OpusHabana publishes an interview with the Cuban poet Pablo Armando Fernández, in which he remembers how influential was Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights in his decision of becoming a writer.
"I didn't choose to be a poet. Sometimes I've said that I was chosen by poetry, and it's not a lie. I was already a writer when I became a poet. I've told that I became a writer listening to a radio adaptation of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. Those voices on the Cuban radio changed my life completely. From then on I was another person, and that defined my destiny: I was going to be a writer and I didn't want to do anything else in life".
Pablo Armando Fernández is a controversial figure due to his relation with Castro's regime.The Clergy Daughters' School was situated at Cowan Bridge, just over the Westmorland border into Lancashire.In 1824, the Rev Patrick Brontë, from Haworth,[...] brought his daughters Maria and Elizabeth there. His elder daughter, Charlotte, [sic] arrived, apparently by herself, in August.The institution had been founded by the Rev Carus Wilson, who was both vicar and squire of Casterton - to which place the school was later removed. [...]Though locally hailed as a generous benefactor, Carus Wilson's school's 'assisted fees' were quite high at £14 per year, with £3 extra for 'accomplishments' of French, music and drawing.Charlotte was only at Cowan Bridge for eight months. Yet her lurid story of child abuse and lack of Christian charity at Low Wood [sic] in her 1847 novel 'Jane Eyre' has been as everlasting as those Dickens, in 1839, portrayed of workhouse cruelty in 'Oliver Twist'.In 'Jane Eyre', Carus Wilson, renamed as the Rev Mr Brocklehurst, was depicted as 'a sanctimonious man, hand in glove with a sadistic God who commanded his teachers to expunge the girls' lust by flogging their bodies, and providing them with scanty, often uneatable food, badly-cooked in a damp, dirty kitchen.'After enduring a harsh winter, the two younger girls [sic] were sent home in spring. Within months they had died of tuberculosis and, possibly, of typhus. Maria was 10 and Elizabeth nine; not a pleasant story. (Roger Bingham)
This felt like a biblical event, but it was certainly moving and elemental. I watched it from outside and then back to monitor it online, on a site where you can watch lightning strikes mapped live.
I was flitting from my own live “real” experience to an online mediated one. This felt like one of the great storms from literature: the storm in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, the lightning in Nabokov’s Lolita or the thunder in Herman Melville’s The Lightning-rod Man. It felt like a scene from Frankenstein. (Mike Small)
Desde la creación, hace varias décadas, de la Colección Huracán, los lectores cubanos han tenido ocasión de acercarse a obras de incuestionable alcance y trascendencia, escritas por autores de diversas generaciones, estilos y latitudes. [...]Cumbres borrascosas (2017, 392 pp), novela de Emily Brontë –única narración publicada por su autora con el seudónimo masculino de Ellis Bell—, apareció, por vez primera, en el año 1847.«Obra controvertida para su época –aseguran los editores de esta entrega—, alabada por unos y criticada por otros que no comprendieron la complejidad de sus personajes y su innovadora estructura».Emily Brontë (1818-1848), quien, junto a sus hermanas Charlotte y Anne, escribió poesía y prosa desde la infancia, presenta en este relato una vívida radiografía de las realidades y conflictos de la sociedad inglesa del siglo XIX.Esta nueva edición –acompañada de un estudio introductorio del poeta y narrador Pablo Armando Fernández— confirma que Cumbres borrascosas no ha dejado de despertar el interés y la curiosidad de numerosos lectores en todo el mundo. (Fernando Rodríguez Sosa) (Translation)
So far, this has been an especially great year for former winners of the prize. In February, Isabel Greenberg (left), who won it in 2011, published her third full-length graphic novel, Glass Town, a book inspired by the imaginary childhood worlds of the Brontës. (Rachel Cooke)
