Sale of the Honresfeld Library by Sotheby’sStatement from the Brontë SocietyThe Brontë Society exists to collect and preserve Brontë manuscripts and artefacts for the public benefit. The manuscripts in the Honresfeld Library were written in Haworth and, as a collection, they bear witness to the intense collaboration and creativity that bound Emily, Charlotte, and Anne Brontë together and to their home at Haworth Parsonage.The Society believes that the rightful home for these unique and extraordinary manuscripts, unseen for a hundred years, is at the Brontë Parsonage Museum, where they can be enjoyed by visitors, explored by scholars and shared with Brontë enthusiasts around the world for generations to come.Regrettably, we are faced with the very real possibility that this immensely significant collection will be dispersed and disappear into private collections across the globe. We are determined to save as much as we can, but due to the dramatic financial impact of the pandemic, the timing is unfortunate. While Covid has reinforced the comfort and hope that we find in literature and culture, museum revenue has fallen away to almost nothing and competition for public funds has become fiercer than ever.We all have a stake in these remarkable treasures. We need to look beyond the narrow commercialisation and privatisation of heritage and work together to protect and share what we all value. As our campaign takes shape, we urge all with an interest in saving this remarkable collection intact to contact us.
Bidding Open 2–13 July 2021
New York Travelling Exhibition
4 - 9 June 2021
London Exhibition
10 - 12 July 2021
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The Honresfield Library, a private collection assembled by two Victorian industrialists that vanished from public view in the 1930s, contains more than 500 manuscripts, letters, rare first editions and other artifacts from a number of canonical authors, including the manuscripts of Walter Scott’s “Rob Roy” and Robert Burns’s “First Commonplace Book.”But it is the Brontë material — based on hoopla surrounding past Brontë auctions, and the estimates for this one — that is likely to cause the biggest stir. Highlights, which will be exhibited at Sotheby’s in New York from June 5 to 9, include a handwritten manuscript of Emily Brontë’s poems, with pencil edits by Charlotte. It carries an estimate of $1.3 million to $1.8 million.The trove also includes family letters, inscribed first editions and other relics that offer a glimpse into life in the Brontë household, like the family’s heavily annotated copy of Bewick’s “History of British Birds” (which features in the opening scenes of “Jane Eyre”).Gabriel Heaton, Sotheby’s specialist in English literature and historical manuscripts, called the Honresfield Library the finest he had seen in 20 years, and the Brontë cache the most important to come to light in a generation.“The lives of these sisters is just extraordinary,” he said during a video interview, before offering a first peek at the materials. Looking at the manuscripts “takes you right back to the incredible moment where you had these siblings scribbling away in the parsonage.”Claire Harman, the author of “Charlotte Brontë: A Fiery Heart,” said she had been “hyperventilating” since she got wind of the auction, which will be held online in July, after additional previews in London and Edinburgh.“It’s just absolutely gobsmacking,” she said. “Scholars and readers have known these things exist, but you forget when they are in private hands. It’s like Sleeping Beauty — there but not there.” (Jennifer Schuessler)
An “incredibly rare” handwritten manuscript of Emily Brontë’s poems, with pencil corrections by her sister Charlotte, is going up for auction as part of a “lost library” that has been out of public view for nearly a century.The collection was put together by Arthur Bell Nicholls, the widower of Charlotte, who of the six Brontë children lived the longest, dying in 1855 at the age of 38. Nicholls sold the majority of the surviving Brontë manuscripts in 1895 to the notorious bibliophile and literary forger Thomas James Wise. The collectors and brothers Alfred and William Law, who grew up 20 miles from the Brontë family home in Haworth, then acquired some of the family’s heirlooms from Wise, including the manuscript of Emily’s poems, and the family’s much-annotated copy of A History of British Birds, a book immortalised in Jane Eyre.The Law brothers’ library at Honresfield House disappeared from public view when their nephew and heir Alfred Law died in 1939, and was inaccessible even to academics.“In the last 90 years, only one or two (very discreet) scholars have had access to slivers of the material, so essentially, only two people alive have seen any of it,” said a spokesperson for Sotheby’s, which is handling the auction of more than 500 manuscripts, first editions and letters from the Honresfield library in July.Sotheby’s described the manuscript of 29 poems by Emily as “incredibly rare”, valuing it at between £800,000 and £1.2m. “It is the most important manuscript by Emily to come to market in a lifetime, and by far the most significant such manuscript to remain in private hands,” said the auction house. “Almost nothing of Emily’s survived – she essentially wrote Wuthering Heights and then parted the world without a trace. There aren’t even really any letters out there by her, as she had no one to correspond with.”It is the only surviving handwritten manuscript to feature some of Emily’s most famous poems, including No Coward Soul Is Mine, The Bluebell, and The Old Stoic, and was mentioned by Charlotte in her 1850 preface to Wuthering Heights, when she noted how she “accidentally lighted on a MS volume of verse in my sister Emily’s handwriting. (Alison Flood)
The 26-bedroom mock-Gothic pile known as Honresfeld House was once home to the Law brothers, self-made cotton magnates who never married and instead devoted their lives to the honourable Victorian pursuits of industry and the arts. Their collection of original works by the Brontë sisters and Scotland’s national poet, Robert Burns, has achieved almost mythical status amongst the literati – not least because nothing has been seen of it for nearly a century.But that changed today when the auctioneer Sotheby’s announced that some 500 of the texts they amassed would go under the hammer in the course of the next year.They include a rare, handwritten manuscript of Emily Brontë’s poems, estimated to be worth between £800,000 and £1.2m, and described by the auctioneer as “the most important Brontë material to come to light in a generation, unrivalled in importance by any private library in the world”. (David Behrens)
And the BBC, Daily Mail, The Telegraph, Fine Books Magazine and a supposedly funny (???) take on it all on Jezebel.
The latest issue of the Times Literary Supplement (July 27) is all about (Emily) Brontë:TLSIncludes (open article):
July 27, 2018 No 6017
Other Wutherings
Emily Brontë at 200
“The twentieth century’s favourite nineteenth-century novel” was how John Sutherland described Wuthering Heights: a view no doubt based partly on the plethora of adaptations for stage and screen, sequels and prequels, poems and songs inspired by the only surviving extended work of fiction by Emily Brontë, who was born 200 years ago. One of them, a musical by Blake Morrison and the composer Howard Goodall, was kiboshed by a rival effort that saw the pop singer Cliff Richard fulfil a long-nourished ambition to play Heathcliff – a surprising choice, you might think, and critics of the production agreed. Rather more successful was Kate Bush’s haunted and haunting song, released in 1978. Robert Potts speaks for many men and women of a certain age (and perhaps younger ones too) when he recalls a “swooping, soaring voice, flowing from a confident eroticism to a trembling vulnerability”. Others paying tribute this week to the strangeness of Wuthering Heights and the violence of its passions include Jacqueline Banerjee, who surveys the flurry of new books released for the bicentenary; Dinah Birch who, re-reading the work with Emily Brontë’s earliest critics in mind, finds the question it puts to all readers “has not lost its force”; and Michael Stewart, the author of a Heathcliff-inspired novel (itself “stomach-churning” in its violence), who also conceived the four “Brontë Stones” in and around the famous sisters’ homes in Thornton and Haworth – “the landscape that surrounded them and offered them a place of solace, but also at times must have felt like divine punishment”. (Alan Jenkins)
No Coward Soul is HersIncluding reviews of:
Jacqueline Banerjee on the lives and afterlives of Emily Brontë.
