Farewell Jean Simmons and other news

The Guardian and the Leicester Mercury review last night's BBC One Imagine: Growing Old Disgracefully featuring 92-year-old editor and writer Diana Athill. Both mention her connection to Wide Sargasso Sea:

The film touched on her widely acclaimed editing skills (and her pivotal role in the success of both Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead and Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea), though Athill the woman rather than Athill the literary visionary was the primary point of interest. (Sarah Dempster in the Guardian)

During her publishing career she worked with VS Naipaul – "really quite awful" – as well as Jean Rhys, whom she helped write Wide Sargasso Sea.
"She needed a great deal of looking after," remarks Diana. (Sian Brewis in the Leicester Mercury)

All Headline News reviews One Day by David Nicholls:

Nicholls’ characterizations are excellent in bringing to life a pair that initially seems incredibly similar to Ryan O’Neal and Ali MacGraw in “Love Story,” though the literary titles that keep popping up — particularly “Wuthering Heights” — would have you think that there are some drastic plot twists to be had. (Andy Bockelman)

And speaking of Wuthering Heights, Tim Smith from the Baltimore Sun is

glad to see that Herrmann's neglected "Wuthering Heights" will get a production next season from Minnesota Opera in observance of his centennial.

Further information on this future revival can be found here.

The Scorecard Review picks '7 Books that Should be Adapted into Movies'. Number 7 is...

7. The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde
Recap: In a world where fact and fiction blend, literally, the oddly named Thursday Next works in the literary crimes division of the Special Operations Network. It’s 1985 and Jane Eyre has been kidnapped from her titular novel. It’s up to Next to catch a dangerous criminal before literature is changed forever.
Reason: The first in a series, The Eyre Affair is incredibly imaginative and could be a fun summer movie. Famous literary figures like Eyre and her Mr. Rochester share the pages with Fforde’s serious minded gumshoes. I’d love to see Rob Reiner take a stab at it, he was excellent at mixing comedy and fantasy in The Princess Bride. Any Hollywood actress would be lucky to get the role of Next, who’s British and in her mid-thirties, but otherwise could be anyone. She’s a tough, no-nonsense kind of woman who could be played by anyone from Angelina Jolie to Kiera Knightley. Plus, if it’s successful, you have at least four sequels written plus more on the horizon. Harry Potter will be over by next year and the Twilight series soon after. This could be a great new fantasy series for Hollywood to exploit! (Megan Lehar)

We are not against a screen adaptation of this wonderful series (or any of Jasper Fforde's books really) but if it's ever done please, PLEASE, don't cast Angelina Jolie as Thursday Next. Seriously.

Another article on hyperemesis gravidarum today, this time from ABC News.

Jane Eyre author Charlotte Bronte died at age 38 along with her unborn child after excessive vomiting and "sensations of perpetual nausea and ever-recurring faintness." (Susan Donaldson James)

The Times reports that during actress Jean Simmons's memorial service another actress, Hayley Mills, read Farewell by Anne Brontë.

And the time has finally come for the Twilight round. It's actually quite short today.

Alt Film Guide:

I fully understand what Meyer was trying to convey by having Bella realize the depth of her feelings for Jacob and I got the Wuthering Heights parallels as well. All the same, I found it mind-boggling that an author would choose to ruin her narrator-protagonist by turning her into a wishy-washy, easily manipulated bouncing doll.
The chief problem is that Eclipse lacks the dark, borderline-psychotic dramatic intensity found in Emily Brontë‘s Gothic novel; hence, Bella comes across as a befuddled tease instead of a pathological case. As a consequence, she seems unworthy of someone as obsessively devoted as Edward. (Andre Soares)

Flick Filosopher:

I didn’t realize during the first Twilight film, nor its sequel, New Moon, but suddenly it smacked me in the face in Eclipse: Edward Cullen, the putative modern Heathcliff and Mr. Darcy all in one sparkly vampire package, is as much a child as Bella Swan, the blank-canvas human teenager he falls in love with. He’s a century-old immortal, he’s richer than God, and he’s not even bound by the clichés of vampirism to avoid sunlight: he could be doing anything and everything fabulous with his endless, privileged life. Traveling the world. Living like a rock star. Anything. What does he choose to do? Attend high school in the rural Pacific Northwest. Where he met Bella, back in the first film, and fell in love with her, for some unknowable reason, and she with him. (MaryAnn Johanson)

The Literary Look has been to see Wuthering Heights, A Romantic Musical in New York, which she describes as, 'an example of what an adaptation of a wonderful novel should never be, this is Brontë on crack.' My Online Library posts about Jane Eyre. And Flickr user skauthen2 has uploaded a picture of a Wuthering Heights-related mosaic in Aughnavallog, Northern Ireland, in the Drumballyroney area where Patrick Brontë was born and raised.

Categories: Anne Brontë, Books, Brontëana, Charlotte Brontë, Movies-DVD-TV, Music, Opera, Patrick Brontë, Poetry, References, Wide Sargasso Sea, Wuthering Heights

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Recent Wuthering Heights-inspired songs

Two new recent Wuthering Heights-inspired songs:

Sandra Ghemdib covers Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights. A live acoustic performance on piano at Fontenay le Comte:



The latest album by French singer Katel, Decorum contains a song inspired by Wuthering Heights as the author herself says on Têtu:

Est-ce le même groupe que pour ton premier album «Raides à la ville»?
Oui, c'est mon groupe live, on a beaucoup travaillé. J'ai un musicien en particulier qui écrit les partitions de cordes, redistribue les parties de chaque instrument. J'ai pris un arrangeur sur Hurlevent, qui est un clin d'oeil à Kate Bush mais moi, dans la chanson, j'adopte le point de vue de Heathcliff, bien sûr (rires). Il ne faut jamais fermer les interprétations! (Ursula Del Aguila) (Google translation)

A teaser can be seen here:


Categories: Music, Wuthering Heights

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A Very Non-Traditional Jane Eyre

Mia Wasikowska has something to say about her Jane Eyre role in Jane Eyre 2011 to the Orlando Sentinel:

