In a rapidly changing intellectual environment, two developments have affected the work of the historical biographer over the past two decades. First, digitisation has made it possible to read vast swaths of printed matter online, including obscure sermons and newspaper articles, and even some manuscripts, without leaving the study. Second, with privacy under erasure, biographers are empowered to go where their predecessors feared to tread with regard to the body and its functions. Both developments are evident in the making of This Dark Night, a book that demonstrates what can be achieved when a scholar-critic of Lutz’s stature applies her empathic imagination to the hidden life and writing practices of her elusive subject.Lutz has a particular interest in the materials that writers used in the Victorian age, the subject of a previous study. In the preface to her new book, she writes; “Keeping slips of paper and a pencil nub nearby, Brontë mastered a peripatetic kind of creativity, interwoven with household work, daydreaming, and exploring her native landscape.” Out on the moors by day and under the stars by night, she scribbled poems on scraps of paper and later transcribed them in drafts written in ink. Lutz argues that “the page worked for her as a sort of frame or foundation on which to build the poem. Similar to those samplers she made as a girl, the letters, words, and lines accumulated like cross-stich across and down the sheet.” Signs of digging her quill pen into the paper while writing remain legible, we are told.As Emily and her sisters prepared their poetry and fiction for publication, they acquired notebooks with thin leather covers the colour of oxblood. When opened, they would easily lie flat. Lutz’s close readings of the texts convince us of the power of a poetic vision inspired by nature and the elements. Her treatment of Emily’s writing materials reminds us that creation is work. (Dr Michael Wheeler)
Forget hot girl summer — for readers, it's decidedly a classics girl summer. According to data from Google Trends, interest in books you might not have read or even thought about since high school English class is way up. This includes some of the standard books you'd find on Rory Gilmore's reading list, like "Jane Eyre" by Charlotte Brontë and "The Catcher in the Rye" by J.D. Salinger, but some titles surging in popularity are unusual picks for the book girlies. (Amanda Manen)
Andrés Muedano: What are you working on next?Tara Menon: I am working on both a second academic book and a second novel. My academic book is an exploration of anger and the novel. I have noticed that readers often label books “angry”—they might say, for instance, “Jane Eyre is a furious book” or “Naipaul’s novels seethe with rage,” but it’s never been clear exactly how they make those determinations. In my book, I ask: what does it mean for anger to be embedded in a novel, rather than simply expressed by one of its characters? What are the formal characteristics of anger in fiction?
But Morton doesn’t believe in bogging herself down in research, not since starring in a British TV production of “Jane Eyre” when she was 19 and carried around a heavily highlighted copy of the Charlotte Brontë book, despairing whenever the adaptation deviated from the novel. From that point on, she stuck to the script and her own imagination. (...)Morton first came to New York as a teen to do press for “Emma,” returned a year later to promote “Jane Eyre” and then couldn’t bring herself to leave, “sofa-surfing” at friends’ apartments so she could immerse herself in the city.“New York stole my heart,” Morton says. It’s where she first got into literature, devouring Charles Bukowski, roaming the aisles at the St. Mark’s Bookshop, checking out movies from Kim’s Video and gobbling hash browns and eggs over easy at the Waverly Diner. (Glenn Whipp)
Sometimes the right project is simply too good to turn down. Wuthering Heights was a fantastic job – I loved every minute of it, and Margot and Jacob and everyone on that production were lovely. I’m lucky that I still get offered work that interests me. The moment it stops being enjoyable, I’ll stop doing it. (Claire Bowman)
" spawned a worldwide annual tradition of red-dress flash mobs, with two taking place in France this year: at the Bon-Repos abbey on July 25 and in the Bois de Vincennes in Paris on July 26, 2026.Sa reconnaissance viendra bien plus tard. Au cours du XXe siècle, Les Hauts de Hurlevent s'impose progressivement comme un classique de la littérature mondiale grâce à ses nombreuses adaptations au cinéma, à la télévision et au théâtre. Kate Bush participera, elle aussi, à cette redécouverte. Car, contrairement au roman dont elle est inspirée, sa chanson connaît un triomphe immédiat. Sortie en pleine période où s'affrontent le punk et le disco, à rebours des tendances dominantes, elle s'impose en tête des classements britanniques et détrône même le groupe ABBA. Du jamais vu pour un premier titre et une artiste inconnue.Lorsque Kate Bush découvre ce récit gothique, ce n'est pas en ouvrant le roman d'Emily Brontë, mais en regardant une adaptation télévisée diffusée par la BBC. Elle n'a alors que 16 ans. Fascinée par l'atmosphère sombre du récit et la puissance tragique de ses personnages, elle finit par lire le livre et se sent particulièrement proche de son héroïne, Catherine, surnommée Cathy, dont elle partage le prénom. Elle décide alors de transposer l'histoire dans le langage de la pop.À l'âge de 18 ans, elle compose Wuthering Heights en une seule soirée, au piano. Sa chanson s'inspire d'une scène emblématique du roman : celle où le fantôme de Cathy apparaît à la fenêtre de Heathcliff et tente de le convaincre de la laisser entrer. Kate Bush prête alors sa voix à l'héroïne disparue : « Heathcliff, it's me, I'm Cathy, I've come home, I'm so cold, let me in-a-your window... » ("Heathcliff, c'est moi, Cathy. Je suis revenue. J'ai si froid. Laisse-moi entrer par ta fenêtre..."). En quatre minutes de musique, la chanteuse parvient ainsi à condenser toute la passion, la mélancolie et le mystère qui font encore aujourd'hui la force du roman d'Emily Brontë. (...)Si Wuthering Heights est devenue une chanson culte, c'est autant grâce à la voix singulière de Kate Bush qu'à l'univers visuel qu'elle a construit autour du morceau. Son timbre aigu, presque irréel, se mêle à des sonorités éthérées pour donner vie à un personnage fantomatique directement inspiré de Cathy Earnshaw. Mais c'est surtout le clip qui va marquer durablement les esprits.Conçue avec le chorégraphe Lindsay Kemp, célèbre pour avoir notamment formé David Bowie à l'art du mime, la chorégraphie contribue à l'atmosphère hypnotique du morceau. Dans une première version du clip, Kate Bush apparaît sous les traits du fantôme de Cathy, vêtue d'une longue robe blanche vaporeuse. Filmée au ralenti, évoluant parmi des effets visuels qui accentuent l'étrangeté de la scène, elle semble flotter entre le monde des vivants et celui des morts.Une seconde vidéo est ensuite réalisée pour le marché américain. Le décor change, mais pas la chorégraphie. Cette fois, la chanteuse danse au milieu de la campagne anglaise dans une robe rouge flamboyante qui deviendra sa tenue emblématique. Plus épurée et plus facilement identifiable, cette version va peu à peu s'imposer dans l'imaginaire collectif et devenir l'une des images les plus célèbres de la culture pop britannique.C'est d'ailleurs ce clip qui est à l'origine de The Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever. Chaque année, à l'occasion de l'anniversaire de Kate Bush - et d’Emily Brontë, née un 30 juillet, elle-aussi - des milliers de fans à travers le monde enfilent la fameuse robe rouge et reproduisent les gestes envoûtants de la chanteuse. De Londres à Melbourne, en passant par Paris, cette chorégraphie née à la fin des années 1970 continue ainsi de rassembler. L'archive ci-dessous nous entraîne dans l'événement organisé en Bretagne en 2024. (Florence Dartois) (Translation)
Final Jeopardy today was in the category “AUTHORS“The clue: “She sometimes signed letters “Charles Thunder”The answer: “Who is Charlotte Brontë?” (Lizzy Buczak in Parade)
The album was recorded across Iceland, New York, and Berlin, and draws inspiration from poetry, literature and visual art. de Oliveira weaves in mythology with references to Milton's Paradise Lost and the poetry of John Keats, Emily Brontë and Anne Sexton. (Kayla Sandiford)
En esto se gastan los jóvenes lucenses su Bono Cultural: «El "GTA VI" y "Cumbres Borrascosas" son los grandes éxitos de este 2026» (...) Cuentan que esta ayuda cultural es más usada por las chicas que por los chicos, aunque esto no significa que estos últimos no acudan a comprar obras literarias al establecimiento. «Ellas vienen, principalmente, en busca de novelas románticas. Cumbres borrascosas vendió muchos ejemplares por el estreno de la adaptación en cines». (Andrés Quintán) (Translation)
An AI includes Jane Eyre in a list of great stories never getting old on Bookclub. The Brussels Brontë Blog recounts a guided day trip through lesser-known Brontë sites in Lancashire and West Yorkshire — Cowan Bridge, Leck, Tunstall Church, Kirkby Lonsdale, and Wycoller — checking off several long-sought locations tied to the sisters' lives and Charlotte's Jane Eyre.
