Deborah Dunn's dance piece Nocturnes, inspired by Wuthering Heights (check these previous posts for more information), is touring Montreal in Canada since last December. There are still a few chances to see the performances:Trial & Eros Company presentsThe Globe and Mail reviews these new performances:
Nocturnes
Maison de la culture Ahunstic, December 11 8:00 p.m.
Maison de la culture Montréal Nord, December 16 8:00 p.m.
Maison de la culture Plateau Mont-Royal, January 13, 8:00 p.m.
Maison de la culture Frontenac, January 18, 8:00 p.m.
Le Centre Segal des arts de la scène, January 22, 8:00 p.m.
Maison de la culture Villeray-Saint Michel-Parc-Extension, January 28, 8:00 p.m.
Nocturnes, involving six dancers representing Emily Brontë’s classic characters, will be presented around Montreal throughout January. Dunn had read Wuthering Heights many times, and always at the back of her mind was the idea that the complex personal relationships at the heart of the novel would translate readily into choreography. That is, until she actually began creating the piece with her dancers.Progrès Villeray:
Originally, Dunn envisioned the three female dancers as young Cathy Earnshaw, married Cathy, and Cathy’s ghost. The three male dancers she saw as young Heathcliff, adult Heathcliff and Edgar Linton. These characters and their internecine connections formed the initial inspiration for the choreography, but during the creative process, the plotline morphed into elemental abstractions.
“Getting Brontë’s characters onto the stage proved to be very difficult,” Dunn says. “From specific people, they dissolved into generalized gothic archetypes. I just couldn’t get across the story. I was resorting to pantomime, and those scenes had to go.”
As art does tend to take on a life of its own, Dunn now sees the piece as representing the book’s symbolic nature. “Take Jane Austen’s characters,” she explains. “They are well defined. They function as real people in real situations. The more research I did on Wuthering Heights, the more it became clear that it is a long prose poem rather than a novel, that the characters aren’t really characters but ideas. Bronte was playing with stereotypes and archetypes.” (...)
Nocturnes is not the retelling of a story, but one conveying images and complex relationships through partnering. Rough-hewn, weight-bearing physicality is the modus operandi over refined choreographic architecture.
In fact, Dunn now sees the Brontë family itself in the dance. The three women are the Brontë sisters. The three men are the distant father, the weak, alcoholic brother, and perhaps the third male is Emily herself, the most masculine (metaphorically speaking) member of the family.
For the original score, composer David Cronkite deconstructed Chopin’s Nocturnes, which gives the dance piece its name. “I wanted a bilingual title that captures the heart of the dance,” Dunn explains. “The quintessence of the piece is gothic and romantic in the true sense of both words.”
Dunn defines gothic as being attracted to death, darkness, depression and despair. “Brontë saw nature as interacting with the story, and she projected the elements onto the characters. In the studio, elemental powers took over the story. I also found myself being influenced by the surrealists and absurdist humour. In Nocturnes, Brontë intensity is matched by Magritte irony.” (Paula Citron)
Trois couples, ou plutôt six personnages, se rencontrent et se fuient en de multiples géométries. La chorégraphe Deborah Dunn dissèque ici le rêve avec humour et fantaisie dans un univers surréel et une atmosphère teintée de romantisme « à la Brontë », le tout sur la musique de Frédéric Chopin, déconstruite et modifiée. (Microsoft translation)Categories: Dance, Wuthering Heights
More choreographies based on Wuthering Heights. Today, May 2, Nocturnes opens in Montréal, Canada:NocturnesAccording to Le Devoir:
Deborah Dunn
COMPANY : Trial & Eros
A coproduction of Danse-Cité and Trial & ErosDATES : 2 au 5 + 9 au 12 mai 2007 ; 20 H
AGORA DE LA DANSE
840 Cherrier Montréal QC H2L 1H4PHOTO Patrick Baker
CHORÉGRAPHE Deborah Dunn
INTERPRÈTES Stéphane Deligny, Sara Hanley, Audrée Juteau, Dean Makarenko, Sonya Stefan, Daniel Villeneuve
MUSIQUE David Cronkite
COSTUMES Deborah Dunn, Josée Gagnon
ÉCLAIRAGES Deborah Dunn
Cette création pour six danseurs revisite le roman Les Hauts de Hurlevent d'Emily Brontë. La chorégraphe croit bien que les lecteurs de Brontë y reconnaîtront l'histoire de ce classique de la littérature, bien que le texte n'y occupe pas une place prépondérante.EDIT: More information on Voir. With this picture by Nicolas Ruel.
«On explore les clichés romantiques de la femme en blanc, de l'amour au-delà de la mort, rapporte-t-elle en entrevue au Devoir. La première partie, très théâtrale, présente les personnages, puis on verse dans un monde plus onirique et surréel. Les personnages y sont toujours, mais beaucoup plus absurdes. Dans la troisième section, ces relations continuent, mais ça devient plus une exploration du romantisme du point de vue des archétypes.» (Frédérique Doyon)
Babelfish translation->
This creation for six dancers revisits the novel the Wuthering Heights by' Emily Brontë. The choreographer believes well that the Brontë readers will recognize there the story of this classic of the literature, although the text does not occupy a dominating place.