At 20, coming off the billion-dollar smash, Alice in Wonderland, the slight blonde can look at the movie world as her oyster. Plum roles in prestige pictures? Yes, she just finished Jane Eyre.
"The corsets," she mutters. "They're as bad as everyone says. TORTURE!" (...)
She donned a Yorkshire lilt for her turn in "a very non-traditional" Jane Eyre that was directed by Cary Fukunaga, who did the harrowing émigré drama Sin Nombre. (Roger Moore)

The Independent reviews several new novels (grown-up literature of dark desire), including Maureeen Gibbon's Thief and Michèle Roberts Mud:

The demon lover has stepped back over fiction's threshold. And in some cases he resembles not so much Dracula as the Count's great twin among Gothic archetypes: Emily Brontë's Heathcliff. Earlier this month, the American writer Maureen Gibbon published Thief, a novel in which a traumatised woman falls for a convicted but – apparently - wholly repentant rapist named "Alpha". For Julia Pascal, reviewing it in The Independent, the questions the novel raises "about abuse, attraction and damage... are so subtly explored as to make the reader want to complete the novel in one sitting".
Thief seasons the lurking horrror of an amour fou with a sanely bracing humour. That sense of saving wit as a light that shows the way through dark places of the heart also informs Mud, Michèle Roberts's new "stories of love and sex" (Virago, £13.99). Here, a series of twists allows legendary lovers from literature and history – Tristan and Isolde, Jane Eyre's Mr (and the first Mrs) Rochester, Emma Bovary, Colette – to tell a story from the other side of myth in the manner of Carol Ann Duffy's The World's Wife. The darkness here comes in the depiction of an affinity between the glamorous heroines of fable and the exploitation of urban waifs – girls adrift in the city, trafficked women – today: sisters under, and in, the skin.
With striking zest, Roberts grapples with a masculine tradition of libertine fiction that can still shock, stun and even move. (Boyd Tonkin)

An article about Morning Sickness in The Guardian mentions again Charlotte Brontë's most likely cause of death:

Before the arrival of drips, in the 1950s, women even died of it," says Barnie-Adshead. Charlotte Brontë, who died in 1855 in the early stages of pregnancy, is believed to be one of its highest-profile victims – in the weeks before her death, she complained that all food made her feel sick, and couldn't keep anything down. (Joanna Moorhead)

Alastair Harper writes in The Guardian. On this blog we (obviously) prefer his wife's opinion:

To my wife, Jane Eyre is a tear-jerking source of perennial inspiration – to me, it's a 19th-century Dawson's Creek.

The Kitsap Sun reviews the Joanna Murray-Smith satire The Female of the Species, now on stage at the Seattle's A Contemporary Theater. Among the many puns there's a Brontë-related one:

We first meet Margot (based very, very extremely loosely on 1970s feminist icon Germaine Greer) as she’s spewing F-bombs and other assorted vitriole at her publisher over her Bluetooth and nonchalantly pulling her bra off from inside her blouse. She’s made herself — and her publishing house — wealthy with her string of hear-me-roar volumes, which have deteriorated over the years into works of commercial catch-phrasing like “Charlotte Brontë: Traitor From Within.” (Michael C. Moore)

Ordnance Survey recommends the Jane Eyre Hathersage Trail:

The Jane Eyre Hathersage Trail, for instance, is full of historical and literary intrigue. Its circular route takes walkers to the various places that were visited by Charlotte Brontë and appear in Jane Eyre. In Hathersage village, walkers will find the ancient church and surrounding halls that were central to the creation of the novel.

The Yorkshire Post interviews artist Kitty North:

Name your favourite Yorkshire book.
Clichéd as it may sound, Wuthering Heights fascinates me. It is an extraordinary book that crosses generations. It is visual with extreme emotional depth – Emily Brontë must have spent time looking and thinking of the lives of the people buried in the graveyard at The Parsonage at Haworth.

You know, the usual Brontë-Twilight stuff. From The Telegraph:

According to the author, who is a Mormon, her books are "about life, not death" and "love, not lust". Each book in the series was inspired by and loosely based on a different literary classic: Twilight on Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, New Moon on Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Eclipse on Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, and Breaking Dawn on A Midsummer Night's Dream. Meyer also states that Orson Scott Card and L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables series are a big influence on her writing.

“Absolutely,” [Melissa] Rosenberg said. “Stephenie’s compared it at times to ’Wuthering Heights,’ or ’Romeo and Juliet.’ You could take the straight-ahead drama part off and drop the fantastical element and still have a compelling story. But, of course, I think the fantastical elements take it to another level.” (John Anderson in the McClatchy-Tribune)

The Kennebec Journal reprints a fragment from Bedside: The Art of Medicine by Michael A. LaCombe, published by University of Maine Press. There's a Brontë reference:

And now he is wasting away on the east wing, barely alive. And he isn't mine anymore. I don't really know what I mean by that. I mean, I had always intended to go back to Stash's with him. It was going to be part of my life, someday. But the hospital bedside just isn't the same thing, my friend. The climate's different; the agenda's changed. Oh, he still taunts me about being unread, still shows me up in his gentle, teasing way:
"Quick, my good doctor, a character from Bronté (sic). ... Time's up ... Heathcliffe(sic, again). Now ... Emily, or Charlotte?"

Buzzle thinks that Wuthering Heights is one of "the best classics for young adults", the author Eve Marie Mont posts on Shooting Stars Mag:

Right now, I am revising my second novel, a YA book inspired by Jane Eyre[.]

An Adventure in Reading reviews Rachel Ferguson's The Brontës Went to Woolworths, Cubicle Confusion describes how it is to read about Helen Burns's death in a bus, Les Brontë à Paris posts a French translation of Charlotte Brontë's letter to Henry Nussey refusing his marriage proposal and celebrates the anniversary of her marriage with Arthur Bell Nichols some years afterwards. Wasatiya... moderación, camino medio posts briefly (in Spanish) about Villette, Book Girl of Mur-y-Castell reviews the Classical Comics's adaptation of Jane Eyre.

