cut or compacted to get the audience home before midnight. I missed many of my favorite scenes, such as Jane in the red room. I was disappointed in the staging decisions of others. (...) Perhaps this was enjoyable to those who hadn’t read the book at all, or for a long time. Perhaps it will inspire people to seek out the book. (...) I am too familiar and have too much affection for the source material to appreciate adaptations for themselves. And yet, I know I’ll continue to see them, if only for the brief moments that they bring to life wonderful parts of the books, like the humor in Jane Eyre that is so often overlooked in its reductive description as a dark, gothic tale.

A very different reaction to the same play can be read on wonderment:

But I will say that Jane Eyre at the Guthrie was wonderful. It was yet another take on a fantastic story. I’ve watched the BBC miniseries (my favorite), read the original book (not so excellent, but must be appreciated for the beauty that the story is, even if I didn’t care for the writing), and now seen the stage version. All were special in their own way. I thought the miniseries was more true to the book than the stage version, but the modifications for the stage made sense for that

Categories: Books, Haworth, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, References, Theatre

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Show your stockings

The Spectator reviews a recently-published book on governesses: Other People's Daughters. The Life And Times Of The Governess by Ruth Brandon. The book cover is, in our opinion, beautiful and the inside references to Jane Eyre are evident.

Actually, as Ruth Brandon’s study declares, it was very rare indeed for a governess to marry her employer. Becky Sharp and Jane Eyre tell us much more about the 19th century’s fantasies and fears than about its realities. (Philip Hensher)

What we have been unable to find is the table of contents, so we don't know whether the more realistic versions of governesses' marriages in Agnes Grey and Shirley (whose governesses actually share the same maiden name) are featured in the book or not.

A few days ago we posted about the exhibition Brilliant Women: 18th-Century Bluestockings exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London. The New Statesman has an article on it as well.

The title of Polwhele's bilious production - "The Unsex'd Females" - helped to create a climate in which generations of women lived in fear of the label "bluestocking", which became an insult. In the 19th century, the Brontë sisters and Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot) felt it necessary to hide their genius under male pseudonyms; in the 20th century the word conjured up images of desiccated female dons. The original "blues" were much more various than this stereotype suggests, and their dilemmas about intellect, fashion and femininity are still with us today. "Brilliant Women" restores them to their rightful place as our foremothers, the missing link in an unbroken chain of female creativity. The struggle for the right to be clever, sexy and feminine is still going on. (Joan Smith)

Incidentally and unrelated to the Brontës save for this exhibition we were reading a book the other day where this quotation by Sydney Smith appeared: If the stocking be blue, the petticoat must be long. It made us smile in a very sad way.

The Evanston Review briefly writes about Patrick Clear, who is about to go on stage (in exactly a week) with Remy Bumppo's Brontë.

• 'Bronte' boy: Evanston actor Patrick Clear has multiple roles in the new Remy Bumppo Theatre production of "Bronte," previewing March 20 and opening March 24(through May 4). He plays Patrick Bronte, Mr. Rochester and others in this play that explores the Victorian literary family of Charlotte Bronte. Clear also has a small role in the upcoming Batman film, "Dark Knight," as well as in a made-for-TV movie called "In the Best Interest of the Children." For more on "Bronte," visit http://www.remybumppo.org/. (Dorothy Andries and Michael Bonesteel)

Don't forget that BrontëBlog readers have a special offer to get 2x1 tickets for the play.

The Kalamazoo Gazette openly admits the dangers of dancing Jane Eyre-based ballets.

For nearly two decades, Kalamazoo Ballet Company founder Therese Bullard dreamed of staging a "Jane Eyre''-based ballet, and finally last June, hers debuted on the Kalamazoo Civic Theatre stage. But as she breathed a sigh of relief, so did her body.
She had to be hospitalized for exhaustion, Bullard said Wednesday in a candid yet light-hearted interview in which she focused on the positive side of being forced to get much-needed rest.
"After being incapacitated for a month, I liked the look of myself in the mirror,'' she said, with a hearty laugh.
"I had lost some weight."
Bullard, who has taught ballet in Kalamazoo since 1963, has had to close her ballet company periodically in recent months because of the events of last summer and later, a boiler problem in the building that houses her dance studio. The boiler has since been replaced.
Now Bullard's company is back in full swing and holding performances, which serve as fund-raisers for operational costs. (Roberto Acosta)

A couple of blogs today sing praises of Jane Eyre: Kylie's Book Nook and Fresh Ideas For You. Not Quite Write draws inspiration form the Brontës. And SixSisters posts two gorgeous ACEOs on Jane Eyre.

Categories: Art-Exhibitions, Books, Dance, Jane Eyre, Theatre

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