This is a grand inducement to reread the novel (the new HQ edition is in good print with no academic frills).Ill Will - Michael Stewart
In his own novel, Stewart attempts to supply some of the details that Emily so effectively but tantalizingly omitted in hers. He has done his research, and complements his dark reading of Brontë’s work with details that both reference and support it.Emily Brontë - A Life in Twenty Poems - Nick Holland
Without subjecting the poems to detailed critical analysis – which is not his purpose here – Holland provides helpful contexts for them, and insights into them.Emily Brontë Reappraised - Claire O'Callaghan.
It is an informally written, no-nonsense reappraisal. There is something admirable about cutting through the thickets of Brontëana and refusing to speculate about things that can never be known, although it does lead her to give short shrift to the idea of “Emily-as-mystic” in her final chapter. This is almost inevitable: an important aspect of O’Callaghan’s reappraisal is to portray her subject as one of those “strong, gutsy women” who are valued in society today, no less of a proto-feminist than her more outspoken sistersEmily Jane Brontë and Her Music - John Hennessy
To begin with, Hennessy is on firm ground. His first chapter provides a brief social context and a masterly discussion of the changing cultural scene in England during the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, especially as these would have impinged on the family at Haworth, and especially as regards music: he has even looked into the archives of their father Patrick’s previous incumbency, Thornton Chapel, to see what instruments and music were available for use there. Hennessy then examines in detail the music to which Emily herself would have been exposed, and which she would have played. (...)
In the fourth and by far the longest part of his Emily Jane Brontë and Her Music, he has itemized and discussed every single piece of music known to have been owned by the Brontës – a Herculean task, since it ranges from the thirty-seven pieces of sheet music in the two youngest Brontës’ “Parrish Collection” to their brother Branwell’s flute book, taking in several other volumes on the way.
EmbraceSubscriber Articles:
Cartoon by Ella Baron
“It was not the thorn bending to the honeysuckles, but the honeysuckles embracing the thorn.” (Wuthering Heights)
Words that outlive us by Michael Stewart
Stones on the Brontë trail
Unquiet numbers by Blake Morrison
How Cliff Richard kiboshed a poet’s Heathcliff
Beyond all reason by Dinah Birch
Wuthering Heights – still baffling, still strange
Cathy comes home by Robert Potts
The magnificent weirdness of Kate Bush
In a rather different way, Town & Country Magazine's Summer Issue is also devoted in part to Emily Brontë's bicentenary with pictures by Agata Pospieszynska and an article by Justine Picardie:Photography by Agata Pospieszynska and styled by Charlie Harrington. In the cover: Cibele Ramm wears a silk organza cape, matching dress and organza dress, all Chanel, and calf-skin boots and matching chaps, Hermès. With special thanks to the Brontë Parsonage Museum
Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is a novel that is exceptional for its shape-shifting afterlife, as well as the pulsating emotion within it: for this is a haunting story that has not only possessed the imagination of countless readers, but also inspired myriad artists and authors to create their own responses to the original narrative. Quite aside from the numerous screen adaptations, Wuthering Heights has proved to be fertile territory for dozens of other writers, including Virginia Woolf, Daphne du Maurier, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes; and its tumultuous power has also stirred musical versions – from classical opera to Kate Bush’s unearthly debut single.
Yet for all the extraordinary force of the novel, the young woman who wrote it remains one of the most mysterious figures in the pantheon of great writers.(...)
Not that this has stopped us from attempting to follow in Emily Brontë’s footsteps: and here I must confess to being one of the legions who have visited her home in Haworth – now the Brontë Parsonage Museum – and followed the footpath from there onto the windswept moors, walking up to Top Withens, the ruined house said to have been the inspiration for Wuthering Heights, the fictional Earnshaw family home in the novel. I first went as a young woman, and have returned in the course of researching several of my own books. And I was fortunate to accompany the artist Cornelia Parker in 2006, when she was creating works that included magnified images of the ink marks on Emily Brontë’s blotting paper, and a lock of her hair (most probably cut and plaited by her sister Charlotte, after Emily’s death). Cornelia also conceived the recording of a séance at which I was present, where two psychic mediums explored the Parsonage after dark; she had asked me there as an observer, rather than a participant, and yet it remains one of the eeriest encounters of my life. This was not because of any supernatural manifestations (though the silent relationship between the living and the dead has long fascinated me, and the boundless love that endures, even when we are separated by death from those we hold most dear). Rather, it was the experience of wandering alone through the quiet house, without the daytime crowds of tourists that flock to the Parsonage, and seeing the relics of the family that once lived here: the little books created by the Brontë children, in such tiny handwriting that they are impossible to decipher without a magnifying glass; the toy soldiers that inspired their earliest imaginary worlds; gloves, shoes, dresses and jewellery (some containing interwoven locks of their hair); drawings, manuscripts, letters and writing desks; brass collars from their dogs, engraved with their names; and all the other lovingly preserved objects, including the piano that Emily played, and the black horsehair sofa upon which she had allegedly died.
The other program which illustrated the results of enabling was the PBS Masterpiece Special “To Walk Invisible” about the Brontë Sisters. While the Brontë sisters were left to their own devices by a father who never thought they would amount to much, their brother, Branwell, was the opposite. The show left the impression that Branwell’s alcoholism and drug abuse was enabled by the family, particularly his father, who paid his debts to get him out of trouble. Despite early artistic promise, Branwell’s addiction and co-dependency was his demise.Der Standard (Austria) reviews the adaptation of Wuthering Heights currently on stage at Renaissancetheater.
The Brontë sisters were likely conscious of the same prevailing viewpoint as that the children in Franklin County, Mississippi experienced; that they were without value because they were poor and without a lot of resources. But, the world’s opinion of their lack of potential did not affect their self-worth as witnessed by what Charlotte Brontë’s character Jane Eyre stated in the book by the same name, “Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! I have as much soul as you — and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you!” (Nancy Catron)
Alles führt hinab ins Grab. Der schräge Bühnenboden im Renaissancetheater lässt die Protagonisten direkt auf das Erdloch zusteuern und gibt damit zugleich einen düsteren Ausblick: Die Geschichte von Heathcliff (Luka Dimic) und Catherine (Felicitas Franz) wird tragisch enden, und Letztere wird sterben, ohne dessen Liebe bestätigt zu wissen. Auch Emily Brontë erlebte den Erfolg ihres Romans Wuthering Heights nicht mehr. Ihr unromantischer Blick auf alle Formen der Liebe – zu Partner, Kind oder Gott – empörte ihr zeitgenössisches Publikum. Thomas Birkmeir hat sich nun Brontës Text angenommen, seine nahe gehende Inszenierung gelangt im Theater der Jugend zur Uraufführung. Das Kindermädchen Nelly (Elisabeth Findeis) und der gottesfürchtige Joseph (Florian Stohr) führen als Erzähler durch die Geschichte: Als Catherines und Hindleys (Pascal Groß) Vater von einer seiner Reisen einen Buben mit nach Hause bringt und ihm den Namen des verstorbenen Bruders Heathcliff gibt, entzweit dies das Geschwisterpaar völlig. Während Hindleys Hass wächst, schwören Catherine und Heathcliff einander ewige Abhängigkeit. Mit dem Tod des Vaters geht das Anwesen in den Besitz des Sohnes über, der seinen "Bruder" misshandelt. Catherine und Heathcliff beschließen zu fliehen, dabei wird sie verletzt und von den Nachbarn gesundgepflegt. Heathcliff sieht sie erst nach Wochen wieder. Als sie auch noch in die Heirat mit Edgar Linton (Jürgen Heigl) einwilligt, schwört Heathcliff ihr Rache. Die Bühnenlandschaft (Vanessa Achilles-Broutin) wirkt karg, doch die Schräge hat es in sich. Eine drehbare Rundbühne in der Mitte verleiht dem Raum zusätzliche Ebenen. Ein fahrbarer Kronleuchter zeigt das Haus der Lintons an. Mehr ist gar nicht nötig, denn das beeindruckende Spiel der Darsteller füllt den Raum komplett aus. Mit starkem Körpereinsatz lässt vor allem Dimic Schweiß und Tränen fließen. Franz ist ihm eine würdige Partnerin. Eine Leinwand im Hintergrund verleiht stimmungsvoll Farbe, ehe sie die verstorbene Catherine in Heathcliffs Vorstellung auferstehen lässt. Das geht berührend nahe. Jubelnder Applaus. (Katharina Stöger) (Translation)As does Die Presse.