Categories: Books, Brontëites, Charlotte Brontë, Comics, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, References, Sequels, Villette

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Wearer Unknown Images

Victoria Brookland has sent us some images from Wearer Unknown, her current exhibition at the Brontë Parsonage Museum. The exhibition runs until July 16th. Click on the pictures to enlarge them.

A Self-Taught Woman	Charlotte's going-away dress (Dark rays in the broad light)	I Know How Fervantly Then to Love
I Poured Myself Along the Veins	Independent Extasy	Soft Sweet Shadow of the Rain
The Peregrine is Stronger	Vesuviennes

Categories: Art-Exhibitions

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The Brontë-oil spill connection

It seems as if there's a Brontë connection to most things, even the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, according to The Globe and Mail.

Visitors to the Yorkshire Moors are attracted to the heather-covered fields, gentle green valleys and charming market towns – the backdrop to Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. It’s hard to imagine a lovelier spot in England.
The moors are also the unlikely setting for a key effort to help stop the environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, where BP’s rogue oil well is into its third leaky month. In the unspoiled countryside just outside Kirkbymoorside, about 40 kilometres north of York, lie a clutch of old industrial sheds, where the famous Slingsby glider aircraft were made. The same sheds now make subsea robots, known as ROVs – remotely operated vehicles – used by oil companies in the Gulf and elsewhere in the deepwater frontiers. (Eric Reguly)

Writer Catherine Gervais says who her favourite author is on Hattiesburg American:

Who is your favorite author? Charlotte Brontë
For new fans, is there any author that you would compare your style to? Perhaps a combination of Charlotte Brontë and Janette Oke. (Mary Lett)

A well-known Brontëites is actress Sonam Kapoor who once again mentions Wuthering Heights in an interview on Masala:

Tell us about your favourite real-life love story and your fave movie love story
Real-life would have to be my mum and dad (Anil and Sunita Kapoor). From the movies, ‘Gone With The Wind’, ‘Wuthering Heights’, and ‘Mughal-E-Azam’. Wait a minute, none of them end very romantically, do they? What movie love story do I like that has a happy ending? There has to be something! (Thinks for a while) I’ve got it! ‘My Fair Lady’! (Nazia Khan)

And finally there might be Brontëites in the making in the Rauhauser family, featured in The San Diego Union-Tribune.

Categories: Brontëites, Weirdo, Wuthering Heights

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Jane Eyre in Doncaster

A new amateur production of Jane Eyre opens today, June 28, in Doncaster, UK

Jane Eyre
The Doncaster Little Theatre
28th & 29th June 2010
7:00pm

Adapted from the novel by Charlotte Brontë and directed by Simon Carr

Starring Becky Winterman as Jane Eyre, with full supporting cast

This startling new version of the classic love story between Jane and Mr. Rochester brings a contemporary feel to one of English Literature’s favourite novels. It is brought to the stage by a talented cast of local young actors! Don’t miss it!

A 2 Act Theatre Company Production

Categories: Jane Eyre, Theatre

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Adultery, Vampires and Bookmarks

The Daily Mail has an article about Harper Lee. We don't know if Charlotte Brontë would be very proud to be the first writer that comes to mind if you talk about adultery:

Her mannish haircuts and hatred of make-up led to speculation that she was a lesbian. However, Mr Shields believes she was just shy and, like Charlotte Brontë, had an unrequited crush on a married man, her literary agent Maurice Crain. (Sharon Churcher)

Tonight on BBC Radio 3, Words and Music will feature a poem by Anne Brontë:

Words and Music: Awake!
Today, 23:00 on BBC Radio 3

Every Sunday evening Radio 3 brings you a sequence of music, poetry and prose united by a theme: this week work about awakenings.

including readings by Peter Marinker and Hattie Morahan from the work of Mary Shelley, A E Housman, Edward Thomas, Anne Bronte and Percy Bysshe Shelley. With music by Handel, Bach, Stravinsky and Britten.

The possibilities of sensual and spiritual awakening through nature is heard in Anne Bronte’s “Lines Composed in a Windy Wood”

Moira MacDonald in The Seattle Times imagines how The Twilight Saga: Eclipse would be if it was a short film:

Scene: Some random, dank forest near the town of Forks, where it rains 364 days a year. (...)An abandoned copy of "Wuthering Heights" lies on the ground nearby[.]" (...)
Edward (thoughtfully, holding "Wuthering Heights"): You know, I'm starting to identify with this Heathcliff guy. (...)
Cut to: A tent, in a dark, cold, rainy and thoroughly miserable forest. It is crowded.
Bella: Why are all three of us in this tent?
Jacob: It's an erotic plot device. Here, let me warm you up in my sleeping bag.
Edward: I should have brought "Wuthering Heights."

The Independent reviews Brian Dillon's Tormented Hope:

A fascinating and erudite meditation on the strange condition that is hypochondria, Tormented Hope examines the lives of nine famous sufferers, including James Boswell, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Darwin, Marcel Proust, Andy Warhol and, in a subsequently added afterword, Michael Jackson. (Brandon Robshaw)

The Las Vegas Review-Journal reviews Nintendo DS's 100 Classic Books and makes the following example:

Bad news: If you bookmark "Emma," then try to read "Wuthering Heights," the game won't let you bookmark both. To bookmark a second book, you must lose the bookmark in the first book. That is monumentally inconceivable. (Doug Elfman)

A Brontëite in the Hattiesburg American, EspeciaLivros (in Portuguese) posts about Wuthering Heights, ademc's photostream uploaded to Flickr a Corel Painter drawing of Branwell Brontë, Carmen y Amig@s posts (in Spanish) about Cowan Bridge.

Finally, Les Brontë à Paris celebrates the 162nd anniversary of the publication of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall with a curious proposal. Could you review/talk about Anne Brontë's book in less than 162 characters? Not necessarily in French.

