Like you’ve come in, and they’ve just left

That Shelf interviews Frances O'Connor about 'blending fact and fiction in Emily'.

Emma Badame: The three Brontë sisters are often referred to or treated as almost a single entity, as opposed to individuals. But they are so different, and their work is so unique. What was it about Emily, in particular, that drew you to her story and where Frances O'Connor: I read Wuthering Heights before I read Jane Eyre and I just really loved that book. I’ve always felt like Charlotte, and Mrs. Gaskell, edited Emily in a way that was just like ‘this is who she was, and she’s here but now let’s go on to the main star’, which is Charlotte. I mean, I love Charlotte, and she’s an amazing artist. But I strongly identify with Emily–I’m an introvert too. Sometimes introverts do get sidelined because they’re not demonstrative. So I guess it felt like bringing her into the light and just experiencing what is it to be an artist who’s introverted and has a lot of energy and power underneath that. That felt very evocative to me, and it could be a great story. So that was the opening idea. [...]

E.B.: I think Emma does such a good job of capturing all those different elements of the character. I wondered if you could talk a bit about how she became your Emily Brontë and how you worked together to bring your vision to the screen.

F.O'C:She was one of the first people who auditioned. I didn’t really know her work, and when the casting director suggested her, I was open to it, but I didn’t quite know what to expect. She just blew me away in the room. There’s something just about who she is. I think she’s just very authentic. Have you met her yet?

E.B,: Not yet. But she’s so interesting to watch. Really riveting in everything she does.

F.O'C: She’s riveting, exactly. She’s so intelligent, but she’s also very much her own person. A lot of the time with actresses, we just want to be loved. But she doesn’t really. There’s something about who she is where she’s just like, “I am myself.” Also, it helped that she also loves Emily Brontë. She was also a geek. So I felt like we both had something to say about her.

E.B,. I knew I liked her.

F.O'C: [laughs] Exactly. I knew I liked her too. She’s also just an incredible actress. Her presence on screen is pretty electric, I think. Then working on it together, it wasn’t at all prescriptive. We just talked about it and kept talking about it, and then when we were on set, we just kept exploring. We tried to keep it really fresh and moving and not telegraphing things like, “We’re heading for here.” We wanted to keep it really alive. That really helped me with the shooting style and everything too, I think. Because the main objective was to try and make her as real as possible. It’s not historical. It’s relatable. [...]

E.B, Like you were talking about earlier–feeling it as opposed to viewing it through glass like a historical artifact at a museum.

F.O'C: Yeah. You’re in there with them, and it feels very real. Then Abel [Korzeniowski, the film’s composer] and I talked about the music reflecting Emily Brontë’s mood and her emotion. If it’s really big, then go with that. Then you have these quite brutal cuts in sound to complete silence.

E.B, Speaking of going big: There’s one scene in particular that comes to mind in terms of Emily’s intensity of feeling. The scene where each character takes a turn wearing an old mask as a sort of game. Each person’s go-round is quite comical until Emily puts it on and things become quite serious and dark. Can you talk about filming that scene? I imagine it was maybe one of the more challenging ones to do, both because of the intensity and because it’s quite intricately shot.

F.O'C: I knew it was one of the big set pieces. It felt very ambitious, and you’re right, there were a lot of shots plus all of the sound and music. The balance was going to be really crucial. We really did a lot of prep for that scene in terms of Nanu [Segal, the cinematographer] and I working out exactly what the best way to shoot it was, to tell the story we wanted to tell. We rehearsed it a lot too with the ensemble until it was really firing on all cylinders. My ambition was to create a very long scene. I love long scenes. Where you think it’s one thing, but as it progresses the characters and the audience realize they’re in a different scene altogether. So it was a challenge, but it was actually one of our favourite things to work on. [...]

E.B.: Charlotte was so young when she had to take charge of the family too. Because their mother was gone and someone had to take on the responsibilities. She felt constrained too, but in a different way from Emily. But they were both victims of expectations.

F.O'C: She was always the one who said, “We’re going to need to make some money to support ourselves.” Whereas Emily really just wanted to live in the house with her imagination. So that had to be very tough for Charlotte. But I slightly push the narrative there in terms of showing Charlotte as being more controlling because I think it helps this particular story. The narrative became its own thing where it had its own requirements.

E.B.: It definitely helps to reiterate Emily’s unique connection to the house, Haworth, and to the land. It was clear that her friends were her family and the house was where she needed to be. As an introvert, it seems to be where she got her energy and her creativity. She couldn’t survive being apart from that. I wanted to ask a bit about the location too because it is so essential to her story–and to all the Brontës. All of their books speak to their love of the Yorkshire moors, in particular. How important was it to find the perfect place to film? And where did you finally choose?

F.O'C: We did actually shoot in Haworth, in their town, and near the parsonage. But the moors around there are quite trampled now. So we went to a place called Dent, where it’s still very wild and beautiful and how you would, in your imagination, think of Brontë Country. But it also presented some challenges in terms of shooting. But it was so worth it. It was very important to create an environment that felt very evocative, and that could make you feel like you were really there. To do that, we looked pretty hard to try to find places that were going to do all that for us. It was fun too because it’s so beautiful up there and you’re like, “Oh, my God. We’re so spoiled for choice.” But having to narrow it down to what was realistic for the shoot was tough.

E.B.:I travelled to Haworth and to the parsonage when I was about nine. That’s when I really fell in love with the stories. But I was interested in the location you choose for the reason you mention, because the original area has so built-up in comparison.

F.O'C: It’s still beautiful, though, right?

E.B.: It’s absolutely beautiful.

F.O'C: Then going to the parsonage. Isn’t that just a crazy moment when you go in there?

E.B.: It was such an integral part of who they all were, so it really feels like you’re connecting to them directly.

F.O'C: Like you’ve come in, and they’ve just left. [...]

E.B.: What do you think it is about the Brontës that has captured people’s imagination for so long? It’s been 175 years since they passed, and there are still regular adaptations of their work and hundreds of websites and blogs dedicated to them. There are so few novels, to begin with, but the interest never seems to fade.

F.O'C: They’re just brilliant stories, but also there’s something about them that’s just very real. There’s something in that I think, that you feel a connection. I think people feel like they know them and they feel a slight ownership over them too. The work feels very personal for something of that era. It’s surprising. I feel like that probably happened because they were quite isolated and didn’t have the influence of society. It was only after they published it that they realized, “Wow, we’ve actually done something slightly risky.” Something out there. Charlotte just went into damage control mode at the time as I’m sure you know. But that’s interesting too, I think.

E.B.: It is interesting because Charlotte is the only one who lived long enough to see the real popularity of their work–the criticism too–under their own names and the celebrity that then followed.

F.O'C: Yeah, to see famous people take an interest. But the Mrs. Gaskell biography was really an exercise in publicity, so the whole of Victorian society would realize, “Oh, look, she’s very decent.” (Emma Badame)

AnneBrontë.org features Mary Taylor.

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The Mad Woman and the Heather

A couple of alerts for today, January 11:

1. The programme Poetry Please on BBC Radio 4 will include a reading of a poem by Emily Brontë:

Sunday 11 January 2009 1630 (Rpt Saturday 17 January 2330)

In the first programme Lia Williams will be reading a great variety of poems as well as two of her own favourites, by the late Harold Pinter. There will also be recordings of Michael Williams reading Cecil Day Lewis' The Album, and Matt Harvey reading one of his own poems.

High Waving Heather by Emily Brontë
From: Brontë - Poems
Publ: Everyman

2. And a new series of Let's Talk About It begins today in Roxboro, North Carolina:

Let's Talk About It Series
Event Date: January 11th, 2009 - March 8th, 2009
Event Time: 2:00pm - 4:00pm
Location: Person County Public Library
Contact: Phyliss Boatwright - pboatwright@roxboro-courier.com
Event Details:
Let's Talk About It 2009 will feature five meetings to discuss "Mad Women in the Attic" a literary series offered by the Friends of the Person County Library and paid for through a grant from the NC Humanities Council. Meetings will be held Jan. 11, Jan. 25, Feb. 8, Feb. 22 and March 8. Books to be discussed are Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gillman, Surfacing by Margaret Atwood and Sula by Toni Morrison. Scholars from NC universities will speak on the books and lead group discussions. The books are free and are available at the library.

Categories: Alert, Audio-Radio, Poetry, Talks

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Let's not think of these sisters as being these twee women

The Yorkshire Post features Anita Rani's Sky Arts documentary Sisters of Disruption.

An unknowing visitor to National Portrait Gallery, so abundantly stocked with canvases showing the great and the good, could easily wander by without taking much notice of the only surviving group portrait of three famous sisters, Anne, Emily and Charlotte Brontë.

Television presenter Anita Rani, born and raised in Bradford near to the former Brontë home in Haworth, is very familiar with the image painted by their troubled brother Branwell.

“We had the iconic painting of the Brontë siblings on the wall in school and they've loomed over me my whole life,” she says, talking to The Yorkshire Post.

“Wuthering Heights was just one of those books - I can't even remember when I first read it - but I remember reading it under my duvet with my torch, but really connecting to the story and its supernatural nature. It's sort of bleak, Gothic nature.