Theater braucht mehr Biss. Genauer: „Bis(s)“, die Rede ist von Stephenie Meyers Vampirsaga. Von dieser ließ sich Thomas Birkmeir, seit 2002 Direktor des Theaters der Jugend (TdJ), bei seiner Inszenierung von „Sturmhöhe“, nach Emily Brontës „Wuthering Heights“ (1847), inspirieren. Es fließt viel Blut – und noch dicker fließen die Gefühle, wie das mit 13 Jahren so ist. Ab diesem Alter ist die Aufführung im Renaissancetheater angesetzt, und Erwachsene dürfen auch zuschauen.On Harper's Bazaar, Justine Picardie looks at photographer Erik Madigan Heck's first public monograph, entitled 'Old Future'.
Ein gewaltiger Krater dreht sich auf der schrägen Bühne, Geräusche werden akustisch zugespielt. Junge Leute im Adelsmilieu kämpfen um die Liebe. Catherine (Felicitas Franz), ein vitales, exzentrisches Mädchen, freundet sich mit einem Findelkind an, das ihr Vater heimbringt: Heathcliff heißt der Bursch. (Die lungenkranke Pfarrerstochter Brontë, die nur 30 Jahre alt wurde, soll sich in dem sinistren Wilden verewigt haben.) Nach dem Tod des Gutsherren übernimmt dessen Sohn Hindley, ein Säufer, den Besitz und verjagt Heathcliff. Dieser erbt ein Vermögen in den Kolonien, kehrt zurück und rächt sich, auch an Catherine, die den landadeligen Nachbarn Edgar erhörte und sich in eine kränkelnde Lady verwandelt hat, die in Wahnsinn fällt.
Archetypen aus Jugendgangs
Die Schauspieler sind großartig, speziell Luka Dimic als Heathcliff und Pascal Groß als Hindley. Vorbei scheinen die Zeiten, als das TdJ mittelmäßige Mimen versorgte. Birkmeir hat den Roman gestrafft und aktualisiert. Catherine ist magersüchtig, Heathcliff ein Bootsflüchtling. Letzteres ist heikel, denn was sagt uns das? Dass Flüchtlinge sich einschleichen und Strukturen zerstören? Heathcliff übernimmt den Landsitz und ruiniert alle – so wie er vor seinem Aufstieg selbst ruiniert worden ist – der eingebildeten oder brutalen Aristokraten.
Insgesamt geht Birkmeirs düsteres Popmärchen mit seinen klassischen Frontstellungen, die immer haarscharf am Klischee vorbeischrammen, auf. Aus dem altertümlichen und langwierigen Buch, ein Klassiker, den heute selbst eingefleischte Romantiker kaum freiwillig zu Ende lesen dürften, hat er eine messerscharfe Parabel über Konstellationen in Jugendcliquen oder Gangs destilliert. (Barbara Petsch) (Translation)
How, then, might one describe Erik's point of view? First and foremost, he is a photographer who celebrates rather than denigrates beauty. He does not objectify the models in his pictures; and even when his imagery is at its most abstract, there is a sense of depth beneath the beautiful surface. This humane quality is, for me, fundamental to Erik's important contribution to Bazaar. The spirited heroines of his stories find themselves exploring dramatic landscapes – in this issue, for example, the spectacular English coastline of Botany Bay – and these wild locations are integral to the narrative. Sometimes, there are subtle literary references – one of his previous shoots for Bazaar suggested an atmospheric reinterpretation of a Brontë myth, while another, featuring Karen Elson last year, had a Gothic air of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca.La Cerca (Spain) shares some information about writer Elena Fuentes:
Desde su infancia mostró su inclinación y habilidad para inventar y narrar historia y adoraba la lectura. Su fascinación por personajes con personalidades fuertes como Heathcliff o Catherine Earshaw [sic], protagonistas de Cumbres Borrascosas, o los que pueblan el universo literario de Patricia Highsmith, le llevó a interesarse por el estudio de la psique humana. (Translation)This columnist from Stuff (new Zealand) reminisces about a trip to Yorkshire, where her father had been born.
The highlight of the trip was the day nana, Keith and I went to Haworth, the village where the Brontë sisters penned their lovelorn epics.Independent Women's Forum discusses the use of 'females' referring to women and quotes Emily Brontë. Medium has an essay called 'Freedom in the transience of mortality: an essay on Romantic ideals' which also mentions Wuthering Heights.
Wuthering Heights, in particular, had fuelled my teenage fantasies of Yorkshire as an alluringly wild hotbed for creativity and romance, so seeing the places that had inspired its author was a surreal experience; a strange piecing together of fact and fiction.
The weather was suitably gloomy as we drove through Bronte Country; grey skies watching ominously over rugged moorland dotted with age-old abbeys, priories and castles that set the imagination alight.
I spent hours lingering over the domestic objects and letters on display in the old parsonage the Brontes had called home, fascinated by how three young women who had led such seemingly quiet lives had written such worldly novels. But things often aren't what they seem. Certainly not, as I was discovering, in Yorkshire.
The almost palpable darkness that appeared to have inspired them but driven others to despair (their brother Branwell became an alcoholic and drug addict) must have been even harder to ignore in the Brontes' day. The house looks out at a cemetery which would, in an era when the average lifespan in Haworth was 25, have been the final resting place for many of their family and friends.
Leaving the twinkling lights of the cobbled main street - looking convincingly like a scene from a Victorian novel - behind us, we hit countryside so dark we could have been anywhere at any time. My sense of being in a place where past and present, history and legend frequently collide grew stronger still. (Lorna Thornber)
Jane Steele by Lyndsay FayeBookRiot asks readers about their 'shifted perspective novels'. Wide Sargasso Sea is used as an example of this 'genre'.
“Reader, I murdered him.”
A sensitive orphan, Jane Steele suffers first at the hands of her spiteful aunt and predatory cousin, then at a grim school where she fights for her very life until escaping to London, leaving the corpses of her tormentors behind her. After years of hiding from the law while penning macabre “last confessions” of the recently hanged, Jane thrills at discovering an advertisement. Her aunt has died and her childhood home has a new master: Mr. Charles Thornfield, who seeks a governess.
Burning to know whether she is in fact the rightful heir, Jane takes the position incognito and learns that Highgate House is full of marvelously strange new residents — the fascinating but caustic Mr. Thornfield, an army doctor returned from the Sikh Wars, and the gracious Sikh butler Mr. Sardar Singh, whose history with Mr. Thornfield appears far deeper and darker than they pretend. As Jane catches ominous glimpses of the pair’s violent history and falls in love with the gruffly tragic Mr. Thornfield, she faces a terrible dilemma: Can she possess him — body, soul, and secrets — without revealing her own murderous past?