Categories: Audio-Radio, Branwell Brontë, Jane Eyre, Poetry, References, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Wuthering Heights

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Re-Orienting Victorian Studies

These days the Annual Conference of the Australasian Victorian Studies Association (AVSA) is celebrated in Singapore. There are several Brontë talks:

Re-Orienting Victorian Studies
25-27 June 2010

Centre of the Liberal Arts & Social Sciences (CLASS) and the Division of English at Nanyang Technological University.
Orchard Hotel Singapore

Panel: Narrative Strategies and Social Order
Ailee Cho, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology:
“Antagonism Displaced in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley”

Ethics, Home, and Hospitality
Divya Athmanathan, Nanyang Technological University:
“Re‐Orienting the Houses in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights"

Panel: Victorian Satellites – Reorienting the Disoriented
Melissa Mae Saradetch, Meridian Junior College:
“‘Which England?’ The Problem of National Identity in Reproductions of the Localized Foreigner and the Alienated Indigene in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights”

Panel: Narrating Control
Stephen Hancock, Brigham Young University―Hawaii: “
‘Moderat[ing] her expressions of pleasure in receiving him’: Hospitality, Femininity, and Control in Wuthering Heights”

Categories: Scholar, Talks

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Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights Eclipsed

Stevie Davis reviews for The Guardian Michèle Roberts's Mud: Stories of Sex and Love:

Feminist themes prevail: through invoking and subverting classic Victorian texts – Madame Bovary, George Sand's novels, Jane Eyre – the collection examines women's freedoms from provocative angles. (...)
The short story is an intimate, subtle and enigmatic form: Michèle Roberts reminds us in this virtuoso collection that she is one of our foremost practitioners of the art.

Another book in reviews of which appear Brontë references often (due both to the topic and the author) is Lyndall Gordon's Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds. In the Washington Times:

Nevertheless, enough of the record remains for the reader to learn about the poet's tastes: She loved the Brontës and Shakespeare. "She was drawn early to Jane Eyre, and Maggie Tulliver, George Eliot's provincial girl 'whose eyes were full of unsatisfied intelligence and unsatisfied, beseeching affection,' " Ms. Gordon writes. (Carol Herman)

John Inverdale chooses for The Sunday Express his favourite books:

Wuthering Heights: Another classic which is a wonderfully passionate book and is set in one of my favourite parts of the country.
I read it at school and have revisited it on several occasions since and every time I read it I get something new from a novel rightly held in such high regard.

We have to agree with Joanna Kavenna in The Guardian - the Brontës are probably not the best writers to turn to for advice in pregnancy:

So I started rereading. I went through a few books by Henry James, Knut Hamsun, Nietzsche, Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Thomas Mann, but found them unforthcoming. Some writers had a lot to say about love and marriage but less about what might happen later.

True Brontëites will notice the (involuntary) irony of this comment from an article in The Guardian about current soap-operas, particularly Coronation Street:

Fickleness of the heart is all well and good when you're nubile like Tina, but the years fly by and quickly you're Mary Taylor, literally begging Norris to accompany you on a campervan excursion to Brontë country before slashing the phone wires and holding him captive until he agrees to wed. (Grace Dent)

Of course, now that The Twilight Saga: Eclipse hits the screens all over the world the whole Twilight-Brontë references stuff is reappearing again:

EDWARD = HEATHCLIFF?: Rent "Wuthering Heights." (We like the 1939 version with Laurence Olivier, Merle Oberon and David Niven.) Emily Brontë’s story, with its classic love triangle, was an inspiration for the Bella-Edward-Jacob relationship in the "Twilight" saga. In "Eclipse," Bella actually compares herself to Bronte’s heroine, Cathy, who’s torn between her feelings for two men. (Mary Colurso in The Birmingham News)

Say what you will about Meyer as a writer, she has an easy-to-read style and has created characters straight out of the great romances of classic literature—and that can’t be bad. Just look at the two men who inspired Edward’sname— the tormented Mr. Rochester in Charlotte Bronte’s “Jane Eyre” and the loyal and selfless Edward Ferrars in Jane Austen’s “Sense and Sensibility.” Do those traits sound familiar? Plus there are multiple references to Shakespeare, especially “Romeo and Juliet,” as well as Emily Bronte’s “Wuthering Heights.” Start reading. (The Buffalo News)

"Edward's always going to have a bit of a lead as he does in the story, as well," said Mark Englehart, senior editor of IMDb editorial.
"Edward personifies that kind of romantic hero from Gothic novels of the 19th century. He's kind of a little like Mr. Rochester in 'Jane Eyre,' the moody, attractive, mysterious man on horseback who comes to sweep the heroine away. ... The whole vampire thing almost seems like icing on the cake with this type of character: It enhances his appeal 10 times more." (Christy Lemire in Associated Press)

Ну а для тех, кому и этого мало, писательница активно вплетает в свое повествование литературные аллюзии: кроме "Ромео и Джульетты" в "Затмении" упоминается такая классика любовного романа, как "Гордость и предубеждение", а главным образом — "Грозовой перевал" Эмилии Бронте, составляющий основное чтение героини "Сумерек" не только из-за отсутствия в доме другой литературы, но и из желания Стефани Майер примазаться со своей политкорректной вампирской сагой к почтенной традиции готического романа. (Лидия Маслова in Коммерсантъ) (Google translation)

LA Weekly presents the L.A. performances of Lin-Manuel Miranda's The Heights with an (obvious) play of words:

WUTHERING "HEIGHTS"
"Wuthering" actually means windy not withering. Though the former is prevalent, the latter also applies to Lin-Manuel Miranda's Latino-rap-calypso musical about living and dying in Washington Heights, and trying to get out of a barrio that's poised for gentrification. (Steven Leigh Morris)

Today's The Mirror's Quizword Crossword contains a very easy Brontë question:

Charlotte Brontë novel featuring the character Helen Burn.

Spanish writer Ana María Matute doesn't miss a chance of reminding us of her Brontëiteness. In an interview in Diario Sur (Spain):

Creo que ya desde niña pensaba en ser como Brontë o Andersen.

-Sí. Primero, porque me contaban cuentos; luego porque los leía, y después porque con cinco años empecé a escribir. Imagina si lo tenía claro. (Marina Martínez) (Google translation)

Lost in Manchester posts about the Blue Plaque that Charlotte Brontë has in Manchester (in Boundary Street where she began writing Jane Eyre while his father was recovering from his cataract operation). Bad Wolf Day recasts Brontë adaptations.

