Heathcliff, not admirable but compelling

The Sydney Morning Herald publishes an extract from For God's Sake: An Atheist, a Jew, a Christian and a Muslim Debate Religion, by Jane Caro, Antony Loewenstein, Simon Smart and Rachel Woodlock

I have had flirtations with religious belief. I was a precocious reader and many of my favourite authors were profoundly religious Victorians (George Eliot, the Brontës, Mrs Gaskell). Heavily influenced by their spiritual world view, I used to try saying prayers secretly at night, waiting for some kind of momentous spiritual experience (I was also a horribly melodramatic and exceedingly morbid child). (Jane Caro)

Tanya Gold in The Sunday Times gives her two cents about the Austen bank notes affaire. Take care Austenites, because she is no Austen fan:

There is an emotional austerity and joylessness to Austen, which Charlotte Brontë described: "The passions are perfectly unknown to her; she rejects even a speaking acquaintance with that stormy sisterhood... Jane Austen was a complete and most sensible lady, but a very incomplete, and rather insensible (not senseless) woman; if this is heresy - I cannot help it." I like to paraphrase this as: what a great writer Jane Austen is; what a shame she had nothing better to write about. Austen is a banker's woman, tidy as coin, dull as rain, no banging. Some fondly call her "subversive" and she was, but only in the sense that women actually speak in her novels.

The Independent (Ireland) reviews Beatsploitation by Kevin Curran:

A book's main character doesn't have to be admirable, but if not, he must be compelling. Rob is no Raskolnikov or Heathcliff; he's basically a selfish, delusional clown, leaving a vacuum of sorts at the novel's heart. (Darragh McManus)

Dawn (Pakistan) makes a nostalgic reminder of the Lahore of the 60s:

We considered ourselves liberated (not in the sexual sense though) but America appeared downright promiscuous. Alongside the adult stuff, one still stuck to reading Barbara Cartland, Georgette Heyer, Daphne du Maurier’s haunting love story ‘Rebecca’, the Brontë sisters and of course Jane Austen. (Anjum Niaz)

A Wuthering mention on Libreriamo (Italy):

Diciamo che è uno di quei romanzi che non sfugge all' attenzione delle nuove generazioni di buoni lettori. Un vero e proprio cult. Questo è l' unico romanzo scritto dalla Mitchell e mi viene in mente la Brontë e il suo memorabile romanzo "Cime tempestose" (il mio primo romanzo del cuore, il secondo è proprio "Via col vento").

El Tiempo (Spain) is fascinated with the idea of Vending Books (Wuthering Heights in an underground machine!); Neverland Hikayeleri posts about Agnes Grey in Turkish; Bancrofts from Yorkshire devotes a post to the Bancroft records of Haworth Church, some of them related to Patrick Brontë; Theatre Gold has created an entry to Gordon & Caird's Jane Eyre. The Musical; Steve Swis has uploaded sobre Brontë moors pictures to Flickr; out-worn heart in a time out-worn posts a Wuthering Heights-inspired meme; another tumblr bear up, brave heart! we will be calm and strong has created some covers for Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights using 19th century paintings.

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Wuther

And yet another adult retelling of Wuthering Heights... 

Wuther
V. J. Chambers
Format: Kindle Edition
File Size: 421 KB
Print Length: 260 pages
Publisher: Punk Rawk Books (3 Jun 2013)

This new adult retelling of Wuthering Heights is intended for mature readers due to explicit sexual content and coarse language.
Instead of storms tearing through Yorkshire moors, the sounds of '90s grunge rock whisper through backwoods American cornfields...
And give new life to the Brontë characters you love to hate.
A gypsy orphan, Heath Galloway adores Cathy Earnshaw, his childhood sweetheart. He would do anything to protect her from her drunken, abusive father--even push the man down a flight of stairs to stop him hitting her.
But with her father dead, Cathy's older brother Matt runs the Earnshaw farm and both of their lives. And Matt despises Heath. Forced to drop out of school and work the fields, Heath is separated from Cathy and the two begin to drift apart.
When Cathy meets the rich, blond, and suave Eli Linton, she finds herself torn between Eli's charm and Heath's brute potency.
Fiercely proud and stubborn, Heath doesn't take well to being brushed aside. He'll get what he wants, or he'll get revenge. No matter how long it takes.

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Going Insane

Patrick McGrath, the author of Spider, talks about madness in literature in The New York Times:

And then comes an extraordinary variation on the theme. In her last novel, “Wide Sargasso Sea,” Jean Rhys takes Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre” and tells the story of Rochester’s wife, Bertha, locked in an attic in his great country house. Rhys creates an early life for Bertha, as Antoinette Cosway, a Creole heiress in Jamaica. Torn from that life and taken to a cold and distant land, she goes insane and destroys her husband’s house. “Jane Eyre” is thus turned on its head, as our attention shifts from the heroine’s trials, and later relationship with Rochester, to the madwoman in his attic and what she suffered to become so, and why she burns down his great house, destroying herself in the process.

No connection to the Brontës but the Manchester Evening News contextualises a news item which is related to 1847:

Terry Whitworth, of Littleborough, has enlarged and coloured in an illustrated map of the town in 1847 - a time when the Brontë sisters were penning some of their best-loved works and Ireland was suffering the Great Famine. (Lisa Gray)

Crave interviews the film director Neil Jordan who talking about his 1999 film Interview with the Vampire says:

Maybe Interview was the start of seeing vampires as romantic characters.
Maybe, maybe. They were kind of doomed, ironic creatures. They were really Heathcliff, weren’t they? They were really interesting, but I suppose maybe every generation invents its own vampire, doesn’t it? Maybe Interview with the Vampire was at the time, maybe Twilight was at the time. I don’t know. I never thought I’d make another vampire movie but here I did. (Fred Topel)

Bath Chronicle presents the Laura Ashley exhibition at the Bath & North East Somerset Council's Fashion Museum:

The Fashion Museum will showcase more than 70 Laura Ashley dresses in a special summer exhibition on display from July 13 to August 26. The display will capture the Laura Ashley look that in the 1960s and 1970s inspired a generation of women to dress as though they were the milkmaid Tess of the d'Urbervilles from Thomas Hardy's novel, or perhaps Cathy from Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights.

StarkInsider reviews the San José performance of the play A Minister's Wife (based on G.B. Shaw's Candida):

Written as much to inform an audience about Christian socialism (as opposed to other flavors of socialism which remain religiously unaligned) and to highlight the wisdom of the minister’s wife, who’s caught between her somewhat prissy, but hopelessly sincere husband, and Eugene Marchbanks, a spoiled and histrionic upper class lad, the story has the tediousness of a period piece, with few of the redeeming virtues of the same. Jane Eyre (or Downton Abbey, for that matter) it’s not. (Cy Ashley Webb)

Libération (France) describes the actress Rinko Kikuchi like this:

Un même décalage s’applique, humainement, à l’héroïne féminine de Pacific Rim, Rinko Kikuchi, 32 ans, samourai dans l’âme mais aussi fragile d’apparence qu’une Brontë japonaise, et star à éclosion lente depuis son apparition en collégienne sourde et très sexuée dans Babel – il y a six ans. (Françoise-Marie Santucci) (Translation)

Estadão (Brazil) reviews the film Augustine:

Há um lado, digamos, gótico nessa história. A forma como Augustine, privada de sua liberdade, conhece o horror. "Acho que, no limite, essa é uma história sombria de sexo e poder."O repórter evoca o universo das irmãs Brontë. "Não digo que tenham sido inspirações conmscientes, mas elas com certeza fazem parte do meu imaginário." (Luiz Carlos Merten) (Translation)

Hell on Frisco Bay announces a local screening of I Walked With a Zombie 1943 and reviews the film;  Requiem for More Books and caryarit ferrer (in Spanish) review Jane Eyre; Près de la plume ... au coin du feu posts a Emily Brontë poem translated into French.