"One explores the romantic stereotypes of the woman in white, of the love beyond death, says in an interview to Le Devoir. The first part, very theatrical, introduces the characters, then one pours in an oniric and surreal world. The characters are there always, but much absurder. In the third section, these relations continue, but it becomes more an exploration of the romanticism from the point of view of the archetypes."
Mainstage A2 - And in Arcata, California:
Friday, May 30th | 8pm | Gala/Talkback | 9:30pm | $28
Saturday, May 31st | 4pm | $25
Trial & Eros [Montréal]
Wuthering Heights (2007)
Choreographer: Deborah Dunn
Inspired by Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, Nocturnes explores the darker side of romantic love. Six characters, finding themselves in three couples, enact the themes of desire, possession and loss within a piece that unites melancholy and humour. The score mixes pieces by David Cronkite, which were inspired by Chopin's Nocturnes, with three original Nocturnes. The costumes by Deborah Dunn, Josée Gagnon and Sarah Tracey are a gorgeous hybrid of Victorian and contemporary design.
Photo by Nicolas Ruel
Photo of Sara Hanley, Sonya Stefan, Audrée Juteau.
The Humboldt Light Opera Company celebrates its 35th anniversary at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, May 31 at HSU’s Van Duzer Theater. Over 100 singers from the last 10 years’ productions, including 35 local and returning soloists, will perform medleys from Titanic, The King & I, Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, Jane Eyre, The Full Monty, King Island Christmas, Quilters and The Music Man. (Maia Cheli-Colando in The Arcata Eye)Categories: Dance, Jane Eyre, Music, Theatre, Wuthering Heights
If only The New Yorker had started earlier it could have helped the 19th century authors too. Of course, the celebrated opening lines would have been a little different.We don't really get the point of the article, or whether they like or dislike the New Yorer kind of openings, because then they go on to ruin some of the most famous opening lines in Literature by 'New-Yorker-ising' them. Had Emily Brontë been an avid reader of the New Yorker, her only novel would have begun thus:
Emily Bronte, Wuthering HeightsHonestly, we still don't know whether this is supposed to be better or worse than the actual opening line:
"On the evening after the rainiest summer day, I returned from a visit to my landlord - the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with."
1801.But we know perfectly well which one we prefer.
I have just returned from a visit to my landlord -- the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with.
Sparks fly in Deborah Dunn's Nocturnes, a new Danse-Cité production about couples, their loves and other misadventures. The dancer-choreographer is an all-out original. In her dance landscape, Dunn is able to infuse her romantic vision (inspired by Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte's sprawling tale of doomed love) with audacious irony, odd beauty and absurd sight gags.And Juliet Wittman, reviewing the play Squall for the Denver Westword, is briefly reminded of Wuthering Heights.
There's plenty of hearty laughter here, and visual jokes that click, but beneath the humour Dunn laces her dance with ideas about the pressures of society, suggesting in her duets a certain tangibility to suffering. But she isn't stuck in melancholy; in fact, most of the physicality is a gas! Dean Makarenko jousting in a swooping cloak (on the wild moors?), Sonya Stefan's jagged laughs that erupt and erase into wails, the stifled rage and mock insistence that drives Stefan and Daniel Villeneuve's intimacy, and Sara Hanley's gliding avenging angel... heck, Stéphane Deligny and Audrée Juteau even exorcise demons. (Philip Szporer)
There's a woman alone in a house on an island off the coast of Maine; a thunderstorm batters the windows. The woman is packing. She has set out three boxes: one labeled Trash; one, Remains to Be Seen; the last, Perpetual Care. The pale face of a younger woman glimmers briefly at the window. I think of Cathy's ghost in Wuthering Heights, rapping against the pane, terrifying the traveler, Lockwood, with her moaning: "Let me in...twenty years I've been a waif." This young woman is fleshly, though. Her name is Cordelia and, as we soon discover when she enters the house, she's barking mad.But Emily Brontë also had her own sources of inspiration, such as the moors. Smarter Travel talks about them.
Top Withins, better known to romantics and English majors everywhere as the supposed inspiration for Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, broods timelessly over the Yorkshire moors. Long since abandoned, the tumbledown remains of this old farmhouse are watched over by two windswept trees and a legion of lazy sheep. (Josh Roberts)Categories: Dance, Haworth, Wuthering Heights
Nocturnes, a piece by Toronto's Trial & Eros, took the story of Charlotte Brontë's Wuthering Heights [sic] set to the music of Chopin in a manner which, although parts of the narrative were retained, was not mere translation.The News (Pakistan) talks about religious fanatism in Pakistan and Jane Eyre makes an appearance:
"I didn't feel like I needed to necessarily tell the narrative, just the image and the archetypes of Cathy and Heathcliff, and going from there and allowing my own life to influence to piece," said Trial and Eros's choreographer and dancer, Deborah Dunn.
While she did not entirely abandon a Victorian aesthetic, the sets and costumes and the dancing itself bore a noticeable surrealist influence. As to whether her audience relates to these personal influences, Dunn does not feel that that is entirely essential.