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

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Branwell Brontë: 193 years old today

Here's wishing a happy birthday to every Brontëite's favourite bad boy. We all know how he would have loved to celebrate: at the pub, of course. And although he never got around to writing his big masterpiece, he still managed to be famous today and certainly not just through his poetry and translations (or his 'reincarnation' as John Lennon).

In the eyes of his family and also in the eyes of generations to come who have read his wonderful juvelia and later literary output, he never fulfilled his promise. The Brontë story would have been a radically different one had Branwell had the self-discipline of his sisters or the ambition of his father.

Thanks to his sisters, Branwell - close to 200 years after his birth - still manages to sparkle, to lure all sorts of people into his brilliant, sad, pathetic life just like he lured travellers at the pub with his stories. And that's quite a feat.

EDIT: Les Brontës à Paris joins in this celebration.

Picture: The life of Feild [sic] Marshal the Right Honourable Alexan[d]er Percy, autograph manuscript, 1835 (Source: Leeds University Library)

Categories: Branwell Brontë, Reminder

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Open Auditions for Jane Eyre in Hull

Auditions for the Yorkshire premiere of Gordon & Caird's Jane Eyre. The Musical:

Jane Eyre Girls (age 8-16) Auditions
Start Time: Saturday, June 26, 2010 at 10:00am
End Time: Sunday, June 27, 2010 at 2:00pm
Jane Eyre Adult Auditions
Start Time: Saturday, July 10, 2010 at 10:00am
End Time: Sunday, July 11, 2010 at 3:30pm

Location:
The Albemarle Music Centre
Street: Ferensway, Hull
Description
Auditions for Hessle Theatre Company's 2011 production of 'Jane Eyre a Musical Drama'. This weekend is just for girls aged 8 -16, who want to audition for chorus parts (Norwood Orphanage scenes) or young prinicpals; young Jane, Adèle, or Helen.

EDIT: A preview can be seen next July 8 in the

Hessle Theatre Company's Grand Tour
Thursday 8th July 7:30pm
The Guildhall, Alfred Gelder Street, Hull

A worldwide tour of musical theatre, including songs from well known musicals including 'Calamity Jane', 'The Boy From Oz', 'Evita', 'Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat', 'The Lion King', 'Man of La Mancha' and premiering music from Hessle Theatre Company's 2011 production of 'Jane Eyre, a Musical Drama'.

Categories: Jane Eyre, Music, Theatre

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The Sad Brontës and the Happy Threesome

The Independent reviews among others Michèle Roberts's Mud. Stories of Sex and Love:

That sense of saving wit as a light that shows the way through dark places of the heart also informs Mud, Michèle Roberts's new "stories of love and sex" (Virago, £13.99). Here, a series of twists allows legendary lovers from literature and history – Tristan and Isolde, Jane Eyre's Mr (and the first Mrs) Rochester, Emma Bovary, Colette – to tell a story from the other side of myth in the manner of Carol Ann Duffy's The World's Wife. The darkness here comes in the depiction of an affinity between the glamorous heroines of fable and the exploitation of urban waifs – girls adrift in the city, trafficked women – today: sisters under, and in, the skin.
With striking zest, Roberts grapples with a masculine tradition of libertine fiction that can still shock, stun and even move. (Boyd Tonkin)

Children's best-sellers are (mostly) criticised by Philip Womack in The Telegraph. There's a Brontë reference used as a kind of rite of passage marking transitions between groups of age:

The vast majority of children (and by “children”, I mean anybody in those prepubescent years who has yet to make the leap to Jane Eyre and Great Expectations) have the literary sensibility of a dead snail and will read any old rubbish.

At the Wilton Bulletin they don't think the Brontë sisters were funny enough:

No chance at all that Stieg Larssen [sic] was a kidder. Robert Frost? Notoriously dark. T.S. Eliot? A little on the dull side, so the personal anecdotes tell us, and Ezra Pound toward the end of his life was a very sad, mad man. How about Jane Austen or the Brontës? Don’t make me laugh. (Joanna Ecke)

You'd never expect a Brontë reference in a polyamory article. Until now:

While [Lindsey] Doe begins the workshop clutching a copy of Vicki Vantoch's The Threesome Handbook to her chest as if it were a favorite Bronte novel, she favors therapeutic speak as much as dirty talk. (Jason Cohen in Missoula Independent)

The Philadelphia Literature Examiner talks about the differences between Jane Eyre and Becky Sharp, 'two girls graduating'. You're History! reviews (4 out of 5 stars) Juliet Gael's Romancing Miss Brontë, a book which is also being read by Girls With Books. HD Wai Learning Blog and Sharin' Stuff (in Spanish) post about Jane Eyre. There's also a couple of brief posts about two Jane Eyre versions: The CinemaScope Cat (1970) and Broken Mystic (1996). 52 Books in 1 Year reviews The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

Categories: Fiction, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, References, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

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The Well Dressed Governess in Sloane Hall

Libby Sternberg is giving away a free ARC of her upcoming novel Sloane Hall with just one condition: to leave a comment on her blog Libbysbooks:

Tell me what you loved most about Jane Eyre. . .if you include your email address in your comment, I'll enter your name into a lottery, choose one winner at random by the end of next week, and send you an Advance Reader Copy (ARC) of my novel Sloane Hall. For those who don't win this time, I'll be running more contests in the future. Or, you can now preorder the novel at Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

The novel will be released in September.


And today, June 25, the History Wardrobe presents their piece Jane Eyre: the Well Dressed Governess at the Middlesbrough Literary Festival:

The History Wardrobe Presents
Jane Eyre: the Well Dressed Governess
Reference Library, 6:30pm

The tale of Charlotte Brontë and her fictional heroine - both women of passionate intensity - is here retold and brought to life through the deceptively genteel fashions of the 1840s. If you enjoyed Undressing Mr Darcy at last year’s festival or Jane Austen’s Christmas here in November, you’ll be sure to enjoy this one too.