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Must I render an account?

A new scholar book with Brontë content:

Victorian Conversion Narratives and Reading Communities
Emily Walker Heady

Ashgate
Published: May 2013
Extent: 182 pages
Binding: Hardback
ISBN: 978-1-4094-5377-2

Because Victorian authors rarely discuss conversion experiences separately from the modes in which they are narrated, Emily Walker Heady argues that the conversion narrative became, in effect, a form of literary criticism. Literary conventions, in turn, served the reciprocal function as a means of discussing the nature of what Heady calls the 'heart-change.' Heady reads canonical authors such as John Henry Newman, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Oscar Wilde through a dual lens of literary history and post-liberal theology. As Heady shows, these authors question the ability of realism to contain the emotionally freighted and often jarring plot lines that characterize conversion. In so doing, they explore the limits of narrative form while also shedding light on the ways in which conversion narratives address and often disrupt the reading communities in which they occur.

Contains the chapter: 'Must I render an account?': the ethics of genre in Charlotte Brontë's Villette.

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Crafty and crafted

The Telegraph and Argus looks at three of the forthcoming Brontë releases we have been mentioning of late:

The timeless appeal of Haworth’s Brontë sisters has once again been highlighted after the announcement of three new adaptations of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.
Archaia Publishing will soon release a graphic novel called Rochester, which has been billed as a modern re-telling of the 1847 novel about an orphaned girl who becomes a governess.
Although yet to be published, the book has already been picked up as a film adaptation by Fox 2000 for a seven-figure sum, with Devil Wears Prada screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna hired to adapt it.
The novel will also get a unique retelling when it becomes a “Cozy Classic.” The series of books re-imagines classic works of literature as 12 word books for toddlers, illustrated by photos of knitted characters acting out scenes from the book.
Having already released versions of Moby Dick and War and Peace, the series adds Jane Eyre and Oliver Twist this autumn.

The Guardian reports that, 'Jeanette Winterson and Anne Tyler are to 'reimagine' two of the Bard's plays by turning them into prose' and the discussions of this leads to Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea.

But writers also seem driven to confront, reinterpret and emend the canon. Sometimes, as in Jean Rhys's Jane Eyre prequel Wide Sargasso Sea, it works triumphantly; sometimes, as with the official Peter Pan sequel Peter Pan in Scarlet, by Geraldine McCaughrean, it doesn't quite fly. Despite the witty sacrileges of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies ("It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains"), Bridget Jones's Diary (whose plot mirrored P&P) and Lost in Austen, sometimes contemporary writers deliver a just karmic kick: in Death Comes to Pemberley by PD James, Wickham finally gets what he deserves. (Bidisha)

Speaking of Wide Sargasso Sea, actress Sian Phillips picks it  for Express as one her 'six best books'.

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, Penguin, £8.99
I reread this recently and it's so crafty and crafted. I'm surprised every time by how she goes back and forward in time. And the way you realise that you're half in another book, Jane Eyre, is startling.

Also in the Guardian, Sarah Waters has selected 40 extracts from Virago books to celebrate the publishing house's 40th birthday. Can you spot a Brontë one? (If not, here are the answers).

Informazione (Italy) reviews a recent Italian edition of Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South.

Tra le atmosfere tenui e meravigliose di Jane Austen, le scritture di passioni offerte negli stessi anni dalle sorelle Brontë, le riflessioni terribili, geniali e stupende che di lì a poco realizzeranno le esplorazioni della psiche di Virginia Woolf, il realismo delicato e netto di Elizabeth Gaskell si ritaglia uno spazio unico e originale nella letteratura inglese del suo tempo. (Translation)

Flavorwire has compiled a literary calendar with 'a bookish event for every day of the year', including several Brontë ones. World Magazine reviews Susanne Abbuehl's On the Gift album, which includes two sung poems by Emily Brontë. The Brontë Parsonage Facebook page shares several pictures of Princess Michael of Kent presenting the artist Diane Lawrenson with her award.

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The Brontë Boy in Leeds

New performances of Michael Yates's The Brontë Boy in Leeds:

The Brontë Boy
By Michael Yates
Directed by Marian Mantovani

Branwell....................…....Warwick St John
Charlotte………….....…...Indra J.Adler
John Brown…   .…..……..Richard Galloway
Patrick……… ……….….Asadour Guzelian
Emily…………………….Keeley Lane
Anne  .……………….….Catherine Copley

Fri 28 June - Sat 29 June
Upstairs @ The Carriageworks: 7.15pm
Tickets: £9 (£7 concessions)

In this tragic drama, young Branwell, who once ruled an imaginary childhood world, is now a man, grown mad trying to cope with the real one. Having failed as a poet and painter, as doomed in love as he is in literature, he slips ever more quickly down the road of drink, drugs and despair.
His loving father Patrick and talented sister Charlotte fight a last-ditch stand for his sanity, but it is Branwell’s sinister friend, gravedigger John Brown, who threatens to have the last word in this ultimately terrifying take on the brilliant family we have read so much about and all thought we knew so well.
The Brontë Boy tells the well-known story with new insight; portraying its emotional tragedy with warmth and wit.
Warwick St John reprises his role as Branwell – which won him the Best Actor award at the Wakefield Drama Festival.

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The Brontës at the New York Musical Festival

The Washington Post reports that 

“The Brontës,” Dizzy Miss Lizzie’s rock-and-roll take on literary sisters Charlotte, Emily and Anne and their brother Branwell, is headed to the New York Musical Theatre Festival (NYMF, pronounced like “nymph”) at the beginning of next month. (...)
With only 30 shows and a track record of sending shows from relative obscurity to Broadway — “Next to Normal” and the one-act musical called “[title of show]” both got their start at the festival — NYMF is the most visible platform Dizzy Miss Lizzie’s has enjoyed to date.
The cost of bringing “The Brontës” to New York is about $25,000 for production fees, renting the space (the play will be performed at the Signature Theatre on 42nd Street), travel, hiring a publicist for the run, paying the actors and crew, and lodging, said Steve McWilliams, the play’s co-author. Dizzy Miss Lizzie’s raised just over $7,000 on Kickstarter and is funding the rest “through the generosity of our friends, family and fans,” co-author Debra Buonaccorsi said.
“I’m a huge Brontë fan and I have been for much of my life, and I think there’s something really appealing about this story,” Buonaccorsi said. “Which is funny because a lot of people thought, ‘The Brontës? That’s a terrible idea. That’s the most boring thing I’ve ever heard.’ But it’s these four misfit siblings, and all they have in the world is each other. It’s this family story.” (Jessica Goldstein)

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Qualms about Rochester

Film School Rejects makes a good point about the forthcoming comic/ screen adaptation Rochester:

Details on the project are slim, but we’re certainly interested in seeing a nineteenth century-set novel about governesses and sprawling estates and orphans and loons in the attic translated to the modern age. We are, however, less interested in seeing the book’s plot translated through the eyes of Edward Rochester, especially because Brontë’s book includes far, far more than just the Jane/Rochester love affair (seriously, it’s really only about a third of the book). (Kate Erbland)

The Mary Sue also has some qualms about it:

So. A modern-day version of Jane Eyre. I’m a bit on the fence here, if only because Brosh McKenna’s other screen credits include the poorly reviewed rom-coms 27 Dresses, Morning Glory, and I Don’t Know How She Does It. Then again: The Devil Wears Prada! I can’t imagine that anyone would think a light, romantic version of Jane Eyre would work (He locks his wife in an attic. He loses a hand.), so I’m going to gather my faith in humanity around me like a warm, comfortable, possibly delusion-inducing coat and say the darkness of the original novel will be kept.
But I guess we’ll have to wait until the graphic novel comes out to see what flavor of contemporary adaptation this movie will be. Don’t let me down, Archaia. (Rebecca Pahle)

And now for a couple of mentions of two radically different aspects of the novel. The Coventry Telegraph features the play A Trade in Lunacy:

The mad woman in the attic theme was prominent in a number of Victorian novels, most notably Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.