A satirical romance about identity, guilt, goodness, and the nature of lies, by a writer who Matthew Pearl calls “superstar-caliber” and whose previous works Gillian Flynn declared “spectacular,” Jane Steele is a brilliant and deeply absorbing book inspired by Charlotte Brontë’s classic Jane Eyre.
The adaptation: Deadline reports that Chris Columbus’s 1492 Pictures, Ocean Blue Entertainment, and Prescience in association with Altus Media acquired the film rights for this thrilling retelling prior to publication. (T.A. Maclagan)
Shifted perspective novels are some of my favorite ways of re-living classic and beloved books. These are reimagined versions of our favorite stories, told from the point of view of an under-appreciated side character, or even the villain. From the stepmother in the updated Snow White retelling Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi, to Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, which tells the story of the mad wife in the attic from Jane Eyre, readers can’t get enough of these novels. (Amanda Nelson)Writer Rebecca Solnit gives some writing tips on Lithub.
7) Facts. Always get them right. The wrong information about a bumblebee in a poem is annoying enough, but inaccuracy in nonfiction is a cardinal sin. No one will trust you if you get your facts wrong, and if you’re writing about living or recently alive people or politics you absolutely must not misrepresent. (Ask yourself this: do I like it when people lie about me?) No matter what you’re writing about, you have an obligation to get it right, for the people you’re writing about, for the readers, and for the record. It’s why I always tell students that it’s a slippery slope from the things your stepfather didn’t actually do to the weapons of mass destruction Iraq didn’t actually have. If you want to write about a stepfather who did things your stepfather didn’t, or repeat conversations you don’t actually remember with any detail, at least label your product accurately. Fiction operates under different rules but it often has facts in it too, and your credibility rests on their accuracy. (If you want to make up facts, like that Emily Brontë was nine feet tall and had wings but everyone in that Victorian era was too proper to mention it, remember to get the details about her cobbler and the kind of hat in fashion at the time right, and maybe put a little cameo at her throat seven and a half feet above the earth.)The Baltimore Sun publishes again an article which originally appeared in the newspaper a week after rapper Tupac Shakur died 20 years ago.
His taste in music was wide and varied, ranging from LL Cool J to Peter Gabriel and Eric Clapton, Kate Bush's "Wuthering Heights" and Don McLean's "Vincent" At 15, Shakur chose the latter song for an acting assignment. Donald Hicken, teacher and friend, found that a surprising choice. (M. Dion Thompson)Deutschlandfunk (Germany) has a short article on Charlotte Brontë and Jane Eyre. Salt Sweet Bitter shares some thoughts on Wuthering Heights and Heathcliff. ANZ LitLovers LitBlog has a post on Justine Picardie's novel Daphne. Finally on Facebook the Morgan Library and Museum shared a picture of Charlotte Brontë's dress from its current exhibition and added some tidbits about the history of the dress itself.
Charlotte Brontë: A Bicentennial Celebration of her Life and Works
Friday 13 & Saturday 14 May
2016 marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charlotte Brontë, one of England’s most beloved authors. Her writings, which constitute some of the most original and striking literature of the nineteenth century, continue to provoke rigorous academic debate. Brontë’s first published novel, Jane Eyre, written under the pseudonym of Currer Bell, rocked polite society with its portrayal of passion and madness. Yet astonishingly, the author was discovered to be a small, plain and shy clergyman’s daughter. This anomaly has inspired contemporary and subsequent generations to examine both the life and work of the woman described by contemporary writer, Harriet Martineau, as “the frail little creature who had done such wonderful things”.
This bicentennial conference – in the village of Chawton, where another woman writer, Jane Austen, penned her much-loved novels – will celebrate the tremendous impact of Charlotte Brontë’s work. Over the course of this two-day event, we will endeavour to map out new directions for research as she enters her third century.
Keynote lectures will be given by:
Juliet Barker – historian, biographer of The Brontës and previous curator and librarian of The Brontë Parsonage Museum, Haworth.
Justine Picardie – author of Daphne, a novel that explores the profound impact of the Brontës on subsequent generations of writers, and Editor-in-Chief of Harper’s Bazaar and Town and Country.
Sally Shuttleworth – Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford, author of Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology and The Mind of the Child: Child Development in Literature, Science and Medicine, 1840-1900, which takes Jane Eyre as one of its key texts.
There is an extraordinary poem about the slave, Harriet Jacobs, hiding for seven years in order to escape her owner, and a delightful poem about Charlotte Brontë in the voice of her biographer, Elizabeth Gaskell. We meet Gerrude Stein and Virginia Woolf, and closer to home, Anna Huntington, whose powerful animal sculptures grace Brookgreen Garden. (Anthony S. Abbott)The writer, fashion analyst and Brontëite Justine Picardie talks about British politicians' shoes in The New Statesman . Virginia Woolf and Charlotte Brontë get mentions:
Yet her commitment to women’s rights did not negate her interest in women’s shoes (and men’s, on occasion), including the ones that she saw while visiting the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth. “The natural fate of such things is to die before the body that wore them,” observed Woolf, who found herself curiously touched by the sight of Charlotte Brontë’s shoes, preserved in a glass case along with a thin muslin dress; relics that had “outlived her”.The Irish Post on York:
York’s an old romantic at heart and that seems to have rubbed off along the way with many a royal wedding taking place in the city. It also boasts two Love Lanes, while just a short drive away is the Yorkshire Moors and the site where Emily Brontë wrote Wuthering Heights.The Sunday Times publishes a curious detail in the Poldark-Heathcliff connection:
Taking a leaf out of Kate’s book (‘Heathcliff, it’s me Cathy. Let me in-a-your window’ ) we took in the breath-taking York Minster, northern Europe’s largest Gothic cathedral and home of The Heart of Yorkshire that sits in the Great West Window, in all its stained-glass glory. (Siobhan Breatnach)
The exhilarating horse rides along the Cornish clifftops have combined with his muscular torso to make the Poldark star Aidan Turner a hot property.And Ben Atkinson was indeed a horse and cart driver in Wuthering Heights 2011. Small world.
But while the famous chest belongs to Turner, many of the coastline gallops were actually performed by stuntman Ben Atkinson. (Sanya Burgess)
The writers John le Carre and Charlotte Brontë are the subject of new books, as is The Kinks frontman Ray Davies. (Rebecca Jones)Maybe they are talking about Claire Harman's upcoming biography but, as far as we know, it is scheduled for 2016.
As the era of the talkies dawned a decade and a half later, Rouben Mamoulian's City Streets (1931), starring Gary Cooper, featured the flashback. But the device remained largely a novelty till the housekeeper Ellen in William Wyler's Wuthering Heights began narrating the main story to overnight visitor Lockwood. (Sumi Sukanya)The author Jennifer Niven lists the best teen books in her opinion in The Guardian:
Judy Blume’s characters, more than my own parents, knew how I felt, what I thought, what I feared. In high school, I graduated to the Brontë sisters, whose dark, dramatic longing spoke to my ongoing sense of displacement.Postmedia News reviews the film The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death:
The spirit is obsessed by the boy, giving him toys and separating him from the others in a bid to take him as her own by luring him into the black marsh. Imagine the Brontë sisters on a bad acid trip and you can get a fleeting frisson of what this movie feels like, because for all the bleak imagery and horror archetype, we actually get two strong female heroines. (Katherine Monk)This columnist of The Rogersville Review recalls her childhood:
My favorite books were the old English romance novels, such Wuthering Heights. I also liked Jane Austin (sic) books, such as Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Sense and Sensibility. (Teresa Kindred)Gawker comments on the Harper Bazaar's interview to Gwyneth Paltrow (the interviewer, by the way, was writer and Brontëite Justine Picardie) and particularly about her break-up with Chris Martin:
Throughout the interview, Gwyn heaps praise on Chris, citing his "strength," "incredible empathy," loving attitude, and patience. She basically shouts "I am Heathcliff" at the interviewer. (Allie Jones)De lecturas, sueños y otras loqueras (in Spanish) and Aamil Syed review Wuthering Heights.