EDIT: Another theatrical alert from Glasgow's West End Festival. The Brontës are featured in this production:

— Marie McGarrol & Shona Miller presents —
Hide and Peep
A treasure trail of moments during a dream-filled west end summer. Spy on friends attempting in their own unique way to help and hinder each other, during a site-specific, promenade piece at the G12 studios. An original performance exploring female characters throughout history, as they battle to tell you their stories in a world where only hope is left. Created by Marie McGarrol and Shona Miller. "All (wo)men make mistakes.
Venue:
G12 Studios, 37 Ruthven Lane, off Byres Road, Hillhead
Date:
Fri 25 — Sat 26 June
Time:
7:00pm — 8:00pm

Lynn Murray plays Emily Brontë and Belle Jones Charlotte Brontë.

Categories: Books, Jane Eyre, Theatre

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I felt Jane was alive and in the room with me

The Brontë Prize winners have been announced. These are the nominations and winners of the 2010 edition:

Romantic Fiction

The Life O'Reilly by Brian Cohen

• Conquer All Obstacles; Jo-Anne Vandermeulen
• Homesong; Misha Crews
• Mangroves and Monsters; Sharon C. Pennington

Women's Fiction

Left in His Closet by Dr. Mary A. Krome

• A Time to Tell; Maria Savva
• Daughter of Mine; Laura Fabiani
• Miles to Go; Laurel-Rain Snow
  

The Utah Theater Bloggers Association reviews the Salt Lake City production of Jane Eyre. The Musical:

I spent that evening with Cast B of Spotlight Productions’ current production of Jane Eyre in the Rose Wagner black box. I was skeptical at first, thinking a musical of this size and scope needed a larger proscenium, but the production fits well in the black box; there is even room for a live, six-member orchestra at stage left. The theatre also made it possible for the audience to have more of an intimate experience; Jane was close and real, instead of a distant dot on a huge proscenium stage.
As Jane, Brittany Bullen does some very nice work. Her speaking voice has a wonderful quality of warmth and familiarity to it; I felt Jane was alive and in the room with me. Bullen’s singing voice is lovely, and her performance is a solid foundation on which to build a show; I willingly followed her through the highs and lows of Jane’s story. Bullen is accompanied by a number of strong voices: Kirk Stapley’s enigmatic Mr. Rochester and Marie Bentley’s Blanche Ingram, just to name a couple. The vocal blending on stage was definitely a highlight for me, a difficult feat with such a large cast — such a large cast! — all on stage at once. (Read more) (Melissa Leilani Larson)

The Moberly Monitor-Index & Democrat insists on the Brontë-Twilight connections:

Each of the “Twilight” books was inspired by and loosely based on different literary classics; Twilight on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, New Moon on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Eclipse on Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Breaking Dawn on a second Shakespeare plan, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. (Beverly Holden)

The Janesville Gazette highlights Wuthering Heights 1939:

WUTHERING HEIGHTS by Emily Bronte (I like the 1939 Laurence Olivier version … but there have been many updates … still the black and white version is so brooding … love that) (Jamie Swenson)

Time-Out Chicago mentions Sherri Browning Erwin's Jane Slayre. A Muse Sings is reading Wuthering Heights (now in Chapter 2), Ellinky (in Czech) posts some scans of a National Trust Magazine number (Autumn 2006) which included the Jane Eyre 2006 shooting at Belton House. Backchat Girls Reviews! posts about Kay Woodward's Jane Airhead, Les Brontës à Paris (in French) fictionalises an evening at the Black Bull with Branwell Brontë. Brontëana1 has uploaded several Haworth YouTube videos. Check them out here.

Categories: Fiction, Haworth, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, Music, References, Theatre, Wuthering Heights

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Physiognomy, Fairy Tales and Feminism

More recent scholar material:

Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism
Excerpts from Criticism of the Works of Nineteenth-Century Novelists, Poets, Playwrights, Short-Story Writers, & Other Creative Writers
Volume 212. Topics: the American Civil War, Fairy Tales, and Physiognomy.
Project Editor: Katryn D. Darrow
* Published by Gale
* Published/Released: July 2009
* ISBN 13: 9781414434100
* ISBN 10: 1414434103

Here is a convenient source of commentary on the careers and works of acclaimed poets, novelists, short story writers, dramatists and philosophers who died between 1800 and 1899. Each volume presents overviews of four to eight authors with chronologically arranged criticism representing the entire range of response to each author. Entries typically include an author portrait, an introduction to the author, a primary bibliography, annotated criticism and an annotated list of further reading sources. Approximately 90-95% of critical essays are full text.
Every fourth volume is a Topics volume covering major literary movements, trends and other topics related to nineteenth-century literature. Volumes include author, nationality, topic and title indexes; a cumulative title index to the entire series is published separately.

It includes the following reprints:

Physiognomy:
Physiognomy in Wuthering Heights by Graeme Tyler (formely published in Brontë Studies)
Fairy Tales:
Investigating the Third Story:"Bluebeard" and "Cinderella" in Jane Eyre by Victoria Anderson (previously published in Horrifying Sex: Essays on Sexual Difference in Gothic Literature)

Feminisms Redux
An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism
Edited and with an Introduction by Robyn Warhol-Down and Diane Price Herndl
Rutgers University Press
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8135-4620-9
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-4619-3
Publication Date: November 2009

The 1991 landmark edition of Feminisms presented the most comprehensive collection of American and British feminist literary criticism ever published. By 1997, realizing the need to update the work to remain within the expanded parameters of feminist literary discourse, the volume was revised to include more than two dozen new essays.
Now, at the dawn of a new century of thought and action, it is important once again to revisit the canon of feminist literary criticism and theory and re-establish the measure for representing the latest developments in the field. Robyn Warhol-Down and Diane Price Herndl have joined together once more to provide academics and general readers with a newly revised and indispensable collection of essays representing the range of feminist literary criticism.
Feminisms Redux, presented in a concise format, includes many essays from the second edition that continue to speak to current concerns and also provides readers with new contributions that address work in postcolonial studies, queer theory, and disability studies. As in the earlier volumes, the editors have gathered the full text of original articles and book chapters, with no edited excerpts. The range of essays focuses not only on gender and sex, but also on sexuality, race, class, nationality, and (dis)ability, and the intersections among these categories as they play out in writing by and about women. More than a revision of archetypal work, Feminisms Redux represents the dawning of a new classic.