For its 74th edition Griffith Review launched an emerging voices competition for new fiction and nonfiction. From hundreds of entries, this is one of the four finalists.(...)Things are bad enough with the human rights crusaders without them picturing Emily Brontë travelling with a bunch of horses, tethered in a stall with her nose in a bag of chaff.In fact, Emily’s container has been beautifully adapted for the purpose. Inside, it is said to resemble her bedroom at the parsonage – dimly lit, with a comfortable bed and embroidered samplers on the wall. This same container will carry her into quarantine and serve as her accommodation while she is in Sydney. Astrid describes it as Emily’s home away from home, although some of Meg’s writers’ festival colleagues, those less enthusiastic, continue to refer to it as her storage unit. (...)
The Chase Celebrity Special turned awkward during the latest edition of the quiz show as Anthony Quinlan accidentally insulted the Queen.Host Bradley Walsh was back on our screens on New Year's Day to present a throwback episode of the ITV series, which first aired in 2020. (...)Bradley asked: "Which monarch was described by Charlotte Brontë as a little, stout, vivacious lady?After a short pause, Anthony replied: "Queen Elizabeth II."Bradley informed the actor what the correct answer is Queen Victoria. (Dan Laurie)
Emily Brontë, Margaret Mitchell, JD Salinger, Ralph Ellison, Harper Lee, Anna Sewell: all wrote a single, game-changing, long-form masterpiece. To that list can be added novelists equally or better known for other art-forms – the poets Sylvia Plath and Boris Pasternak; the playwright Oscar Wilde; the short story writers Alice Munro and Edgar Allan Poe, although Brontë was also an accomplished poet and Salinger a revolutionary short story writer. (...)Yet spare a thought for the writers who crave the recognition, and possibly the money, yet fail to find it. Emily Brontë wrote Wuthering Heights, perhaps the 19th century’s most extraordinary English novel, partly because her poetry had failed to find an audience (Poems, by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, featuring the verse of all three sisters and published at their own expense in 1842, sold only two copies).Alas, so did Wuthering Heights, which met with pitiful reviews, prompting Brontë’s biographer Winifred Gerin to argue that such catastrophic disappointment prevented Brontë from writing anything again (she died two years later, from tuberculosis, at the age of 30). Yet a letter to Emily from the publisher Thomas Newby in 1848 references a second novel Emily was apparently working on before she died.One can scarcely imagine how Emily might have followed Wuthering Heights, whose imaginative power remains startling; either way it’s believed Charlotte destroyed the manuscript, along with the fantasy prose sequence, Gondal, that Emily for years produced with her sister Anne, in order to protect her reputation. (Claire Allfree)
Jane Eyre (2011)While this Gothic classic doesn’t bear an obvious comparison to The Power of the Dog, Mia Wasikowska’s performance as the titular character allows viewers to sympathize with Jane’s absolute aloneness as she arrives to work at Thornfield, intermittently inhabited by the Byronic Mr. Rochester (Michael Fassbender). Jane, ever the outsider, challenges Rochester’s egotism and bitterness while dealing with her own suspicions about the secretive household. Jane’s inner rebelliousness frequently clashes with her Calvinist education and her exposure to Rochester’s shallow class contemporaries, yet she refuses to compromise her dignity throughout. Unlike Rose in The Power of the Dog, she is more than a match for the terrors of the house, even when she must reconcile her love for Rochester with the secrets he has been hiding. Cary Fukunaga’s camera frequently puts Jane at the mercy of natural elements, at odds with both the English wilderness and a wholly indifferent society. (Rebecca Bihn-Wallace)
Y acabo, como muchas otras veces, con los versos de una mujer que se merece otro enorme reconocimiento: Emily Brontë, autora como ustedes saben de la inmensa novela Cumbres borrascosas. Aquí van esos versos: «¿No parece esta tarde, en su ocaso, / dar paso a un día más hermoso?». Que tengan ustedes, a pesar de la que está cayendo, un feliz año nuevo. De todo corazón se lo deseo. De todo corazón. (Alfons Cervera) (Translation)
Wilful Design: The Sampler in Nineteenth-Century Britain
Chloe Flower
Journal of Victorian Culture, Volume 21, Issue 3, 1 September 2016, Pages 301–321,
This article recovers the cultural significance of the sampler in nineteenth-century Britain. I argue that this mainstay of female education models a circular shape of development in which the young girl painfully revises earlier experience; the subject is conceived of as perpetually reworking herself without obvious linear progression. Though this article is situated against canonical works of Victorian fiction, it focuses primarily on actual samplers to argue that these pieces of childhood embroidery should be recognized as a form of life-writing. After establishing the conventions of the sampler, I turn to an apparently anomalous example that exemplifies the temporal and affective patterns ingrained by the pedagogical exercise of sampler sewing. My central artefact is an autobiographical sampler from the needle of a 17-year-old Sussex girl named Elizabeth Parker. Currently housed in the Victoria and Albert Museum, this textile from 1830 recounts Parker’s childhood experiences in service, and the horrors of physical abuse and sexual assault that led her to contemplate suicide, all compressed into 46 lines of cross-stitch. I argue that the sampler as a pedagogical tool resists the Bildungsroman’s model of the self as formed through temporal progression towards self-contained adult agency. Instead, the sampler materially and thematically enforces the recursive temporal dynamics of conversion.
Charlotte Brontë's Oeuvre as Fantasy Fiction
Hoeveler, Diane Long, Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature, no. 130, 2016, p. 15+
Charlotte Brontë began writing seriously when she was fourteen years old, creating a large prose cycle known as the Angrian and Glass Town sagas by the age of twenty-four. That fiction, interspersed with poetry and drama, features imitations of the major genres of the era: historical romance, silver fork novels, gothic, melodrama, and journalistic political and social commentaries. But at the core of these early works, as well as her later, mature novels, is a type of fantasy writing: for all of these works attempt to accomplish the cultural and personal work that lies at the heart of fantasy. As Laplanche and Pontalis note, fantasy writing most frequently emerges out of an author's meditation on her own personal narrative of psychic and emotional survival (18-27). As such, fantasy writing, like juvenilia, tends to comment on its own moment of production, and it does not present the sort of historical specificity associated with realistic novels. But it is the tension between the personal and the historical that is so intriguing and powerful in the works of Charlotte Brontë: and it is that tension, as well as the techniques and characteristics of fantasy writing, that this essay will explore.