While Bookish has several 'Romance Authors Remember the First Sex Scenes They Read'.

3. Jane Eyre
"She was young, naïve, vulnerable, certain her world was about to end. He was older, worldly, cynical and ruthless in pursuit. Her cri de coeur imprinted itself on my gawky, 12-year-old adolescent brain in a way few have ever since: 'Do you think I can stay to become nothing to you?' she asked. 'Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong!--I have as much soul as you,--and full as much heart!'
She, of course, is Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, and he is Mr. Rochester. What has always impressed me about this scene (which I have read so many times I practically know it by heart), is how fully it engulfs the reader in a swooning, desperate, unexpected passion.
The clothes remained on, but the writhing and groaning of the sheltering chestnut, soon to be split asunder by lightning, was a cleverly coded metaphor for what remained unspoken about soulmates whose love was tainted by the madwoman in the attic.
Brontë's enduring brilliance proves how a great writer can say much about love and sexual desire without showing so much as a pinky. Sometimes all you need are a wild wind and indelible, flawed, yet all-too-human characters to start the swooning, and the reader's imagination will do the rest."
--Karen Moline, author of "Lunch" (Ron Hogan)

The Independent wonders if young writer Samantha Shannon is 'the next EL James'.

Samantha Shannon received a six-figure advance for The Bone Season, the first of what is set to be a seven-part series described by its publisher as "Beauty and the Beast written with the imagination of the Brontë sisters". (Robert Dex)

We sincerely hope that the books are better than the description.

Faro de Vigo (Spain) features young poet Marcela Porto Mato.

Sus inquietudes literarias -junto a las de sus hermanas Andrea y Lara- han llevado al crítico literario Armando Requeixo a referirse cariñosamente a las hermanas Porto Mato como las Brontë gallegas, un apelativo que reconoce su decidida apuesta por las letras gallegas. (Silvia Pampín) (Translation)

USA Today's Happy Ever After lists several 'new paranormal reads', one of which is Lexicon by Max Barry where

Whip-smart orphan Emily Ruff is making a living running a three-card Monte game on the streets of San Francisco when she attracts the attention of the organization's recruiters. She is flown across the country for the school's strange and rigorous entrance exams, where, once admitted, she will be taught the fundamentals of persuasion by Brontë, Eliot, and Lowell who have adopted the names of famous poets to conceal their true identities. For in the organization, nothing is more dangerous than revealing who you are: Poets must never expose their feelings lest they be manipulated. Emily becomes the school's most talented prodigy until she makes a catastrophic mistake: She falls in love. (Joyce Lamb)

Whichever Brontë is meant would be thrilled to see herself considered a poet.

Sri Lanka's Daily News discusses the origins of feminism:

Several years later, Charlotte Brontë in her novel, ‘Shirley ‘ had the heroine longing for a trade - even if it made her coarse and masculine-instead of the vacant, weary, lonely life of a woman of her class. (Aditha Dissanayake)

The Age discusses endings:

Like life itself, great epic stories end on a beat of finality.
Odysseus returned home. Heathcliff died. Rick (Humphrey Bogart) reluctantly sent Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) to a haven.
TV and cinema, however, usually prefer to keep their ''property'' options open, often to their detriment. (Paul Kalina)

Flavorwire shows 'The Childhood Art of Famous Authors' including a drawing by Charlotte Brontë. Mjurka posts about The Professor. To Read, Or Not To Read reviews April Lindner's Catherine.

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This is My Letter to the World in New Hampshire

An alert for tomorrow, June 28 in New Hampshire:

Friday June 28th 7:00 p.m.
Concert by Rebekah Alexander and David McLellan
Cathedral of the Pines
Rindge, NH

Ms. Alexander is a gifted recitalist who has performed with many opera organizations, including Guerilla Opera, Worcester Opera Works, Boston Opera Collaborative and New England Light Opera, and more. She is a strong advocate of contemporary music and has performed works by Heggie, Crumb, Cage and many others. She performed the role of Phedre in Socrate by Satie with Opera Hub this month.

Mr. McLellan studied classical guitar at the Hartt School of music, the New England Conservatory and the Aspen Music Festival. He has taught at the Hartt School and at the University of Connecticut while giving solo recitals throughout New England. He has toured in Great Britain and performed in music festivals in the U.S. and South America.

The presentation, entitled “This is my letter to the World…” combines music with some of the best-loved poetry by the likes of Emily Dickenson (sic), Emily Brontë, John Clare and William de la Mare. Music by Leisner, Britten, Dodgson, and Berkeley.

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Ten Brontë pounds for Branwell Brontë

First of all, a happy birthday to Branwell Brontë, born on a day like today in 1817.

We wonder what he would make of the fact that one of his sisters might appear on a £10 note. The Guardian thinks it should be Jane Austen on the new bank notes, as she created the character of Elinor Dashwood. Emily Brontë is a strong contender, though:

Surely someone like Emily Brontë, whose stock market investments on her family's behalf belie her unworldly image, or George Eliot, with her appetite for large advances and interest in Germany, might be a more business-friendly choice of novelist? 

But then again, if that's what were are judging, Charlotte Brontë created Jane Eyre, who had a windfall of £20,000 pounds. That could rub off a little.

A young commenter on CBBC's Newsround thinks it should be the Brontë sisters:

"I think the Brontë sisters should be on a note because they wrote a lot of very popular books and they are great role models for women."
Ciara, Bristol, England

However, it does look like (also here) it will be Jane Austen after all.

Ian Brady, known as the Moors murderer, has now broken his silence of nearly 50 years and has mentioned Wuthering Heights. We have been unable to find his actual words as there seem to be three versions:

From the Guardian:

"Why are we still talking about Jack the Ripper over a century on? Because of the dramatic background: the fog, the cobbled streets … it fascinates them. With the Moors it's the same: Wuthering Heights, Hound of the Baskervilles, that sort of thing." (Helen Pidd)

From Express:

Referring to his notoriety, Brady said: "Why are they [the public] still talking about Jack the Ripper, after a century? Because of the dramatic background, the fog, cobbled streets.
"Mine's the same... Wuthering Heights, Hound Of The Baskervilles." (Owen Bennett)

And from the Sydney Morning Herald:

"I can go into the reasons, they're somewhat theatrical, why they're still talking about it. Jack the Ripper, after a century, it fascinates them because of the dramatic background; capes, cobbled streets - the moors is the same thing. Wuthering Heights and all that, The Hound of the Baskervilles." (Gordon Rayner)

Way to soil the novel.

Diario de Mendoza (Argentina) also makes a strange statement:

Las jóvenes, frescas y vírgenes, constituían una fuente de tentaciones: eran, por el sólo hecho de serlo, una provocación para los hombres de todas las edades. Y la literatura lo reflejó a través de las novelas de Balzac, Proust y las hermanas Brontë, entre otras. (Patricia Rodón) (Translation)

What? It sounds as if the Brontës wrote Lolita.

