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  • S2 E4: With... Mia Ferullo - For the fourth installment of our second series, we welcome Mia Ferullo. Artist, master's student, and part of the team at the Brontë Parsonage Museum, M...
    3 days ago

Sunday, April 06, 2025

Corrupting Women in Lost Houses

BBC describes Margot Robbie's stay in Yorkshire while shooting Wuthering Heights:
The locations chosen for the new film included Arkengarthdale, Swaledale and the village of Low Row. Robbie, 35, stayed at the hotel Simonstone Hall, near Hawes, with other cast members. (...)
The hotel is a "historic country lodge" where presenter Jeremy Clarkson famously got into a fight with a Top Gear producer in 2015.
A staff member said Robbie was "very lovely" and even enjoyed a Sunday roast and afternoon tea there with her husband and new baby.
The employee told the BBC: "The weekend was great fun, where she met lots of other guests and visitors and she introduced her baby to the resident pigs and peacocks here."
The film crew's base camp was near Holiday Home Yorkshire in Reeth, whose owner said it was "very exciting" seeing the trailers in the tiny village.
One local holiday let owner said he saw Robbie driving a tractor with her co-star - although the agricultural vehicles were not invented until the late 19th Century.
He said: "There were four tractors, old-fashioned open-to-the-elements style and they were being escorted by two Range Rovers."
Another Dales resident said he had seen filming at Surrender Bridge, which is close to an old lead smelting mill. The landmark also featured in the opening scene of the BBC series All Creatures Great and Small in the 1980s and is on the Coast to Coast path route.
The film's base camp was located in rural Arkengarthdale
Crew members also stayed at the Charles Bathurst Inn, in Arkengarthdale, and were described as "very friendly". (Hayley Coyle)
The Telegraph shows literary houses that have been lost
 High Sunderland Hall
At the time of its demolition in 1950, High Sunderland Hall was a derelict, roofless shell, but its destruction forever robbed us of a slice of Brontë history. The gothic manor house, which had loomed over the Shibden Valley outside Halifax since it was built for the Sunderland family in the 17th century, is believed by many to have been the model for Wuthering Heights, the house at the heart of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel of the same name.
For six months from September 1838, Brontë was employed as a schoolmistress at Miss Patchett’s school at Law Hill house, just a mile or two away from the Hall. It’s thought that she could see it from the school’s top windows, passed by it on bracing walks with her pupils and was perhaps even invited inside. What evidence survives shows that it had the same exposed and remote situation as its purported fictional counterpart, the same richly carved grotesque statuary on its façade, and the same air of decayed grandeur. Its floorplan was a close match for the foreboding house where Cathy and Heathcliff grow up in the novel, too.
In the late 1940s it was reportedly offered to both the Brontë Society and the Halifax Corporation by its final owner. But its foundations had been dangerously weakened by mining and successive tenants had neglected repairs, so the high cost of bringing the building back from the brink saw it sacrificed to the wrecking ball instead. (Felicity Day)
Texas Public Radio reviews Brother Brontë by Fernando A. Flores:
Brother Brontë is hard to define. But it is full of adventure, profound themes and unforgettable characters. It’s an electric look at a future that is somehow plausible and resonant. (Yvette Benavides)
NoHo Arts District gives information on the Jane Eyre production in Pasadena:
Mystery and romance abound in A Noise Within’s production of Jane Eyre, the thrilling and heart-wrenching tale of self-determination by Charlotte Brontë, adapted by Elizabeth Williamson and directed by Geoff Elliott. (...)
“I read the adaptation first, having never read the novel, and I couldn’t put it down—it set me on fire,” says Elliott. “It’s a deeply affecting love story that’s also a Gothic horror tale, at once stirring, terrifying, with an impending sense of violence, and, in the end, uplifting. Williamson did a remarkable job of distilling the novel, which I’ve since read three times, into a sweeping, fast-moving two hours that moves like a river.”
A one-hour INsiders Discussion Group will take place prior to the matinee on Sunday, March 30, beginning at 12:30 p.m. Post-performance conversations with the artists will take place every Friday (except the preview) and on Sunday, April 6. Student matinees are scheduled on select weekdays at 10:30 a.m.; interested educators should email education@anoisewithin.org. (Renee Ronceros)
 Can't we just wait and see? The Guardian steps in in the Wuthering Heights 2026 controversy:
Last week, images were leaked from the shoot of Emerald Fennell’s forthcoming adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Margot Robbie, who plays Catherine Earnshaw, has been seen in a white wedding dress, which has distressed self-proclaimed ­historical experts.
Has Fennell committed a crime against period dress? Even Vogue felt the need to weigh in.
Fennell’s Wuthering Heights has been under fire since it announced lead casting last September. Part of this was inevitable: a female artist such as Fennell, who is both hyper-talented and hyper-privileged, gets two successful films or albums before the envious backlash kicks in.
It didn’t help that, in tackling Wuthering Heights, she was taking on one of the few classic novels to touch with nuance on race in 19th-century England – a nuance altogether lacking from the social media chat about ethnicity and casting.
Robbie’s co-star is Jacob Elordi, a white, dark-haired actor who plays the adult incarnation of the outcast orphan Heathcliff. Brontë clearly wrote Heathcliff as a character who is ostracised in rural Yorkshire in part because he looks foreign to English eyes.
In Andrea Arnold’s 2011 adaptation, Heathcliff was played by James Howson, the first actor of black heritage to take the role.
To many racially conscious Brontë fans, including prominent American film critics, Fennell’s choice of a white actor felt like a step backwards. But what form Heathcliff’s “foreignness” takes is deliberately ambiguous in Brontë’s text. In a much-analysed line, one neighbour says Heathcliff could be “a little Lascar, or an American or Spanish castaway”. Arnold herself had originally searched for a Romany actor.
All the text tells us for sure is that Heathcliff’s adoptive father claims to have found him on the streets of Liverpool. The city’s associations with the slave trade often suggest to contemporary readers that Heathcliff is the child of an enslaved African. That is entirely possible.
But it is also possible he was the child of the seafaring Spanish and Basque community, established in Liverpool during the 19th century. One such prominent family was the Elordietas. They would have looked not unlike a certain Jacob Elordi, whose Basque father emigrated to Australia at the age of eight.
When we assume that a dark-haired outsider must be of African origin, we let English racism off the hook. We forget how narrowly beauty standards defined “Englishness” to exclude even a hint of darker colouring. English chroniclers under the Tudors, keen to whip up anti-Spanish prejudice, would routinely accuse the Spanish population of being miscegenated with north African blood, attributing conventional Spanish dark looks to this ancestry. These attitudes were still around in Brontë’s day. (Kate Maltby)
NewsBytes suggests you improve your vocabulary by reading Wuthering Heights:
Discover descriptive language in 'Wuthering Heights'
Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights is famous for its vivid descriptive language.
How can you forget the moody landscapes of the Yorkshire moors?
From this, you can learn how adjectives are effectively used to evoke atmosphere and emotion.
By studying Brontë's use of descriptive language, you can gain insights into crafting more expressive sentences. (Anuji Trehaan)
Female sexuality in books is discussed in The iPaper:
Romances, in particular, were charged with corrupting women’s virtue as authors like the Brontë sisters and Jane Austen popularised the genre in the 18th century. (Gwendolyn Smith)
Scroll.in discusses Jane Austen:
Austen had many critics after her death. Charlotte Brontë called her writing “a carefully-fenced, highly-cultivated garden … I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen in their elegant but confined houses.” (...)
The greatest praise for Jane Austen, however, comes from Virginia Woolf. Writing about women writers in A Room Of One’s Own, this is what she says about Jane Austen: “Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching.” Woolf regarded Jane Austen and Emily Brontë as two women who wrote as women write and not as men write and goes on to say, “What genius, what integrity it must have required in face of all that criticism, in the midst of that purely patriarchal society to hold fast to the thing as they saw it without shrinking. Only Jane Austen did it, and Emily Brontë. They wrote out of themselves,” she added. (Shashi Despande)
Newsday talks about a recent talks by Sarah Jessica Parker and her mother  at Adelphi University Writers and Readers festival:
[Adriana] Trigiani asked Parker and Forste a series of questions about formative books they hold dear, such as the first book they remembered reading and owning, comparing Jane Eyre to Wuthering Heights, and whether it’s important for a main character to have a moral compass. (Maureen Mullarkey)
Emma Vocchi has read Wuthering Heights and writes about her experience in Vogue (Italy):
Leggendo Cime Tempestose ho imparato che a volte vale la pena lottare per certi amori, certe anime speciali. A volte vale la pena assecondare le proprie pulsioni, perché solo così si può essere davvero felici. (Translation)