"I understand that it's not always the exact same thing," she said. (Duncan Day-Myron)
Apart from the numerous attacks on girls' schools in northern areas, attempts to stop musical or theatrical functions at educational institutions have been periodically reported from major cities. Books as innocuous as Bronte's 'Jane Eyre' remain a source of controversy at some centres of higher learning and women in many places have reported warnings delivered to them to cover their heads or dress 'appropriately'.Islamic extremism meets Elizabeth Rigby. Who could ever imagine?
Why the fuck I had to write a high school book report on Jane Eyre but had to discover 'The Metamorphosis' on my own I'll never know. I don't even remember most of Jane Eyre other than the girl eating it on the sled on the end. I mean really, who tries to kill themselves by running a sled into a tree? Maybe I was just too young to put the proper 'weight' on it...or it could have just sucked. Wow sorry for that tangent. That one's been building for awhile. My English teacher would be proud. (Aidan Williamson, interviewer)Not so proud, because the described plot incident corresponds to Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome. Once again the three magic words: check-your-sources.
I remember a day in seventh grade during silent reading time I burst into loud sobs while reading the final chapters of Jane Eyre.More musical tidbits, GaydarNation reviews Alphabeat's debut album. The reference to Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights (check this previous post) is also mentioned:
I cried so much and so hard my teacher asked if I might step outside so my classmates could read in peace. (Libby Rogers)
Similarly, '10,000 nights' is a car windows down, sing-a-along, summer classic. Again, songwriter and guitarist Anders B refers to musical icons of the past, with a wink to Kate Bush's 'Wuthering Heights'. But with a chorus of “You're so ooh, you're so ahh, you're so cool”, Alphabeat aren’t exactly aiming for literary par. (Anna Rutherford)Precisely Snowbot talks about Kate Bush's original 1978 song. More things on the blogosphere include: Viciados em Livros reviews, in Portuguese, Wuthering Heights 1939 and Viewpoints does the same with Jane Eyre 1996. Emily Brontë's Shadow is the name of a new Google Group with the following purpose:
Ever since I began to know and love the life and work of Emily Brontë, I began to make a mental list of women who I felt captured her sense of non-conformity, creativity, edge, and valor. It seems time to make it public, so others can add to the list and discuss. (n+Fold)Categories: Dance, Movies-DVD-TV, Music, References, Websites, Wuthering Heights
Two Brontë premieres today, November 7: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall in Ramsbottom, UK and Polly Teale's Brontë in Johnson, VT:Summerseat Players present
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Adapted by Deborah McAndrew
Directed by Rebecca Carney
Theatre Royal, Smithy Street, Ramsbottom BL0 9AT
The Play runs from Saturday 9/11/2019 to Saturday 16/11/2019 (excluding Sunday 10/11/2019).
The Preview will be on Thursday 7/11/2019
The Charity performance will be on Friday 8/11/2019.
With: Stephen Claxon, Holly Boland, Chris Dunn, Clodagh O’Flynn, Paul Farmer, Lizzy Dunn
In 19th century Yorkshire, a mysterious young widow Helen Graham and her son arrive at the desolate estate of Wildfell Hall. Isolating herself from the village, she soon becomes the subject of local gossip and speculation. Intrigued by this beautiful and enigmatic woman, a young, local farmer, Markham, gradually falls in love. Torn apart by her attraction to Markham and the secrets of her past, Helen finally reveals the shocking history she thought she’d left behind.
Based on the 1848 novel by Anne Brontë The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a passionate story of a woman’s fight for independence. This new stage adaptation has been lovingly brought to life by award winning playwright Deborah McAndrew.
And in Johnson, Vermont:Northern Vermont University Performing Arts Department present
Brontë
by Polly Teale
Directed by Laura Roald
Dibden Center for the Arts, NVU Johnson campus
November 7-9, 7:30pm
November 10, 2:00pm
In the days of the Brontës, the clock at Haworth Church was inscribed with the words “Time how short – eternity how long!”, but this cannot have been the experience of Patrick Brontë, forty years the incumbent of the parish. Tithonus-like, he survived his young wife and all six of his children, living on and on at the quiet limit of the world, a white-haired shadow worn down by loss, and waiting open-armed for the end. When he reached eighty, his immortality on earth was sealed by Elizabeth Gaskell who described him in her newly published Life of Charlotte Brontë, as a child-hating “strange half mad husband” who let off steam by sawing the legs of chairs, shredding silk dresses, burning his hearthrug and his childrens’ boots, and firing a loaded gun from the kitchen door.Now, that April de Angelis's adaptation of Wuthering Heights is being performed at the Chichester Theatre Festival, new reviews are appearing. The Portsmouth News focuses on Amanda Ryan, Cathy in this production:
Aware of being “somewhat exccentrick”, the Revd Patrick Brontë objected less to Mrs Gaskell’s descriptions of his “passionate explosions”, for these had, he said, no basis in truth, than to what he called her “false statements respecting my denying my children the use of animal food”. The story, picked up from a disgruntled former servant, that his children were fed only potatoes suggested that the death from consumption, at the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge, of his two oldest children, Maria, aged ten, and Elizabeth, aged nine, were the result of constitutions weakened by a poor diet. As to the picture of himself, Gaskell was, Patrick Brontë explained, a novelist and therefore saw things with a storyteller’s eye, but in doing so she had ironically missed the character he felt he most resembled, “the father of Margaret in North and South, peaceable, feeling, sometimes thoughtful – and generally well-meaning”.
