Jane Eyre's green fingers

The Sheffield Telegraph reports one more great side-effect to have come out of Jane Eyre 2011:

The latest big screen version of Jane Eyre is set to have a dramatic impact on one of the area’s most historic houses.
But it is the garden rather than Haddon Hall itself that is being transformed thanks to location fees paid by makers of the film, starring Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassbender, which is due for release in September.
Haddon, acknowledged as England’s most perfect surviving medieval house, is being gradually restored under the care of its present incumbent, Lord Edward Manners. But the famous terraced gardens have received little more than basic maintenance over the last century – until now.
All visitor income is ploughed back into the upkeep of the property, near Bakewell. But Haddon’s latest appearance as Thornfield Hall has brought a welcome boost to the coffers, enabling work to begin on a three-year replanting project.
Acclaimed garden designer Arne Maynard is in charge. He believes a garden should draw out the essence of its setting.
In Haddon’s case, that includes restoring elaborate Rennaissance gardens which have lost much of their character. [...]
The public can see the work in progress this year. There will also be a chance to see some of the grounds for the first time during garden open days each Friday until the end of September.
“For example it means they can now walk down to the river and over Dorothy Vernon’s Bridge,” says Lord Edward.
“It’s a chance to explore parts of the garden that aren’t usually open. People have been very appreciative.”
Haddon Hall is open noon-5pm daily.

Another recent movie connected to the Brontës is The Trip, which is recommended by the SanRafaelPatch:

The Trip [...] is about two British comedians embarking on a week-long road trip through Northern England for a magazine article about the region's finest restaurants. If they are Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, you're not going to escape the hilarity of their dueling Michael Caine impressions and bantering Bond villains, let alone their observations on the fine points of ABBA, all while they relish fine wine and cuisine and visit the haunts of Coleridge, Wordsworth and the Brontës. Together these quick-wits keep the conversations lively and make this road movie a worthwhile trip. Besides, the food looks great. (Michelle Murphy)

Literateur interviews poet Sophie Mayer, whose new collection of poems, The Private Parts of Girls, is coming out on July 15th.

There is a poem in your new collection entitled ‘On Being Dismissed as “Plathlike”‘, in which you describe a female poet becoming domesticated, ‘canonised and tamed’. The poem also has a quote from a Brontë novel as its epigraph. How useful do you think it is to compare poets to one another and create a canon, and do you think that female poets are dismissed or taken less seriously because of their gender?
I think that canonisation by the critical establishment often requires etiolation, not only of female poets but any who make the transition to the accepted mainstream. Their rough edges are smoothed. Particularly for female poets, I think there are limited types (arche- or stereo-) to which they are conformed: the hysteric, the domestic, the harpy, the saint. To paraphrase Mae West on marriage, “the canon is an institution, and I ain’t ready for an institution yet.”
As for comparing poets and creating a canon: I think that canon has a limited meaning, or can be most useful defined as relating to a consensus established by a critical mainstream and promoted/supported/expounded via institutional means such as awards, anthologies, pedagogy, media presence, etc.
But a book such as The Gender of Modernism by Bonnie Kime Scott does precisely the opposite: it looks behind the received canon to show a network, a playground, an interchange that is fluid, social, interdependent, dehierarchised and often (for all those reasons of refusing to be established/establishment) in danger of being forgotten. So those kind of groupings can be very valuable, whether they follow the line of a public manifestation (implicit or explicit) at the time, or are connections argued later, such as the connections between Emily Brontë and Emily Dickinson alluded to by Susan Howe in My Emily Dickinson.
I think women who take up public space are still perceived as a threat; poetry may allow them to do so in such a way as disguises the threat they pose, by presenting their concerns through the domestic/romantic – but then bringing that mode of (dirty linen) address into the public sphere often provokes condemnation, but on the other hand is now the safe/expected mode of female writing. I was listening to a male poet read from his work this weekend and heard many of the traits of the supposedly female confessional genre, but because it confessed about moving (and being moved) in public space – on the road, in a hotel, at a parade, at a pub – it escaped the label.
On the other hand, female poets who are explicitly political, experimental or erotic often risk not being heard at all. There are lots of useful labels for them that engage the stereotype of women as talking too much, too loudly and not to the point: shrew, termagant, windbag, etc. But it’s hard to make the argument that women writers are dismissed, without being dismissed oneself as one of those stereotypes. Observe the treatment meted out to Carrie Etter’s Infinite Difference anthology of innovative women writers, many of whom are explicitly feminist, (and which I’m very proud to be part of) by the TLS, which claimed at once that it was full of incomprehensible nonsense, and that the idea of an anthology for women writers was special pleading for work that should stand or fall on its own merits.
So the canon and its guardians offer the only game in town; you have to play the hand they deal you and I don’t know anything about poker so this metaphor is going to collapse. (Anna Kirk)

Les Soeurs Brontë continues posting in French about Jane Eyre's daughters: today it's Margaret Lea from Diane Setterfield's The Thirteenth Tale. 365 Days @ the Movies reviews Jane Eyre 2011. Associated Content has an article on 'Jane Eyre & The Eyre Affair: A Comparison. The Similarities of Religion in Both Novels'. And finally, Flickr user *Miss Diane* has uploaded a few pictures taken a Haworth and the moors.

Categories: Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, Poetry, References