Cool Age reviews The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

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The Bronze Sisters in London

As the Brontë Parsonage Facebook reported yesterday:

Diane [Lawrenson] has won the Londonart.co.uk Special Sculpture Award at the Society of Women Artists exhibition, Mall Galleries, London, for her sculpture of the three sisters. Princess Michael of Kent will present her with her award on Wednesday 26 June at 11am,

The exhibition itself begins Thursday, June 27 as Londonart.co.uk explains at its editorial:

Society of Women artists 
Mall galleries 27th June - 6th July , London

This year, Londonart is once again proud to be a sponsor of the Society of Women Artists. Their 152nd Annual Exhibition runs from 27th June to the 6th July 2013. Founded in 1855, the Society has had a unique history dedicated to promoting art by women. The exhibition will be held at the prestigious Mall Galleries, The Mall, London, SW1 and this rich cornucopia of artistic excellence will showcase a stunning and eclectic mix of artwork in all media.

Of special merit this year are the singularly expressive sculptures of the Brontë sisters by Diane Lawrenson R.C.A. S.W.A. The three figures of Charlotte, Anne and Emily are utterly captivating and a joy to behold. Diane contends with man’s definition of women’s form and beauty in sculpture by portraying her own view of the character and individuality of the three famous authors. Living in Haworth, a remote Pennine village in Yorkshire, the sisters were isolated socially and educationally yet emerged as celebrated literary geniuses.

Diane sees Charlotte as the driving force and visionary, Anne as gentle, caring and duty bound and Emily as a self-contained strong character, who passionately embraced nature in all its forms. An artist worthy of taking on the challenge of depicting the sisters, Diane Lawrenson is a member of the Royal Cambrian Academy. She has won the Peter Hambro Sculpture Award, the American Square Conference Centre Sculpture Award and the Alec Tiranti Special Sculpture Award. Her work is in both public and private collections.
The Society of Women Artists encourages variety and versatility and features some of the finest contemporary women artists from all over the world. It is open daily from 10 am – 5pm. See the SWA website for further details at http://www.society-women-artists.org.uk/

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Rochester adapted

Here's apparently our next Brontë adaptation, as told by The Hollywood Reporter:

In a deal worth low seven figures, Fox 2000 has picked up the rights to Rochester, an upcoming graphic novel from Archaia Publishing, with Aline Brosh McKenna attached to write the adaptation. [...]
Rochester is a modern retelling of Jane Eyre, the classic 1847 novel by Charlotte Brontë. The book told the story of Eyre, an orphaned girl who becomes an independently minded governess at the estate of Edward Rochester, a man with a secret or two who falls for her.
Archaia’s editor-in-chief Stephen Christy will exec produce with the company’s Jack Cummins. The deal may be the company’s last act as an independent publisher; BOOM! Studio is acquiring the company, known for its many Eisner-nominated graphic novels.
Rochester marks a reunion for McKenna, Kinberg and Christy as the trio previously teamed up to adapt Archaia’s acclaimed sci-fi graphic novel series Rust. That project is set up at 20th Century Fox.
Rochester also returns McKenna into the fold of Fox 2000 for the first time since her breakthrough film, the adaptation of The Devil Wears Prada. (Borys Kit)

EDIT: According to Comic Book Resources:

Ramon Perez, who illustrated Jim Henson’s Tale of Sand for Archaia, is now at work on the book. (TJ Dietsch)

Word & Film begins an article on a forthcoming adaptation of Madame Bovary very ominously for the above:

With the underachieving films “Jane Eyre” and “Wuthering Heights” barely in our wake, it should not be surprising that yet another piece of classical literature is being brought to the big screen. This time the French are chiming in with another version of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, set for release in 2014. (Gregory J. Helmstetter)

Onirik (France) reviews Susanne Fletcher's Witch Light.

Le récit de la jeune femme fait écho aux lettres que le pasteur envoie à sa femme Jane (un hommage voilé à Jane Eyre, dont Susan Fletcher avoue être fan absolue ?), et l’on voit l’homme littéralement se transformer au contact de cette créature que lui-même condamnait d’abord sans la connaître. (Claire) (Translation)

680 News features 'a pair of college campuses' in southwest China.

“We are adults,” says Zhang Panyu, an 18-year-old student whose reading of “Jane Eyre” helped him navigate his own first romance. “We need to know something about everything.” (Justin Pope and Didi Tang)

The Financial Times and the Daily Mail both continue discussing the women who might be featured on the new £10 notes.

It's Wuthering Heights turn in Hypable’s BattleShips. Susan Hated Literature recommends Jane Eyre while What Rosie's Reading recommends The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Laura Reading Books has enjoyed rereading Villette. Finally, congratulations are in order for sculptor Diane Lawrenson. As reported on the Brontë Parsonage Facebook page:

Diane has won the London Art Co UK Special Sculpture Award at the Society of Women Artists exhibition, Mall Galleries, London, for her sculpture of the three sisters. Princess Michael of Kent will present her with her award on Wednesday 26 June at 11am, and we are so proud of you, Diane! 

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Wuthering Heights in Hamburg

An alert for tomorrow, June 26 in Hamburg, Germany:

Bucerius Kunst Forum
Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights

26. June 2013 20:00 - 22:00 h
Great Novels in World Literature

Hanjo Kesting (commentary), Barbara Nüsse and Volker Hanisch (readings)

A ZEIT-Stiftung Ebelin and Gerd Bucerius series

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From Oedipus and Moses

The Province reviews the performances of Blake Morrison's We Are Three Sisters in Vancouver:

Although it shamelessly rips off Chekhov, the play and United Players' production offer an entertaining look at these remarkable siblings.
We Are Three Sisters drops us into the Brontës' Yorkshire home in the 1840s when the sisters were secretly writing and publishing under male pseudonyms. Like Chekhov's Three Sisters, the play features a pompous schoolmaster, a promising brother who wastes his life over an unworthy woman, and sisters yearning to leave the provinces for the distant capital. (Jerry Wasserman)

The New Statesman reviews A Child of One's Own by Rachel Bowlby which includes the following statement:

One could say that the Oedipus narrative gave us Wuthering Heights where the Moses story resulted in Jane Eyre; or at least that between them can be found the spectrum of objective and subjective narrative possibilities. (Rachel Cusk)

The Edwardsville Intelligencer interviews a local professor:

Most of us have read or seen adaptations of Victorian literature – think Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde and the Brontë sisters. Even if you’ve never read one of their books or seen a film adaptation, their names are solidly fixed in popular culture. (Aldemaro Romero quoting Dr. Helena Gurfinkel)

The Independent (Ireland) reviews the novel This House is Haunted by John Boyne:

In boldly entering the territory of classic Victorian ghost stories, it pays a courtly nod to past masters, with deliberate echoes of Dickens (a minor character here), Henry James and the Brontës. Then, uncursed by postmodern cleverness, it brings the reader into its world with an absolutely straight bat.

The Rural (Australia) talks about... rural writers:

So-called regional writers – of which Alice Munro, from western Ontario, is counted among their number – are renowned for producing works that derive intensively, in varied ways, from the localities in which they were raised or have chosen to settle, yet are of universal appeal. Think, for instance, of Harper Lee in the American south, the Brontë sisters in Yorkshire, or even of Raymond Chandler's murky vision of Los Angeles. (Roger Stitson)

The writer Tim Fountain offers convincing advice in Gay Times (warning: strong language):

Avoid gloryhole sex, aged 14, en route to the Brontë Parsonage Museum, Haworth. It’ll scar you for life.

actusf (in French) interviews the writer Tim Powers:

Actusf : Quels sont vos auteurs du XIXe siècle favoris ?
Tim Powers : Et bien, c’est plutôt vaste comme siècle ! Si je mets de côté la poésie, je dirais Edward John Trelawny, Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain, les sœurs Brontë et bien sûr Charles Dickens. (Interview by Arthur Morgan and Stephen Barillier) (Translation)

Rodrigo Fresán reviews Jeffrey Eugenides The Marriage Plot in Página 12 (Argentina):

Y si en Las vírgenes suicidas (1993) las trágicas y adolescentes y muy bronteísticas hermanas Lisbon acaban optando por la autoeliminación como punto de partida para un mito que suplantará a vidas inocurrentes[.] (...)
Aquel “Lector, me casé con él” en las últimas páginas de Jane Eyre es, claro, una tentación. (Translation)

Austen Authors looks for things that Charlotte Brontë and Jane Austen have in common; Nadaness in Motion posts about Wuthering Heights.