Nothing anyone ever said about Patrick Brontë was as strange or surprising as what he said about himself. The oddest of the stories he told Mrs Gaskell, repeated here by Dudley Green, is the one describing how “in order to make them speak with less timidity”, he questioned his children under the cover of a mask. “I began with the youngest [Anne, aged around three] – I asked her what a child like her most wanted – She answered, age and experience – I asked the next [Emily, aged around four] what I had best do with her brother Bramwell, who was sometimes a naughty boy. She answered, reason with him, and when he won’t listen to reason whip him.” And so it continued, each child wearing the mask to reveal their true self.
So busy was Mrs Gaskell constructing the masquerade of the Brontë myth that she missed the unmasked man staring right at her. Similarly, Patrick Brontë was unaware, until he was shown his daughters’ published books, that behind another set of masks his tiny house was pulsating with what Mrs Gaskell called, when she read the Brontë juvenilia, a “creative power carried to the verge of insanity”.
Green, who previously edited a fine edition of Patrick Brontë’s letters, is primarily interested in revealing Brontë the clergyman (the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has written a foreword), who rose from an impoverished childhood in County Down to take up a scholarship at St John’s College, Cambridge, where he befriended Lord Palmerston and William Wilberforce, was in favour of Catholic Emancipation and against capital punishment, who campaigned for a proper water supply, and established a Sunday school. Green also gives attention to Brontë’s published poetry, which contains something of the family grimness. “Verses sent to a lady on her birth-day” begins, “But, hark, fair maid! Whate’er they say, / You’re but a breathing mass of clay, / Fast ripening for the grave”. Overwhelmed by his burden as a penniless widower, he frantically sought to replace his children’s mother, but had his proposals firmly turned down. Resigned to being alone, he emerges as a concerned father who, as Branwell told a family friend, “watched over his little flock with truly paternal solicitude and affection . . . their constant guardian and instructor”.
If he was bad-tempered and took his supper alone it was because of the sheer weight of parish duties. In 1834, he presided over 135 funerals; 301 baptisms took place in Haworth Church in 1835. Sometimes he performed twenty baptisms a day. Green describes a life of graft and grief. When Charlotte told her father a few years after the deaths, one after another, of Branwell, Emily and Anne, that she was being courted by his curate, Arthur Nichols, his rage was surely understandable. Patrick Brontë “was no domestic demon”, as a friend said of Branwell, “he was just a man moving in the mist who lost his way”, and as soon as he had found his way again he gave his consent to the marriage.
Green is the first biographer in forty years to attempt to repair the damage caused by Mrs Gaskell. “I thought I carefully preserved the reader’s respect for Mr Brontë”, Gaskell said, but “the desire of doing justice to [Charlotte] compelled me to state the domestic peculiarities of her childhood which . . . contributed so much to make her what she was”. It follows that the peculiarities of the children must have contributed to the man Patrick Brontë became, but there is no sense in these pages that his children were peculiar at all. This is in many ways the book’s strength; rather than rehearse the nature of the “genius” Patrick “fathered”, Dudley Green describes the nuts and bolts of the working life that allowed such talent to flourish.
The Georgia Straight presents Deborah Dunn's new choreography: Elegant Heathens. Her previous piece, Nocturnes, inspired by Wuthering Heights, is mentioned:While training at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and working as an usherette at the Odeon, Leicester Square, Amanda Ryan decided to fill a gap in her literary education.'Once I'd worked out how to sort out the popcorn, there wasn't much left to do,' she says, 'so I started to read Wuthering Heights.
'I was completely shaken by its anti-romanticism and by its portrait of Heathcliff, the ultimate anti-hero. The book is so relentless, so brutal and so incredibly modern.'
Amanda is now playing Cathy, the heroine of Emily Bronte's novel, in a new stage adaptation by April De Angelis at Chichester Festival Theatre until Saturday. (...)
Amanda - whose credits include Shameless (Channel 4), Closer (National Theatre tour) and Shekhar Kapur's film, Elizabeth - says: 'I'd love to travel back in time, join the Bronte sisters in the parlour and have a conversation with these extraordinary talents.
'You have to wonder how this young woman could have written a novel of such dark passions. But I took a walk over the moors while I was there and thought about the way Cathy is rooted in the landscape.' (Mike Allen)
She's created pieces around subjects from Elizabeth I (The Little Queen) to Wuthering Heights (Nocturnes) and silent-film star Louise Brooks (Pandora's Books).(...)The Yuma Sun talks about the upcoming release of the film adaptation of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight:
In fact, Dunn seems so steeped in history, one pictures a weighty copy of Wuthering Heights sitting on her bedside table. It turns out that image is not so far from the truth. "I've read it five times," she states matter-of-factly. When the artist thinks back to what got her interested in the classics, it wasn't necessarily at home. (Janet Smith)
Lemmon says she considers herself a "literary snob" who prefers reading Pearl S. Buck and Charlotte Bronte, and thought she'd never get sucked in by the series, which is mostly written for teens. (Darin Fenger)A few days ago, we linked to a comment where BrontëBlog reader Faye told about not really finding the much-mentioned similarities between Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre and the Twilight series. Now, in an effort to tip the balance, we bring you a link to a comment where reader ThisbeCiel states that the parallels are there indeed. The debate is on!