I guess that when you grow up in Yorkshire, in West Yorkshire, you understand that. It's in you. I’ve just done lots of interviews with people trying to explain what that means, but if anybody's walked up on the moors as a kid, you can't explain it. There's a real freedom in those moors, but there's also a broody, dark, mystical, bleakness about them - but there's romance in that. And that was me as a teenager. Reading Wuthering Heights, wearing Dr Martens, stomping across the moors, listening to the Smiths in my headphones, raging against everything that I was being told, trying to figure out why I was being told that I had to behave in a certain way, and I actually just wanted to go and live my own life.

“Then fast forward 35-odd years, here I am telling their story - and it turns out they were doing the same thing.”

She explores her heroines in a new documentary, The Brontës by Anita Rani: Sisters of Disruption, which airs on Sky Arts on Tuesday, May 20.

Anita delves into her own “obsession” with the famous siblings and also learns about what really motivated their writing, hearing about the circumstances in which they lived, discussing racial representation and discovering the ways in which their texts are still used to help women suffering today.

Anita meets experts and along the way visits the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Brontë Parsonage in Haworth, and walks on the moors nearby. She also takes a trip to her parents’ old business, drawing parallels between her own world and the sisters’ lives.

One clear picture she comes away with is that - despite the many adaptations of Emily’s Wuthering Heights which present it mainly as a romantic love story, for example - much of the sisters’ works are full of rage.

“Let's not romanticise them too much and let's not think of these sisters as being these twee women sitting around crocheting and knitting,” says Anita, 47, who lives in Hackney.

“They are serious, smart people who are worldly. Well, were they worldly-wise? I mean, they grew up in that place in Yorkshire but they were reading about what was happening in the world and they were reflecting on what was happening in the world - they were paying attention to what was happening. Even the title, Sisters of Disruption, which they were… it feels like the documentary itself is disrupting a narrative, which feels very good to have a punk spirit which I think they had as well.

“Let's remember that women raging and having to change the agenda and talk about equality is nothing new.”

Anita talks to Professor Katy Mullin, from the University of Leeds, who was lead researcher for Coercive Control: From Literature into Law, which the institution describes as the first interdisciplinary project to consider the complex relationship between British literary fiction and the crime of coercive control.

Prof Mullin tells Anita how Anne’s book The Tenant of Wildfell Hall - a “radical novel”, she says - is being used as an aid for domestic violence charity in Bradford.

Anita says: “That's so powerful, that a piece of literature that was written 180 years ago can still have so much meaning to it that it's used as a resource to help women who are going through similar things now in the modern era.”

It speaks to “the power of art and the power of that storytelling and the power of her conviction,” says the Woman’s Hour presenter, who released her memoir The Right Sort of Girl in 2021, which was followed up by her novel Baby Does A Runner in 2023.

Anne might have been the most quiet of the sisters, but no less angry. She’s also probably Anita’s favourite of the three.

She says: “The story that she tells was so taboo - to talk about a woman who leaves a marriage, leaves an abusive relationship, and empowers herself and takes her child with her. I think, for me, that is so badass. I can relate to the anger. I guess what I feel is, as a child I always felt that I wanted to do so much, and I could see everything happening around me and feel all the weight of expectation, but now I've got to a point where I don't actually care about any of it anymore.”

Meanwhile, there are debates about race, too. Actors who have portrayed Heathcliff on screen over have tended to be white but the possibility that the character was not - he is described in the book as "dark-skinned” or a "a little Lascar" (a South Asian sailor) - has been raised more in recent years.

Anita, whose parents were born in India, felt it was important to include that conversation because, growing up in Heaton and Odsal, she had “never read anything like that before” - a novel with a key character “who could look like me”.

She says: “It's on the page. It's art, and if Heathcliff wasn't that for you, that's fine, that's who you've got in your head. But it is also very possible that he wasn't white, and very probable. I think it's written there,” she says. “It's pretty straightforward. I don't think people should have an issue with it. I really don't. And if people do have an issue with it, maybe they should ask themselves why.”

The documentary also looks at how Haworth in the early to mid-1800s was a difficult place to stay live.

Dr Claire O’Callaghan, editor-in-chief of Brontë Studies, the official journal of the Brontë Society, explains to viewers how residents in Haworth, which then had no sewer or drainage system, would throw out their waste and materials from the slaughterhouses.

“The streets were literally running with blood and all kinds of horror that you can’t even imagine today,” she says in the documentary.

The smell from the graveyard, too, was atrocious as the village’s one cemetery could not accommodate the number of deaths which happened at the time.

Anita says: “We don't think about something as basic as health and hygiene and just the stench and the rot and the disease that was all around them. Misery. And literally the smell. And how that would have informed them. We think about the moors and the landscape actually, that just what they're seeing day in day out would have absolutely seeped into their psyche and, ultimately, was their own downfall.” (John Blow)

NewsBytes shares '5 life lessons from 'Jane Eyre' that still make sense'.

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Let's talk about Jane Eyre

An alert from Cold Spring, Kentucky. Another talk of the Let's talk about it program.

LECTURES

Let's Talk About It, 5:30-7 p.m.

Dr. Tonya Krouse discusses "Jane Eyre" by Charlotte Bronte.
Cold Spring Branch Library, 3920 Alexandria Pike.
Discussion series led by Northern Kentucky University professors.
Presented by Campbell County Public Library. 859-781-6166. Cold Spring.

Categories: Alert , Talks , Jane Eyre

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'Elegant but confined houses'

The Telegraph and Argus reports that

A survey is being launched today that will help form a new 10-year cultural plan for the area.

The organisation behind the survey, Bradford Cultural Place Partnership, aims to understand what culture really means to the people of Bradford.

It could be the National Science and Media Museum or Brontë Parsonage, or the bright lights of Leeds Road, or Billy Pearce in pantomime at the Alhambra.

“Bradford District is a strong contender to be the next UK City of Culture for 2025. Regardless of the outcome of our bid, we believe that a thriving culture is key to the future success of our district. That’s why we’re making a 10-year plan for it and that’s why we need your help,” starts the survey. (Jo Winrow)

The Telegraph suggests 'Five beautiful corners of Britain that really need you to visit this autumn' including

Haworth Moor: tourist honeypot becomes novel encounter

Brontë country is deservedly popular. It’s easy to get to – with lovely Haworth and Hebden Bridge at its edges. It’s dotted with teashops and inns, and the house-museum – aka The Parsonage, recently helped survive by a £20,000 grant from the TS Eliot estate – provides welcome shelter from the sudden inclemencies that blow in on the unceasing westerlies. When you head out on to Haworth Moor in October, though, you feel the full impact of a landscape that inspired one of the greatest English novels. Nothing much stands between the Atlantic Ocean and the West Riding Pennines and fists of wind can suddenly blow in as if from nowhere. The uplands darken and the sky turns the shade of drystone walls. This is a time for a fast striding up to Top Withins to marvel at the way a young female writer forged a cosmic romance from the raw material of her immediate locality. “Lengthen night and shorten day,” wrote Emily. “Every leaf speaks bliss to me. Fluttering from the autumn tree.” Who could possibly disagree? (Chris Moss)

British Comedy Guide interviews actor Brian Blessed.

Is there a book or film that changed your life?

The book that absolutely changed my life was Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. It was the strangest thing because when it came out, the critics hated it, and it nearly broke her heart.

Eventually, I played Heathcliff in a Brontë Festival in Yorkshire and I went all over Brontë country - to the Brontë house, where she wrote Wuthering Heights. Wuthering Heights actually exists - just outside the Brontë home at Haworth Parsonage, where Emily Brontë is buried. Wuthering Heights is on the hill in the background; it's a cottage called 'Top Withins'.

The book, when it came out, was just too strong for the critics and they criticised it really heavily. The great tragedy is - and nobody really knows this - that she had written a second novel and she was so horrified, and so heartbroken, that she burned it. We don't know, to this day, what it was about.

Of course, months later, the world suddenly appreciated Wuthering Heights for what it was: bold, brilliant, powerful and dramatic - much more dramatic than Jane Eyre. (Si Hawkins)

The New Yorker has a very interesting article on Jane Austen which seems to place Charlotte Brontë's opinion of her in context.

But Austen was hardly a best-seller, and by the eighteen-twenties her books were often out of print. The critical line on her, even from admirers like Sir Walter Scott, was that she was a miniaturist specializing in an exceedingly narrow sector of British society, the landed gentry. Everyone agreed that she captured that world with astonishing precision; not everyone felt that it was a world worth capturing. “A carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden with neat borders and delicate flowers,” Charlotte Brontë described “Pride and Prejudice” to a friend. “I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen in their elegant but confined houses.”

Queen Victoria was a fan (a taste, possibly the only one, she shared with B. B. King), and after the publication of Austen-Leigh’s memoir, in 1869, Austen enjoyed a revival. What had put off readers like Charlotte Brontë now became the basis of her appeal. Her books transported readers to a simpler time and place. They were escapist fiction. Winston Churchill had “Pride and Prejudice” read aloud to him when he was recovering from pneumonia during the Second World War. “What calm lives they had, those people!” was his thought. “No worries about the French Revolution, or the crashing struggle of the Napoleonic Wars. Only manners controlling natural passion so far as they could, together with cultured explanations of any mischances.” [...]