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New Audiobooks

I.J. Miller's Wuthering Nights will be in a few days on audio for your acoustic pleasure (no pun intended):

Wuthering Nights: An Erotic Retelling of Wuthering Heights

Emily Brontë and I.J. Miller, read by Joy Pratt.
AudioGO, unabridged, eight CDs, 12.25 hrs
ISBN 978-1-4789-5212-1

This isn’t quite the beloved Brontë classic you read in high school English class. But it’s not a bad retelling of it either—that is, if you don’t mind adding a healthy dose of erotica. In Miller’s version, the relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff becomes more elicit and a much more sexy. Narrator Joy Pratt brings a distinct femininity to the book, her accented voice ably capturing the spirit of the prose. Pratt’s delivery is flawless; her tone and pronunciation perfect. And, she manages to convey both the newer material and the original text in a similar manner. A Grand Central paperback. (Publishers Weekly)

Alison Croggon's Black Spring is also available as an audiobok since some months ago:

Black SpringAuthor: Alison Croggon
Reader: Kim Hicks
Running Time: 7hrs 51minPublisher:
AudioGO Ltd
Number of CDs: 8
File Quality: MP3 (128 kbps)
Release Date: 03/01/2013
ISBN: 9781471323959

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A Picnic in the North

Via The Telegraph & Argus we find out that the so-called National Picnic Week (which ends today, by the way) has chosen Top Withins (Number 15) for their Britain's Top Picnic Sites list:

We’re so excited to announce our list of the best picnic locations in the country. Picnics are loved by British people because of our desire to get out into the Great Outdoors and the British countryside never fails to provide a stunning location for you to tuck into your sandwiches.
I’ve been lucky enough to visit a number of these stunning locations and I really can’t recommend them highly enough. What could be better? Sunshine, sarnies and scenery – the perfect combination!" Phil Browne - National Picnic Week organiser 

Post-noon recommends places to visit in North Ireland:

For literature lovers, head to the Brontë trail, where the father of the Brontë sisters preached.

Brontë trail is ok, but we are afraid Patrick Brontë doesn't preached very much in Ireland as it was ordered in Cambridge when he was already in the UK.

Asheville Citizen-Times reviews Dark Companion by Marta Acosta:

Since its publication in 1847, Charlotte Brontë’s classic “Jane Eyre” has inspired numerous novels, including Marta Acosta’s modern-day story, “Dark Companion.”
The novel is irresistible from the start. The narrator, 16-year-old Jane, hooks readers with this opening line: “On the night that I die, a storm rages …”
As the story unfolds, readers learn that Jane has spent most of her childhood in inner-city foster homes. Jane knows that the only way out of her tragic circumstances is by getting a good education. (...) “Dark Companion” is the perfect modern Gothic novel. Like “Jane Eyre,” “Dark Companion” has romance, suspense, secret passages and identities, maybe/maybe not-ghosts, and a cataclysmic fire in an old ancestral hall. “Dark Companion” is a fun, spooky read. (Jennifer Prince)

The Telegraph makes a heated vindication of the North as centre of artistic creation:

This means some if not most of the most dramatic and world changing moments of artistic, scientific and culture innovation in British history have originated in the north. Take from the rest of the country what began, and thrived, in the north – the novels of Laurence Sterne, Lewis Carroll, the Brontës, Malcolm Lowry, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe of York, the machines of Arkwright, the experimentation of Thomas De Quincey, the poetry of Wordsworth, Hughes and Larkin, the engineering of the Stephensons, the social theories of Marx and Engels, the campaigning of Cobden and the Pankhursts, the Yorkshire of Hockney, Hepworth and Henry Moore, the wit of Alan Bennett, the computer vision of Alan Turing, the Jodrell Bank of Bernard Lovell, the broadcasting of Granada, the Coronation Street of Tony Warren, the pop music of Liverpool, and then Manchester, the opening ceremony of Danny Boyle – and the nation shrinks. (Paul Morley)

The Battle of the £5 notes continues in the British Press:

But the Bank refused to reveal who the woman was, saying it might 'prejudice' the selection process for people to appear on the next round of banknotes.
Although the Bank maintains its silence over the identity of the woman it chose as a 'contingency', it is expected she hails from a list of 83 influential women chosen by the public,The Times reported.
The list includes Charlotte Brontë, Jane Austen and Emmeline Pankhurst. (Rosie Taylor in Daily Mail)

Or The Times advocating directly for Jane Austen in an opinion article .

Also in The Times we find our beloved AA Gill reviewing The White Queen:

The first thing that must be said on behalf of this historical adaptation is that it isn't the long 19th centruy or Jacobethan, and it isn't written by the Austen-Brontës or Andrew Davies.

Barbara Allen in The Observer describes different forms of abuse:

The abused are great at denial mechanisms – everything from "He doesn't mean it" to "He's under pressure at work", to what I'd term the "Heathcliff" (a couple so passionate there are bound to be fireworks). 

The Dallas Morning News reviews Lexicon by Max Barry:

In Lexicon, Max Barry creates a world not unlike ours, but with a hidden dimension of power wielded by word-magicians known as poets. Candidates, selected because they are “good with words,” are recruited as young people and trained at a special academy in the Virginia suburbs of Washington. This school is never named, but all of the teachers have the names of famous poets, such as T.S. Eliot and Charlotte Brontë. (Joyce Sáenz Harris)

The Star (Malaysia) talks about Malorie Blackman, Britain’s newest children’s laureate:

Blackman is also the first black laureate and a forceful advocate for black and ethnic minority children’s needs and rights. As a child, Blackman loved myths, legends and fairytales, and comics such asBunty, Judy and Jinty. She read Elinor Brent-Dyer’s chalet school stories, Joyce Lankester Brisley’s Milly-Molly-Mandy series and later Agatha Christie, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. She loved them all, she says, “but I was very aware that I was not in the books I was reading. I still remember feeling I was totally invisible in the world of literature”. (Susanna Rustin)

Sarah T. Schwab contributes to the Lauren Sandler debate and uses Emily and Anne Brontë as examples of writers with no offspring in The Observer (NY); Bookie Mee and Beauty Vintage (in Portuguese) post about Jane Eyre; Rosie's Period Journal posts a photo gallery of Jane Eyre 1997.

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Wuthering Heights in Ilkley

A new adaptation of Wuthering Heights opens tomorrow, June 24, in Ilkley (Yorkshire):

Wuthering Heights
Wharfeside Theatre

Date: 24 Jun - 06 Jul 2013 (But Not Sundays)
Start time: 7-30-pm
Written By Walter Swan and Yvette Huddleston
Directed By Walter Swan and Yvette Huddleston

Wuthering Heights is one of the most powerful and enduring love stories ever written. Set in the wilds of the Yorkshire Moors, it is a tale of passion, loss, revenge and, ultimately, hope. Heathcliff and Cathy have become icons of passionate and romantic love despite the fact that Catherine Earnshaw is, at times, spiteful, capricious and wilful and that Heathcliff is, at different points in EmilyBrontë’s novel, described as devilish, a murderer and inhuman. The depth and ferocity of the love that Heathcliff and Cathy feel for each other is undoubted, so why exactly does Cathy choose to marry local landowner Edgar Linton instead?