The book that started it all: “My favorite book is “Jane Eyre.” I responded to the book in the most positive of manners. I still get shivers thinking about reading it for the first time. Rochester, he’s so handsome and manly. [The book] is so fascinating. I haven’t been able to read it in awhile. I was 13 when I read it. It was hard to get started. I think I read the beginning four to five times.” (Carol Shedd interviewed by Abigail Crocker)Brief news: The Grant County Chronicle-Tribune announces that next month's reading choice of the Gas City-Mill Township Public Library Book club: Jane Eyre.
Not sure about you, but we have this ongoing love-hate relationship with Emily Bronte’s seminal work. We didn’t want to read it in high school. Then we kind of liked it, despite its frequent lapses into soap opera-style melodrama. Then we forgot about it, until that interminable MTV “modernization,” which made us reach for the book on the shelf just out of sheer reverence. So, yes, we’re excited to see the live version of Heathcliff and Cathy. All that’s missing is the foggy moors and that six-page essay due Monday. (Jordan Bartel)Procastinando posts a series of curious Amsterdam's graffitis including one with a Brontë mention! (in Spanish) and Other Stories posts about Classical Comics' recent edition of Jane Eyre. The Graphical Novel.
The Brontë Season is made up of: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, the Gothic story of a penniless young governess, met with immediate success when first published. The eponymous Jane takes up service in creepy Thornfield Hall and soon finds herself at the centre of a haunted cover-up-conspiracy with the dashing-yet-devilish, Mr Rochester. Will they live happily ever after? Will their worlds come crashing down around them? It's a Brontë, so be prepared for both!The re-opening of Elizabeth Gaskell's house in Manchester next Sunday, October 5 is in The Telegraph, with special focus in the garden restoration:
Emily Brontë's emotionally gripping Wuthering Heights is, without a doubt, one of the most tragic and infamous love stories ever told. As the most introverted and reclusive of the sisters, Emily's personality remains a mystery.
But as they say, 'still waters run deep' and even if you've never read a word of the Brontës in your life, you will have at least heard of Heathcliff and Cathy and their passionate-yet-destructive love that transcended even death. This production will leave you covered in goosebumps and reaching for the nearest copy.
Anne Brontë, the least well-known (and vastly under-appreciated) of the sisters wrote the most shocking of all the Brontë Tnovels put together, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.
Sitting in her usual writing spot in the dining room, overlooking the garden of her Manchester home, Cranford author Elizabeth Gaskell is in a "doleful mood".The Lytham St Annes Express talks about a local presentation of the latest book by Victoria Hislop:
The chrysanthemums she has been "nursing up into bloom this past summer were carelessly left out-of-doors this past night & have been frozen to death", she confides in a letter to her friend, the American author and art professor Charles Eliot Norton, in October 1859.
It is a mishap that, 155 years later, the gardeners at 84 Plymouth Grove will hope to avoid as they bring Gaskell's flowerbeds back to life. (...)
Elizabeth was known to her family as 'Lily' so it is fitting the garden will include lily of the valley and martagon lilies, while visitors in spring should see a "host of golden daffodils" similar to those made famous by the poet William Wordsworth, who Gaskell met. Just as Charlotte Brontë noted how "a whispering of leaves and perfume of flowers always pervaded the rooms" through the open windows in the summer of 1851, so the new garden has been designed with scent in mind.
The Manchester Historic Buildings Trust has restored the Grade II* listed villa, where Still parties will be allowed in. When I visit, Sir James leads the way with a hand-held searchlight. (Ruth Addicott)
Victoria told of the background to The Sunrise – set in Cyprus at the time of the island’s partition in 1974 – as well as revealing details of her favourite authors and books – Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë.The Washington Post reviews Daphne du Maurier and her Sisters by Jane Dunn:
This study of the three du Maurier sisters is part of a trend that involves suggesting, with varying degrees of subtlety, that the lesser-known siblings of superstars are the equals, or in some respect even the superior, in talent. This trend was slyly mocked by the witty Oxford novelist Barbara Trapido, who titled her debut “Brother of the More Famous Jack,” upending the relative renown of artist John Butler Yeats and his infinitely more famous brother the poet William Butler Yeats.The Star (Malaysia) interviews the writer Jessie Burton:
In the three decades since Mrs. Trapido had her targeted laugh about this phenomenon, we have heard a great deal about Vanessa Bell being at least as worthy as her sister Virginia Woolf, to say nothing of William Michael versus Dante Gabriel Rossetti or the ancestresses of this whole enterprise, Anne rather than Charlotte or Emily Brontë. Author of a dual life of Bell and Woolf and a study of the royal cousins Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots, British biographer Jane Dunn readily concedes that “a bevy of sisters is more than the sum of its parts, and it is to this protean relationship that I, as a biographer, like to turn.”