Brontë's Domestic Uncanny
Levenson, Karen Chase, Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature, no. 130, 2016, p. 124+
Elizabeth Gaskell begins her biography of Charlotte Brontë with a description of Haworth, the town where the family moved the day before Charlotte's fourth birthday, on April 21, 1820. Gaskell insists that we cannot understand the Brontëan sensibility without comprehending the peculiarities of this north Yorkshire region, steeped as it was in a culture fixed and unyielding in spirit, and yet dynamic and adaptable to the rough demands of industrial development and expansion. Every region clutches and extrudes habits as it hurtles through time, but Yorkshire people apparently hold tighter and release more violently than others do. According to Gaskell, "For a right understanding of the life of my dear friend, Charlotte Brontë, it appears to me more necessary in her case than in most others, that the reader should be made acquainted with the peculiar forms of population and society amidst which her earliest years were passed, and from which both her own and her sisters' first impressions of human life must have been received" (60). Here--where rebellion and fixity were partners, where provinciality marched with vision--is where the Bronte children lived and died, and wrote the works that even now bring shivers to the spine, tempest to the soul, and yearning to the heart. But although Haworth was home to Charlotte Brontë, home in her works bore as much relation to Haworth as Wonderland or the Looking Glass world bear to Oxford in Carroll's Alice books. Not that Brontë fictionalizes Haworth; but for her (as for many others) hominess transcends the home from whence it was engendered and represents states of mind and associated spaces that continue to be as relevant today as they were two hundred years ago.
Brontë RelicsEDIT: And another one at the Swindon Festival of Literature:
An Illustrated Lecture with Professor Deborah Lutz
Thursday, May 15
Time: 8:00 PM
*** Offsite: Morbid Anatomy Museum (New Space) , 424 A 3rd Avenue (Corner of 7th Street and 3rd Avenue)
Presented by Morbid Anatomy
Portable desk boxes, samplers, albums of pressed ferns, printed books with diaries written on their flyleaves, mended stockings and locks of hair that belonged to the Brontës carry traces of their lives: nicked with incident, smoothed by handling, frayed with wearing. These things bring to life the daily, domestic round of the Brontë sisters. The Brontës themselves believed in the ability of material objects to be charged with an almost-enchanted meaning, to be imbued by their possessors.
Emily, Anne and Charlotte surrounded the characters in their novels with such articles: the wardrobe with paintings of the twelve apostles on its front that gleams out of a dark corner at Jane Eyre as she sits in the anteroom of a madwoman’s prison. The oak sleeping cabinet that belonged to the now-dead Catherine Earnshaw holds her old books and the names she carved into the wood: those who sleep there dream of her. Love letters in a sealed bottle are buried by Lucy Snowe under a pear tree; Agnes Grey watches her desk be catapulted out the window by the brats she teaches. The ordinary—and extraordinary—pasts of these women emerge out of the remnants of their physical selves.
Deborah Lutz is finishing a book on Brontë relics: The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects (forthcoming, Norton, 2015). She also has a book due out soon on a related topic—Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Previous books include The Dangerous Lover: Gothic Villains, Byronism, and the Nineteenth-Century Seduction Narrative (Ohio State UP, 2006) and Pleasure Bound: Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticism (Norton, 2011).
Keith Hooper
Wroughton Library, Ellendune Centre SN4 9LT
7pm • 15 May
Keith Hooper – on Charlotte Brontë’s Jane eyre: an Autobiography.An illustrated lecture which explores ‘the path of the poor orphan child’ from the Red Room to Thornfield Hall.
Dr Keith Hooper, who holds a doctorate in nineteenth century Literature, uses a line from Bessie’s song to the ten-year-old Jane, as a starting point to reflect upon aspects of this highly popular work.
A few more reviews of Shanghai Ballet's Jane Eyre production currently on stage in London:Performed with clarity of character if not narrative this is an evening of spellbinding sequences rather than a authoritatively structured whole.
But the accumulation of detail adds up to a work that is never less than engaging.
The selection of music is eccentric, ranging from medieval dances to Barber's Adagio For Strings. And what's Greensleeves doing in there? (...)
f you want to see a good example of cross-cultural fertilisation look no further. (Neil Norman in Daily Express)
It’s not a good idea to confuse your audience from the get-go when you are trying to do something completely different.
It’s a shame because Jane Eyre marks an ambitious creative leap for the Shanghai Ballet, who have chosen to make their London debut with this production instead of taking the easy way out and giving us yet another Swan Lake. Though it is the case that whatever the ballet’s failings, the cast perform it with an impressive dramatic conviction and an accomplished, versatile technique. (...)
Not so good is the use of recorded music, a strange soup of Elgar, Britten, Samuel Barber, John Dowland and others, especially when some of it is incongruously linked to the choreography. (Debra Craine in The Times)
A frustratingly meek Xiang Jieyan and a dashing Wu Husheng make an attractive Jane and Rochester, but they’re more efficient than transporting, with no chemistry together.
De Bana’s sometimes clumsy choreography, over-emphatic physical storytelling and poor pacing, and a score tritely skipping from chamber music to Greensleeves to Barber’s Adagio for Strings, don’t help. (...)
The power of her mournful second act duet with Wu is rather undermined by him dragging her off like a sack of spuds, though. And ultimately her character arc goes nowhere, either. (Siobhan Murphy on Metro)
On the whole an enjoyable evening of ballet, with the fire scene being the stand out moment, and the ending being the low point. (Lynne Howell on Brontë Parsonage Blog)DanceTabs publishes a Flickr album of pictures of the production.
What was your familiarity with Jane Austen before this movie?Stephenie Meyer herself has no trouble with Austen or Brontë. In The Examiner:
I had read Jane Austen in school, so I knew the book, and I knew the world. But I'm more of a "Wuthering Heights" guy. I'm more of a Brontë man. I like how wild, how dramatic "Wuthering Heights" is. Jane Austen keeps it very reserved, very repressed. (...)
Stephenie Meyers, the "Twilight" author, produced the film. Did you read her books?
I haven't read them, but I saw one of the "Twilight" movies.
Did you like it?
Ummmm…Yeah. I liked it. I'm not really a "Twilight" guy. Again more of a Brontë man than a Meyers man, but she was a great producer. (Mike Vilensky)
Q: What would be the number one book to read while you were there?The Telegraph reviews the A Bic for Her Bridge Christie show at the Edinburgh Fringe:
Meyer: Would it be too meta to be reading Austen books while you're at Austenland? Cause it probably would...Maybe I would read the Brontë's that would work, too. (Shaina411)
En route to a conclusion that emotively embraces Malala Yousafzai, the 16-year-old girl shot in the head by the Taliban for advocating girls’ education, there’s a fine little repeated motif about Thatcher’s “turning”, an unrepeatable gem about her proposed revenge for tennis commentator John Inverdale’s infamous “never going to be a looker” remark, and a great demolition of the patronising Bic For Her pastel-coloured biro that gives the show its title. How on earth, she suggests, did the Brontë sisters ever manage without one? (Mark Monahan)The Guardian reviews No Place To Call Home by Katharine Quarmby:
After a brief period of the romantic, fortune-telling Gypsy figure beloved by Charlotte Brontë and other Victorians, the hostility grew to its height in the Holocaust, when up to half a million Roma were murdered by Nazis and their allies, in the camps and elsewhere. (Rose George)The Telegraph has an article about the quite extraordinary Minack Theatre in Cornwall:
This newspaper recently carried a photograph of spectators in Minack huddled against the driving rain during a performance – appropriately enough – of Wuthering Heights. But for a show to actually be cancelled, the elements have to be truly appalling. And whatever the weather, umbrellas are forbidden. (Philip Johnston)Sophia McDougall in the New Statesman is a bit tired of 'strong female' characters:
I love Jane Eyre declaring “I care for myself” despite the world’s protracted assault on her self-esteem. My despair that the film industry believes the world is more ready for a film featuring a superhero who is a raccoon than it is for a film led by a superhero who is awoman is long and loud.Keighley News insists on the efforts to preserve and restore Haworth's heritage.