August 24 Jean RhysRhys was born and grew up in the Caribbean island of Dominica, and it is this background that informed her most famous novel, Wide Sargasso Sea. This prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, written around 80 years after the classic, describes the marriage of Jane’s eventual husband, Mr Rochester, to his first wife, Bertha. In Jane Eyre, she is the “madwoman in the attic”. This story gives her a lot more context, and explores themes of racism and feminism. (Karly Cox)
66. What were the pseudonyms originally used by the Brontë sisters? (Abigail Rabbett and Fiona Leishman)
Helen Graham tells of her marriage to a charming man who turns out to be an alcoholic. Worse still, his gentleman friends are fellow imbibers, and she must endure their flushed faces and drunken badinage. We must see how alcohol makes privileged chaps behave like beasts. In one hellish soirée, abuse turns into fighting as the claret flows.Joe Queenan writes in The New York Times about the the current trend among reviewers of being generally too nice or too servile. The faithful readers of BrontëBlog will laugh reading this paragraph:
Authors are described as a cross between Madame de Staël and Arthur Conan Doyle, or are said to write like Charlotte Brontë on acid, or have out-Dostoyevskied Dostoyevsky and checkmated Euripides, when they are more of a cross between Candace Bushnell and Ngaio Marsh, or write like Willa Cather on Robitussin-DM, or have been narrowly out-Mavis Gallanted by Mavis Gallant, and were lucky to play Edna Ferber to a draw.The Telegraph publishes a conversation between Elton John and Sam-Taylor Wood. Her current exhibition on London, Yes I Know is mentioned:
EJ: She's done a short film, photo shoots of people, two or three new series of videos, a new series of photographs, all in the last nine months. That's an awful lot of work. I think there is a deep-rooted drive in her that is fuelled by the fear of the cancer coming back.If some days ago we posted about a graffiti in Amsterdam with Brontë echoes, today Cherwell (Oxford's student newspaper) explores the Oxford's English Faculty toilets:
STW: Yes, totally. You can see it with the Wuthering Heights [series of Brontë-inspired photographs, now on show at London's White Cube gallery]. Knowing how I felt when I did those pictures, being in that barren, disturbing landscape - there is a base level that definitely comes from what I've been through.
The same cubicle [Cubicle II] also showcases everyone's favourite: Jane Eyre. The famous line of ‘Reader I married him' receives the response that, unfortunately, ‘He ruined me' and the comment ‘well, that's what you get for saying ‘yes, sir' when he asked. Look it up'. Ah, Jane Eyre banter. It's underrated. (Gini Sharvill)Patrick Brontë being a Cambridge man, we hope that the Cambridge toilets are up to scratch.
10. Who is the Charlotte Brontë character sent to Lowood Academy by her cruel aunt before becoming a governess at Thornfield Manor?Precisely, Jane Eyre is one of the readers' picks of the Christian Science Monitor. The Mexican La Jornada Guerrero talks about the Cuban poet Pablo Armando who mentions his Brontëite origins:
Fui poseído por una voz que me alertaba que había seres abandonados, que sufrían, que carecían de voz y rostro y de los medios para sobrevivir; pero esa voz me llegaba en inglés”, narró.Finally, Die Welt reviews in German Anne Donovan's Being Emily.
Su interés por la literatura se arreció cuando escuchó en la radio Cumbres Borrascosas, de Emily Brontë. (Marisol Wences Mina)
In addition to picture books, Pinkney illustrated an eclectic selection of classic adult novels, including Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, Rabbit, Run by John Updike and Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. (Julia Eccleshare)
It's the Pennsylvania Franklin Library edition of 1975.