Where Charlotte Brontë and Leslie Stephen went wrong was in assuming that the world of the Woodhouses and the Knightleys, the Bingleys and the Bertrams, was Jane Austen’s world, that she was writing about her own social circle. But Austen did not belong to that circle. She knew and observed people in it, of course, but her own family belonged to what is called the “pseudo-gentry”—families that lived like the gentry, had the gentry’s taste and manners, and often married into the gentry, but depended on a male family member with a job to maintain their style of life. (Louis Menand)

Fosters has asked the staff of York Public Library (Maine, USA) about their current reads.

Michelle read “Mexican Gothic” by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (Fiction):

“This is a very visual novel with a strong sense of ‘place.’ It’s descriptive such that I could picture everything as it was unfolding. The characters are well-drawn and the narrative so intriguing I couldn’t wait to pick the book back up again. The novel is Emily Brontë (dark, eerie) crossed with Isabel Allende (magical realism) with a smidge of H.P. Lovecraft (old school horror) thrown in for good measure. Bonus: it’s currently in development as a dramatic series for HULU. And I. CAN’T. WAIT.” (Jane Siviski)

The Tab talks to athletics star Amy Hunt about how she plans to balance a BA in English with running.

So how is she feeling about the actual academic bit? “Supervisions excite and terrify me, the first few might be really horrible. The most terrifying thing is that I know I need to start reading faster; it’s scary to think how much I need to read in one week.” She’s passionate about her course and its breadth of study. “We have the whole span of literature on the course; James Joyce and Bronte but then also last year’s Booker Prize Winner ‘Girl, Woman, Other’. It’s great to see that diversity and learn about a whole range of different people’s lives and times and experiences. Because it is so broad it is an amazing subject to do, I’ll be interested to see what I gravitate towards throughout my degree.” (Xanthe Robertson)

SyFy Wire's Chosen One of the Day is Catherine Linton's ghost.

October is nearly upon us and the spoopy times are a-comin’! So let’s talk about Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, obviously. 

The novel is a mainstay in high schools and colleges all over the country, and there’s a lot happening in those hundreds of pages — everyone sucks, everyone’s sad, and everyone’s mad. It’s great. But early on, there’s a particular passage from our narrator, Mr. Lockwood, relating a series of nightmares he’s had while staying in the Heights — Wuthering, obviously, and not to be confused with 96,000? Dollars? Holla!

ANYWAY, so this dude Lockwood is having some nightmares and one of those nightmares scared me so intensely as a reader that I still think about it a decade and a half after reading the book for the first time. In it, a small ghostly hand grabs his hand from outside of a window and he hears a child’s voice crying, “Let me in!” [...]

I have legitimately been haunted by this scene from Wuthering Heights since I was 20 years old—which, incidentally is how long that little kid ghost was haunting the moors, which I'm sure is just a coincidence and not significant at all. But it is horrifying and I’m probably going to have a nightmare because of this Chosen One of the Day so thanks a lot, internet. (Preeti Chhibber)

El cultural (Spain) mentions several Spanish writers who did translation on the side.

Como Ferlosio traduciendo a Collodi o, ya más conocidamente, Carmen Martín Gaite traduciendo a Flaubert, a Svevo, a las Brontë, a Virginia Woolf y un largo etcétera. (Ignacio Echevarría) (Translation)

Youth Journalism has an article on Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca, describing it as 'A modern-day adaption of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre'. For the Literature posts about Jane Eyre.

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New York, North Carolina, Ireland. Three Jane Eyre alerts

Three different alerts for today, September 12:

In the Hendrick Hudson Free Library in Montrose, New York:

Literature Lovers Book Discussion 12:30 PM

Description: Join an enlightening discussion of Charlotte Bronte's classic Jane Eyre September 12th at 12:30pm at the Hendrick Hudson Free Library in Montrose. Bring your lunch; the library will provide a beverage. Books are available at the circulation desk.

Contact Information : Hendrick Hudson Free Library, 185 Kings Ferry Road,
Montrose, N.Y. 10548 914-739-5654

In the Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County-North County Regional Branch, Huntersville, North Carolina.

12:10 p.m.
Let's Talk About it.
Madwomen in the Attic: Discussion about female roles in Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë), Wide Sargasso Sea (Jean Rhys), The Yellow Wallpaper (Charlotte Perkins Gilman), Surfacing (Margaret Atwood) and Sula (Toni Morrison)
For adults. Free
16500 Holly Crest
LaneHuntersville, NC 28078 (704) 895-0318

Let's Talk About It (LTAI) is a reading and discussion program designed for libraries that brings scholars and community members together to explore how selected books illuminate a particular theme. Participants read 5 books over a 10-week period.

And finally, in Castlebar, Ireland:

Castlebar Book Club
Venue: Castlebar Library
8.00pm
Interested in books and reading? Like a chance to let off steam about the most over-rated book ever? Or talk about the book that changed your life? Or the book that every man should read? If so, come along to the Castlebar Book Club in Castlebar Library for an enjoyable evening with other like-minded book lovers. Books for September 2006 meeting: "Jane Eyre" by Charlotte Bronte and "Wide Sargasso Sea" by Jean Rhys

The Mall, Castlebar, Mayo County. Phone: 094-9047578

Categories: Alert, Jane_Eyre, Charlotte_Brontë, Wide_Sargasso_Sea

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Wish for wings

Several blogs talk about Haworth and the surrounding area today.

Janne recently visited Haworth and writes about it, in Norwegian, with several pictures.

Idealistic Nymph has just found out that her hotel for her London stay is actually in Leeds (!!) but is thrilled to be able to go to Haworth.

The Pennine Pen lives in the area and recently visited Hebden Bridge, a place which is famous for this:

The village of Heptonstall which sits on the hill overlooking Hebden Bridge is the burial place of American writer Sylvia Plath. The Bronte sisters have also made this area popular for tourists as they lived in nearby Haworth and wrote about this area.

But let's now move onto some other sort of journey: reading. What I think about what I read writes about Wuthering Heights.

I bought Emily Bronte’s novel and began reading it. However, I never made it beyond page 164. The plot intrigued me, the mood scared me, and the writing was beautiful, but I became busy with other schoolwork and with more pressing demands. Time took over. Before I knew it six years had past and I had yet to complete the book. [...]
I am glad that I stuck with it. I found the story rewarding and the characters unforgettable. The narrative structure fascinated me and I appreciated how Nelly, the housekeeper, was able to make the past come alive so a reader could understand the historical and emotional dynamics at work.
Several thoughts struck me after reading the book.
First, I was struck most by how the emotional state of each character affected his or her physical health; I think that is what frightened me the most about the novel. Deteriorating physical health was as much a pervasive theme as the haunting physicality of the moors and the rainy lonely climate of the Heights. Heathcliff as a man is not nearly as frightening as the fact that his emotional state makes him sick with revenge and hatred. Likewise, Hareton verges on frightening because Heathcliff’s emotional state begins to consume him.
Second, I was stuck by the complete absence of religion. Scholars probably would debate the point by noting how Heathcliff discussed, and then refused, a church presence at his funeral. However, most of the works I have read from that time and after (both British and American) included a strong depiction of how religion influenced lifestyles and outlooks.
Last, I was intrigued by how well Bronte construed class in the book. I have read essays in the last year noting that American fiction is dead because of the absence of fictional depictions of class differences. Regardless of the debate of where (or if) class is perceived, there are few better novels in the English language that explore class as well as Wuthering Heights. Class is all-consuming to Bronte’s characters and a transferable identity from one generation to the next, which is equally a frightening thought to an American in 2007.
I am glad that I returned to Wuthering Heights and completed the book. I not only allowed the characters to finish their stories, but I also filled a hole in my life that I found myself frequently stepping into as I scanned by bookshelf.

Interesting. We are glad they finished the book and shared this :)

It's not easy being green embarks on another kind of journey. A review of / tribute to the lastest screen adaptation of Jane Eyre.

Yes, they did take the whole flashback thing too far, and if I had written the screenplay I wouldn't have put it in there, but I do think it captures the essence of Jane's internal conflict. She thought she was going to marry that man. [...]
Yes, in the movie there was a lot of steamy kissing . . . I think it was just Sandy Welch's attempt to convey how much of an ordeal it was for Jane to do what she knew she had to do. And one thing I have to admire is that there was no voice-over! In these beautiful first-person stories, movie makers almost always feel it necessary to stick in random voice-over narration, which interrupts the story and destroys the emotion. I have to admit that I found the movie mesmerizing. I watched the entire thing in one go, and I couldn't stop thinking about it for days afterwards. It may not be perfect (actually, it definitely wasn't), but it's the best one so far--so much better than all the others that I can't take any of them seriously . . . not that I ever did. How can you even argue when you put Toby Stephens up against the likes of Timothy Dalton, William Hurt, Ciaran Hinds, and Orson Welles? All bigger names, to be sure, but they just didn't work. And he definitely worked.