A new tourist map of Haworth has been released to highlight every aspect of the historic village – not just the buildings and sights associated with its most famous former residents, the Brontë sisters.FemaleFirst interviews the writer Sarah Stovell:
What other Victorian gothic novels have you enjoyed and drawn inspiration from?Multiculturalism in Leicester according to The Independent:
(...)I also love ‘genuine’ Victorian novels - Wuthering Heights is my very favourite. I studied it for my A Level English Literature sixteen years ago and still remember it vividly.
And the Asian immigrants from East Africa – affluent professionals and businesspeople – were better equipped to prosper than any before or since. "While others came to Britain from villages in Bengal or Kashmir," says Suleman Nagdi, who arrived from what was then called Rhodesia, "we had been immersed in Britishness – Jane Eyre and all that – from our school days, and that immersion helped us integrate more quickly: we were familiar with the education and legal systems and everything else." (Peter Popham)A list of young talents in the Sydney Morning Herald, such as Kate Bush:
was on top of the British charts at the age of 19 with her debut release, Wuthering Heights, which, depending on your viewpoint, is a classic pop song of romantic genius, or one of the most irritating earworms ever released.And San Diego Magazine talks with the literary agent Sandra Dijkstra:
My mom always thought I “read too much.” Ironic, coming from a reading teacher, but her chief concern was that I be attractive and find a good mate. Still, all that early reading, from Nancy Drew to Jane Eyre, clearly made a difference, as my love for books grew from a guilty pleasure to a thriving livelihood.Uncouth Reflections and Draegonflies review Jane Eyre positively; the Brontë Parsonage Blog posts about the recent East Riddlesden Hall Brontë Society meeting (with particular attention to seventeenth century samplers and needlework in those days).
What would the Brontë sisters sew? They stitched samplers long before Charlotte grew up to write “Jane Eyre,” before Emily wrote “Wuthering Heights” and before Anne wrote “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.” [...]Well, we are not the Brontë Parsonage Museum but we can confirm that the samplers do indeed belong to their collection. And while it is true that pictures of the actual samplers are hard to come by, there is a website selling stitch kits to make replicas at home.
Charlotte completed her sampler at age 13 in April 1829. Emily was done with hers at age 11 on March 1, 1829. Anne finished hers at age 10 on Jan. 23, 1830. They stitched their samplers at their home, Haworth Parsonage in Yorkshire, after the girls had returned from school where their older sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, had died from privation and illness suffered at the boarding school.
It is easy to imagine the sisters sitting together, hoops and needles in hand, making row after row of cross-stitches to fashion each word. Perhaps the sewing was an occasion to sit together and talk about life in the village or to remember their sisters. Or perhaps the sewing was drudgery, an onerous task to be got through until they could go out to the moors where they let their imaginations run wild.
As might be expected of the daughters of Patrick Brontë, a clergyman, the Brontë sisters’ samplers consist of lengthy passages from the Bible, from Proverbs and Psalms.
Photographs of the Brontës’ samplers are included in “Samplers and Tapestry Embroideries” by Marcus Huish, first published in 1900 in London. Huish describes the samplers: “They show a strange lack of ornament, and a monotony of colour (they are worked in black silk on rough canvas) which deprive them of all attractiveness in themselves.” Judging from the photographs, it’s easy to see how Huish might arrive at that conclusion, but the samplers, to my eye, have an almost architectural beauty of composition.
Huish says in his book that the owner of the samplers at that time was Clement Shorter, a journalist who collected manuscripts, books and materials related to his favorite authors, including the Brontë sisters.
Each sampler differs somewhat from the others. The top verse in Charlotte’s sampler reads: “A house divided against itself can’t stand.” But horizontal bars of stitching separate the seven verses in the sampler. Did she intend that as a bit of drollery? It can be argued that “Jane Eyre” has the “house divided” idea as one of its themes. Rochester was certainly a “house divided against itself,” given the fact that he had a madwoman, his wife, living in the attic, while falling in love and persuading Jane, the governess, who didn’t know about the wife, to marry him.
A line in Emily’s sampler says: “Surely I am more brutish than any man, and have not the understanding of a man.” Was this line from a verse from Proverbs a foreshadowing of her character Heathcliff, whose callous behavior transgressed social and moral codes, in “Wuthering Heights”?
Anne’s sampler, also with verses from Proverbs, bears this line: “She is more precious than rubies and all the things thou canst desire are not to be compared unto her.” It was Anne who created the character Helen, the wife of Arthur, the unfaithful, drunken husband who did not value his wife. Helen fled from him in “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
The three samplers are stitched with the same zigzag border, similar to a Greek key pattern.
I searched a long time on the Internet for images of the samplers so I could direct readers to them, but I was not successful. The only images I found are in Huish’s book.
I came across references stating that the samplers are housed at Haworth Parsonage, now a museum, but at websites pertaining to Haworth I did not find information to confirm that the samplers are, indeed, housed at the museum. I e-mailed a query but have not yet received a reply. (Ardeana Hamlin)
So these narratives influence our lives but also at the same time, we influence the themes of romance novels and romantic movies?Business World explore romance books:
Yes. Consider that there is a social class element in romance. We can see that in Jane Eyre, even in Beauty and the Beast. (Jenny Hall)
My daughter Tanya Cruz Duldulao chose Wuthering Heights, the only novel written by Emily Brontë. The novel centers on the doomed love between Heathcliff, a tormented orphan, and Catherine Earnshaw, his benefactor’s vain and willful daughter. Their childhood romance turns into a passionate love when they meet again in their adult life. But class differences keep them apart and Catherine’s deathbed scene is a telling depiction of why love hurts. (Elfren Sicangco Cruz)And My High School Journalism similarly mentions Wuthering Heights:
By middle school, though, we wanted to be adults. We played at relationships like we played house as pre-schoolers, though here, the stakes were much higher than giving Mom a headache from all the rattling pans. We were sure that we felt passions akin to those of the great romantic heroes; we didn’t yet know Heathcliff, but we certainly had stronger feelings for our crush of the week than he did for Catherine. For those of you who still don’t know Heathcliff (and I suggest you get to know him; Wuthering Heights is an amazing book), consider Jack and Rose. (Julia Shumway)The Jack and Rose parallel we find quite arguable, though.