On Thursday, October 28, Portland-based multidisciplinary artist Anthony Hudson presented their lecture “Tales from Queer Horror,” consisting of a brief history of queer horror as well as information about their Hollywood Theatre program of the same name. [...]Hudson noted people often think of queer horror as a subgenre, but Hundson argues that it is not in fact a subgenre but rather an integral part of horror as a whole. They argued that horror’s queer roots can be traced all the way back to gothic stories such as Wuthering Heights and Carmilla, the latter of which is one of the first vampire stories. Gothic stories, Hudson argued, frequently feature “a sexualized other who [the characters] want, but can’t have because society will not allow [them] to because it’s said to be wrong.” (Betsy Wight)
-Muchas veces has hablado sobre lo que fue para ti el encuentro con la novela Cumbres Borrascosas...-Fue absolutamente todo. Si yo no hubiera escuchado en Delicias una versión radial de Cumbres Borrascosas a los 10 años, no me hubiese hecho escritor. Mi imaginación me llevó a la Inglaterra de Yorkshire, al lugar donde se desarrolla aquella novela; me devuelve a personajes como Heathcliff pero también a personajes como Cathy. Yo siempre he dicho que mi vida literaria ha estado influida por mujeres: Emily Brontë, Carson Mc Cullers, Marguerite Yourcenar... (Eugenio Marrón Casanova) (Translation)
Sydney-born Thorp, now living in Cork, has dreamed into being a complex and compelling protagonist and a convincing exploration of a veiled female story. Just as Jean Rhys, in Wide Sargasso Sea, gave a voice to the first Mrs Rochester from Jane Eyre, Thorp has fleshed out King Lear’s wife. (Martina Devlin)
Famed author, Charlotte Brontë, also has links to the picturesque village.North Lees Hall provided the basis for Thornfield Hall in Bronte’s novel, Jane Eyre. Brontë’s childhood best friend, Ellen Nussey, also had family links to the village church.Nussey’s brother was Hathersage’s vicar and Charlotte reportedly stayed at the vicarage with Ellen for three weeks in 1845.The surrounding moors also provided inspiration for her novels. (Beth Gulliver)
Nabbing Sean Barrett, the narrator of Mick Herron, Jo Nesbo and Wilbur Smith, to read it was a stroke of genius. “Nothing good can come of this,” you warn yourself as, voice pregnant with menace, he tells of the glories of manuscripts torn apart to provide loo paper, early printed books burnt by religious fanatics, and the “idle books, and riffe raffes” chucked away by Oxford’s Sir Thomas Bodley. Cheap access to books came via circulating libraries, such as the one visited by the Brontë sisters in Keighley, and the Boots reading rooms. (Christina Hardyment)
In which Charlotte Brontë novel is Edward Rochester a major character?
Keeping dogs, in fact, helped all these writers keep their sanity. Bronte, and Woolf all depended on their dogs "to keep them grounded during the white heat' of sustained creative work," writes Adams. Carlo, a gigantic Newfoundland, gave the reclusive Dickinson an excuse for long walks around Amherst.
Dogs bound through "Wuthering Heights," Bronte's only novel, but she left no record of her relationship with Keeper, a once violent mastiff she tamed. Others fill in the gap. "The accounts of Emily's funeral," Adams says, "all mention Keeper" who, according to Emily's sister Charlotte, "to the day of its death, slept at her room door, snuffing under it, and whining every morning." (Margo Hammond in The Cleveland Plain Dealer)
Now for some Brontëites.
This is not the first time that we report on Cuban poet Pablo Armando Fernández's love for Wuthering Heights. This article on Juventud Rebelde returns to his memories of his discovery of the novel and its influence on his writings (in Spanish).
Argentinian actress Mónica Villa is interviewed in Clarín. She chooses Jane Eyre as her favourite fictional heroine.
Another Brontëite happens to be Natasha Trethewey, poet and author of Native Guard as she says in this interview in Newsweek:
Ellie's Thoughts in Print, posts a lot, and we mean a lot, of pictures of her recent visit to Haddon Hall:Thornfield Hall in Jane Eyre 1996 and 2006. Reel-me-in talks about The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. And the weird thing of the day: Look at how a real estate promoter from Rochester, NY can publicise his business. We agree with Reject the Kool-Aid (where we found the link):My Five Most Important Books
* "Wuthering Heights" by Emily Brontë. It's so dark and romantic, and I was inspired by the way Brontë used the language of the characters to communicate their class differences.
And finally, there's this terrible affront to Mr. Rochester at www.mrrochester.com. You sir, ought to be ashamed of yourself.We wonder whether their estates come with madwomen in the attic.