This new adaptation explores the complete story of Wuthering Heights, spanning two generations – from Heathcliff’s arrival on the moors, adopted by the Earnshaws as a child, to his death in middle age and the emergence of another love story that is redemptive, positive and joyful.

A special Brontë Society performance will take place on June 25 

The evening includes a pre-performance 'in conversation' with Brontë scholar Dr Patsy Stoneman, of the University of Hull, playwright Walter Swan, and Executive Director of the Brontë Society Professor Ann Sumner.

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Banknotes, Penguin Popular Classics and Zombies

The Irish Times has an interesting article about the changes that ebooks are bringing to the book industry:

The first was the news that Penguin was calling time on its Popular Classics range. You might have seen them, these snappy paperbacks in green and white jackets (at least in recent years), printed on thin paper but priced very competitively, at about €3. Hard to beat if print is your thing and you want a quick infusion of Twain or Brontë, Verne or, as this is the season for it, Joyce.
The company has, unsurprisingly, not abandoned classics altogether. No, Penguin will still publish its Modern Classics series, but it is killing the popular classic at the low price and abandoning this space in the market to Wordsworth Classics, which publishes an extensive list at a similarly low price, and to ebooks.

In the same newspaper we found this review of Terry Eagleton's How To Read Literature:

Riding to the rescue of “slow reading,” a bid Eagleton makes as if it were heroic, is not urgent. But he does well to describe a normal seminar, where a few students sit around a table discussing Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Student A says: “I can’t see what’s so great about Catherine’s relationship with Heathcliff. They’re just a couple of squabbling brats.” Student B: “Well, it’s not really a relationship at all, is it? It’s more like a mystical unity of selves. You can’t talk about it in everyday language.” Student C: “Why not? Heathcliff’s not a mystic, he’s a brute. The guy’s not some kind of Byronic hero; he’s vicious.” Student B retorts: “OK, so who made him like that? The people at the Heights, of course. He was fine when he was a child.” So it continues.
Eagleton asks us: “What is wrong with this discussion?” His answer, much to the point, is that if you were listening to the discussion and had never heard of Wuthering Heights, you would “find nothing to suggest that it was about a novel”. It could be gossip about some friends of the students.
Eagleton’s point is valid. Literature is literature. The only trouble with his intervention is that the way the students talk about Wuthering Heights is the way Eagleton himself writes about every novel he supposedly analyses in the present book and in Heathcliff and the Great Hunger (1999). (Denis Donoghue)

Leslie Salzillo in The Daily Kos talks about her love for Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights:

Damn You, Emily Brontë
Oh, the bittersweet pain of it all. I could so easily let myself be consumed by the lovely and ridiculous drama, and just cry. Cry now as I did years ago, and as I will years from now. The words are excruciating. It’s as if Emily Brontë reached inside me, ripped out my heart, threw it on the floor, and stomped on it. And I love her for it.  (...)
Reading Wuthering Heights was a turning point for me. It’s when I came to the realization that deep down (and I can admit it now) I crave stories about tormented, passionate, and unrequited love. Love that exists, yet can never be. Love that, with a single touch, can lift you into the clouds, or with a single word, slam you back down to the ground, causing you to ‘take to the bed’ for days, maybe weeks. Love that is without pride... (Read more)

Publishers Weekly reviews the audiobook edition of I.J. Miller's Wuthering Nights:

This isn’t quite the beloved Brontë classic you read in high school English class. But it’s not a bad retelling of it either—that is, if you don’t mind adding a healthy dose of erotica. In Miller’s version, the relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff becomes more elicit and a much more sexy. Narrator Joy Pratt brings a distinct femininity to the book, her accented voice ably capturing the spirit of the prose. Pratt’s delivery is flawless; her tone and pronunciation perfect. And, she manages to convey both the newer material and the original text in a similar manner. A Grand Central paperback.

The Times talks about the mystery woman who will fight against Churchill for the new £5/£10 notes:

The Bank declined to reveal who the mystery character was, stating that it "would be likely to have the unfortunate effect of prejudicing any future selection process". However, it will commission a design for an alternative banknote to Churchill's.
The undisclosed woman is almost certain to be among a list suggested by the public and compiled by the Bank. Among the 83 names are Jane Austen, Emmeline Pankhurst, the Brontë sisters and Ada Lovelace, the world's first computer programmer. The final choice of historical figures rests with the Governor, who is advised by Chris Salmon, the chief cashier, and the Bank's note division. (Alex Ralph)

The Telegraph talks about the film World War Z and begins by making an introduction into the zombie genre:

A decade later, for Val Lewton’s eerie 1943 production of I Walked with a Zombie, directed by Jacques Tourneur, screenwriters Curt Siodmak and Ardel Wray updated the plot of Jane Eyre and transposed it to the West Indies, thus demonstrating that mash-ups of 19th-century English literature and zombies didn’t begin with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. (Anne Billson)

The journalist insists on Jacques Tourneur's film:

I Walked with a Zombie: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies isn't the first mash-up of 19th century Eng Lit and zombies. It's 70 years since legendary RKO B-movie producer Val Lewton asked screenwriters Curt Siodmak and Ardel Wray to update and transpose the story of Jane Eyre to a Caribbean island. "There's no beauty here, only death and decay," says a plantation owner to the nurse who has come to the island to care for his sick wife – but Jacques Tourneur's directing ensures this is the most hauntingly beautiful zombie film ever made.

Coincidentally, Catholic Online (of all places...) also makes a top ten zombie list with I Walked with a Zombie on number 2:

Described as "Jane Eyre in the West Indies," this subtle - but still effective spooker from producer Val Lewton has a wife investigating some odd goings-on at her husband's island plantation. Her walk through the jungle undergrowth to the sound of voodoo drums is a classic!    (Greg Goodsell)

Los Angeles Times has its own list:

During the 1940s, Val Lewton produced a series of subtle, brilliantly effective low-budget horror films such as 1942’s “Cat People.” One of his best was this poetic horror film that is a loose variation of “Jane Eyre.” Frances Dee as a Canadian nurse hired to take care of the wife of a sugar plantation owner on a Caribbean island and ends up resorting to voodoo to try to cure her. (Susan King)

And Filmoria:

One of the interesting aspects of the zombie movies is how easily it can be fit into other narrativie structures. This 1943 film has more than a few nods to Jane Eyre, including narration by the female protagonist. Oddly, this zombie, called a zombie throughout the film, is not a flesh hungry monster but an unfaithful wife in a catatonic state. When a nurse is brought to the house to care for the wife, she learns of the woman’s history and eventually that the woman has been cursed with a voodoo curse. (Lesley Coffin)

The Atlantic explains how reading makes us more human:

From Great Expectations I learned the power the stories we tell ourselves have to do either harm and good, to ourselves and to others; from Death of a Salesman I learned the dangers of a corrupt version of the American Dream; from Madame Bovary, I learned to embrace the real world rather than escaping into flights of fancy; from Gulliver's Travels I learned the profound limitations of my own finite perspective; and from Jane Eyre I learned how to be myself. (Karen Swallow Prior)

Whatculture! gives some reasons why Jane Eyre is not suitable to be adapted into a film:

Detailing the life of its title character from childhood through her first love, Jane Eyre is the most famous book to come from the powerhouse Brontë sisters and a classic of English literature. Bringing themes of morality and spirituality to the fore, it helped bridge the gap between poetry and novels. But everyone in the English speaking world already knows that.
Why It Shouldn’t Have Been Adapted: The issue here is less with adapting Jane Eyre in general (it has been done well before, such as the 2006 BBC miniseries), but with putting it in cinemas. The story covers a lengthy time period, forcing directors to cut important parts of plot. The book’s most famous elements with Mr Rochester and Thornfield Hall don’t appear until a good way through the tale, but many adaptations will quickly jump there for the typical love story. This also lets in another problem. Jane is written to be rather plain, with Rochester also not overwhelmingly attractive, something a big production couldn’t afford to do. With a good third of the story involving children and unattractive leads, Jane Eyre just isn’t made for Hollywood. (Alex Leadbeater)

The Guardian lists some consequences of wet summers:

If things get really stormy, you could retreat to a rain-battered tent and have a go at Wuthering Heights. (Homa Khaleeli and Emine Saner)

The Windsor Star interviews Ken Ludwig Brown, author of How To Teach Your Chilcren Shakespeare:

"You don't understand Jane Austen really well unless you understand Shakespeare. She was a huge Shakespearean fanatic. I'm rereading Wuthering Heights at the moment, and the book is filled with Shakespearean references."