It’s no accident that the three Brontë sisters crop up early in Miss Dunn’s interesting if flawed study of Angela, Jeanne and Daphne du Maurier. For one thing, Daphne du Maurier, as Miss Dunn writes, “was fascinated by the Brontë siblings and identified with them all, but she jokingly hoped that she and her sisters might emulate Charlotte, Emily and Anne one day, if only she could get her artist sister to write, too.” By artist, she means painter and thus her younger sister Jeanne, whose portrait of Daphne reproduced in this book reveals her to have been talented if not overly burdened with originality of style. (...)
Then there’s her imagination, as formidable as any writer’s, her artistic fearlessness and fierce independence that gave her writing a power and an originality that few of her contemporaries — and certainly not either of her sisters — could approach. In this, she is the equal of Emily Brontë or Mary Shelley, except that, unlike them, she did not produce just one masterpiece like “Wuthering Heights” or “Frankenstein.” (Martin Rubin)
Who are your three favourite authors?And USA Today talks with another author, Susan Vaughan:
Of all time? Charlotte Brontë, Hilary Mantel, and Margaret Atwood. (Verity Watkins)
Why RS (Romantic Suspense)?The Spectator reviews Churchill’s Rebels: Esmond Romilly and Jessica Mitford by Meredith Whitford:
I grew up reading mysteries, first Nancy Drew, then authors my mother read, Agatha Christie and Erle Stanley Gardner, for example. I've always loved the tension and the puzzle. Then I discovered Gothics like Jane Eyre and books by Mary Stewart and Phyllis Whitney and fell in love, so to speak, with the romance aspect as well. I love writing romantic suspense because it throws the hero and heroine together under extraordinary circumstances and pits them against a clever villain.
Even ardent Mitfordians must quake at the sight of yet another biography of the sisterhood. There have been more forests felled in the name of Nancy, Pamela, Diana, Unity, Jessica and Deborah Freeman-Mitford than the Brontë sisters. (Mark McGinness)
Emily Brontë, Cime tempestose - Nella mia classifica personale, Cime Tempestose è la storia d'Amore con la A maiuscola. I tormenti di Catherine e Heathcliff hanno attraversato indenni ormai quasi due secoli e stregato intere generazioni. (...)WAZ (Germany) announces the airing, today October 2, of Wuthering Heights 2011 in 3 Sat:
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre - Intramontabile. Ogni anno assistiamo alla pubblicazione di centinaia di emuli più o meno validi che raccontano con altre dinamiche e in altre epoche la storia tormentata del misterioso Rochester con l'ingenua ma caparbia Jane. Ovviamente, nessuno vale l'originale. Jane Eyre è Jane Eyre. (Translation)
Wuthering Heights (3 Sat, Do., 22.25 Uhr, TV-Premiere). Berührende Filmneuauflage des Romans „Stürmische Höhen“ von Emily Brontë um die Liebe eines Waisenjungen zur Stiefschwester. (Translation)WiseFreak posts about Wuthering Heights; Pamreader posts about Jane Eyre as passive or strong; Upcycle Shed has made a Jane Eyre-inspired wall hanging; We Are All Fools in Love posts a beautfiul Jane Eyre 2006 collage.
Karna’s portrayal offers nothing new. His brooding, reclusive presence is reminiscent of Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights and Shashi Kapoor’s Karan in Shyam Benegal’s “Kalyug”, a film adaptation of the Mahabharata. (Priya Krishnan)The Guelph Mercury mentions the performances of Deborah Dunn's dance piece Wuthering Heights at the Guelph Contemporary Dance Festival:
[L]a película mantiene su interés a pesar de no ser más que una novela “rosa” en la tradición de novelas de Jane Austen o Emily Bronte, por ejemplo. (Vanguardia, México)Anne Thackeray Ritchie, Jane Eyre: Contradiction of Companionship and Isolation is the title of a paper by Chen Shinzi that can be read here.
You can listen to Colin Paterson's interview aired today on BBC Radio 4's Today programme here.The US artist was in Howarth (SIC!), Yorkshire, to play a fundraising concert for the Brontë society, which runs a museum dedicated to Charlotte and Emily's books.She has been dubbed the 'godmother of US punk' but on Friday night Patti Smith was paying tribute to English literary heritage.
The BBC's Colin Paterson went to meet her.
The Telegraph & Argus was also there and publishes a video of the concert:Haworth’s Brontë Schoolroom was packed for a unique concert by New York punk legend Patti Smith last night.The Facebook wall of the Brontë Parsonage talks about the concert too:
All 125 tickets for the tiny gig sold out in just two days, and the lucky few who got tickets weren’t disappointed, as Smith played an acoustic set that included shout outs to Wuthering Heights’ Heathcliff and Cathy, who she dedicated Dancing Barefoot to, and the Brontë sisters tragic brother Branwell. (...)
She is also a published poet, and the concert mixed music with poetry readings. She is also a huge fan of the Brontë sisters, and after visiting Haworth last year offered to play a fundraising gig for the Brontë Parsonage and schoolhouse. The money will go towards the upkeep of the building where Charlotte Brontë taught.
Backed by guitarist Tony Shanahan, Smith enthralled the crowd with a mix of classics and newer songs, and spoke of her love for the sisters in between tracks.
She dedicated first song, Wing, to her sister Linda who first introduced her to the books. She said: “She gave me the great gift of appreciation of Charlotte Brontë.”