Emma Campbell Webster, author of Being Elizabeth Bennett: Create Your Own Jane Austen Adventure, which applies the principles of Fighting Fantasy to Pride And Prejudice, published next month (they haven't used this on the US edition, but it ought to be described as a book where "YOU become the WIFE"). Apparently, you need to know a lot about Austen to negotiate successfully the various impediments to marrying Mr Darcy. The Bookseller thinks it's "gimmicky but fun", but with any luck, Webster can start on The Attic Of Jane Eyre. (Stuart Kelly)Categories: Books, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Weirdo, Wuthering Heights
To be avoided, on the one side, is the Scylla of the OTT Gothic novel: everyone knows there is a madwoman in Rochester's attic, but this adaptation reminds us that there are monsters on Jane's sketch pad, too. On the other side lies the Charybdis of a sloppy romance: Rochester, the Byronic owner of Thornfield, is the prototype for every tall, dark and smirking nob Barbara Cartland ever wrote about. But navigate between the two, and you discover the first great English Bildungsroman in which hero and heroine are given a sentimental education.What's with today? Barbara Cartland's all over the place.
Let no one tell you this novel lacks absurdities. Rochester at one stage turns up in drag, disguised as a gypsy fortune-teller. On the page, you have Jane's voice to make credible the incredible. On television, you rely on your actors. White has cast perfectly. Jane is played by Ruth Wilson, an unknown 24-year-old fresh out of drama school. There is not a reaction shot in which she does not look intelligent, and not a line she delivers that does not suggest the thinking behind it. Her Donald Duck mouth and heavy eyebrows give her face too much character for beauty, yet any intelligent man might fall for it (particularly if the alternative is Blanche's porcelain mask). "That look," Rochester says. "No judgement, no pity. That look would pry secrets from the darkest souls." He says it with anticipation.Donald Duck mouth?! Surely that's worse than especulating about her height.
There is no long list of character actors. Tara Fitzgerald, as the infant Jane's unloving aunt, is no sooner seen than gone. Richard McCabe stands out as vindictive Mr Brocklehurst, headmaster of Lowood School - but Eyre's schooldays are done with in ten minutes. Her friendship with Helen Burns is disposed of in half that time. Pam Ferris as Grace Poole, keeper of the first Mrs R in the north tower, is seen mainly bustling down corridors.It was too long ago since someone mentioned Rochester's - symbolic or not - castration. We were hoping we wouldn't have to hear it until after the last episode.
These excepted, every long shot is a composition of beauty. Most tell a story, too. The finger of God points down from a mural at a young Eyre, framed for lying. Her fellow pupils, dressed identically in white caps, are like clones. Respectable society is as uniform as the wooden coffins in which Helen Burns's fellow victims of onsumption are carried off.
The Derbyshire countryside has rarely looked so consistently cold and grey, either. Out of its mists, to confront Jane for the first time, rides Rochester: black hair, black cape and black stallion. But once at Thornfield, he becomes associated with warmth: orange hues lick his face at the fireside, the sun illuminates him on a picnic and, at the end of episode one, his bed is engulfed in flames. The question Jane will have to answer is whether the fire within is, or is not, hellish.
The conceit of the book is that while Rochester believes Eyre, in her sinless youth, to be in need of a sentimental education into life's horrors, it is he who ends up taught a lesson in humanity by her. His blinding - the symbolic castration that brings Jane back to him - is the creepiest moment in the book, not to mention the most absurd. I hope this magical adaptation has the sorcery to make us accept it.
I became a writer when I was 10 years old after I heard on the radio the first episode of an adaptation of Emily Brontë's novel Wuthering Heights. From then on I was another person and I prepared myself to be a poor, abandoned, lonely, and sad Englishman.And this is not the first time that Mr. Fernández has said something similar.