Diario de León (Spain) interviews the writer Javier Pérez:

—¿Qué libro no dejarías de leer o leerías por segunda vez?
—Cumbres borrascosas, de Emily Brönte (sic); El Gatopardo, de Lampedusa. (Translation)

The Shelter Island Reporter has a funny Brontë reference in an article about kitchen remodeling:

These Manhattan kitchen remodels are something of a rite of passage in the city. They are nerve-wracking, disrupting, dirty and behind schedule. During ours, I was working during the week in Philadelphia so I would return to find a wife who had been driven wild by the demo and construction. (There is a scene in Jane Eyre that comes to mind.) (James Bornemeier)

The Oregonian has a weird metaphor:

Great romances -- "Phantom of the Opera," "The Hunchback of Notre Dame," "Wuthering Heights" -- prove you can't always tell what's inside by looking at the packaging. But who thought that was true for coleslaw or a million other packaged "healthy" foods that fill grocery-store shelves? (Dr. Mehmet Oz and Dr. Mike Roizen)

Keighley News talks about the Brontë harness races that will be held in Haworth next June 30; Marina Saegerman and Helen MacEwan write in the Brussels Brontë Blog about their recent experiences at the Brontë Society AGM; Leggere che Passione... (in Italian) and Estante Íntima (in Portuguese) review Wuthering Heights; Coffeebeings reviews Jane Eyre 2011 and John Guy Collick shares his thoughts about Arashi Ga Oka 1988; A Little Shelf of Heaven posts a review and a giveaway of April Lindner's Catherine.

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Call for Papers: The Brontë Sisters and Their Works (Ankara'2013)

The Department of Foreign Language Education at Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey is organizing a Brontë conference in December (call of papers deadline in August 2013):

12-13 December 2013 at Middle East Technical University Ankara, Turkey

“The Brontë Sisters and Their Work” is the theme for this year’s

METU British Novelists Conference organized by the Department of Foreign Language Education in Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey.

The organizers invite proposals for 20-minute presentations on any aspect of the work of Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë. Interdisciplinary and comparative approaches placing the work of the Brontë Sisters within contexts such as media, performance and adaptation studies are also welcome. Selected papers will be published in the conference proceedings.

Please send abstracts of about 250 words to metubnc@metu.edu.tr by 23 August 2013.

Please include your name, institutional affiliation, and contact information in your submission.

Queries can be directed to Dr. Nil Korkut-Naykı at nkorkut@metu.edu.tr

The keynote speaker will be Prof. Diane Long Hoeveler, editor of the forthcoming Blackwell volume, A Companion to the Brontës (2014).

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True for Wuthering Heights, true for coleslaw

The Province reviews Blake Morrison's We Are Three Sisters, currently on stage at the Jericho Arts Centre, Vancouver.

The sisters themselves are somewhat formulaically differentiated. Anne wants love; Charlotte, who calls Jane Austen’s novels “narrow and airless,” wants to be useful and help others; broody Emily (MariaLuisa Alvarez) wants passion. They’re framed by two other very good female characters: Tabby, the maid with attitude (Emma Middleton), and rich bitch Mrs. Robinson (Helen Martin), who loves Branwell and then dumps him.
Director Sandra Ferens keeps the action moving along nicely on Carolyn Rapanos’ handsome drawing room set, even through the long, draggy second act where Morrison shows unequivocally that he is no Chekhov. Nice period costumes from Elliott Squire. The acting is uniformly strong on the women’s side, although Lyons needs to be louder. Navaratil, the best of the mostly good men, could give her voice lessons. Abel and Preston are fine. Allan and Secunda overact their eccentric characters.
Throughout the play we hear, ominously, about Anne’s and Emily’s coughs (oddly, the actors never cough). None of the five Brontë sisters (two died in childhood) or their brother lived past 38. In real life, tuberculosis took them all. (Jerry Wasserman)

Not Charlotte, though.

The resident Brontëite at The Huffington Post, Dave Astor, discusses literature in literature.

Literature in literature happens more often than we might think, and it's an effective device. We get a sense of a character's tastes, which helps open a window into her or his psyche and intellect. Heck, people who love books are usually smart and curious.
We not only get a sense of what literature is enjoyed by a character, but also what literature is enjoyed by the creator of the character. After all, authors often put some of themselves in their protagonists. And if the authors are from long ago, it's nice when the writers they cited back then continue to be well known today.
That's the case with Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Jane Austen's Persuasion -- all of which positively mention Sir Walter Scott and his still-read work. [...]
And, like orphans Homer and Melony relating to Jane Eyre in The Cider House Rules, Christopher Snow of Dean Koontz's Seize the Night identifies with the shadowy title character of Gaston LeRoux's The Phantom of the Opera because he has a physical condition that forces him to go out only at night.

The Pilot pays a tribute to James Gandolfini's Tony Soprano:

In spite of everything we loved him. I loved him, the empirical way a bystander loves Heathcliff or Atticus Finch. The way one pities Hamlet. (Deborah Salomon)

The Boston Globe reviews the film Augustine.

Though not quite on the level of the bond between Jung and Sabina Spielrein in “A Dangerous Method,” (Spielrein, after all, was from a respectable family), Charcot and Augustine walk together through misty hospital grounds reminiscent of Rochester’s estate in “Jane Eyre.” He talks, she listens, and an intimate connection haltingly forms beneath their mutual illusions. (Peter Keough)

The A.V. Club features I Walked with a Zombie and describes it as follows:

Tourneur’s I Walked With A Zombie sounds, no doubt deliberately, like a cheapo creature feature, but it’s really a melodrama in horror-movie disguise, more kin to Wide Sargasso Sea than Night Of The Living Dead. (Sam Adams)

More on films, as Cineblog (Italy) discusses Queen Victoria and the films made about her. The article begins by stating the importance of her long reign:

Regina di Gran Bretagna e Imperatrice per 64 anni: Alexandrina Vittoria, in oltre sei decadi ebbe il tempo e la statura di influenzare profondamente la sua epoca e gli artisti che la vissero: Oscar Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Dickens, e le sorelle Brontë. Fu un’era di grande progresso scientifico ed espansionismo imperialista e non furono pochi, tra cui il grande Joseph Conrad, a denunciare gli abusi e l’ipocrisia di una società dipinta come interessata al mero profitto ad ogni costo. (F. Colla) 

The Telegraph features that great British tradition: school uniforms.

Cloaks Innocence, mystery and drama all wrapped into one useless garment. Yes, they still exist, from windswept Wuthering Heights cloaks for the girls at Lancing College to Falkner House London’s more urbane four-panel flared cape with contrasting collar. (Janette Wallis)

And now here's one of the weirdest comparisons we have read in all these years (and we have read plenty of them!). Courtesy of TH Online:

Great romances -- "Phantom of the Opera," "The Hunchback of Notre Dame," "Wuthering Heights" -- prove you can't always tell what's inside by looking at the packaging. But who thought that was true for coleslaw or a million other packaged "healthy" foods that fill grocery-store shelves? (Michael Roizen and Mehmet Oz)

Storytelling Rules (formerly Drunk Writer Talk) asks readers to pick between Jane Eyre and Elizabeth Bennet. Reading in Reykjavík continues posting about reading Shirley while The Never Dusty Bookshelf has just finished it.