The family moved to Kenmore, N.Y., and by age 12, Lynn was putting herself into the world of Emily Brontë's "Jane Eyre" and "Wuthering Heights" at the public library. "I'd stop there on my way from school. I thought it was a really nice place to spend time," she said. (Bonnie Bishell)The Cavalier Daily writes about college education:
Still, part of the beauty of college is the social experience. While parties and drunken stupors are not unique to college, some experiences are. Gaining culture through Shakespearean plays or putting on Sunday’s best for Saturday gamedays prepares us for future Jeopardy game nights and cocktail parties. Is knowing who Jane Eyre is and how to dress for a dinner event worth the price of admission? (Hung Vu)The Brontë Sisters posts about the Brontës' Valentines. Jessica Guthrie and Sylvia-Louise post about Wuthering Heights and Ni de niña jugué a las comiditas (in Spanish) includes the novel on a top ten love stories. The Reading Room, Uncreated Conscience and So many books, so little time (in Spanish) include Jane Eyre on a similar top ten while White Noise briefly posts about the novel on audiobook format. Finally, Floor to Ceiling Books writes about Louise Rennison's Withering Tights.
A couple of scholar books with Brontë content:Dress Culture in Late Victorian Women's Fiction Literacy, Textiles, and Activism
Christine Bayles Kortsch, Eastern University, USA
* Imprint: Ashgate
* Illustrations: Includes 18 b&w illustrations
* Published: November 2009
* Format: 234 x 156 mm
* Extent: 212 pages
* Binding: Hardback
* ISBN: 978-0-7546-6510-6
In her immensely readable and richly documented book, Christine Bayles Kortsch asks us to shift our understanding of late Victorian literary culture by examining its inextricable relationship with the material culture of dress and sewing. Even as the Education Acts of 1870, 1880, and 1891 extended the privilege of print literacy to greater numbers of the populace, stitching samplers continued to be a way of acculturating girls in both print literacy and what Kortsch terms "dress culture." Kortsch explores nineteenth-century women's education, sewing and needlework, mainstream fashion, alternative dress movements, working-class labor in the textile industry, and forms of social activism, showing how dual literacy in dress and print cultures linked women writers with their readers.
Focusing on Victorian novels written between 1870 and 1900, Kortsch examines fiction by writers such as Olive Schreiner, Ella Hepworth Dixon, Margaret Oliphant, Sarah Grand, and Gertrude Dix, with attention to influential predecessors like Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot. Periodicals, with their juxtaposition of journalism, fiction, and articles on dress and sewing are particularly fertile sites for exploring the close linkages between print and dress cultures. Informed by her examinations of costume collections in British and American museums, Kortsch's book broadens our view of New Woman fiction and its relationship both to dress culture and to contemporary women's fiction.
The Gothic, Postcolonialism and OthernessThe Brontë chapter has a title not to be forgotten: Heathcliff as Terrorist (Chapter 3). If you want to know Tabish Khair's approach is useful to read these previous posts.
Ghosts from Elsewhere
Tabish Khair
Palgrave Macmillan
04 Nov 2009
9780230234062
208 pages
Starting with a re-examination of the role of the colonial/racial Other in mainstream Gothic (colonial) fiction, this book goes on to engage with the problem of narrating the 'subaltern' in the post-colonial context. It engages with the problems of representing 'difference' in lucid conceptual terms, with much attention to primary texts, and highlights the strengths and weaknesses of colonial discourses as well as postcolonialist attempts to 'write back.' While providing rich readings of Conrad, Kipling, Melville, Emily Brontë, Erna Brodber, Jean Rhys and others, it offers new perspectives on Otherness, difference and identity, re-examines the role of emotions in literature, and suggests productive ways of engaging with contemporary global and postcolonial issues.
Unbelievable though it may seem, the line between children’s and adult literature is easily dissolved, proven through the discovery of a connection in the most unlikely of places. It’s time to brush off the Bronte sisters’ anthology, because Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre may have been reincarnated as none other than the children’s classic Matilda, by Roald Dahl. Don’t believe me? Keep reading.The Washington Post reviews Girl in a Blue Dress. A Novel Inspired by the Life & Marriage of Charles Dickens by Gaynor Arnold:
Doubters need look no further into Bronte's celebrated novel than to Jane’s stint at Lowood School. The unchallenged dominance of the tyrannical clergyman Mr. Brocklehurst melts seamlessly into terror-inducing Trunchbull of Crunchem Hall Elementary. Both stories present these formidable adversaries as the source of evil in an otherwise sacred institution, terrorizing their students for no discernible reason. Our small, unassuming heroines are personally wronged by these monsters in ways that reveal surprising insight into the maturation of fear. The ‘adult version’ presents a punishment of public humiliation and the accusation of untruth, while in Dahl’s world children are sent to The Chokey – a broom closet of isolation filled only with darkness and protruding nails. Though the young are terrorized by things they can (or cannot) see and physically feel, adults dread the sight and feeling of others, rather than themselves.
If you believe at age five – as most five-year-olds do – that where there’s good, there’s evil, you’re likely to think the same at age 65. Which brings us to our opposition, in the form of two angelic teachers: Miss Temple and Miss Honey. Gently nurturing and protecting the young protagonists, these women are the embodiment of the caring mother that neither girl possesses. More importantly, they serve as the primary representation of what is highly valued by authors Dahl and Bronte: family. Recurrent almost ad nauseum in Jane Eyre is the belief that familial ties, or relationships to those who are alike (and therefore meant to be together) create an almost magical bond, enabling not only health and happiness, but the ability to subconsciously communicate across long distances. This mystical power takes on a more modern form in Matilda’s telekinetic powers, supposedly caused by diverted excess energy in her enormous brain. The cause lies with her neglectful parents, obtuse to the point of completely missing their daughter’s extraordinary prodigy. Her bond with Miss Honey becomes increasingly familial as Matilda involves herself in the personal problems of her caring teacher, finally resulting in their becoming a legal family when Matilda abandons her own.
In constantly encountering parallels between the two novels, what becomes increasingly apparent is the resemblance between Matilda and Jane themselves. Readers will find them both to be quiet misfits who desire little more than to love and be loved in return. They share a relationship to the literary genre as well: Matilda in her use of books as an escape from the tortures of the real world (ironically, Jane Eyre is mentioned), and Jane, in addition to reading herself, in her need to live a life that is ‘readable’. Throughout the course of the novel, she directly addresses readers, explaining to them that she has omitted or altered portions of her own life in order to increase the narrative appeal. Again, the same values are manifested in ways molded only by an increase in age – not a change in values.
Arnold's novel seems poised to enact a much-deserved act of feminist revenge, something like Jean Rhys's "Wide Sargasso Sea," which exposed the brutishness of Rochester in "Jane Eyre." But Arnold is ultimately too charitable and too attendant to the historical record for anything like that. "Girl in a Blue Dress" is, among many things, the story of one woman's remarkable resistance to bitterness and the blessings that eventually flow from that spirit. (Ron Charles)Another Brontë reference comes from The Boston Phoenix. A review of the exhibition Butterfly Flight & Other Stories by Anne Siems in Walker Contemporary (Boston):
She mixes in early American stenciled wall decorations and designs that young girls embroidered into samplers. She sets it all atop dreamy soft-focus landscapes rendered with a golden brown patina that makes the paintings look antique. The combination transforms these influences from just a pastiche into something that feels fresh and sweeps you up like ravishing moments from a Brontë sisters novel. (Greg Cook)The Fuquay-Varina Independent talks about Joyce Hope's book Joy Comes in the Morning:
Lauren MJ Connelly, published freelance writer and blogger at www.puremama.com, says the book “is destined to become an instant classic. This beautiful novel has the potential for being developed into other forms of media a la the works of Laura Ingalls Wilder or the Brontë sisters.”Fairweather Lewis posts about Fritz Eichenberg's 1943 illustrations for Wuthering Heights and Addicted to Film mentions several Jane Eyre adaptations.