"Jessica is a New York workaholic in her mid-thirties, reeling from a broken relationship that she thought would last forever and slowly isolating everyone she knows. When every block in New York tells a story of her own bad behavior, the only solution is to take a job in London, where she plans to live a life of solitude like a Brontë sister," a synopsis said. (Karen Butler)
As worries grow over the cost of culture – barely a week goes by without an actor complaining about theatre ticket prices – one form of art remains absolutely free, in London at least. On the underground, there is still poetry, as there has been since 1986. The new verses for spring – this is the 116th set of poems – include the lovely Riches I hold in light esteem (also known as The Old Stoic) by Emily Brontë: scant lines about freedom and courage that may just make weary commuter eyes leak a little as the train clanks between Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square. (Rachel Cooke)
Wuthering Heights by Emily BrontëIf there's anything to be taken from this list of books so far, it's that Stevie Nicks is a sucker for a brooding romantic. And no one does brooding romanticism quite like the Brontë sisters — Heathcliff in Emily Brontë's "Wuthering Heights" is a perfect example of this. He starts off a bit romantic for Catherine, then spirals into a vindictive monster, making him what they call in the literary world a Byronic hero. Charlotte Brontë created her own Byronic hero, Mr. Rochester, in her novel "Jane Eyre.""I first read 'Jane Eyre' and 'Wuthering Heights' (written by Charlotte's sister Emily Brontë) when I was in college in California in the late 1960s," Nicks said. "They are two of my favorite books because they're just so brilliantly written. The beauty of both these classics is that they were fantastic when I was a teenager and they still appeal to me now as a 63-year-old woman."While this certainly isn't the complete list of Nicks's literary favorites, it's a great starting point for those hoping to be inspired by some of the darker themes and characters out there. After all, one can't sustain on Jane Austen alone. (Amanda Chatel)
The Montreal writer, who was born to a Scottish father and a Lebanese mother on a Royal Canadian Air Force base in the former West Germany, made the codes of Victorian literature a veritable playground in this fourth novel which visibly pays homage to the Brontë sisters.“Many of us recognize and love these themes: frightening mansions, family secrets, hidden origins and inheritance quarrels,” underlines the author, met by The duty to Montreal. Victorian Gothic literature is like a toy box full of treasures and disguises for me to enjoy. (...)Like most of Ann-Marie MacDonald’s novels, Fayne was born from a simple image. “This time it was a mysterious undulating landscape. I didn’t know if it was water or windswept moor. Then, in the upper right corner, I added an old stone mansion. I looked at my drawing, and I understood that I was in the land of the Brontë sisters. I also sketched the silhouette of a young person, hair blowing in the wind, dressed in a Byronesque style. I didn’t know if it was a boy or a girl. Below I wrote a quote: “I heard something in the bog” I had to follow these three ellipsis and unravel the mystery of what would become Charlotte Bell. »
Still, imagine reading one of Faber’s collections without ever having heard the songs. You would not be able to conjure Cocker’s sly, fruity delivery of the words, “I said, well, I’ll see what I can do” in Pulp’s Common People, nor the leaping desperation with which Bush sings, “Heathcliff, it’s me, it’s Cathy, I’ve come home” on Wuthering Heights. (Dorian Lynskey)
The Studio – Parwich, Derbyshire DalesSleeps: TwoPrice: Seven nights from £502This beautiful, detached cottage is set in the heart of Derbyshire and is ideally located for couples looking to explore the locations which inspired various Brontë books, including the literary classic Jane Eyre which was written by Charlotte Brontë.The property boasts traditional features including wooden beams, a wood-burning stove and a beautiful walled garden – perfect for an evening drink or a cup of tea in the morning sunshine.Situated in the south of the Peak District National Park, the cottage is just a 30-minute drive away from Chatsworth House, where Jane and Edward Rochester’s first meeting was filmed in the 2011 film adaption. (Daniel Smith)
Manderley y Cumbres Borrascosas, dos de las mansiones literarias más famosas en mi haber, se mezclaron durante mucho tiempo como recuerdos opacos en mi memoria, sin saber realmente por qué; hasta el punto de que esa frase mítica de la esposa del señor de Winter de Anoche soñé que volvía a Manderley en la película de Hitchcock Rebeca (1940) podría haber sido pronunciada por Catherine Earnshaw como Anoche soñé que volvía a Cumbres Borrascosas, con la misma sensación de pérdida en ambos casos. Nada. Ni caso; asociaciones que uno se hace. (...) (José Joaquín Martínez Egido) (Translation)