Among others it includes the classical Four Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.

Categories: Books, Scholar

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How Heathcliff and Cathy's break-up really happened

First of all, Better World Books Blog has a podcast of an interview to Juliet Gael, author of Romancing Miss Brontë. Click here to listen to it.

The Courier-Mail has an article on the Twilight saga and as you know no article on Twilight is complete without mentioning the Brontës:

Inspired by Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Emily Brontë and other classic writers, there's no doubt that Meyer recycled a winning romantic formula: star-crossed lovers of different classes and the agony of choosing between two worthy men. Edward is, after all, Mr Darcy with fangs while Jacob is Wickham with heart and heat. (Karen Brooks)

Another love (?) story likened - thankfully jokingly - to Wuthering Heights by Sports Interaction is that of 'Bachelor Jake Pavelka and Vienna Giradi':

Like Wuthering Heights, it was a love fraught with controversy set against the torrid backdrop of the Yorkshire Moors a reality TV dating show. [...]
The final conversation between the doomed duo took place last night at around 6 p.m. pacific time – and, like Heathcliff and Catherine – the break-up occurred via cell phone. (Ellen Delaney)

What's not a joke is the fact that this autumn a fictional account of Anne Frank's life in the secret Annex told from the point of view of Peter van Pels - the teenage boy with whom Anne had a love 'relationship' - will be published: Annexed by British YA author Sharon Dogar. What's controversial is the following, quoted from Strollerderby (a Babble blog):

However in Dogar’s re-telling of the tale, things get quite heated between the pair. While her publisher confirms the author removed scenes of the pair making love from the final version of the book, he also said that the author believes Anne and Peter “had sex.” (helaineo)

The author of the article discusses the possible limits of these kinds of retellings:

While one hates to call BS on writers using real events and classic novels to create their own original tales (if we did, amazing books ranging from Bel Canto to Wide Sargasso Sea would not exist), Annexed feels more than a bit icky. (helaineo)

On the blogosphere, Jane Eyre is reviewed by John Bao and Liblog (in Italian) and Charlotte Brontë is the subject of posts on Victorian Literature and Annie the Adventuress.

Categories: Audio-Radio, Books, Fiction, Wuthering Heights

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Companion and Gender

Recent books with Brontë-related essays:

The Cambridge Companion to English Novelists
Series: Cambridge Companions to Literature
Edited by Adrian Poole
University of Cambridge
ISBN-13: 9780521691574
Published January 2010

In this Companion, leading scholars and critics address the work of the most celebrated and enduring novelists from the British Isles (excluding living writers): among them Defoe, Richardson, Sterne, Austen, Dickens, the Brontës, George Eliot, Hardy, James, Lawrence, Joyce, and Woolf. The significance of each writer in their own time is explained, the relation of their work to that of predecessors and successors explored, and their most important novels analysed. These essays do not aim to create a canon in a prescriptive way, but taken together they describe a strong developing tradition of the writing of fictional prose over the past 300 years. This volume is a helpful guide for those studying and teaching the novel, and will allow readers to consider the significance of less familiar authors such as Henry Green and Elizabeth Bowen alongside those with a more established place in literary history.

The Brontë chapters are:

10. Charlotte Brontë by Patsy Stoneman.
11. Emily Brontë by Heather Glen.

The Telegraph's reviews mentions the Brontë sections:

As well as those figures Leavis confidently declared to be the pre-eminent English novelists – Austen, Eliot, James and Conrad, with special mentions for Dickens and Lawrence – Poole has asked various academics to write essays on many others, including Sterne, Burney, Thackeray, Charlotte Brontë and Stevenson – all disapproved of by Leavis. (...)
Patsy Stoneman reduces the gothic strangeness of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre to a lesson in gender equality.

Gender and Victorian Reform
Editor: Anita Rose
Cambridge Scholar Publishings
Date Of Publication: Dec 2008
Isbn 13: 978-1-4438-0067-9
Isbn: 1-4438-0067-8

Gender, in the nineteenth century as now, is an integral part of identity. As a result, gender, along with race and class, has long been a vital part of public discourse about social concerns and reform. The fourteen essays in Gender and Victorian Reform address the overt and subtle ways in which gender influenced social reform in Victorian England. In addition to investigating the more readily apparent instances of gender in the areas of suffrage, women's education, and marriage law reform, the contributors to this collection examine the structure of charitable organizations, the interpretation of language and literacy, ideas of beauty, and religion through the lens of gender and offer diverse approaches to Victorian literature and culture. Some examine specific texts or single canonical authors, others introduce the reader to little-known authors and texts, and still others focus on the culture of reform rather than specific literary texts.
Essays are arranged into four parts, with Part I focusing on historical context and a revisioning of the historical romance. Part II addresses more specifically the role of women in public life and in the professions. The essays in Part III look even more specificallyat the connections among reform, gender, literacy and literary genre in Eliot, Collins, and Gaskell. The final four essays offer readings of the impact of gender ideology on beauty, dress, politics and religion.
Taken as a whole, the essays in this collection present a serious consideration of the role of gender in art and in public life that spans the Victorian era. Reformist impulses are revealed in a number of Victorian texts that are not generally read as overtly political. In this way, this collection thoughtfully focuses on the influence of gender on a wide range of social movements, and moves the significance of gender beyond simply the content of Victorian fiction and the identity of the authors and into the more fundamental connection of discourse to reform."

The Brontë essays are:

Chapter Eight: Reading the Institution: Charlotte Brontë’s Visual Literacy and Sites/Sights of Resistance in Shirley by Eric G. Lorentzen
Chapter Eleven: Reforming Beauty in Brontë’s Shirley by Margaret E. Mitchell

A review of the book can be found on Brontë Studies (Volume 35, Issue 1 (March 2010), pp 89)

Categories: Books, Scholar

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"We knew exactly when we’d got lot number 278"

Richard Wilcocks writes on the Brontë Parsonage Blog about the newly-acquired letter. Quoting Ann Dinsdale:

I followed the auction online in the Parsonage library with Sarah Laycock. We watched the auction results as they came in, with some excitement, and we knew exactly when we’d got lot number 278. Because of the high estimates, we bid only for this one.