At one point she brought a young musician Kizzy Brown to the stage to play flute while she read one of her poems, Night Wind. She had only met the young musician the day before on a visit to Ponden Hall.
She referred to the often overlooked Brontë sibling, Branwell, who died young after bouts of alcoholism and drug abuse. Smith said: “When you come here you think of Charlotte, Emily and Anne, but Branwell gifted the sisters with the gift of the dark romance, it was a world they created together.” (...)
As concerts go, you would go a long way to get more unique than seeing the 66-year-old godmother of New York punk playing the former classroom of Charlotte Bronte.
But that is exactly what the lucky few who nabbed tickets to Patti Smith’s gig last night got to see.
Before she started with opening song Wing it was obvious the night would be peppered with talk of the Brontë sisters, and Smith engaged with the crowd about how they inspired her. (Chris Young)
Just pinch me. It's hard to believe in the cold light of day that it all really happened, but Patti Smith was playing the Old Schoolroom in Haworth last night, and it was an amazing gig. (Julie Akhurst)and posts pictures of the event.
Museum director Ann Sumner said: “As far as we know this is the first time a rock star has ever held a concert to benefit a museum in the UK. We are honoured and grateful Patti Smith has chosen to support us in this way, and very excited to hear her play.”Ann Sumner also tells Keighley News that although the Brontë Society was not able to obtain the Charlotte Brontë manuscript poem recently auctioned at Bonhams they have other goals:
But the Brontë Society now has its sights set on a previously unpublished manuscript by one of the acclaimed literary sisters.Hopefully it will be a successful appeal as it is a very exciting Brontëana item indeed.
Professor Ann Sumner, who took over as the Brontë Society’s executive director just two months ago, told us: “The society was present at the auction but had to drop out at an early stage.
“While it was very interesting, we are currently concentrating on fundraising for a previously unpublished manuscript, and will be announcing this appeal shortly.”
She declined to comment further on the new target of the literary society, which is one of the oldest organisations of its kind in the world and is responsible for administering Haworth’s Brontë Parsonage Museum – once the family home of the sisters.
At Haworth in Yorkshire, where the parsonage looks over the seeping gloom of the graveyard, conditions were similarly testing for the Brontë sisters. “I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen in their genteel but confined houses,” Charlotte wrote of Austen’s rarefied circles. Certainly, theirs was a more rugged terrain, both literally and metaphorically – “moorish and wild” as Charlotte described the setting of Wuthering Heights in her preface to the 1850 edition of her sister’s novel.The Guardian reviews Daphne du Maurier and her Sisters: The Hidden Lives of Piffy, Bird and Bing: The Hidden Lives of Daphne du Maurier and her Sisters by Jane Dunn:
At Haworth, subject to their own brand of isolation, the motherless children retreated to the dark sequestered mansions of the mind where their imagination found a freedom that was not afforded them in their daily lives as daughters of a 19th-century Yorkshire parson. (Deborah Alun-Jones)
Her book belongs to the growing genre of what might be called Sisterly Feelings; Paula Byrne's excellent recent The Real Jane Austen and Dunn's own A Very Close Conspiracy: Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf are notable examples, though perhaps one of the greatest is Daphne du Maurier's own The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë, in which the brother's tortured life vividly illuminates those of his three remarkable sisters. Unlike the Rev Brontë's girls, Gerald du Maurier's three daughters were not equally touched by genius, which sets a problem for biographer, compounded by the refusal of the surviving partner of the youngest, Jeanne, to allow the author access to her archive. (Simon Callow)Andrew Motion discusses literary sequels in The Scotsman:
A similar kind of ingenuity – although less flashily done – appears in Wide Sargasso Sea, in which Jean Rhys imagines the life of the first Mrs Rochester in Jane Eyre. In the novel’s luscious yet brilliantly well-organized prose, the “mad woman in the attic” is given a background, a life, a love and a tragedy that make it impossible for anyone who’s read it to think in the same way again about her husband in his subsequent Brontë-life. That’s quite an achievement. Rhys actually manages to enrich a book commonly agreed to be a masterpiece before she went anywhere near it.Daisy Fried discusses Anne Carson in The New York Times:
Many readers (including me) first knew her through “The Glass Essay,” a 38-page multipart lyric narrative in 1995’s “Glass, Irony and God.” The poem is an inspired mash-up: a confessional-style “I” recounts a breakup with a lover and a visit to an aged mother while considering the life and writings of Emily Brontë and reporting on her surrealist visions of nudes.Mary McNamara talks about the new generation of female characters on TV series. Although we understand her point we think she is wrong quoting Jane Eyre as example in the Los Angeles Times:
Through characters such as Claire [House of Cards] and Sylvia [Parade's End], Alicia [Good Wife] and "Homeland's" Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes), we can imagine Anna Karenina if she believed she had a future, Jane Eyre with self-esteem, Elizabeth Bennet granted a real education and maybe a trip or two to London. We can see Tess of the d'Urbervilles provided legal counsel or Jo March allowed to run away and be a soldier.