Pero fue, sin dudas, una emisión radial de aquellos tiempos la que le incitó a su encuentro con la literatura: Cumbres borrascosas, la novela de Emily Brontë cuyos parajes y personajes él podía ubicar allí en Delicias, como si el batey se transmutara en los páramos del Yorkshire inglés. (Eugenio Marrón Casanova) (Translation)
Cime tempestosePassando a Cime tempestose (1847) di Emily Brontë, Heathcliff e Catherine Earnshaw sono due personaggi tanto iconici quanto ambigui e complicati. Da un lato abbiamo Catherine, una donna graziosa, appassionata e vitale, ma anche impulsiva e capricciosa; dall’altro troviamo Heathcliff, prima un giovane sempliciotto e poi un uomo affascinante e letale, animato da un antico rancore. L’amore che lega i due personaggi è altrettanto contraddittorio – bruciante e proibito, nato in giovane età ma destinato a non compiersi fino alla morte. (Martina Ostinelli) (Translation)
Le bellissime Poesie delle sorelle Brontë, edite da Mondadori nella traduzione di Anna Luisa Zazo, sono state analizzate nella rubrica Approfondimenti, tuttavia vorrei dare il mio contributo sulle affinità e le differenze tra le tre sorelle scrittrici.Una felice scoperta è stata Anne, la più mite delle Brontë, surclassata da Emily e soprattutto da Charlotte che cercò di limitare l’estro creativo della sorella.Le poesie appartengono al ciclo di Angria e a un periodo giovanile in cui Anne mostra la sua vena garbata e preziosa.I suoi componimenti hanno per protagoniste figure femminili evanescenti che fanno pensare alla sua contemporanea Christina Rossetti che amano o sono prigioniere, di principi che non riescono a salvarlo da loro stesse ma le lasciano prigioniere delle loro limitazioni.Non c’è un lieto fine nelle ballate e nelle romanze e questo è tipico di certi modelli romantici, ma compare l’idea di dolore, di sofferenza e di una sorta di ansia di elevazione spirituale.Anne fu la più consapevole della natura divina dell’amore e molte sono le poesie dedicate a Dio come liberatore delle anime che sono legate a Lui da vincoli morali. (Patrizia Falsini) (Translation)
An opinion column in El Periodista Digital (Spain) mentions Wuthering Heights. Mundiario (Costa Rica) and L'Indépendant (France) discusses Emily by Frances O'Connor.. The World of the Brontës puzzle is featured in The Brussels Brontë Blog.
What difference does it make to see the original manuscript of a literary text rather than just read the printed version? As someone who once nearly sullied a priceless Charlotte Brontë manuscript in an American archive with one of my own tears, I would say it makes all the difference. Faced with the real thing, my pretensions to being a detached and objective researcher dissolved. [...]TES thinks that the digitalisation of these papers may help students connect with classic authors.
The most fascinating are not the fair copies of great works, written to submit to publishers before the days of typewriters, but the private documents never intended for public eyes. Seeing them as they are offers a transgressive frisson, a sense of intruding on a private space.
This is particularly the case with Emily Brontë's diary entry, written at "past 4 o'clock" on Monday 26 June 1837, now accessible on the British Library's new website. Emily never kept an ongoing journal, only a few fragments offering fly-on-the-wall records of what was going on in Haworth Parsonage at the moment of writing, secret missives intended only for her own eyes and those of her sister Anne, whom she sketches, along with herself, writing at the dining-room table, in this particular example. It shows the way in which Emily's imaginative and real lives intersected: news of characters in her fantasy world of "Gondal" rubs shoulders with a down‑to-earth record of the fact that Charlotte is at that very moment upstairs sewing, listening to Branwell read aloud. The entry ends with a transcription of an actual conversation, as Emily and Anne discuss the possibility of going out on the moors before evening to get into the mood for writing. But we will never know whether or not they did so. Emily, as ever, remains fugitive.
Children are so accustomed to school visits from modern authors that they can struggle to see classic writers as real people, according to Jacqueline Wilson.Back to heroines, The Huffington Post defends the plucky ones.
The best-selling children’s author said: “Modern authors have become well-known because they do so many school and library visits.” Her novels, which include The Story of Tracy Beaker, are regularly among the most-borrowed from British libraries.
“The problem is that classic authors like Noel Streatfeild, Robert Louis Stevenson and Louisa May Alcott can’t really strut their stuff around the schools,” she added.