More on the latest episode of Sons of Anarchy titled Faith and Despondency. As usual, beware of spoilers! Vulture recaps:“But this world’s life has much to dread / Not so, my Father, with the dead.” —Emily Brontë, “Faith and Despondency” [...]Nerd Core Movement writes about it too:
And then there’s Tulley and Juice, a certainly nonconsensual relationship fueled by heroin, Vaseline, and Emily Brontë. Tulley reads him Brontë’s “My Comforter” (“Was I not vexed, in these gloomy ways / To walk alone so long? … A brotherhood of misery … ”), and Juice snorts heroin. Juice’s victimization in this situation is amplified by the fact that he is of African-American descent, complicating Tulley’s actions. The fact that Juice and Gemma both are “bent over” and in some way victimized in this episode is noteworthy. [...]
“Faith and Despondency,” a poem by Emily Brontë, is a dialogue between father and daughter on life and mortality. The father hears the daughter’s strength and lack of fear in the face of sorrow and despair. At the end he says, “Well hast thou spoken, sweet, trustful child! / And wiser than thy sire.” Abel’s knowledge has outpaced his sire’s, and it’s on the table now, just waiting to be dealt with. (Leigh Kolb)
Now Juice is somehow coming to peace with doing cocaine, being Marilyn Manson’s bitch in prison while having Emily Brontë poetry read to him. In other words, not all of his dogs are barking. [...]Paste picks some lines from the poem as one of the episode's favourite quotes:
Tully also promises to take good care of his “Puerto Rican” and Jax knows Juice needs a lot of love right now, signifying that he either knew or didn’t care that the Nazi leader was turning him into his prison bitch. As a token of his appreciation, Tully sends Juice a care package — a poetry book by Emily Brontë (which is where the title of this episode came from), a vile of cocaine and a jar of petroleum jelly (does anyone use petroleum jelly anymore?!?). Later in the episode we find Juice snorting the coke off his hand with no clothes on while Tully lays in his lap and reads “My Comforter” from the book of poetry. This is a match made in a very weird section of heaven. (Damon Martin)
“A brotherhood of misery, their smiles as sad as sighs; Whose madness daily maddened me, Distorting into agony, The bliss before my eyes!”—Emily Brontë’s poem “My Comforter,” read by a postcoital Tully to Juice (Emily Worden)On to something else. As The Huffington Post puts it,
Cornel West -- the famous public scholar and political polemicist whose many books include Race Matters, Democracy Matters, and The Rich and the Rest of Us -- cares about the novels of a dead, white, privileged British woman of the Regency Era. [...]Jane Austen appears in several of the '50 Novels Featuring Famous Authors as Characters' selection made by Flavorwire as do the Brontës:
West views the fact that one still has to make a case for Austen's place at the top of the pantheon of great literature as evidence of how much men still dominate. It pains him that writers such as Twain, Emerson, James, and even Brontë could be so harsh toward her. (Kathleen Anderson)
As for the most popular fictionalized writers? No surprise to see a ton of Shakespeares, Austens, Dickenses and Brontës scampering with pens through the pages of other peoples’ novels. [...]Coincidentally, The Independent briefly discusses fan fiction in the light of a new project:
Daphne, Justine Picardie. Daphne DuMaurier’s life and her own obsession with the Brontës juxtaposed with a young writer’s obsession with DuMaurier, with lots of passionate correspondence, of course. [...]
Solsbury Hill, Susan Wyler. Emily Brontë’s ghost, literal and figurative, haunts a young fashionista visiting the moors in this recent Wuthering Heights paean. [...]
The Secret Diaries of Charlotte Brontë, Syrie James. James is another writer who specializes in recreating the lives of our favorite authors, this time through an ultra-passionate look at Brontë’s diaries and love interests. Not to be confused with…
Emily’s Ghost, Denise Giardana. This novel of the Brontë sisters hews as close to facts as it can, and despite possibly manufacturing love quadrangles for them, is highly recommended for devotees of the sisters’ Gothic fiction. (Sarah Seltzer)
A guarded welcome for Project Remix, a new initiative in schools which suggests that students aged between 13 and 19 years of age re-make literary works in new genres: re-casting books, stories and poems – from Pride and Prejudice to “Ozymandias” by way of The Hound of the Baskervilles – as strip cartoons, music, film trailers, book-jacket designs or “creative writing.” [...]The Yorkshire Evening Post recommends Further North, a bar in Harrogate Road, Chapel Allerton.
Literary classics have also been appearing in strip cartoons since the 1960s; I know well-read people familiar with, say, Titus Andronicus only through such cartoons. A recital of Shelley’s “Ozymandias” was used as a trailer for the last season of Breaking Bad. And so on.
But I’d certainly like to see scholars encouraged to try “fan fiction” adjustments to Wuthering Heights or David Copperfield. The only problem would be to stop them bringing some of the famous characters together in unlikely sexual convergences.
It’s one thing to write a fan fiction in which Harry Potter and Hermione get it on. Not so with Uriah Heep and Betsey Trotwood. (John Walsh)
Of all the seasons, autumn is where we re-ignite these ancient rituals, the flames and fireworks of bonfire night revisits sectarian division; the wizards and witches of hallowe’en reach back yet further to a pagan past. Such a night, clear and moonlit, with a whiff of smoke on the frosty air, seems an apt backdrop to launch my very own beer on an unsuspecting world.Lecturas de Beltrán, kaitlynn's book blog and Free Through Fiction post about Wuthering Heights. Julie Akhurst, owner of Ponden Hall, writes on Carolyn Mendelsohn Foto about her experience hosting a Wuthering Heights Creative Residency.
The name That Quiet Earth invokes the Gothic of Wuthering Heights and the pomp of Genesis, its dark, mysterious nature, its deep toffee taste, prodigious strength and soft, soporific finish ideal for the time of year. That Further North should lay on pork pie and parkin makes for a perfect night out.
Improvements are planned at one of the Bradford district’s biggest tourist attractions.The Telegraph and Argus also reports that Bradford Council is planning some cuts, but they won't affect the public toilet near the museum.
The ticket desk at the entrance to the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth could be moved.
Ann Dinsdale (pictured), collections manager at the parsonage, said: “The ticket desk is right at the front door, so people have to queue outside and the weather is not always great! Also, there is only space for one person to man the desk. The idea is to move it into the foyer area, which will enable people to wait inside, and it will mean that at busy times we can have more than one person issuing tickets.”
If the plans are approved by Bradford Council, it is hoped to carry out the work in January.
The Labour group would close all public toilets, except those in “high traffic tourist areas” which include City Park and City Hall, Brook Street, Ilkley, Brontë Parsonage and Saltaire. (Hannah Postles)The Times's Leading Article of today talks about Yorkshire being third at the latest Lonely Planet's Best in Travel best region in the world ranking:
Really, though, an injustice has been done. Charming though Sikkim and The Kimberley no doubt are, do they boast an Andrew Marvell, a bunch of Brontës, an Alan Bennett or a Ted Hughes?Janice Turner adds in the same newspaper:
South Yorkshire is neither the wild West Yorkshire of the Brontës' moors nor the refined North Yorkshire of Harrogate's spas and tearooms. It is - was, alas - the county's engine room. (...)Via The New Yorker's Page Turner we have found a recent Poetry Foundation article on literary siblings.