Festivaltopia shares some beautiful covers including some classical Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Also in Festivaltopia the most misunderstood characters in literature include Heathcliff and Bertha Mason. Shanghai City News Service is excited about Emma Rice's Wuthering Heights production now playing in Shanghai.

Finally, new episodes can be found on both Behind the Glass (Mia Ferrullo, artist, master's student, and part of the team at the Brontë Parsonage Museum) and House of Brontë (a tribute to Maria Branwell Brontë).

12:30 am by M. in ,    No comments
A new essay on Anne Brontë just published:Redeeming Eve: Religious Feminism and a Defense of Anne Brontë’s Tenant of Wildfell Hall Cassity OertleEssais. An Undergraduate Journal For Literary And Cultural Theory And Criticism, Vol. 15 No. 1 Spring 2025, pp 87-100On many online book forums and social media platforms, Anne Brontë is often regarded as the forgotten Brontë sister, and for...

Saturday, April 05, 2025

Saturday, April 05, 2025 8:40 am by Cristina in , , , , ,    No comments
Big Issue has novelist and journalist Hannah Beckerman pick her top 6 domestic noirs and apparently Jane Eyre is one of them.Jane Eyre by Charlotte BrontëSharing multiple themes with Rebecca, Charlotte Brontë’s classic novel also features an innocent young woman, an eligible suitor and a mansion in which all is most definitely not what it seems. SciFi Now reviews Roanne Lau's The Serpent...
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The new issue of Brontë Studies (Volume 50  Issue 1-2. January-April 2025) is available online. We provide you with the table of contents and abstracts:Editorial Introductionpp 1-6  Author: O'Callaghan, ClaireDepathologising Excess in Wuthering Heights pp 7-21 Author: Krauze,...

Friday, April 04, 2025

Friday, April 04, 2025 7:48 am by Cristina in , , , , , , , ,    No comments
Pasadena Weekly features A Noise Within's Jane Eyre.What might be more surprising is that its director, the co-artistic director who has guided A Noise Within’s mission for 34 years, hadn’t read the novel until after encountering the script that adapts the gothic tale from 1847.Geoff Elliott had heard of Elizabeth Williamson’s adaptation of “Jane Eyre,” but he said he had never been required to read...
3:28 am by M. in ,    No comments
 A recent bachelor's thesis in Spanish:"Se asegura que la víctima persigue a su asesino": Trauma y violencia en Cumbres Borrascosasby Clavería Benabarre, AinoaAdivsors: Escudero Alías, Maite amd Jiménez Pérez, NataliaUniversidad de Zaragoza, FFYL, 2025Department of Englhsh and German Philology El objetivo de este trabajo de fin de grado es analizar los efectos del trauma y la violencia en...