Ms Wilson was speaking to TES in response to a survey published this week, which shows that 82 per cent of English teachers see pupils struggling to identify with classic authors such as Charles Dickens, Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë.
The British Library survey of 520 teachers also reveals that 76 per cent of English teachers believe that their students find it difficult to think of classic authors as real people.
“Pupils just think of poets as dead white males,” said Bethan Marshall, senior lecturer in English education at King’s College London. “They think they’re completely irrelevant. Authors now seem more real than those who wrote hundreds of years ago.” [...]
Among the teachers surveyed, 82 per cent said students would be inspired by seeing authors’ original manuscripts. This was certainly true of Ms Wilson when she was at school: “For me, the first time I saw the manuscript of Jane Eyre – to see that, in Charlotte Brontë’s neat handwriting. And Jane Austen, it’s all scratched out and corrected. That was a surprise, because her prose is so precise.” (Adi Bloom)
I grew up reading books, novels especially, and mine is an old story, especially by now, when we've been talking about whether or not women can or should be counted among serious writers for several hundred years now. Each generation thinks that it has discovered the subject but really, all we do is replicate the arguments of the past. Check the work of Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Brontë, Virginia Woolf. Each in her own way decried the same things: Women's interests are not viewed as serious. Women find it hard to fight back because those who do will be castigated as complainers and scolds. Men control everything and so a woman who writes is helpless to stem the tide against her.The Yorkshire Post features the exhibition Artists of Faith at the Brontë Parsonage Museum.
But even as they cataloged their demands, each writer, in her own way, also excelled at presenting the plucky heroine. Each excelled at the narrative of perseverance, exactly as if each one needed to say: "Take it on faith. This is what you're going to need." [...]
When I was 11, the woman who lived next door cleaned out her daughter's room--the daughter had moved away--and a box of books appeared on my desk. Most were advice manuals dispensing counsel about make-up and hair-styles, the provenance of the good girl, the girl who did as she was told. But tucked underneath were a couple of novels. These had heavy cardboard covers and thick yellowing pages. They smelled of age and promise. The first one I opened began with a line that told me this book was going to be different. First off, the narrator was a woman. Second, and even more important, was the way she saw the world, with herself at the center and the story her own.
That was how I met Jane Eyre. She was a revelation to my 11-year-old self--the self who had already been taught that good books were written by men about courageous guys and noble, thoughtful boys. Jane was not like any girl character a man had written. She thought for herself. She took terrifying action, often at great risk, and did things that were unthinkable.
Unimaginable. Almost unbelievable. And yet I believed she could do them. And although I would not have said so when I first read her story, she made me believe that I could do things too. (Randi Davenport)
The Brontë family’s strong links with the Methodist faith were founded in Patrick Brontë’s own religious grounding as a young priest – his career was nurtured by John Wesley’s friend Thomas Tighe and – and his wife Maria Branwell’s family were devout Methodists from Cornwall. After Maria’s death her sister Elizabeth came to Haworth to help raise the Brontë children and she had a powerful influence on the lives of her young nephew and nieces. [...]Still locally, Keighley News reviews the book Walking the Literary Landscape by Ian Hamilton and Diane Roberts.
“I think the reason the Parsonage works so well in that respect is because the Brontës were such interesting people,” [curator Nick Cass] says. “They were interested in social justice and early ideas of feminism and engaged with those issues particularly creatively. So I think to do anything either political or creative in that space is a legacy and a tribute to them and a really interesting way to provoke thought about how we deal with those issues today. What is also interesting about the Parsonage is that the Brontës were very interdisciplinary in their practice – they drew and painted as well as writing. ”
He feels that visitors coming to the museum are affected by the experience of being in the Brontës’ home and describes it as having for many people almost “a sense of pilgrimage.” Exploring the rooms in which the family lived and worked – and, in many cases, died – can have a profound effect, highlighting not only a sense of intense creativity but also mortality and loss. “People are looking for an absorbing experience not necessarily to spend a long time reading,” he says. “And some of the best artworks can express things that words can’t.” The Methodist Church Collection comprises 51 artworks altogether from which Cass selected 11 – they include outstanding work by Graham Sutherland, Mark Cazalet, Elizabeth Frink and Maggie Hambling – to display around the Parsonage. He says that he mostly went by intuition in making his selection.