I love Scarborough, but despite its nickname, it's no "Brighton of the North". It's a saltier, less effete, more cussed town. The Yorkshire countryside is more the untamed, rain-lashed place of Heathcliff's wandering than the cosy hills of Last of the Summer Wine.
For years, a tiny pub on the road between the English villages of Haworth and Keighley has been home to a peculiar rumor. The Cross Roads Inn was one of Branwell Brontë’s favorite haunts. It was at the Cross Roads that two of Branwell’s friends claim he read from a manuscript that featured the characters who would later appear in the novel Wuthering Heights.AARP lists '21 Great Novels It's Worth Finding Time to Read' and among them is
Despite Charlotte Brontë’s insistence that her sister Emily wrote Wuthering Heights, the rumor that their brother Branwell penned the novel has persisted. In their various biographies, Juliet Barker, Daphne du Maurier, Lucasta Miller, and Fannie Elizabeth Ratchford all considered the possibility that Branwell was the true author of Wuthering Heights. Barker claimed to have identified a story of Branwell’s that influenced the relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff; du Maurier pointed to poems written by Emily and Branwell as evidence of an early collaboration between the two that could have blossomed into Wuthering Heights.
The persistence of the rumor reflects the curious, cloistered upbringing of the Brontës, but also the more universal experience of siblings. Collaboration and competition between brothers and sisters exists no matter their vocations, but literary siblings challenge our assumptions of lonely genius, isolated writers alone at their desks. Patrick Brontë, father to the four artists, who raised them himself after their mother died, wrote: “As they had few opportunities of being in learned and polished society, in their retired country situation, they formed a little society amongst themselves—with which they seem’d content and happy.” (Casey N. Cep) (Read more)
10. Jane Eyre by Charlotte BrontëWhile BlogLive (Italy) selects the ten best alpha males in literature.
Nathaniel Hawthorne hated the Misses Brontë, because they could do what he could not — write books that sing with authenticity and genuine suspense, and do so nearly 200 years later. (Jacquelyn Mitchard)
3. Heathcliff – da Cime Tempestose di Emily Brontë (genere: gotico, romance) – “Forse il mio primo eroe alpha, grazie alla mia insegnante di inglese per avermelo fatto scoprire tanti anni fa”. (Jill Shalvis) (Translation)A columnist from The Daily Pennsylvanian highlights a rather different aspect of Heathcliff.
Sadness has its hecklers, too. But there’s a perverse glamorization of being down in the dumps that doesn’t exist for the truly content. Just look at Heathcliff or Batman or Daria. Would anyone like those characters if they were a little more upbeat? (Rachel Del Valle)
“This next song is based on a John Dryden poem.” It’s clear from this introduction that Lydia Baylis isn’t your average performer. Following Lucy Mason‘s Coffee House Session of a fortnight ago, this latest Curiositea performance sticks to the same formula: one café, one guitar, and one outstanding voice. In many ways, though, Baylis is a very different artist to the Australian Mason. And with Virginia Woolf and the Brontë sisters among the Welsh singer’s other sources of inspiration, there’s a distinctly cerebral edge to her work, which she describes as “dark cinematic pop” during her post-gig interview with Boar Music. (Sam Carter)El Faro de Vigo (Spain) looks at the local British colony established there in 1873.
La afición a la buena lectura, con autores literarios de moda como Charles Dickens, las hermanas Brontë o Lewis Carroll comienzan a tener también adeptos entre los jóvenes vigueses. Era costumbre en estos autores publicar sus novelas por capítulos mensuales en revistas, siendo esperadas con auténtica ansiedad por los jóvenes británicos asentados en la urbe. (José Ramón Cabanelas) (Translation)The Vancouver Courier reviews the stage production Armstrong's War.
A recent graduate of U. Vic’s acting program, Byskov makes his Vancouver stage debut in Armstrong’s War, too. As a wounded Afghanistan war hero, Byskov is initially intense, angry and in denial about his mental state. What Michael does not need is a terminally chirpy, cheerful kid in pigtails reading teenaged mysteries or Wuthering Heights to him. (Jo Ledingham)While the Missoula Independent recommends the local production of The Woman in Black.
If you love Wuthering Heights or any other eerie old-timey book/BBS television series, you'll dig this. (Erika Fredrickson)The Rhode Island Public Radio tells the story of a local medical center:
Their only hope: find a buyer willing to help turn the hospital around. And, like a country gentleman’s daughter in a Brontë novel, Landmark flirted with several suitors. There was Caritas Christi. RegionalCare Hospital Partners. Transition Healthcare. HealthSouth. Capella. Prime. None made it past the early hurdles.Twaddle and Lisa Richards: Rock N' Roll Politics discuss Wuthering Heights, the latter deeming it 'The Best Unromantic Novel About Domestic Abuse and Greedy Revenge'. Reading Log posts about The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Entre montones de libros writes in Spanish about Agnes Grey. Also in Spanish, Curistoria posts about the rejection letters received by Charlotte Brontë. Wordpixelsblog discusses Justine Picardie's novel Daphne.
Rhode Island’s Hospital Conversions Act requires state approval to turn a nonprofit hospital into a for-profit one. The process derailed a few deals. Delay followed delay. Hopes rose. Hopes fell.
Then, the most serious offer to-date came from the for-profit outfit Steward. But a bitter and public fight broke out between Steward and insurer Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Rhode Island over the contract with Landmark. And Steward backed out at the last minute, too. But finally, like that heroine in a Brontë novel, it turned out that one of Landmark’s first suitors was the one all along: Prime Healthcare. Landmark president Richard Charest. (Kristin Gourlay)
Gemini (May 21-June 20) “I need not sell my soul to buy bliss,” says a character in Charlotte Brontë’s 19th-century novel Jane Eyre. “I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all extraneous delights should be withheld, or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.” This would be a great speech for you to memorize and periodically recite in the next two weeks. Do it in front of your mirror at least once a day to remind yourself of how amazingly resourceful you are. It will also help you resist the temptation to seek gifts from people who can’t or won’t give them to you. (Rob Brezsny)Too bad that all that is said mockingly in the novel by Mr Rochester passing as a gypsy fortune teller saying what he thought Jane would be thinking (chapter XIX).
2. The performancesJustine Picardie discussed Daphne du Maurier and mentioned her Brontë connections on BBC Radio 4's Today programme yesterday (via @BronteParsonage and @Breffney). Sheila Kohler talks abour her novel Becoming Jane Eyre on HoCoPoLitSo's YouTube channel. The Mechanicsville Local reports that Miss Mechanicsville 2013's favourite novel is Wuthering Heights. Por la calle de Alcalá writes in Spanish about Emily Brontë and Wuthering Heights.
[...] John Kazek plays a number of roles, said Bissett, "from the Albanian pimp to the friendly punter to the Nigerian father. John is a much-loved Scottish actor whom I saw perform in 'Wuthering Heights' when I was still at school. I knew then at 13 [that] I wanted to work with him when I grew up." (Julia Borcherts)
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Today, April 21 is the 197th anniversary of Charlotte Brontë's birthday and in Agropoli, Italy, the Occhi di Argo association and the publisher Albus Edizioni have organized a literary party:Domenica 21 aprile alle ore 11,00 ad Agropoli da Crea inizia la Rassegna Autrici in Design.More information on L'Informazione.