Thursday, April 03, 2025

Thursday, April 03, 2025 7:36 am by Cristina in , , ,    No comments
The Fader asks the front woman of indie-pop band Japanese Breakfast Michelle Zauner.about the books she's been reading.Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë & Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë“All three of these gothic novels, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Frankenstein, are books that are just totally different than I was led to believe they would be. I don't think a lot of people have read Jane...
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The Asian tour of the Wise Children's Wuthering Heights production continues and now comes to Shanghai, China:Wuthering HeightsAdapted and Directed by Emma RiceShanghai Culture Square Theatre Shanghai Culture Square, 597 Fuxing Zhong Lu, by Shaanxi Nan Lu, Huangpu DistricApril 4-6,   2pm...

Wednesday, April 02, 2025

Wednesday, April 02, 2025 7:16 am by Cristina in , , ,    No comments
Waterford Council reports on a recent local event attended by writer Martina Devlin.Author Martina Devlin joined Waterford City and County Librarian Mary Conway for the first Writers at Waterford Libraries event of 2025 in Central Library on March 29th to discuss her latest book Charlotte and writing life.Martina Devlin is an author and newspaper columnist. She has written nine novels, two non-fiction...
An online alert for tomorrow, April 3:The Brontë Lounge with Helena WhitbreadThu 3 Apr, 7:30pmOn the anniversary of the birth of celebrated 19th-century diarist Anne Lister, you’re invited to the Brontë Lounge to talk with Lister’s biographer, Helena Whitbread MBE. Since 1983, Helena has been carefully...

Tuesday, April 01, 2025

Tuesday, April 01, 2025 7:46 am by Cristina in , , ,    No comments
 According to The Sun, Wuthering Heights has finished filming.[Owen Copper's] next big role is in Wuthering Heights alongside Margot Robbie, where he plays a young version of Heathcliff. And on Saturday he spent the evening hobnobbing in Mark’s private members club in London’s Mayfair — after Margot invited him along to a very posh wrap party. My mole told me: “Margot threw a massive...
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In a few days, a production of the Gordon & Caird Jane Eyre musical opens in Freeman, South Dakota:64th Schmeckfest Festival 2025Jane Eyre. The MusicalMusic and lyrics by Paul GordonBook and Additional Lyrics by John CairdApril 3,4, 5Freeman Academy, 748 S Main St, Freeman, SD 57029, USADirector...

Monday, March 31, 2025

Today marks the 170th anniversary of the death of Charlotte Brontë at her home in Haworth.Woman and Home reviews Layne Fargo's The Favourites, which is a retelling of Wuthering Heights.Katarina Shaw and Heath Rocha aren’t just skaters; they are a force of nature. Brought together as teenagers, their chemistry electrifies audiences, setting them apart from their competitors. They don’t just perform...
 A new art thesis with Brontë-related topics:Out of the scriptorium: De-writing the journeywoman, re-wilding the domestic and making spaceCharlotte Lee-PotterRoyal College of Art, 2025This practice-research redraws literary and natural landscapes via an original entanglement of geopoetics, feminist...

Sunday, March 30, 2025

Mind-blowing revelations in Digital Spy. Owen Cooper, who plays  young Heathcliff in the upcoming Emerald Fennell's Wuthering Heights adaptation:Appearing on This Morning during the week, the young star was asked by Ben Shephard and Cat Deeley what it was like working with the A-List Barbie star."I...
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A new compilation ebook (self)published in Spain:Paladines Del QuijoteMano de MithrilLLC - KdpSaISBN: 9798312047240¿Sabías que los gigantes fueron el menor de los problemas del Quijote? Mucho se ha escrito sobre el ilustre hidalgo de la Mancha, pero son pocos los que saben que tuvo lidiar con androides,...

Saturday, March 29, 2025

Saturday, March 29, 2025 11:25 am by Cristina in , , , , ,    No comments
The Times asks writer Kaliane Bradley about her favourite books.What is your favourite book by a dead author?Because this question is impossible to answer — I like too many dead authors too much — I’m going to use this space to say I think Villette is the best novel Charlotte Brontë — or any Brontë — wrote. It’s a superb portrayal of loneliness and the sobering daily work of sanding fantasy down...