It must have been a very exciting moment.

The Telegraph has an article on why 'A British film industry enriches all our lives' and director Andrea Arnold is mentioned:

Second, small films are where talent is nurtured. [...] Who knows where Andrea Arnold, about to direct Wuthering Heights, will end up? (Paul Gent)

What we really wonder is where Wuthering Heights will end up, as it's a while since we had relevant news about it.

Big Hollywood reviews the HBO documentary For Neda. Neda's literary choices are briefly commented upon:

Neda Soltan’s subversion of thought also extended to literature. From Wuthering Heights to The Last Temptation of Christ, Neda’s widely varying and mostly illegal collection of books reveals a most curious and searching young mind that wanted to know and experience all the best that humanity had to offer, most of which was and is forbidden in the Islamic Republic. (John T. Simpson)

The Bradford & West Yorkshire edition of BBC News takes a look at recent portrayals of Dewsbury and we are reminded that the place also had good things to offer such as:

"I mean, the house where Charlotte Brontë used to be a teacher is still there, just up from the Dewsbury Moor estate." [says Martin Wainwright, northern editor, the Guardian newspaper]

Sugarscape describes the book Beautiful Malice by Rebecca James as,

a good teen mystery story, with hints of Wuthering Heights and Gossip Girl thrown in (mang0)

YouTube user thomasengqvist has uploaded a couple of videos: one of Anne Brontë's tomb in Scarborough and the other of its surroundings. StephanieVandrickReads posts briefly about Juliet Gael's Romancing Miss Brontë.

Categories: Anne Brontë, Books, Brontë Parsonage Museum, Brontë Society, Brontëana, Movies-DVD-TV, Wuthering Heights

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Jane Eyre in Bristol and more

Tomorrow, June 23, a production of Jane Eyre adapted by Willis Hall opens in Bristol, UK:

Jane Eyre
By Charlotte Brontë
Adapted by Willis Hall
Directed by Lucy Pitman-Wallace

Performed by Bristol Old Vic Theatre School's Graduating Overseas Course Students.

Jane Eyre ranks as one of the greatest works of English Fiction, a grand passion that survies cruelty and loss; a story of success and redemption, a tribute to the indomitable spirit of a heroine battling prejudice in a time of rigid social convention.

This will be the third adaptation presented by the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School's Overseas Course to celebrate the sharp wit and great courage of independent women in the eighteenth and ninteenth centuries.

June 23-26
Evenings 7.30pm
Thu & Sat mats 2.30pm

And today, June 22, an alert from the Columbia Festival of the Arts (Columbia, MD):

Wine and Cheese Reception & Reading
Sheila Kohler reads from Becoming Jane Eyre
Tuesday, June 22, 7:00 – 9:30 p.m.
The Rouse Company Foundation Student Services Hall – Rm. 400
Howard Community College

Presented in Partnership with the Howard County Poetry & Literature Society

The South-African-born author of "Becoming Jane Eyre" and "Cracks" will read and talk about her works at Howard Community College. There will also be a book sale and book signing as well as a wine and cheese reception to follow.

Categories: Fiction, Jane Eyre, Talks, Theatre

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The Troubadour in Wuthering Heights

The Henley Standard has an article on musician Gordon Giltrap, taking a look back at his career:

In 1996, Gordon realised a dream of playing guitar alongside Cliff Richard, on stage in Cliff’s West End musical Heathcliff. As well as performing in the role of The Troubadour, Gordon arranged the overture and wrote two pieces of music.

And on a more serious note, the Daily Times (Pakistan) pays a tribute to Benazir Bhutto including a fragment of a poem by Anne Brontë:

When I think of her I am totally lost and poet Anne Bronte’s following lines – to some extent – represent my present state of mind.
Oh, I am very weary,
Though tears no longer flow:
My eyes are tired of weeping,
My heart is sick of woe. (Wajid Shamsul Hasan)

You can read the complete poem here.

KSL has a special offer for Jane Eyre. The Musical in Salt Lake City (only valid tonight and tomorrow night), so do check it out if you are in the area.

Les Brontë à Paris posts in French about the 1996 screen adaptation of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Fly High! reviews Villette and From Isi reviews Wuthering Heights in Spanish. Finally, The Squeee has uploaded the second chapter of her podcast/reading of Jane Eyre.

Categories: Anne Brontë, Jane Eyre, Music, Poetry, Theatre, Wuthering Heights

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Wuthering Heights in BBC Radio 7 Next Week

Wuthering Heights airs again next week on BBC Radio 7:

Wuthering Heights (originally aired in 1995)
The novel by Emily Bronte, dramatised in 5 parts by Bryony Lavery.
With John Duttine and Amanda Root.
Music by Ilona Sekacz.
Produced by Janet Whitaker.

With John Turner, Geoffrey Whitehead, Steve Hodson, David Collings, Jonathan Keeble, John Hartley, Emma Fielding, Becky Hindley, Tessa Worsley, Patience Tomlinson, Sharon Duce, Jilly Bond, Sheridan Smith, Paul Rhys, Gary Cady, Daniel Evans, James Cohen, Emily Watson, Liam Barr, Kirsty Adams, Felix Bell, Ryan Tebbut, Atase Mora and Naomi Bell.

Monday to Friday
10:00 AM / 03:00 AM

21 June Episode 1
Mr Lockwood visits Heathcliff's unwelcoming house on the moors.

22 June Episode 2
Torn apart from Cathy, Heathcliff plots revenge on Hindley.

23 June Episode 3
Heathcliff has left with Isabella, leaving Cathy sick and distraught.

24 June Episode 4
Sixteen years after Cathy died, her daughter visits the vengeful Heathcliff.

25 June Episode 5
Vengeful Heathcliff has schemed to force Catherine to marry his ailing son Linton.

Categories: Audio-Radio, Wuthering Heights

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