Gli Occhi di Argo e Crea hanno organizzato una festa per l'anniversario della nascita di Charlotte Brontë, presentando due capolavori della scrittrice vittoriana: Henry Hasting e Il Segreto.
Le due opere sono state tradotte da Maddalena De Leo che sarà intervista e ci svelerà particolari inquietanti e poco indagati di Charlotte.
Avremo una visione gotica della Brontë, un'immagine inedita e quasi sconosciuta.
L'appuntamento cilentano è imprendibile per gli appassionati della scrittura di Charlotte Brontë: i libri presentati saranno una piacevolissima scoperta.
All'incontro parteciperanno oltre a Maddaena De Leo, l'editore di Albus Giuseppe Bianco, l'attrice Maria Cristina Orrico, la professoressa Annamaria Perrotta e l'editore Francesco Sicilia de L'ArgoLibro. Da Crea sarà letta la recensione critica della scrittrice e poetessa Eufemia Griffo.
Introduce l'incontro Anita Fersula.
Electricity changed everything, and so suddenly, so recently. Caesar's wife never saw a light bulb, Shakespeare never watched television, neither Emily Brontë nor Charles Dickens used a word processor. Back then, when darkness fell, the dark came down and people lived their evenings by candlelight.Rather more scholarly, The Brown Daily Herald interviews Amanda Anderson, professor of English:
As a literary scholar and theorist who has written on 19th-century literature and culture, how do you explain the intersection of literature and politics? How is that relationship played out? One of the things I’m most interested in exploring is the plurality of ways that writers engage the question of politics. … Some writers are interested, very broadly, in power dynamics and how power inheres in every social interaction, and they’re good at diagnosing that. One author who’s really good at that is Charlotte Brontë — she’s a very modern thinker when it comes to the ubiquity of power in interpersonal dynamics. (Phoebe Draper)Now for some screen-related tidbits. The Telegraph reviews the second episode of the third season of Downton Abbey (BEWARE of SPOILERS!)
Some Downton fans might have felt cheated by the beginning of this second episode. Previously, Matthew (Dan Stevens) and Mary (Michelle Dockery) had been left precariously at the altar before vows had been exchanged. Could Matthew, who had been showing hints of socialist sympathies, suddenly have decided not to marry into the aristocracy? Could there have been a Jane Eyre-style intervention when the congregation were asked for any just cause why the union should not take place? (Ben Lawrence)Página 12 (Argentina) mentions François Truffaut's film Les Deux anglaises et le continent, not overlooking its Brontë connections.
Como en tantos films de su realizador, aquí sus personajes caminan tras los pasos de las hermanas Brontë y hacen suyas las palabras de Arthur Rimbaud en su deseo de reinventar el amor. (Emilio A. Bellon) (Translation)Hecklerspray gushes over Tom Hardy.
He’s also starred as Heathcliff in the Masterpiece Classic version of Wuthering Heights. As a Heathcliff (and all things Wuthering Heights) connoisseur, I can confidently state that he’s PERFECT, even with a heinous mop of hair on top of his head. Nothing is more macho macho man than a guy who knows how to relish in a bit of romance every now and then. (Hillary Scales)And Malaya Business Inside wonders about the Philippine Wuthering Heights-inspired soap-opera Walang Hanggan.
“Walang Hanggan,” according to an insider, will have its final episode on October 26.Hathaways of Haworth is offering a tutorial on making Victorian clothes and accesories if only a suitable venue can be found in Haworth. Do spread the word or get in touch with them if you know of such a place. They are also working on 'undressing' the Brontës for Christmas and on a Brontë play. Coyote Canyon Press reviews Juliet Barker's revised edition of The Brontës. Peggy's Blog writes about Jane Eyre and Valhalla Gate posts about the 2011 adaptation in Spanish. Bibliopunkk gives 5 out of 5 stars to April Lindner's Jane. Ça sent le brûlé ! reviews Agnes Grey in French. Neverland writes in Italian about Wuthering Heights 2009. Bokboxen discusses in Swedish the eternal Austen vs the Brontës question. Unlimited Possibilities reviews Justine Picardie's Daphne.
Will two of its lead stars, Coco Martin and Julia Montes, die, like the two protagonists in “Wuthering Heights”?
The novel, admitted the creative team headed by Rondel Lindayag, served as inspiration to the series. (Ethel Ramos)
So what’s next for Jane Eyre? Next weekend at Washington University’s Edison Theatre, the enduringly romantic character will hold down the center of a new work by choreographer, director and St. Louis native Annie Loui.Justine Picardie traces a profile of Harper Bazaar's legendary editor Diana Vreeland in The Telegraph:
In a recent phone interview, she said the book has been one of her favorites since, as a young adult, she received a copy from her mother.
“I was fascinated with it,” Loui said. “It’s a brilliant adventure story, as well as a coming-of-age story, and a love story. And the heroine is somebody you can really respect — smart, and kind of determined. She was very alluring as a role model.” (...)
In conceiving her version of “Jane Eyre,” Loui said, she wasn’t influenced by previous dramatic adaptations. Rather, she took her own approach to bringing the characters and events of the book onto the stage.
“The way I tend to construct new work is to take a novel and then condense it to the essence of each of its scenes,” Loui said. “You figure out what really needs to be there to tell the kernel of the story. And suddenly, a 700-page novel becomes a 35-page script — with a lot of movement that illuminates the action.”
As such, the 75-minute “Jane Eyre” strikes a balance between dance concert and theater piece. The words in the production “are all Charlotte Brontë’s.”
“The truth of the matter is, we have a lot of text in this particular production,” Loui said, such as when Jane expresses disagreement or forthrightness. But other moments from the novel lend themselves to the sort of imagery at which dance excels.
“For instance, when it says, ‘She rides on a horse to go to school,’ I literally have somebody as a horse, and somebody as the carriage, and she rides on that and gets to school,” Loui said. “So movement does what movement does, and words do what words do.”
She has also explored other ways of enhancing the story’s theatricality.
“There is a secondary character I created, who is ‘Voiceover Jane,’” Loui said. That character, whom the audience can see, represents “Jane’s inner conscience. As we see Jane going through teaching school or being submissive, we hear Voiceover Jane speaking her inner emotions, and her inner feelings.”
“Jane Eyre” was workshopped last year at the University of California, Irvine, where Loui is professor of movement.