Emily Brontë's eternal love story Wuthering Heights has inspired about 30 adaptations. Each new version clamours to set itself apart from the rest.The Independent quotes Wuthering Heights in an article about fusion across the arts:
Deepak Verma has found the perfect way to make his telling of the tragic love story stand out from the crowd. He has moved the story wholesale from the wilds of the Yorkshire Moors to the sun-scorched desert of Rajasthan.
Heathcliff becomes Krishan and song-and-dance numbers a la classic Bollywood movies become part of the script.
"People who love the novel understand that it's a universal story. To me it's about a kid with nothing brought up in a house where he sees the good life and where he meets the love of his life," says Verma.
"Reading the story, I found a real parallel, because of the social structures and all the other frameworks of the story, with today's India.
"It might seem strange to some people to relate Victorian England with modern India, but the issues of class and society and all those big things are there in the story and in today's India. I wanted to embrace that with this piece."
The project has been a labour of love for Verma, who has spent almost five years seeing his original idea go from concept to stage.(...)
But it takes some guts to bring a new version of Wuthering Heights to Yorkshire.
"I'm really excited about it coming to Yorkshire. It's the last venue on the nationwide tour and we're going to be really celebrating when it comes to an end next week," says Verma.
Not even a little nervous?
"It's been really well received and we're talking to people about it going into the West End. I think that helps, the fact that it has been so well received."
He doesn't seem to quite grasp the gravity of the situation. He has not just moved one of Yorkshire's greatest novels to Rajasthan, but has also, judging by early reports, fair butchered the story.
Verma's version features Catherine and Heathcliff and their love story, but does not follow the latter half of the novel and the story of their children.
"I took a long look at it and had to decide what story from all of this I wanted to tell in the two hours that I had on stage," says Verma.
"And it was clear to me that the story I really wanted to tell was the eternal love story between Cathy and Heathcliff."
Verma finally reveals the other reason he is confident that Yorkshire audiences won't simply be up in arms and see it as sacrilegious.
Brontë's book, clearly, is the major source of inspiration for the new play.
But Verma has also returned to the classic age of Bollywood of the Fifties and Sixties for his inspiration.
"The stories from Bollywood of that era are about big emotions and big stories. It seemed a perfect fit for this story and particularly the way I wanted to tell it. I wanted to take the aesthetic of those classic movies and bring that to the stage as a part of this story. It just made sense to me," says Verma.
The musical has already secured a loyal – and culturally diverse – following at its London performances. Verma says that Indian audiences are fiercely loyal to shows that they enjoy, but the universal nature of the story has brought in people from all cultures.
The show has been developed and produced by Tamasha, one of the leading Asian theatre companies in the country.
Run by Kristine Landon-Smith and Sudha Bhuchar, who played Sanjay's love interest Meena in Eastenders, the company was set up almost 20 years ago. Its name is taken from the Punjabi word meaning commotion, and it was established to address the paucity of Asian work on British stages.
Verma says that it is recognised now not as a leading Asian company, but a leading "theatre company whose work has an Asian slant to it".
"The reason I wanted to tell Wuthering Heights on stage was because I have always felt a real connection to the character of Heathcliff," says Verma.
He says he was also always attracted to the darkness of the novel.
"I love the images of the dark moors, but for me, the key to Wuthering Heights is the love story that is at its centre. That's why it works perfectly as a Bollywood musical."
Wuthering Heights is at Harrogate Theatre, June 16 to 20. (Nick Ahad)
The worry now is that the concept could soon buckle with the strain of carrying so many disparate meanings – some contradictory – and market pressures. "Fusion" for example, describes Chadha's populist pastiche Bride and Prejudice as well as the new, colourful production of Wuthering Heights by theatre company Tamasha, which transports the story to Rajasthan using both Bollywood and British musical theatre styles, a combo previously served up in Bombay Dreams. Audiences do love such productions of borrowing and cheek. (Yasmin Alibhai-Brown)The Telegraph interviews Tom Hardy and several mentions to Wuthering Heights 2009 slip in (with the eternal will be on ITV1 later this year):
Hardy’s also played Charles Bronson, the notoriously violent prisoner, and Bill Sikes. And he’s going to be Heathcliff in ITV1’s upcoming version of Wuthering Heights. In episode one of that he bashes his head against a wall with such force that you can hear a crunch. (...)We were afraid that someone would link together the results of the Ryan Commission in Ireland and Jane Eyre and it has happened. In The Independent or the Irish Times:
In a preview of the ITV1 adaptation of Wuthering Heights, it’s hard to tell whether Hardy’s Heathcliff is going to hit or kiss his Cathy (who will be played by his The Take co-star Charlotte Riley) – which is just how you want him. And there’s a tenderness to his performance that he hasn’t had the chance to show before now. (Serena Davies)
"Some of us read the Bronte's accounts of what their powers-that-be did to orphans. We were horrified. It gave us bad dreams. But it was fiction. That was the great thing. It was fiction. It hadn't happened. Not really. And certainly not in Ireland. Now, we know different. Now, we know, courtesy of the Ryan Commission, that, within living memory and within our own country, we visited comparable horrors on our children. Let us not hide behind euphemisms. This was not just 'failure to protect'. This was torture, pure and simple." (Lise Hand)The Books on Film Examiner talks about Robert Pattinson and suggests a period piece for the actor:
Would you pick a "period" piece such as his part as the older Rawdy Crawley in Vanity Fair based on the classic novel by William Thackeray (that subsequently got cut but put back in for the DVD)? A Jane Austen or Bronte novel, perhaps? How about another biopic, something like his role as Salvador Dali in Little Ashes? (Connie Ann Kirk)And the St Petersburg Times reviews Jack Murnighan's Beowulf on the Beach:
Then he offers, for each book, the Buzz, which he defines as "your cocktail party Ph.D." — what most people know about the book whether they've read it or not. (A Farewell to Arms is a great war novel, Jane Eyre's title character is a fine role model for girls.)(Colette Bancroft)Hungtington News selects Jayne Eyre (sic) and Wuthering Heights as favorite romantic movies. The Banned Books Group recommends both novels as Urgent Reads: The 20 Books You Must Read This Year!, in the Rockland Republican Journal. The Worksop Guardian talks about an awarded local teacher with a Brontë project:
Since winning the award, the Valley teacher has brought in a new lesson plan for Wuthering Heights that includes group discussions and presentation that prompted quiet murmurings of applause from her pupils. (Tom Glover)The Times (South-Africa) concludes this article about reading love stories with a mention to Wuthering Heights:
I’m a collection called My Mistress’s Sparrow is Dead, a book of classic love stories edited by Pulitzer Prize winner Jeffrey Eugenides, offered as “a cure for lovesickness and an antidote to adultery.” I like the idea that reading saves marriages; it should be used in literacy campaigns. The book includes stories by Anton Chekhov - The Lady with the Little Dog, which recently starred in the film of The Reader– Alice Munro Denis Johnson, Vladimir Nabokov, Raymond Carver and Richard Ford. With such a variety of well-written takes on everything love related you might as well just marry this book. I’m sure that by the time I finish it, the sun will shine and I can finally fall asleep without artificial assistance. Until then, if you’re reading this, I still like to imagine you as Heathcliff to my Cathy, throwing yourself on my grave when you realize your mistake and I’m using the book to disguise myself as I sit, watching your building, waiting to see what you’re reading now. (Tymon Smith)On the blogosphere, Love Romance Passion interviews the author Sandy Lender, an absolute Jane Eyre fan (as we posted before):
10. Is there anything else you’d like to share with us?When You're Happy, I'm Happy =D and Giraffe Days post about Wuthering Heights, Hey, Little Sister talks about samplers, embroidery and the Brontës, ihartyou23 finds echoes of Emily Brontë's novel in the Filipino soap opera Tayond Dalawa.Sandy Lender: This might seem a wee bit odd, but in addition to my Choices Meant for Gods, I would encourage folks also to read Jane Eyre,
by Charlotte Bronte. This novel is one of the best ever written. It’s my favorite of all time. There are elements in Jane Eyre that influence my writing on a conscious and subconscious level, and folks who have already read the book will probably pick out a few of those elements in Choices Meant for Gods.