For example, true to the romantic spirit of the age, when Charlotte Brontë first saw the sea she became faint and swooned, and as Charles Sprawson observes in his Haunts of the Black Masseur: The Swimmer as Hero (1992), when Shelley drowned off the coast of Viareggio, “ … it was the culmination of a love affair with water that influenced him to sink rather than swim.” (George Winter)The Toronto Star describes as follows the Toronto District School Board's Student Short Story Contest:
The teachers got as much out of the contest of their students. They read the stories in their free time, passing them back and forth for comments and editing. They watched the creative unconscious unfold before them. Talk to them today, and many will describe student stories like scenes from Jane Eyre. (Catherine Porter)The durability of gothic and Frankenstein in particular is the subject of this article in The Independent:
Like Moby-Dick and Wuthering Heights, Frankenstein is a unique, sui generis work, born of obsession. It feeds on sensational, science-fiction elements to make subtler points about our essential disconnect with nature. (Philip Hoare)The Winnipeg Free Press reviews In The Land of Birdfishes by Rebecca Silver Slayter:
In the Land of Birdfishes envelopes the reader in its heavy atmosphere of secrecy, guilt, delusion and obsession. Though much of it takes place in the endless sunshine of a northern summer, its dark, constricted feel gives it a strong resemblance to Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë's 1947 Gothic classic. (Joanne Epp)The Derby Telegraph remembers how
David James, chief executive of Visit Peak District and Derbyshire, said: "It's not unfamiliar to see the Peak District as the location for major films and TV series.The Journal Sentinel reviews the novel The Perfect Ghost by Linda Barnes:
"From Jane Eyre to Harry Potter, the Peak District and its diverse range of fantastic locations has for a long time attracted film and television crews. (Kelly Tyler)
Em narrates her journey from Jane Eyre-like innocence to becoming Malcolm's eager lover as if she's talking to her dead partner. While Malcolm prepares a production of "Hamlet," Em narrates a story seeped in cuckoldry, malevolence and mystery. (Carol E. Barrowman)El Espectador (Colombia) interviews the author Carolina Andújar:
¿Cuáles son sus libros y autores de cabecera?The Budapest Times talks about the the Hungarian premiere of the new play by Andras Visky:
Siempre tengo a Lin Yutang, me fascina, amo su personalidad. Ese hombre me llena de dicha. Y de los clásicos, a Bram Stoker y a las hermanas Brontë. (Translation)
I Killed My Mother is the story of Bernadett, a modern-day Jane Eyre of Ceausescu’s Romania, an orphan, exposed to cruelty and neglect, yet possessing a strong sense of self-respect and the capacity to love and forgive.ITProPortal reviews the new Kobo Aura HD:
I was staggered to discover that classics like Chinua Achebe's 'Things Fall Apart' and Jean Rhys' 'Wide Sargasso Sea' didn't feature amongst Kobo's 3.2 million titles. (James Laird)The Huffington Post mentions The Enemy, the song written by Mumford & Sons for Wuthering Heights 2011; Der Standard (Austria) thinks that Gaslight 1943 has Jane Eyre echoes; Film de Culte (France) offers the chance to win VOD vouchers to watch online Wuthering Heights 2011; the Brontë Sisters talks about A.B. Nicholls's marriage proposal to Charlotte Brontë; Smart Bitches.Trashy Books reviews Sharon Shinn's Jenna Starborn; BDSM Book Reviews posts about Ranae Rose's Wuthering Heights Clandestine Classic.
Adèle Varens, daughter of a French prostitute, takes center stage as a teenage vigilante in Victorian London, exacting revenge on men and relieving them of their valuables in Betsy Cornwell's dazzling, fiercely feminist riff on Charlotte Brontë's classic, "Jane Eyre." (...)This page-turner of a thriller remains remarkably faithful to Brontë's original while breaking new ground with its fascinating protagonist; the title plays off a Brontë quote: "Reader, I married him."Cornwell dedicates her book "for all the attic girls." (Jean Westmoore)
The life of Emily Brontë is an enduring object of fascination. So small, the life, so sparse, so limited. Yet it delivered those magnificent poems and Wuthering Heights. How could this be? Genius, I suppose, paired with a vivid interior life. But as neither of those are cinematic, Emily imagines what could have led her to write as she did. It’s a ‘speculative biopic’, and modern, but there’s no Billie Eilish on the soundtrack or breaking of the fourth wall or jokey intertitles or any of those larks, which is a mighty relief. Instead, it’s daring, and ravishing. If you’d asked me if Emily might have ever tried opium, or had a passionate affair with a sexy curate, I’d have laughed in your face. But here I absolutely bought it. (Deborah Ross)
In Wuthering Heights, New Year’s Day is also the day assigned for young Cathy and Hareton’s wedding. (Alice Dunn)
El Tiempo (Colombia) y El Nacional (in Catalan) also recommends the film and Le Devoir (Canada) says it is "a superb biography".
De niña había leído con placer las novelas en las que Jane Austen describía las relaciones de distintas hermanas, y le había fascinado no solo la obra de las Brontë, sino también la historia personal de las tres hermanas. (Translation)
Cécile McLorin Salvant's cover of Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights is one of the songs of the year in Will Hermes list as published in WAMC Northeast Public Radio. The song is also in the list of Daniele Casandro in Il Internazionale (Italy).
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