“I had wonderful audiences, from people who were scholars of ‘Jane Eyre,’ to people who really knew nothing about it,” Loui said. “I did a talkback with the audience each time to find out if they could follow it, and everybody did. That was very exciting to me.” (Calvin Wilson)
And she also benefited from Carmel Snow's visionary choice of photographers and literary breadth (it was Snow who had run Bill Brandt's portrait of TS Eliot and landscapes of the Brontë parsonage in Haworth, and paired Truman Capote with Cartier-Bresson, commissioning the pair to do a story on New Orleans in 1946).The model Holly Carpenter offers her opinion on Fifty Shades of Grey in The Independent (Ireland) :
"I also think it was trying far too hard to be shocking. The love scenes in books written by the likes of Emily Brontë are far less vulgar yet far more erotic and steamy."The Boston Globe reports the winners of the New England Book Awards. One of the them is Margot Livesey's The Flight of Gemma Hardy:
In “The Flight of Gemma Hardy” (Harper) by Margot Livesey, a young woman, orphaned at 10, accepts a position as an au pair on a remote island. Livesey, a Cambridge resident, set her novel in Scotland, where she was born. (Jan Gardner)Culture Map Austin interviews comedian Anna Renzenbrik about her show Spider Dance:
But beneath the mockery of rules is a hint of real nostalgia for them, which Renzenbrink attributes to Victorian fiction she read as a child. “Whether it was Anne of Green Gables or Jane Eyre, people were really stifled in their lives in those books,” she says. The advantage to strict rules of decorum? “It’s so easy to create drama, because you just have to break one of them.” (Amy Gentry)The Chronicle Herald reviews Zander Sherman's The Curiosity of School:
Sherman completely misses the boat on public charter schools like Knowledge Information and Power and smaller, human-scale alternative schools. That’s a little odd because he strongly favours precisely that type of schooling. If he feels that Wuthering Heights is far preferable to Harry Potter, that Latin and Greek teach mental discipline, and everyone can be a polymath, then it’s surprising that he doesn’t turn to the very schools that continue to uphold that educational legacy. (Paul Bennett)Another chance to listen to Maureen Corrigan's review of the revised edition of Juliet Barker's The Brontës on NPR's Fresh Air Weekend:
Juliet Barker released a new edition of her landmark 1994 biography, The Brontës. Critic Maureen Corrigan says that even the 136 pages of footnotes are "thrilling," as readers are taken "deeper into the everyday realities" of the Brontës' "strange world."Thirdcoast Digest reviews the recent chamber piece by composer Anna Clyne, Fits+Starts (2003):
The music sounds like collage, bits of ideas strung together intuitively. It does advance as the title suggests, rather like a tornado moving erratically through the land, picking up and spewing out whatever mostly tonal musical bits lie in its path. If this description makes the piece sound disordered, it’s the ardent disorder of Heathcliff and Catherine dashing through a stormy night. (Tom Strini)The Daily Mail describes like this the TV-series Hunderby:
A joyfully dark Victorian tale which, for reasons best confined to the master’s bedroom, really should have been called Fifty Shades Of Brontë.The Times reviews Naomi Wolf's Vagina: A New Biography:
She calls dopamine the ultimate feminist chemical. Women can achieve great things when they unlock their sexual natures — and she quotes Edith Wharton, Georgia O’Keeffe and George Eliot as women who achieved the sublime through sexual fulfilment. In her excitement, though, she fails to mention Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, Florence Nightingale or even Elizabeth I, all women who left their mark on the world despite not having much sugar in their respective bowls. (Daisy Goodwin)The importance of language in The Sun Daily (Malaysia):
Language has always fascinated me, arising no doubt from the childhood imaginings of Grimm's fairy tales and Enid Blyton's Noddy adventures. From then grew an interest in English literature and the classics of Dickens, Hardy, Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, D.H. Lawrence, Shakespeare and the romantic poets – inspired by the dedicated convent teachers. (Halimah Mohd Said)Vorrei Essere un Personaggio Austeniano reviews the Italian edition of the Hiromi Iwashita Wuthering Heights manga; Indianapolis Romance Novels Examiner posts about Rochester as romantic hero; 101 Books in 1001 Days reviews Wide Sargasso Sea; lindabloggen (in Swedish) reviews Wuthering Heights.
Of the plausible nominees, this is a very respectable lot. I was nonetheless disappointed that Moira Buffini‘s adaptation of “Jane Eyre” never got more traction. (Gerard Kennedy)The Tri-City Herald's Mr. Movie reviews the film giving it 4 stars:
Purists may not love this version. There are flaws. But it’s Jane Eyre and to Jane Eyre is divine. (Gary Wolcott)Movie City News looks back on Sundance and reviews Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights:
Arnold shifts the perspective of the novel away from Nelly Dean, the storyteller, and Lockwood, the rapt listener, by truncating the tale to focus almost entirely on the relationship between Cathy and Heathcliff. This shift of perspective is subtle but important; as a literary device, the entire tale is filtered first through Nelly Dean’s perspective as a storyteller, a gossip, and a lover of stories herself, and then through Lockwood’s own class biases as he listens to the tale; this greatly affects how the events are interpreted. In other words, where the book never attempts objectivity because the tale being told is clearly an embellished one, here there is no observer within the story itself, leaving us to interpret the events as if they are, in fact, objective truths within the world of the story.We are not sure whether this columnist from the Gloucestershire Echo has really read/watched Wuthering Heights:
For me, this didn’t quite work because without Nelly Dean’s embellishment and romanticizing, Cathy feels even less sympathetic in that she comes across as caring solely about money and security rather than love (true enough), while Heathcliff seems to be always just stomping around glaring angrily, slamming doors, and being generally ungrateful and recalcitrant without the sympathetic glean of Nelly Dean’s interpretation of events adorning them. Without Nelly’s lens to focus the tale, we have two characters who aren’t, in and of themselves, greatly likable; thus this adaptation becomes more an observation of events than a tragedy in which we come to feel significantly invested. [...]
Visually, Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights is stunningly beautiful, with desolate frames of windy moors, and the most realistic depiction of the sanitary conditions of its time since, perhaps, Tom Tywker’s Perfume. You can practically feel the chill, damp wind blowing you nearly sideways, the muck of the mud holding fast to your shoes with every step. Sound, too, is excellently used in augmenting the storytelling and creating a sense of time and place. But when we get to older Cathy and Heathcliff ( Kaya Scoldelario and James Howson), somehow we lose much of the passion that underlies the tale; the fire that smolders in Heathcliff’s breast, this ancient, destructive love, Heathcliff’s unrelenting fierce anger at being denied what he wants even after overcoming a lifetime of servitude and indignities, are played up by Nelly Dean’s sympathetic perspective, and that element is missing here. Arnold’s version of Wuthering Heights is certainly the most visually stunning of the film versions of this tale, but from a literary standpoint, Cathy and Heathcliff need Nelly Dean to soften them up a bit and make them more palatable. (Kim Voynar)
AS the winter nights draw in, programmes such as Downton Abbey, Wuthering Heights and Great Expectations provide great escapism from the doom and gloom of the weather outside.A Huffington Post columnist reminisces about reading (Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice) to an old lady. And as Valentine's Day is approaching, so the 'romantic' recommendations begin: Greensboro Books Examiner suggests Jane Eye and Wuthering Heights.
Ghost stories like The Inkeepers or are excited for The Woman in Black this Friday, or like the Gothic elements in the newest take on Jane Eyre or like in novels like Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. (Manny Lozano)Slant Magazine reviews the film The Woman in Black where
Daniel Radcliffe stars as Arthur Kripps, a lawyer whose namesake and familial distress (his wife died in childbirth and his cherubic son perpetually sketches him wearing a sad face) feels Dickensian, but after the single father travels to a village in order to sort out the very messy affairs of a recently deceased biddy who lived in its outskirts, he finds himself walking through Emily Brontë's foggiest nightmare. (Ed Gonzalez)Laura's Reviews posts about Emily Brontë's poetry. At the Movies reviews Jane Eyre 2011 in Malay. Michael Peverett discusses Charlotte Brontë's sense of humour. Mystica reviews Justine Picardie's Daphne. Finally, an alert from Gainsborough:
The Gainsborough and District Fine Arts Society
The AGM for members of the Fine Arts Society will take place on February 2nd 2012 at l.15pm at Trinity Arts Centre.
The lecture will follow at 2pm from Mrs Elizabeth Merry on The Young Brontës and Art: visual influences on their creative development.
Drinks will follow at 3.15pm. (Gainsborough Standard)
Unless explicitly said