The flashback scenes that were so controversial are more easily understood after the first viewing of the series, in our opinion. They become a visual way of showing just how close Jane and Rochester truly are and to make the separation seem more real and more of an effort by comparison.

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

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Wuthering Heights 2011: one more name

We have one more face and name to add to Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights Cast. The IMDb Wuthering Heights 2011 page now includes Oliver Milburn (pictured - source) as Mr Linton. Still Heathcliff remains a mystery.

On to the other Brontë screen production now, as Sally Hawkins - Mrs Reed in Jane Eyre 2011 - speaks to The Moviefone Blog.

Well, let's talk about Mrs. Reed first. She's a tough cookie, to say the least. What was your experience on 'Jane Eyre?'
She's definitely not a truth-sayer! She's quite a terrifying character, and it was a comparatively small part but she's quite a powerful character and force of nature. I sort of fall in love with every character I do; you have to to understand how they became what they've become, whether they're the ugly kind or the very beautiful kinds of characters. So she's gone through various things in her life, and as people do, it makes them become twisted in some ways and distorted and damaged and see the world in a very narrow, small blinkered way, and she's one of those people. And I felt incredibly sorry for her.
Jane Eyre, her youth, her vitality, her beauty, it's more than she can bear, and everything that Jane is, for Mrs. Reed, reminds her of what she isn't, and it's terrifying to her and destroys [her]. It saddens her, and she can't really deal with those types of emotions, and so she goes to the other extreme, which people do. When they're angry, the root of that is fear, and that's who she is. And she's a very scared woman who is hanging on and right to the end when you see her on her deathbed, she's hanging on to that -- all she knows in life is hate and anger, and to let that go would destroy her, I think, even though she's on the point of death.
I grew up with 'Jane Eyre,' reading it at school, and it's one of those, I think, for a lot of women, a lot of girls, it's the iconic story and so many girls relate to Jane Eyre and her character... The Brontë sisters -- they really speak to young girls in their writing. It's timeless and their stories will go on forever and ever and ever because they're great storytellers. (Jenni Miller)

We just wonder, though: Jane Eyre's beauty is more than Mrs Reed can bear?

More film stuff. The Press reviews Stephen Poliakoff's Glorious 39:

It is a chocolate box, Merchant Ivory-style period drama where you get to stare at lovely old cars and mansions, but with the dark undertow of a 19th century novel like Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights. There is always the sense that there is a Bertha in the attic of these perfect stately homes filled with the echoes of cut glass British accents. There is something of the gothic at play.
The gothic is adorned with an eerie, paranoid tone similar to The Wicker Man, Don’t Look Now or a creaky episode of Tales of the Unexpected. (Charlie Gates)

And Artinfo writes about Pierre Huyghe's The Host and the Cloud which can be experienced at the Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris, through November 27.

Pierre Huyghe's new film has been causing a stir in the French art scene, with fellow artists, fans, and even students on field trips descending into the pitch-black basement of Marian Goodman's Marais space to experience "The Host and the Cloud." Filmed in a closed-down museum at the edge of urban Paris over the course of three days — Halloween, Valentine's Day, and the May 1st International Workers' Day — the film is less a love-it-or-hate-it affair than a two-hour endurance test composed of a cacophonous runway show with a model on an invisible catwalk, a profusion of white rabbits, and, most strenuously, a red-tinted disco scene with an unrelenting version of Kate Bush's shrill "Wuthering Heights" playing normally at first, then in reverse. (Nicolai Hartvig)

Erin Blakemore, author of The Heroine's Bookshelf, is interviewed by The Christian Science Monitor:

Several of your heroines (Anne Shirley, Laura Ingalls) are from children’s lit. How do their stories remain relevant as you get older?
“Jane Eyre” is actually a good example. I read it when I was far too young. When I was little it was a story about a little girl being oppressed by authoritative people. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve had my own romances and relationships and struggles, and I have come to see the book as the story of a young woman sticking to what’s important to her in really extraordinary and terrible places. (Nora Dunne)

The Daily Mail takes a look at Kate Middleton's family tree and discovers the following:

In the rich tapestry of her father’s family, for example, there is Harriet Martineau, one of the Victorian age’s leading thinkers, and a renowned writer and philosopher.
A woman of immense strength of character, and a friend of Charles Darwin, Charlotte Brontë, Florence Nightingale and George Eliot, Harriet travelled to America as a single woman and brought back a bestselling book of her experiences. (Christopher Wilson)

It must be said, though, that Charlotte Brontë and Harriet Martineau were only friends for a time. They had a fall-out over Martineau's review of Villette and Martineau remained sour about it even after Charlotte's death.

The Brussels Brontë Blog has a post on how 'Brussels Brontë Group member Johan Hellinx explains came to write an article in the Breton language about the Brontës’ stay in Brussels'.

Jane Eyre - Tankar i samband med P1:s Bokcirkeln writes in Swedish about Jane Eyre in connection with the radio programme Bokcirkeln. Associated Content user Melanie Mullen picks Jane Eyre as her top favourite book of all time. And finally, Not Another Book Blog reviews April Lindner's Jane.

Categories: Books, Brussels, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, Music, Victorian Era, Wuthering Heights

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Charlotte Brontë was a rat

Tomorrow marks the beginning of the Chinese New Year, which will be the Year of the Rat (not to be mistaken with the more famous and sung year of the cat!). According to Sun Star Cebu Charlotte Brontë was a Rat by Chinese horoscope standards, something which she probably ignored.

There's plenty of art on different formats today.

Art X world has an article on the forthcoming exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (15 April – 29 June 2008): Blood on Paper: The Art of the Book (more information on this previous post of ours) and whose subject matter is 'the astonishing inventiveness with which the book has been treated by some of the most influential and respected artists of our time'. Thus:

Artists have reacted in different ways to the possibilities offered by books as a means of expression. Powerful interpreters of texts include Balthus and his dramatic illustrations for the narrative of Wuthering Heights (1993) . . .

You can read more about this Balthus connection in previous posts, although he's certainly not the only artist to have been seriously inspired by the Brontës.

The New York Times reviews a totally different kind of exhibition yet the journalist couldn't refrain from writing a quite puzzling metaphor:

Arranged in a long, numbing row, the art was assigned to attic galleries so unlike the large, gorgeous rooms for mainstream paintings downstairs that an outsider couldn’t help wondering if the installation had been intentionally devised as a metaphor (Roma here cast as “Jane Eyre” ’s Bertha Mason in the attic of Hungarian society). (Michael Kimmelman)

Hmmmm... right.

Let's talk about a movie review and an intriguing comparison. Beliefnet reviews The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and Heathcliff is briefly mentioned.

This movie may be about one of the most famous outlaws in the days of the Wild West, but it is not a bang-bang shoot-em-up Western. It is a broody psychological Western, a lot of peering out into endless prairie landscapes, as much Ingmar Bergman as John Ford, with a little bit of Heathcliff thrown in. (Nell Minow)

Albeit in French, Heliodore has a lengthy post on the Wuthering Heights Ballet which was on stage in Paris a few months ago. It includes pictures as well.

And finally let's talk about book, of course. The Daily Mail briefly reviews The Heroines by Eileen Favorite.

Anne-Marie's time is taken up with tending to a series of famous literary heroines who mysteriously arrive at her Prairie Bluff Bed and Breakfast, seeking temporary refuge from their tragic destinies.
With a strict policy of non-interference, Anne-Marie makes soup for Scarlett O'Hara, toast for Emma Bovary and offers a sympathetic ear to a distraught Catherine as she debates the respective merits of Heathcliff and Linton. (Eithne Farry)

Normblog posts the results of the poll onthe readers' favourite English-language novelists. Charlotte Brontë makes it to number 10 and Emily to number 32. Several authors received only one vote; among them is Jean Rhys, author of Wide Sargasso Sea, as you know.

First Time Writes shares how it feels to read Jane Eyre for the first time.

And finally an alert for tomorrow - Thursday, February 7th, first day of the new Chinese Year - in Roanoke, Virginia:

The Book Club at Cantos Booksellers is discussing "Wuthering Heights." There's still time to read it. 6 p.m. 342-1000.

Categories: Alert, Art-Exhibitions, Books, Dance, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, Wuthering Heights

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Did the Brontës eat bilberry pie?

The Telegraph publishes one of those articles that really open new frontiers in the Brontë scholarship: Did the Brontës eat bilberry pie?

Bilberry pie goes back a long way in the North. The Brontë sisters - Charlotte, Emily and Anne - almost certainly ate it at Haworth Parsonage. They could have picked the bilberries from the wuthering moors. There's an old Haworth recipe for bilberry pie made from the pulp of cooked apples, sugar and bilberries, with a crust glazed with egg white and sugar. The apple pulp adds much needed juiciness (if bilberries have a fault it is a tendency to Northern grit). It is to be served with 'cream if obtainable'. I like to think of the Brontë sisters eating this Yorkshire treat in their gloomy old parsonage. They needed some comfort in their short and miserable lives. (Bee Wilson)

If you want to feel like a satiated (miserable is at your own choice) Brontë you can check the Haworth bilberry pie recipe here.