ABC, Australia's national public broadcaster, has also acquired Mammoth Screen's new four-part adaptation of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights for ITV. The drama, which stars RocknRolla actor Tom Hardy as Heathcliff, is yet to get a confirmed TX date in the UK.Four parts? The version we know is just 142 minutes long.
Wuthering Heights and The 39 Steps will form part of ITV Global Entertainment's drama slate. (Will Hurrell in Broadcastnow)
The Bronte shrine - shivers and gloom liveThe writer Sarah Shun-Lien is interviewed in the San Diego Reader:
26 March 1955
Norman Shrapnel
"Bronte Products - Cabinet Makers, Undertakers," a weathered signboard announces, and one sees what it means. None of the British literary shrines is stronger or more faithful in atmosphere. Haworth, for all its lively beckonings to the tourists who are now being drawn to it by Charlotte's centenary, cannot help conveying a sense of isolation and mortality.
A scowl of dark stone, hewn as it seems out of a recalcitrant hilltop, the place preserves a rigour that the Bronte postcards, the Bronte Guest House, the Bronte Cinema Company, the Bronte buses and tours, the Bronte fisheries, house furnishers, and cafe, and the Bronte Lodge of Buffaloes are quite unable to soften. And they would be wrong if they wanted to. For no true pilgrim would come here - however gay his plastic mac, however uneerie the Yorkshire pudding he can eat in the lurching main street without expecting to shiver a little.
Shiver he does. The humanisers may try their best but the ghosts win, hands down. The living seem upstarts. To all appearance it might still be, as it was then, a manufacturing village in the Honour of Pontefract, with 4,668 inhabitants. Now there is this other industry, bringing some 50,000 visitors in a good year. The Bronte Society runs its affairs with taste and restraint, and yet it is impossible to visit Haworth Parsonage, now a museum, without feeling that one is intruding upon a passionately private life.
The air is domestic, unbearably mournful, yet reproachfully vital. Samplers worked by little dead Brontes, those other sisters, are on the walls. Here is a Bronte book of music, published in 1894, with fugues built on the notes of the sisters' initials. But such light relief is a mere holding back of the pervasive sadness.
Emotion is the last thing you expect to feel in a literary shrine; here, even to the most stalwart non-reader of Charlotte Bronte, it is in every nook and corner. From Charlotte's window upstairs the outlook is much as she knew it. And there by the window, as if watching and listening for Branwell's tipsy return, stands Charlotte's lavender silk dress surmounted by an alert bonnet. This centenary summer will bring visitors from many countries. The silent watcher by the window in Charlotte's room will no doubt forgive the mass intrusion. Her legend and Haworth's are now one.
Back in Haworth the Baptist Church ladies are showing signs of a reaction against this atmosphere of female doom. They are producing a Yorkshire dialect sketch entitled "Anastasia Joins t'Domino Club". (Norman Shrapnel)
What book has been most life-changing for you?What's on Stage reviews a Prima Artists entertainment showcase to clients in the cruise industry (verbatim) and finds the most improbable Brontë connection of the month:
“Jane Eyre completely killed me when I read it in eighth grade — it’s one of my favorite middle-school memories. I was totally gripped by the story, and I felt such a connection to Jane and was swept up by the figure of Mr. Rochester. And I think, in part because they had a picture of Charlotte Brontë on the cover, that it was the first time I began to think about the writer, the person out of whose imagination the story arose. I’ve read the book at many different points in my life — it’s interesting because Jane Eyre is also a teacher, and the book describes her both as a child and as a young woman. I never thought of the connection between Jane Eyre and Ms. Hempel Chronicles, but it’s funny to think that they cover somewhat similar territory. (Sonia Eliot)
The second Elvis impersonator of the day was another hunk of burning love by the name of Mario Kombu. This particular version of the king of rock and roll was of the sultry, brooding variety, more a Heathcliff of the Elvis world really. (Mark Ritchie)Another highly improbably Brontë landscape is Spanish Bay (in Pebble Beach, California). But not according to the Monterey County Herald:
First, let me say unequivocally that no one can argue with the view off the patio that looks onto bonny, undulating greens and out to sea. Scanning that windswept horizon, you fully expect to see Heathcliff roaming about, tearing his hair and calling for Cathy. (Mike Hale and Melissa Snyder)Austinist reviews the latest album by The Decemberists: Hazards of Love:
Leaning heavily on imagery from Wuthering Heights, Kate Bush's Hounds of Love, almost every Greek tragedy ever written and of course, Andrew Lloyd Weber, The Hazards of Love does live up to the story-telling heights Meloy aimed for. In terms of the music, we find it a bit stunted. (Paige Maguire)EDIT: The Indie Credential gives more clues about the "Wuthering Heights imagery":
In fact, the characters in this tale remind me a bit of Heathcliff and Kathy (sic) in Wuthering Heights - another haunting tale - but one in which the lovers got what they deserved because of their own inability to handle their emotions and act like decent human beings.It doesn't come as a surprise as The Decemberists covered Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights in the past.
Confessions of an addict: A power higher than any couch potato has mandated the switch to digital TV. The time has come to give in.Here are a few blogs: Gone to Falmouth writes about Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea and Hidden Attraction posts justs about Jane Eyre. The Absurd Heroine doesn't want Villette to end. And Inbetweenies reminisces about a trip to Haworth a couple of years ago. Incidentally, the road to the Brontë Falls is the subject of this picture uploaded to flickr by Charlotte.Taylor83. Finally on youtube, Jim Clark has posted a poem animation of Charlotte Brontë's Mementos.
What followed was a passage equal in horror and desperation to Bronte’s description of Mister Rochester’s mad wife in Jane Eyre. You know, the hidden loony, the “dark secret” of the family, sitting in the gloomy attic, all hope gone.
It seems that, following the federal mandate to switch from analog to digital TV, Melissa was enticed to get Cable TV with some “On Demand” options. The addiction began almost immediately. (Hugh Gilmore)
“Bloody hell, Gordon, you’re freaking me out.” Is that what wives normally say first thing in the morning to their husbands? I don’t know what to expect any more. Gordon Brown, my Heathcliff of a husband, is so volatile at the moment (who am I trying to kid? It’s been like that ever since we started dating, or “stepping out” as Gordon liked to put it). So this morning I did what I’ve learnt to do every day, half-open one eye to gauge his mood. I flipped out. His face was one inch in front of mine waiting for me to wake up. It was such a shock I jumped and nearly smacked him in the face with my head. Once he had my full attention he started rabbiting on: “Sarah, I’ve done it. I’ve bloody gone and done it.”The Telegraph & Argus announces that the Red House Museum in Gomersal (Mary Taylor's house) is in the middle of a spring cleaning... in autumn: (Picture source)
Due to the busy programme of events at Red House, Gomersal, each room undergoes specialist cleaning every one to two years.The Summit Daily News reviews the performances of Charles Vance's The Mystery of Irma Vep at the Backstage Theatre in Breckenridge, Colorado.
