Jane Eyre and Emma Brown

Two totally different alerts for today, July 21:

1. A new chance to see and listen Claire Bloom reading Jane Eyre (check these old posts 1, 2), this time in the Alnwick Playhouse, Bondgate Without, Alnwick, Northumberland.

Claire Bloom, acclaimed British actress renowned for film, tv and stage appearances, brings her one woman show to the UK following a successful US tour.

Jane Eyre is the prototype for all supermarket romances in which a poor, virtuous heroine captivates a virile older man above her station. The prototype is a work of genius.
This will be a dramatic reading of a gripping, startlingly ground-breaking novel.

"If you could find a genie willing to grant you three wishes, one of them might be to sit and listen to Claire Bloom read you a great novel" The Plain Dealer, Cleveland US

"Ms Bloom gave transfixing, fully characterised readings, consistently rich in colour and texture" New York Times

tickets: £12 & £11 (conc)

2- The IASIL(International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures) 2006 Conference in the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia (20 Jul-23 Jul) presents a contribution about Emma Brown, the novel by the recently deceased Clare Boylan based on the unfinished last novel of Charlotte Brontë.

Friday, 21 July 10:00 AM
Dark Spaces. 'Emma Brown' by Clare Boylan and/or Charlotte Brontë
Giovanna Tallone, Milan, Italy

Clare Boylan’s novel Emma Brown is an interesting case of intertextuality.

Starting from the few existing pages of an unfinished novel by Charlotte Brontë entitled Emma, Boylan takes up the challenge to delve into the tradition and the conventions of a Victorian literary form to scan areas of psychic and social darkness. In fact, the mysterious young pupil who—in a stock Brontë situation—arrives at Fuchsia Lodge, is revealed to be not who she is, a fraud, a non-existing person with no past. Her search for her own name and her own self leads to a physical and metaphorical journey out of the small and closed spaces of a Brontë novel into the open spaces of the dark subworld of Victorian cities.

The purpose of this paper is to identify elements from Charlotte Brontë’s writing in her concern with an individual’s struggle with circumstances alongside typical Boylan’s concerns with dysfunctional families, pre-adolescence and social constructions. Strong gothic elements of secrecy underlie the novel and characterize its spaces, so that the interplay of different spaces is by itself an intertext, which at the same time represents a continuum with Boylan’s fiction.

Categories: Jane_Eyre, Theatre, Charlotte_Brontë, Sequels, Talks