Did you know that the first Sunday in August is the Sister's Day? Well, apparently it is. The Bradenton Herald talks about sisters:

It may not be widely known, but the first Sunday each August is recognized as "Sisters' Day." In keeping with this celebration of the spirit of sisterhood, let's explore some books written by, or about sisters - all of which can be found on the shelves of the Manatee County Public libraries. (...)
Perhaps the most famous sisters are the Brontës - Charlotte, Emily and Anne. In addition to their many personal works and biographies, check out some of the following, which offer a glimpse into the lives and works of these extraordinary 19th-century authors.
Lucasta Miller's background as a literary critic and editor are apparent as she sorts through the folklore surrounding the Brontë' sisters in "The Brontë Myth." The book deconstructs the fables surrounding the sisters in order to spotlight their works -and not the legends that surround the women. This is a must read for any fan of the Brontë's novels. Similarly, "The Brontës at Haworth" by Juliet Gardiner is an exploration of the lives and home of the Brontës. Pictures of their watercolors, ink washes, letters and diary pages are contained within the work, as well as portraits of the family. The visual elements in this book are sure to delight anyone interested in the Brontë sisters. (Stacy Reyer)

Now that the Heathcliffgate was over, Wendy Bardsley (author of Branwell's Own Creation) tries to revive it as the Branwellgate:

A final word on Gordon Brown's supposed likeness to Heathcliff. Author and Brontë expert Wendy Bardsley suggests the Prime Minister has much more in common with Branwell Brontë, Emily's troubled brother. "His energy could concentrate to a pitch of white hot steel, leaving behind a trail of awesome ideas, sometimes malformed – conceived with brilliance but finally unsustainable." Not much is known about Branwell, except that he was dismissed from his job as clerk of Luddenden Foot station when there was found to be a deficit in the accounts, attributed largely to his incompetence. Perhaps there is something in it. (Matthew Bell in The Independent)

The Times (South Africa) reviews The Interloper by H. Parker with curious Brontë connections:

Unsuccessful writer Heather dies before her time and, while in Limbo, is invited to join a writers circle comprising Charlotte and Anne Bronte, Katherine Mansfield and Olive Schreiner: with their help she is determined to complete her magnum opus. (Aubrey Paton)

Tomorrow, August 4, Shannon McKenna Schmidt, co-author with Joni Rendon of Novel Destinations: Literary Landmarks from Jane Austen’s Bath to Ernest Hemingway’s Key West, gives a talk at the Schenectady County Public Library, Schenectady, NY. The local Daily Gazette interviews her:

Q: How did you divide up your book? (...)
We did visit the ones that really interested us, too. I wanted to go to the Yorkshire Moors for the Bronte sisters and “Wuthering Heights.” This was our first literary trip together. (Interview by Wendy Liberatore)

For more information related to the Brontës in the aforementioned book, check these previous posts.

The Capital from Annapolis unveils film director Steven Fischer's Brontë interests:

The bookcases in Steven Fischer's Annapolis home are a virtual smorgasbord of the humanities.
There are volumes on luminaries such as Leonardo da Vinci and the Bronte sisters, tomes about silent film stars Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, a biography of movie director Francis Ford Coppola and a series of books on the Civil War. (Theresa Winslow)

We read in the Southern Oregon's Mail Tribune:

Here's something you don't see every day: classics flying off the shelf. But according to an e-mail from Barnes and Noble hyping "the top five best-selling classic novels of the year," some great books are "flying off the bookshelves."

Unfortunately there's no Brontës in there but an Austen:

Anyway, the winners are (drum roll): 1. "Of Mice and Men," by John Steinbeck. 2. "Lord of the Flies," by William Golding. 3. "1984," by George Orwell. 4. "The Great Gatsby," by F. Scott Fitzgerald. 5. "Pride and Prejudice," by Jane Austen. (...)
Classics is its own niche. And within it there's a Steinbeck nichelet, an Austen nichelet, etc. In a postmodern world in which everything (books, for example) is a commodity, do the Steinbeck people still talk to the Austen people? Not so much. The Steinbeck people might let Hemingway and Faulkner into their nichelet, and the Austen people probably hang out with the Bronte people, but that's about it. (Bill Varble)

The journalist has a point but it's not good to generalise. These humble Brontë nichelet tenants from BrontëBlog have read (one or the other) the top-five books, as we are sure many of our readers have.

Now let's quote some very biased Brontë clichés. Regina Barreca in The Philadelphia Enquirer makes use of the last Batman film: The Dark Knight to talk about why-girls-love-bad-guys:

From Charlotte Bronte to Barbara Cartland, thousands of novels and tales insist that women have to find the man who will colonize their emotions, enslave their passions, and rule over their lives.

We expected to see Emily Brontë mentioned here (although we wouldn't agree either).

Russell Kane reviews The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks in The Times and says:

Explicit humanism in a novel can be preachy and cloying, but a shrew or a Bronte villain can be a more powerful tugger of heart strings.

A Brontë villain is a strange category. Who can be defined by that? John Reed? Mr Brocklehurst? Arthur Huntingdon?.... Heathcliff? Too easy to call them villains.

Now the blogosphere. In a Strange Land reviews Shirley:

I've just finished reading Shirley, by Charlotte Bronte. It's a fascinating book, and I think one that can fairly be read as a feminist text. No doubt someone, somewhere, has written an analysis of Shirley, as part of her Honours or Masters or doctoral work, possibly in Women's Studies, or possibly in English. If so, I haven't read it, and I haven't even looked for it. What follows is my own, untutored response to the book. (Read more)

David and Imelda Marsden post on the Brontë Parsonage Blog about a couple of interesting upcoming events:

We are holding a sponsored Luddite walk in North Kirklees - where Charlotte Brontë set Shirley. On 7 September 2008 at 1.30pm it will start at the Dumb Steeple in Mirfield, with North Kirklees Rambler Association member Ken Dews as the leader. A talk will be given on the route the Luddites marched in 1812 by Luddite expert Dr J A Hargreaves. Funds raised on the walk will go to Hollybank School in Mirfield which the Brontë sisters attended between 1831-1836 when it was called Roe Head. The school now caters for severely disabled young people aged five to nineteen, who are resident at the school, educated and cared for by dedicated staff.
For further details telephone 01924-519370 or 01535-648209 or email david.marsden1603@hotmail.co.uk or david.marsden9117@ntlworld.com
Also - the Ramblers Association have a stall at the Mirfield Show on Sunday 17 August where details and sponsor forms can be picked up. This is held near the site where Blake Hall stood - where Ann Brontë was a governess. Only the South Lodge remains.

They also promise information about the shooting of the new Wuthering Heights TV series at Oakwell Hall (that has already finished). We will stay alert.

Tuning Fork Travels visits Haworth and the Brontë Parsonage Museum (to which Suite101 devotes a post). Reading, Writing, Working, Playing now that has finished Gaskell's biography of Charlotte posts (among other things) about Jenny Uglow's biography of Gaskell and Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes poems about Emily Brontë.

Finally we cannot finish without quoting this post (and excuses for the self-referentiality and total absence of humility).

Categories: Books, Brontë Parsonage Museum, Elizabeth Gaskell, Haworth, Movies-DVD-TV, References, Shirley, Weirdo, Wuthering Heights

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"All this time I've been trying to be Cathy when I should have been trying to be Jane"

Samantha Ellis brings a lot of Brontës to her discussion about role models in literature in The Guardian:

Last summer I was on the Yorkshire moors, making the pilgrimage to Top Withens and arguing (over the wuthering) with my best friend about whether we'd rather be Jane Eyre or Cathy Earnshaw. Like Kate Bush, I chose wild, free, passionate Cathy over stoic, virtuous Jane. But my friend found Cathy silly, a snob who betrays Heathcliff for Edgar and makes them all unhappy, while Jane makes her own way. As we reached the top, I had a moment of realisation: all this time I've been trying to be Cathy when I should have been trying to be Jane. (...)
Reading around the books, through writers' biographies, diaries and letters, I tried to work out why some writers forced their heroines to give up and why some were brave enough to try to make their characters' dreams come true. And I wanted to know how the writers' own stories ended, what really happened, which stories they didn't tell. Take Charlotte and Emily Brontë: Charlotte fell in love, got her heart broken, exorcised her demons by writing them out, and married wisely. Emily never got to fall in love – imagine what she might have written if she had. Maybe it would be more interesting to have to choose between Charlotte and Emily than Jane Eyre and Cathy Earnshaw.
I might be older but I'm not wiser; it's still Emily. Not least because I read a telling little story about Charlotte's husband berating the women of Haworth for impiously hanging out their washing in the churchyard, and that makes me think he must have been a bit of a prig. Knowing more about the writers made me realise why so many of them left their heroines on the brink. Because interesting lives are difficult. (...)
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
For years, Emily Brontë's novel was my template for raging, tempestuous love (the only kind). Cathy, the headstrong heroine, refuses to become ladylike and runs wild on the moors with brooding hero Heathcliff. Their love is so strong that even death fails to part them! But now, the idea of Cathy dying of a broken heart and haunting Heathcliff (trying to, as Kate Bush put it, grab his soul) seems less appealing, especially because it all comes from her betraying Heathcliff for puny, sallow Edgar.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune recommends summer readings:

"The Eyre Affair," by Jasper Fforde (Penguin, $15) A delightfully unique heist novel that takes place in an imagined, alternate London where literature is so valuable that police have a special unit to fight literary crimes. Fforde's page-turning tale focuses on detective Thursday Next, who seeks to take down criminal mastermind Acheron Hades, who's guilty of numerous literary crimes, including stealing the manuscript of Charles Dickens' "Martin Chuzzlewit" and plotting to kidnap Jane Eyre. Quirky and wonderful fun for book lovers. (Chuck Leddy)

Screenrant talks about the upcoming remake of Anna Karenina by Joe Wright and compares its gestation to Jane Eyre's:

Filmmaker Joe Wright faces a situation with his upcoming Anna Karenina adaptation – similar to that which director Cary Fukunaga faced earlier this year with Jane Eyre. Wright is attempting to realize a story on the big screen that has already been adapted for either the film or television medium countless times in the past (over twenty occasions, for the Leo Tolstoy novel in particular). (Sandy Schaefer)

The Washington Post recommends reading Jane by April Lindner:

Some teens read classics willingly, and not just for English class. If you like fairy tales, mythology and classics, check out Jane by April Lindner, a contemporary take on Jane Eyre that recasts the heroine as a nanny who falls for her employer, a bad-boy rock star. Fantasies are often written as series, which is apt; readers can grow up with their fictional counterparts.  (Katie Aberbach)

The State (South Carolina) has a nice article about Jane Eyre:

As I am wont to do — twice annually is my habit — this writer took upon herself of late the task of removing and replacing each of the dusty denizens of her home library, whence she came upon one long-forgotten volume: “Jane Eyre,” purchased when said writer wished to convey to her four female progeny that others than old or dead white men bore responsibility for production of such novels as were deemed “classic.”
So enchanted did I immediately become with said volume — between whose maroon cloth-bound covers reposes the story of an orphan girl who becomes governess to the presumed illegitimate though comely progeny of a well-spoken man of crude assemblage — that I began to transport it with me everywhere. (Read more) (Christine Schweickert)

The Greenville News asks local personalities about the book which left the biggest mark in their lives:

Dr. Susanna Ashton: ‘Wuthering Heights’ by Emily Brontë.
Ashton, now an associate professor of English at Clemson University, was a college student when she first picked up the Emily Brontë classic.
But the book, with its story of tortured romantic yearning, didn’t resonate with Ashton for the usual reasons.
“What was shocking to me is what a terrible book it is,” Ashton recalled. “It’s about terrible people, doing terrible things to each other. … And yet, it’s such a shockingly awful, awful, dreadful novel, that it’s genius, and it stays with me forever.”
The book’s unhappy resolution up-ended Ashton’s view of how literature should be, but it also challenged her to think about the world in a different light.
And ultimately, “Wuthering Heights” made its mark on Ashton’s life. “I think I became a reader and a scholar and an English professor and maybe a more complicated person because of a book that gave me no closure and drew strong, powerful emotions and made me really angry.” (Donna Isbell Walker)

The Tennessean recommends a re-reading of Jane Eyre; Words Into Bytes, Let's Talk About Movies, wayfarings, the film365 project and El Baúl de Utilerías (in Spanish) review Jane Eyre 2011; For the Love of Lit... discusses the American and British posters of the movie; Literature in English and other Things posts about Emily Brontë in Portuguese; Abigail's Ateliers is in Haworth for the Brontë Society Weekend and shares some personal experiences in the Brontë Parsonage.

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

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From Juvenilia to Quilts

A couple of recent YouTube//Twitch videos with Brontë-related topics:

Jennifer Brooks: Brontë Juvenilia | #victober

October 2021

In today’s Victober video, I wanted to talk about the juvenilia of the Brontës. The Brontës are some of my favorite Victorian writers and it was great to see where they started.

Mary Fons: Ep. 21.1 - The Brontë Sisters' Quilt, Kitty-Quilt, and Mary's CRAZY Quilt Trend Theory

September 2021

Did you know that the famous, brilliant Brontë sisters — yes,  the 'Wuthering Heights', 'Jane Austen' (sic), and 'Agnes Grey' Brontë sisters — made a quilt?! They did! Just one! Is it perfect? No! But their novels are, so who cares! Let's look at the quilt and talk about it, because ... 

I'll be co-teaching a workshop with England's own Jenni Smith on October 16th & 17th (2021) centered on the Brontë quilt. I'll give you history and context; Jenni will teach you how to make your own version of the quilt. Visit www.quiltfolk.com to sign up. The lecture will include a visit to Haworth, in Yorkshire, to view the ACTUAL quilt and we'll be live to have tea and you'll love Jenni's teaching style, etc., etc. It's going to be great and on this stream, I talk a bit more about it and we watch a video.  

After that, we take a brief look at kit quilts from the 1940s, and THEN Mary loses her mind over the 'Branches and Vines' quilt from 1875 and you will too. We talk about the environment's impact on quilt trends and of course we all eat chips. 

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In Knoxville and Henderson

Some Brontë alerts for today, February 3:

In Knoxville, TN:

Brontë Society: 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 3, Panera Bread, 4855 Kingston Pike.
"Themes, Sources, Evolution from Childhood Influencing the Writing of the Brontës."
Info: 865-681-7261 or email BronteUSA@gmail.com. (Knoxville News Sentinel)

In Henderson, NC:

Perry Memorial Library
Let’s Talk About It : “Mad Women in the Attic.”

Let’s Talk About It is one of the library’s most popular offerings, according to library Director Patti McAnally. This year’s topic was picked by participants in last year’s series. The North Carolina Humanities Council provides all the books and helps bring scholars to discuss each novel. It’s partially funded with a grant from the N.C. Humanities Council, in collaboration with the N.C. Center for the Book —a program of the State Library of North Carolina — and the Friends of the Perry Memorial Library.
McAnally said bringing the program to Vance County year after year was an easy choice.
“There are many benefits to the program,” she said via email. “The books chose offer different perspectives on the topic and may expose participants to new authors. With the help of the scholar, participants can explore and discuss important aspects with others in the community. The series offers both educational and social opportunities.”
Each session will be held from 7 to 9 p.m. in the Farm Bureau Room at the library and will include discussion led by a scholar and refreshments. This year’s schedule is Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre” on Feb. 3, “Wide Sargasso Sea” by Jean Rhys on Feb. 17, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” on March 3, “Surfacing” by Margaret Atwood on March 17, and Toni Morrison’s “Sula” on March 31. The first two books — “Jane Eyre” and “Wide Sargasso Sea” — will be available for pick up at the library Monday, Jan. 12.
The N.C. Humanities Council describes the series as one that delves into what happens when women don’t conform to gender norms; perhaps, as the organization’s website says, they are branded mad and locked away in an attic — much like poor Bertha in Brontë’s 1847 work. (The Daily Dispatch)

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"I still haven’t read anything like it"

Today we have an abundance of extraordinary articles published in the press. The bicentenary is almost here (April 21) and the British media are mobilising all the big literary names to talk about it:

The Guardian asks an impressive list of big names of writers and artists to talk about Jane Eyre:

‘The shock and thrill of discovering this book, aged 13, continues to run in my veins’ … On the bicentenary of Charlotte Brontë’s birth, writers and artists reflect on her greatest creation:
Sarah Waters, Tessa Hadley, Jeanette Winterson, Margaret Drabble, Esther Freud, Andrew Motion, Maggie O'Farrell, Polly Samson, Helen Dunmore, Blake Morrison, Julie Myerson, Cornelia Parker, John Mullan, Helen Simpson, Polly Teale, Samantha Ellis, Mick Jackson, Joanna Briscoe, Linda Grant and Sarah Perry.

We could quote from almost anyone of them. We encourage you to read them all, but highlight what Maggie O'Farrell says:

Like many people, I first read Jane Eyre in my early teens, in the first flush of excitement at swapping my children’s library card for an adult one. The back cover promised a thrilling love story between a poor, plain girl and a brooding, troubled landowner. Later that night, I found myself wrong-footed. What, I wondered, was this neglect and abuse of an orphan child? Whose was this frank, unwavering voice? By the time Jane was locked by her heartless aunt into the terrifying red room, I had forgotten all about the promised love story. I pressed on, late into the night, straight into Lowood and the deprivations at the hands of religious fanatics.
I had, in short, never read anything like it. The shock and thrill of discovering this book, aged 13, continues to run in my veins. I read it without a single preconception; I knew nothing about it. I was as unprepared as those first Victorian readers for Rochester, for the fire, for the stalled marriage, for the lunatic locked away in the attic.
If Jane Eyre taught me anything as an astonished 13-year-old, it was to strive, to push my reach beyond my grasp, not to settle for compromise. When we studied the book at university, Brontë’s words were filtered for me through various frameworks of academic theory. Jane Eyre is a feminist novel, I was told. Or it is the link between the epistolary and the gothic novel. It is the precursor to all stream-of-consciousness writing. It is a psychological tract about doubles and doppelgangers, addressing levels of human consciousness. It is all these things and yet none of them. One of the reasons Jane Eyre continues to provoke so much discussion and theorising is that, like Jane herself, it eludes definition. It does one thing with its right hand while doing quite another with its left.
Thirty years on, I still haven’t read anything like it. Jane Eyre remains the book I return to the most. I read it every couple of years. Parts I know off by heart, yet each time I come away with something different. It is my datum, my pole star, the novel by which all others shall be measured.