Finally, from the Brontë Parsonage Facebook page:

Any last takers for our special performance of 'Wuthering Heights' (on Tuesday, June 25) at the Ilkley Playhouse? I'm afraid the drinks reception is now full, but if you turn up at 7pm you can catch the pre-performance discussion between playwrights Walter Swann and Yvette Huddleston, Bronte Society Director Professor Ann Sumner and Bronte scholar Patsy Stoneman. 

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Brontë and Gaskell Talk

An alert for tomorrow, June 22 in Derbyshire:

Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell
Spring Bank Arts Center
New Mills, Derbyshire

The story of a friendship told in their own words
A costumed reading in aid of the restoration of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Manchester Home compiled and directed by Robin Allan with InterTheatre’s professional team.

2.30pm Saturday 22 June 2013

Tickets £8.50 including afternoon tea.

EDIT: An another (musical) alert from the Canterbury Cathedral:

Benjamin Britten’s The Company of Heaven
Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending
Vaughan Williams’ An Oxford Elegy
Concert date: Saturday 22 June 2013, 7.30pm
Andrew Clover, Narrator
Juliet Cowan, Narrator
Juliette Roos, The Lark Ascending violinist
Juliette was a Strings Finalist in the BBC Young Musician of the Year 2012 and winner of the Walter Todds Bursary
Nazan Fikret, soprano
Bradley Smith, tenor
Canterbury Choral Society
Canterbury Philharmonic Orchestra
Richard Cooke, Conductor

As you probably know, Britten's Company of Heaven contains words by, among many others, Emily Brontë.

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Jane Eyre sold and Ponden Hall for sale

The Keighley News shares the results of yesterday's auction at Bonhams:

A rare first-edition copy of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre has sold for £39,650.
The work, the first published novel penned by Haworth's legendary literary sister, went under the hammer at Bonhams this afternoon.
It had a pre-sale estimate of between £30,000 and £50,000.
The buyer is an overseas collector, who wishes to remain anonymous. The Brontë Society, which runs the Parsonage Museum at Haworth, said it was not among the bidders.
The three-volume book – published in 1847 using Charlotte's pseudonym, Currer Bell – is marked in pencil with its original price, 31 shillings and sixpence. (Alistair Shand)

And more Brontë-related things for sale, as Ponden Hall is still on the market. The Telegraph makes you want to buy it on the spot:

A historic manor house which may have helped inspire Wuthering Heights is on the market for £950,000.
Grade II listed Ponden Hall is less than two miles away from the picturesque Yorkshire town of Haworth, where the Brontë sisters grew up with their brother Branwell.
Emily Brontë, who visited the house with Branwell to use its extensive library, is traditionally said to have based Thrushcross Grange, the grand home of the wealthy Linton family in Wuthering Heights, on the property.
Other scholars argue that the hall may have been the inspiration for the Wuthering Heights farmhouse itself. A Victorian account tells how Reverend Patrick Brontë, the Brontë siblings' father, described the house to a visitor to Haworth as being “the original model of Wuthering Heights”.
Ponden Hall was built in in the small village of Stanbury in 1634 by the Heaton family, but was extensively modernised and rebuilt by succeeding generations.
Carefully refurbished by its current owners, it offers six bedrooms and an additional two-bedroom self-contained annexe. There are four acres of land, and attractive views over the Yorkshire countryside.
Period features include stone flag floors and exposed beams. Some Brontë fans believe that a tiny single-paned window in the master bedroom may have been the inspiration for the window which the ghost of Cathy desperately scratches on in Wuthering Heights.
Owner Julie Akhurst, who bought the house with her husband Steve in 1998, said: "Living in this house has given us a unique chance to inhabit a corner of literary history, but after 15 years we’re reluctantly moving because of our children’s schooling. It’s time for someone else to enjoy the pleasure and privilege of owning Ponden Hall."
As well as possibly inspiring Wuthering Heights, the house was used as the setting for a short story by Branwell Brontë.
Local legend claims that the the dead pear tree in the garden was given by an infatuated member of the Heaton family to Emily Brontë.
Stewart Charnock Bates, the chairman of estate agent Charnock Bates and a member of the Guild of Professional Estate Agents, said that the area had much to offer to fans of history and literature: "Many people chose to live in the area because of the beautiful scenery which provides inspiration for both writers and artists. Whilst the Brontë connections to Haworth remain the area's greatest connection, the steam railway is equally popular because it is on this very railway line that the famous film The Railway Children was filmed."
A number of houses in Yorkshire have been identified as being the inspiration for Wuthering Heights over the years, including an isolated ruined farm called Top Withens and the now-demolished mansion of High Sunderland Hall.
The biographer Winifred Gérin has suggested that Ponden Hall is more likely to have been the model for Wildfell Hall, the old mansion in Anne Brontë's novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.
Ponden Hall is for sale for £950,000 through Charnock Bates, Halifax (Leah Hyslop)

Also in The Telegraph, writer Sally Gardner discusses her struggles with dyslexia as a child.

“When I was 14 I finally wound up in a school for maladjusted children, which was a sort of pre-Borstal that no longer exists, because no other school would have me.
“By then I was showing promise at art, but nobody was interested. I was surrounded by children with behavioural problems who would have screaming fits and one day I was with them and the noise was so unbearable that in desperation I picked up a book, which turned out to be the complete works of the Brontës.”
Garner started tracing the opening paragraph of Wuthering Heights with her index finger and discovered she could read. It was, she says, an electrifying moment. (Judith Woods)

The Bryan County News interviews writer Vicki-lynn Brunskill who picks Jane Eyre as one of her favourite books.

The Foyles blog has a lovely article on books (obviously!):

In an effort to read more just for pleasure, Rachel Darling from our Charing Cross Road branch explores the merits of rereading, asking the rest of our staff to suggest things that they have enjoyed reading again, or would like to reread if only they had the time. [...]
But what else have people enjoy rereading? I had quite a few suggestions of books people had loved as teenagers - The Catcher in the Rye, The Bell Jar, Lolita, works by the Brontë sisters and Virginia Woolf. Looking back on that period of teenage angst is somehow gratifying - how much you've changed and yet how much you still relate to! (Rachel Darling)

The School Library Journal reviews the translation of Jane, le renard et moi, which will be released in September.

A friend of mine once told me the story of something that happened to her when she was in the second grade. All at once one day all her friends decided that she was poison. For seemingly no reason they wrote her a letter explicitly stating that she was no longer their friend and they hated her. I remembered this story as I read the tale of Helene and the very similar shut out she experienced at the hands of her former friends. Sometimes there is no logical explanation for child cruelty. We’re lucky if we have a Jane Eyre to turn to, even as we try to find new friends and confidants. For some children out there, Jane, the Fox & Me is going to be their own Jane Eyre. Helene will shoulder their blows and offer hope for coming out strong at the end. Could a book of this sort hope for anything better? A rare piece. (Elizabeth Bird)

The Romania-Insider interviews a Romanian student who has lived in Scotland since he was five years old.

Are there any similarities between Scotland and Romania -or the Scots and the Romanians? I wouldn’t dwell on the similarities between the Scotland and Romania. The differences are most interesting; Romania’s landscapes remind me of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Scotland’s remind you of Wuthering Heights. (Matt Sampalean)

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