The beautiful Georgian coffee pot, held here by museum officer Helga Hughes, is one of 200 artefacts currently undergoing preventative conservation cleaning in the kitchen at the Oxford Road museum, which was once the home of textile merchant and manufacturer Joshua Taylor.
“Every artefact needs treating differently,” said Helga. “This is a really careful process.”
Hogs hair and pony hair brushes, specially selected for their softness, are among the staff’s special cleaning kit. Separate brushes are used for different materials.
The white gloves Helga is wearing are worn to prevent tarnish caused by acids in the skin. Helga said it is a preventative process to stop dust damaging the objects. (Sally Clifford)
Shelly Bordas directs the production which follows the story of a hunchback stableman named Nicodemus (Willard) and housemaid Jane (Wee) who interact with Lord Edgar (Wee) and Lady Enid (Willard), characters that are a cross between “Wuthering Heights” and “Psycho.” (Leslie Brefelt)And... BlogCritics Magazine reviews Wuthering Heights. The first part is published here. The Yorkshire Post has an article about a couple of crime incidents in Haworth. Novel Readings posts about Pedagogy, Evaluation, and What We Look for in 'the' Novel, an interesting post with some Jane Eyre appearances. Encore une histoire du fil... posts some pictures of newly made Brontë samplers. On Meloukhia we can read two (not very enthusiastic) reviews of Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea. Le télèphone pleure is, in contrast, publishes a ravishing review of Wuthering Heights (in Spanish)
So what led you to take up the subject of debt?EDIT (2 October 2008) (from ohnotheydidnt):
Long ago, I was a graduate student in Victorian literature. When you think of the 19th-century novel, you think romance — you think Heathcliff, Cathy, Madame Bovary, etc. But the underpinning structure of those novels is money, and Madame Bovary could have cheerfully gone on committing adultery for a long time if she hadn’t overspent. (Deborah Solomon)
“I became a Victorian. That was my field of study at univer-sity - and that's the age par excellence in which plots are driven by money and people are embroiled in an outbreak of capitalism. Wuthering Heights is driven by money: Heathcliff earns a fortune and then comes back to extract the house from its previous owner. Madame Bovary would have been quite all right had she kept within her budget. It's not the adultery - it's the debt that sank her.”Today we have just another sample of that (perverse) journalist custom of defending one cause by attacking just another that happens to be on the journalist's mind for some reason. Christina Patterson vehemently defends in The Independent that Shandy Hall (Laurence Sterne's house) in Yorkshire should be preserved but thinks necessary to add:
Apart from the world of Brontë shortbread and sub-Austen samplers, there are a number of buildings in this country that operate not as sacred temples to writers elevated to the top table of heritage Britain – deified, commodified and occasionally revivified by Andrew Davies – but as living, and often leaking, tributes to some of this country's greatest minds, and their work.The Daily Star (Bangladesh) has reread Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things and thinks that
The settings and landscapes of Aymenem can easily be compared to Bronte's Wuthering Heights and give it character. It is very much visible in the book that the kind of landscape the writer grew up in is still very much living in her --- the way she loves a tree or a river or the color of the earth. It is a different kind of love. (Shusmita Amin Chowdhury)Categories: References, Wuthering Heights
When I was about 10, my family and I sat down together to watch a television movie. It was Jane Eyre starring George C. Scott as the brooding Mr. Rochester. I was hooked; I loved Mr. Rochester, I loved Jane, I loved the moving score by John Williams.The Berkshire Eagle announces the premiere of a theatre play with some Brontë references:
Later, I pulled my mother's school copy of the novel from the bookshelf and started reading. My 10-year-old self was shocked to find that the book started with scenes not shown in the movie (I had no idea then how movies could chop up great stories). After reading the book, I found that I loved reading Jane Eyre even more than watching the movie.
While reading the book for this review, I asked myself why the book is so appealing to me. The story is not without its flaws; it is hugely contrived with plot twists that are not plausible. Certainly the gothic romance aspects of the novel were fascinating to me as a teenager, but there is so much more to it than that. Then late one night while reading I had an epiphany: I want Jane Eyre for my new BFF.
Why would anyone want to be best friends with a character from an early 19th-century novel? There are many reasons. Jane is kind; after she turns on her aunt and is sent to boarding school, she becomes one of the most compassionate heroines in fiction. I could always count on her to be there for me.
Jane is honest; she tells Mr. Rochester he is not handsome and tells the reader that she (Jane) is not beautiful. She understands her own flaws and is forthright about them. I know she would tell me if my new haircut was a mistake.
Jane is loyal; she stays true to Mr. Rochester. I don't think I would ever have to find a new BFF. And Jane is forgiving (see the above about Mr. Rochester; also take note that she forgave her cruel aunt.)
Jane is a listener; she listens while everyone around her talks. I would love to have someone like her listen raptly as I chattered on and on. And Jane is moral; even in the depth of her love for Mr. Rochester she leaves him rather than become his mistress. She would never suggest we go clubbing.
But the No. 1 reason I want Jane as my best friend is that she is interesting. What a wonderfully intriguing (if not real) life she has lived. What a great way she has of telling a story. (Yes, I know it is actually Charlotte Brontë telling the story, but still…) Can you imagine getting a phone call from her saying, "Wait until I tell you what just happened!"?
I still enjoy watching all the Jane Eyre movies. There are many — the newest one will star Ellen Page (Juno), and I look forward to seeing it. But I'm sure it will not be as good as the book. (Lesley Cunningham)
Karen Zacarias' "The Book Club Play," which opens tonight on the Berkshire Theatre Festival Main Stage after three nights of previews, is ostensibly about literature and six members of a book club — Lily (Cherise Boothe), Alex (Bhavesh Patel), Will (Tom Story), Rob (C.J. Wilson), Jen (Anne Louise Zachary) and Ana (Keira Naughton). Their love of books carries them from Harry Potter, "Pat the Bunny," "Jurassic Park," "Son of Tarzan" and "Chicken Soup for the Soul" to Hemingway, Cervantes, Joyce, Nabakov[sic], The Brontes, Shakespeare, Angelou, Tolstoy and Margaret Mitchell.The Oakland Tribune correspondant to the British Open Championship 2008 has a strange idea of what Wuthering Heights looks like:
Most clubhouses at old British courses are directly out of Mary Poppins or Wuthering Heights, all brick and gables. Birkdale's is a Rubic's cube of a structure, various blocks with two huge picture windows. (Art Spander)Winged Ink posts an article about Anne Carson's The Glass Essay:
I'm posting my piece I wrote about it, which was originally published in the New Zealand Poetry Society magazine, A Fine Line (May 2008). (...)The poem can be read here.
The final reason I love The Glass Essay is because it inspires me. It was either during or immediately after reading this poem that I sat down and wrote my own Emily Brontë poem, ‘Passion’. The idea for it had been sloshing around in my head for some time, but I hadn’t known how to write it. Reading The Glass Essay unlocked something, and it just poured out.
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