Sarah Freeman from The Yorkshire Post asks the authors of several of the new Brontë books what the Brontës mean to them: Sophie Franklin (Charlotte Brontë Revisited), Deborah Lutz (The Brontë Cabinet), Lyndsay Faye (Jane Steele), Mick Manning (The Brontës – Children of the Moors: A Picture Book), Tracy Chevalier (Reader, I Married Him), Jolien Janzing (Charlotte Brontë's Secret Love), Nick Holland (In Search of Anne Brontë). Quoting from Lyndsay's Faye's eulogy of Jane Eyre:

Later, when I studied Charlotte’s life and understood what she went through, I admired the way she wove abuse into art so unapologetically. She didn’t write a sad harpsichord song or embroider a poem about the death of her sisters –she took the real Cowan Bridge school and turned it into Lowood, courageously and in public, and created an enormous literary sensation. To her detractors, she wrote: “Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion.” She was a firebrand.

John Sutherland in The Evening Standard tries to be honest with Jane Eyre and Charlote Brontë;

This is the year of Charlotte Brontë: her bicentennial.  Let’s resolve, by way of celebration, to read her honestly: not prettify her and the fiction she has left us. Brontë is, above all, an uncompromisingly honest novelist. Honest about herself, honest about her sex and honest about the inherently embattled relationship of the sexes. A main part of Brontëan honesty is that she confronts, as few novelists do, the fact that most women are not beautiful — they never have been and never will be. Ditto men. (...)
The publisher who first recognised her worth, George Smith, declared bluntly that Miss Brontë was not pretty — but he had never met a woman who wanted more to be so. Charlotte made Smith’s firm a pot of money. He paid her half what he paid his male star authors but was generous in other ways.
He commissioned George Richmond, the leading portraitist of the day, with the secret instruction to create the pretty Charlotte she wished to be and wasn’t. It was a noble thing of Smith to do. The portrait will hang in room 24 of the National Portrait Gallery for ever, eternalising the pretty (not the plain) Charlotte Brontë.
We’ll see a lot of that portrait this year. Maybe even on a five-pound note and first-class stamp. It is essentially dishonest but most of us have, hidden in the secret attic of our minds, a prettified portrait of ourselves.  (...)
Reading Charlotte Brontë honestly is not easy. Particularly for male readers. They have an easier time with the man-pleasing Jane Austen. Austen is a novelist who flatters the male gaze. Every one of her six heroines could be played on-screen by Gwyneth Paltrow as a demure, inherently passive object of male desire. The Austen heroine does what her world tells her to do. Brontë’s heroines (particularly plain Jane) are something else. 

John Sutherland also signs a review in The Times of the new paperback edition of Juliet Barker's The Bontës. A Life in Letters.

Claire Harman explores the radical ideas of Jane Eyre that have been obscured by its status as a 'classic'. In Financial Times:

The classic status of ‘Jane Eyre’ can obscure just how shocking its radical ideas were at the time. (...)
In 1847 it shocked people considerably: the author, known only by the name that appeared on the title page, “Currer Bell”, seemed like a dangerous revolutionary, challenging social and sexual norms with his story of the servant who claims to be the spiritual equal of her master. For “Currer Bell” had to be a man, surely? No woman would have the worldly knowledge that the plot implied, or the shamelessness to express it.
Alarm bells rang in the ears of critics who read Jane’s cries of “Unjust! Unjust!”, like those of “any other rebel slave”. What was all this about equality, insubordination, this denunciation of clerics as hypocrites and authority figures as questionable? “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will”, was a statement as incendiary as any to be found in the subversive socialist pamphlets of the day (or in Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, published the year after Jane Eyre); Currer Bell’s girl-rebel seemed to be encouraging all oppressed people to join her when she extolled “the strangest sense of freedom” that comes from making a stand — “it seemed as if an invisible bond had burst”. Published just months before the outbreak of bloody revolutions in Italy, Hungary, France and Germany, the novel could hardly be read as politically innocent, despite the fact that it was ostensibly just a love story, and about a girl. “There is throughout it a murmuring against the comforts of the rich and against the privations of the poor,” the Quarterly warned, “which, as far as each individual is concerned, is a murmuring against God’s appointment — there is a proud and perpetual assertion of the rights of man, for which we find no authority either in God’s word or in God’s providence. We do not hesitate to say that the tone of the mind and thought which has overthrown authority and violated every code human and divine abroad, and fostered Chartism and rebellion at home, is the same which has also written Jane Eyre.” (...)
As we celebrate the secure place Charlotte Brontë has in our hearts and our literary heritage, it might be as well to remind ourselves who we’re remembering. The realisation that it’s someone who might not just want to surprise you with the power of her writing, but shake you by the shoulders with her ideas, is perhaps more peculiar than pleasing.

Bustle lists several things about Charlotte Brontë you may not know about:

I was named after Charlotte Brontë, so it's lucky that I was a huge Jane Eyre fan growing up. My mother read it to me when I was too young to understand repressed desire and the appeal of sexy, brooding assholes. But I still loved the Gothic intensity of the novel. I loved the raw emotion, the windswept moors, the madwoman in the attic, and I loved Jane.
When I read the book myself, years later, it was a very different experience. I had opinions on the postcolonial implications of poor Bertha in the attic, and on that terribly run boarding school, and on Rochester and how he's pretty much a (sexy) jerk. But most of all, I was shocked at how real Jane feels. Two centuries later, her angst and her love and her gritty independence are just as relevant as ever. Jane, like Charlotte, is all roiling emotions hidden underneath a nice girl facade. And Charlotte, like Jane, changed the world of English literature forever.
But who was Charlotte Brontë? She's more than than "one of the two Brontë sisters" (poor Anne Brontë, no one talks about her), and she's more than that female writer from the 1800s who's not Jane Austen. Here are some facts that might give you an idea of the woman behind Jane Eyre. (Charlotte Ahlin)

Although Charlotte preventing Emily Brontë's second unfinished novel from being published is not something you may not know, but something with no base whatsoever.

The Daily Telegraph summarises the Charlotte Brontë story, particularly the loss and suffering parts:

“Villette! Villette! Have you read it?” exclaimed author George Eliot when Charlotte Brontë’s final novel was published in 1853. “It is a still more wonderful book than Jane Eyre. There is something almost preternatural in its power.”
But 200 years after her birth, the eldest Brontë sister to reach adulthood is still remembered for her first novel Jane Eyre, credited to Curer Bell when published in 1847.
Like governess Jane Eyre, Brontë’s final protagonist Lucy Snowe was alone in the world, without family or fortune, when she arrived in cosmopolitan Villette to work as a teacher at a French boarding school.
Given Brontë’s conviction that art was most convincing when drawn from personal experience, it is unsurprising Jane Eyre and Villette won popular and critical acclaim. (Marea Donnelly)

The Yorkshire Evening Post has a fashion article featuring clothes and accessories from Next around Haworth (including the Brontë Parsonage and The Old School Room):

Stephanie Smith celebrates Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre through modern interpretations of its fashion. Photos by James Hardisty.

The Yorkshire Post has an article about Ponden Hall:

Brontë fans travel from all over the world to stay in Ponden Hall which provided inspiration for one of the most famous scenes in literary history.
Years of benign neglect followed by loving care and a grade two star listing have combined to protect Ponden Hall’s historic features. Charlotte and Emily, who knew it well, would certainly still recognise the property, near Haworth, which has escaped the ravages of excessive modernisation.
The old front door, the mullions, beams and the fireplaces are still there, along with the extra wide staircase that led to the sisters’ favourite room – “the finest library in the West Riding” full of the best books money could buy, including a Shakespeare first folio. The box bed next to the tiny east gable window, said to have inspired one of the most famous scenes in literary history, is there too. It is not the original but a faithful replica, crafted by cabinet maker Andrew Feather for Ponden Hall’s owners Julie Akhurst and Steve Brown.
They commissioned it after turning their idyllic family home into a B&B. Guests can now stay in the Earnshaw room, sleep in the box bed and look out on to the moors through the window. It exactly fits Emily Brontë’s description in Wuthering Heights where Cathy’s ghost scratches furiously at the glass trying to get in. The words of the story’s narrator, Mr Lockwood, still gives readers goosebumps: “I muttered, knocking my knuckles through the glass, and stretching an arm out to seize the importunate branch; instead of which, my fingers closed on the fingers of a little, ice-cold hand.”
“We think that Emily based that scene on this room because old documents relating to the house describe a box bed in a reception room across from the library and you can see where it was bolted to the wall by the window. It is just how it is described in Wuthering Heights,” says Julie, an English literature graduate and former journalist, who has researched Ponden Hall’s Brontë heritage. (Read more) (Sharon Dale)