“The works are not there to illustrate any particular point, so I tried to have a sense of how particular paintings might work in particular places,” he says. “Then I explored what that suggested to me and what broader connections there might be.” (Yvette Huddleston)
Brontë fans can follow in the footsteps of their heroines thanks to a new walks book.The Globe and Mail reviews the novel American Innovations by Rivka Galchen.
Walking The Literary Landscape takes people from Haworth on to the moors past the Brontë waterfalls.
Walkers visit Top Withens, the ruined farmhouse reputed to be the inspiration for Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, then back to Haworth via Stanbury.
The Brontë sisters are among famous writers featured in the glossy paperback, written by Ian Hamilton and Diane Roberts.
Each of the 20 walks takes in a location linked to the life or works of a well-known writer. They include poets like William Wordsworth and Ted Hughes and novelists like Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, together with children’s writers Beatrix Potter and Lewis Carroll.
The authors tell how the Brontës are still inextricably linked to Haworth and describe the Parsonage Museum as “superb”.
They add: “Our walk follows in the footsteps of the sisters, who demonstrated in their writing a remarkable sympathy for nature in the raw and an ability to withstand a fair amount of hardship.”
As in Atmospheric Disturbances, Galchen’s acclaimed debut novel, there are communications with the dead, and the possibility of other, slightly off-kilter, universes where things like time travel are scientifically possible. Or are they? In my favourite story, The Region of Unlikeness, Galchen combines an unwieldy love triangle with the speculative, resulting in a kind of mash-up of Back to the Future and Truffaut’s Jules et Jim, although rather than Jeanne Moreau’s free-spirited Catherine, the woman here is a lonely and insecure graduate student in civil engineering. The happiest days of her life begin when she meets Ilan and Jacob by chance in a Moroccan coffee shop on Upper West Side. “They were discussing Wuthering Heights too loudly, having the kind of reference-laden conversation that unfortunately never fails to attract me,” revealing everything we need to know about her and the men. (Zsuzsi Gartner)Another conversation on Wuthering Heights is mentioned in an article about Cuban writer Pablo Armando Fernández and his book Los niños se despiden on CubaDebate.
Lo conocí por los tempranos años 80, en casa de Ada Santamaría Cuadrado, en un cumpleaños que Ada le celebró a Pepe Rodríguez Feo con sus amigos. Pablo estaba acompañado de Maruja y a una pregunta nos habló, a mi hermano y a mí, de “Cumbres borrascosas”, la novela que más le gusta y también de las hermanas Bronte; nos recordó el famoso verso de Emily: “The soul to feel the flesh, the flesh to feel the chain”, que se quedó flotando para siempre en el aire.The Irish Times interviews writer Joseph O'Connor.
Heathcliff, Catherine y Edgar, Hareton Earnshaw, la señora Dean, Hindley y su esposa Frances, la granja de los Tordos. La historia de las dos familias que viven en la zona, los Linton y los Earnshaw. La amistad a escondidas y el amor apasionado, una historia de borrasca entre cumbres. (...)
Estallamos en una carcajada, hicimos la cola y continuamos hablando de Heathcliff, Hareton y del fantasma de Catherine. (F. Vladimir Pérez Casal) (Translation)
Which writers, living or dead, would you invite to your dream dinner party? If there is a Hell being prepared for me, it will be a dinner party. But I’d like to be in a bar, late at night in New York, with Colm Toibin, Patti Smith, Dickens, St John of the Cross, Toni Morrison, Keats and Emily Brontë, with her brother Branwell leading the singsong while arm-wrestling. (Martin Doyle)Jess Mountifield reviews Jane Eyre after having watched the 2006 adaptation first. From the Brontë Parsonage Facebook page: a great grand daughter of Sir James Roberts's visits the museum all the way from Canada, the display for the 1940s weekend being prepared and finally the sad news of the death of Oscar the (local) cat. Corner Store Press posts Fritz Eichenberg's Jane Eyre illustrations. The Fiction Therapist asks Could Wuthering Heights’ Cathy have been mindful?
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