Keighley News has an alert for the London Brontë Society members:

Brontë Society members are being invited to step out in London on May 14 to remember Charlotte.
Members from across the country can join the London and East Group for their spring walk around the capital.
The walk will follow in Charlotte Brontë’s footstep when, with her sister Anne, she walked from St Paul’s Cathedral to the publishing house of George Smith in Cornhill.
The walk, which begins at the Monument at 11am, will finish at 1.30pm on the site of the London Bridge Wharf.
This is the place where in her book Villette, Charlotte described boarding the packet steamer for Ostend. (David Knights)

The Yorker lists five period dramas, including Wuthering Heights 2009:

Tom Hardy and Charlotte Riley star as Emily Brontë’s tormented lovers in this gritty, gothic adaptation. If you’re expecting something light and fluffy, you’re looking in the wrong place – Wuthering Heights is passionate and twisted in equal measure, and for a long time a happy ending seems unreachable. Boasting a stellar cast including Andrew Lincoln and Sarah Lancashire (Happy Valley), this reworking of Brontë’s 1847 novel is definitely one of the most faithful to the text. The eponymous house is well and truly brought to life with an intensity so vivid that its walls feel almost touchable. Compelling viewing from the outset, Wuthering Heights is without a doubt one of the best period dramas produced in recent years. (Catherine Coleman)

An interesting article in Palatinate:

I worry for the fourteen year old that reads Jane Eyre and idolises Rochester; for the girl that picks up Pride and Prejudice and dreams for a Darcy. Aware of the contexts and literary debate surrounding such novels, armed with a copy of Madwoman in the Attic, these texts are fruitful, meaningful insights into womanhood in the nineteenth century. Picked from a library shelf by impressionable teenagers, they are problematic.
Yet Jane Eyre has, for a long time, been my go-to favourite book, and I cannot imagine my teenage years without it. It is about self-discovery, about staying true to yourself, about education and growing up. And it is no more damaging than a Hollywood rom-com oozing with unattainable beauty standards. Or a modern young adult novel like Twilight, in which a girl’s life doesn’t really start until a really quite dangerous male vampire falls in love with her. Perhaps in picking my fight with literature, I am failing to recognise that I am taking on the whole of culture.
But literature is where we expect standards. As teenagers, we felt intelligent (if quite a bit nerdy) clutching our copy of The Great Gatsby instead of collapsing in front of the TV. We expected to learn something. We didn’t turn off – we absorbed.
There are, of course, plenty of strong female role models in classic literature, and these were in the books I gravitated towards. I enjoyed the Jane Eyres and the Jo Marches. I liked how they stood out as something different, something I could identify with. I also wasn’t stupid. I knew these books were set in different periods, when it meant something different to be a woman. (...) Unfortunately, I don’t know what the solution is. We cannot reissue Jane Eyre emblazoned with the warning ‘Danger: Contains overtones of patriarchy’, but we can increase the visibility of contemporary novels about strong healthy women who don’t gnaw down trees. (Ellie Scorah)

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reviews Jane Steele:

Flushed with humour and humors, this novel is a hoot. I laughed not only at Jane's audacity as a character — "No weeping," she reminds herself during a crisis, "thinking is better than weeping" — but also the author's accomplishments skillfully mashing up a modern serial killer novel with a 19th-century novel of manners. The notion of such a thing isn't making you lightheaded, is it? (Carole E. Barrowman)

The Irish Times on the importance of place in literature:

Consider where Wuthering Heights might be now if Heathcliff hadn’t had those wild, desolate moors to storm around in. Long consigned to a dusty shelf? The mysterious moors are not only as much part of Wuthering Heights as the characters and plot, they are intrinsic to the story and mirror Heathcliff’s inner turbulence. (Zoë Miller)

Parenting advice in the Arizona Daily Star:

A good novel can go beyond reality; it can take us into the minds of other people. When I was a girl I felt I really “knew” Jane Eyre and Jo March of “Little Women.” (Marilyn Heins)

The Herald interviews the author Sarah Sheridan:

While as a teenager Sheridan fell in love with crime writers Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh (and owned a well-thumbed copy of Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë as a 10-year-old), it is Swiss author Johanna Spyri's famed Heidi that can lay claim to being her most beloved childhood book. (Susan Swarbrick)

The Daily Mail talks about the plans for an itinerant Great Exhibition of the North, to be launch in 2018:

Ministers have ploughed money into the Great Exhibition of the North, which will launch in 2018 to show off the best the North has to offer.  (...)
Highlighting ten great cultural icons from across northern England - including the Bronte Sisters from North Yorkshire, Leeds playwright Alan Bennett and Manchester's Factory Records - he wants to use the region's rich cultural history to inspire a new generation to make the North proud again. (...)
The Great Exhibition of the North will celebrate an eclectic mix of culture over the last two centuries.
It will show off literary classics from the Bronte Sisters - the famous poets and novelists from West Riding of Yorkshire village of Haworth who charmed, inspired, and even shocked readers in the 19th century. (Matt Dathan)

The Halifax Courier publishes the Calderdale Major diary for next week, including:

Wednesday, April 205.30 pm: Mayor to officially open Splendid Shreds of Silk and Satin – A Celebration of Charlotte Brontë in Quilts exhibition at Bankfield Museum.

Gloucester Citizen describes the sound of the band British Sea Power as

It follows 2013's Machineries Of Joy which featured beautifully mechanised rhythms alongside wind-blasted Brontë-rock cinematics.

The Age doesn't like Germaine Greer's opinions on a recent Australian TV show:

And it was especially depressing to see a woman questioner criticise women for "poor partner choices" – and for Germaine Greer to essentially agree with her.
Re-reading the Bronte novels recently had persuaded Greer that women "are always on the lookout for men who are exciting, taciturn, difficult and potentially violent".
How pathetic for a feminist scholar like Greer to provide a "romantic" justification for violence by implying that 21st century women who, unlike the Brontë heroines, can vote, own property and legally control their own lives, yet deep down seek to be dominated by a Heathcliff or a Rochester. (Anne Summers)

The Neue Bürcher Zeitung (Switzerland) reviews the National Portrait Gallery's Charlotte Brontë exhibition:

Bescheidene Feier
Kein Wunder, dass deren Leserschaft sich Lebendigeres wünschte. Als im vergangenen Jahr eine Foto aus der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts auftauchte, die angeblich die drei Brontë-Frauen zeigte, wurde diese Möglichkeit in englischen Zeitungen heiss diskutiert. Leider kamen Fachleute zu einem Negativ-Befund. Und auch die nur einen Raum füllende, in einem Winkel der National Portrait Gallery versteckte Ausstellung fördert keine bahnbrechenden Neuigkeiten über Charlotte Brontë zutage: zu spärlich und disparat sind die Gegenstände, Briefe und Bücher dieser bescheidenen Feier der Dichterin, die uns dann doch wieder auf die Literatur zurückwirft. Was ja nicht das Schlechteste ist. (Marion Löndorf) (Translation)

Asturias24 (Spain) discovers Charlotte Brontë to Spanish readers who may not know her:

Jane Eyre es una joya de la literatura, pero no sólo por su calidad artística, representa un valor mucho más importante que la armonía estética. Supone un testimonio del pensamiento feminista cuando el movimiento aun carecía de nombre y de identidad como tal. Jane es un personaje de ficción que no se puede considerar representativo del conjunto de la sociedad del momento pero con cuyos comportamientos y reacciones se sentirían identificadas la mayor parte de las mujeres de hoy. (Eva Del Fresno) (Translation)

La Razón (Spain) describes Wuthering Heights as

la obra maestra de las venganzas rebuscadas e indirectas. (Carlos Sala) (Translation)

Regarder en Coulisse (France) interviews the composer Jill Santoriello who remembers how

Mon premier musical était une adaptation, pas très très bonne, des Hauts de Hurlevent. j’ai arrêté après la première version et j’ai commencé à chercher une autre histoire à mettre en musique et ce fut A Tale of Two Cities. (Stéphane Ly-Cuong) (Translation)

NewsChannel6 mentions a local writer, Jamie Turner, who writes under pseudonym, like the Brontës. Optima Magazine (Italy) would like to see Emma Watson as a Brontë sister; the Express & Star and Shropshire Star Weekend Magazine has an article about literary journey to the homes and birthplaces of authors, including the Brontës and Haworth. Noteablepad reviews Yuki Chan in Brontë Country. The World of my Green Heart reviews Charlotte Brontë's The Spell. Milady's Boudoir follows the Jane Eyre Hathersage and Trail. Vorrei Essere un Personaggio Austeniano (in Italian) reviews Shirley.

Finally, a passing mention in the Daily Mail about Barley, a dog film star whose

next big project is a film about the Brontë sisters,' Gill [Rawlings] reveals. 'Beyond that, who knows? The sky's the limit. I just wait for the next call.' (Sarah Rainey)

We suppose Barley will be Grasper in the upcoming To Walk Invisible.

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