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Friday, May 20, 2016

The filming of Sally Wainwright's To Walk Invisible has begun! Many websites are showing (lots and lots of as well as some video footage) pictures of the first scenes being filmed at Micklegate in York disguised as Cornhill in London with Charlotte and Anne going to see George Smith. See for instance The York Press.
A York street went back in time on Thursday, as the BBC filmed a new drama from the creator of Happy Valley.
Film crews, horses and carriages, and actors in period dress filled a section of Micklegate for most of Thursday, to film a scene for To Walk Invisible, a drama about the lives of the Brontë Sisters.
Written and directed by Sally Wainwright, filming is taking place around Yorkshire, and will chronicle Charlotte, Emily and Anne's relationship with each other and their brother Branwell, who was plagued by alcoholism and drug addiction in the last three years of his life.
Wuthering Heights author Emily Brontë will be played by Chloe Pirrie, Finn Atkins as her older sister Charlotte, author of Jane Eyre, and Charlie Murphy as younger sister Anne, who wrote Agnes Grey and The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall.
A new BBC drama about the Brontë sisters from the creator of Happy Valley filmed in Micklegate.
Hundreds of people gathered to watch the set develop, with fake street lights, horses and extras, before Atkins and Murphy - as Charlotte and Anne - shot their scene, walking out of Barker Lane and up the hill towards the Falcon Tap, which had been given a makeover to represent Smith, Elder & Co - the London publishing house which released Charlotte's Jane Eyre, written under the pseudonym Currer Bell, in 1847.
Chris Ceaser, who runs The Gallery next to where the film crew set up, said: "It's good for the street that these beautiful buildings we have are being used and recognised for what they are.
"I think it's nice to see Micklegate being associated with something positive, that's changing the way the public feel about it."
Shelagh Garside, who runs nearby Curtain Up, said: "Micklegate is known as one of the fanciest streets in York, it's the Queen's entrance, so it's a great way to immortalise the street."
The two-hour drama will also star Jonathan Pryce in the role of the Brontë sisters’ father, Patrick, with their brother Branwell played by Happy Valley actor Adam Nagaitis, and is expected to air later this year.
York Mix, Minster FM and the Daily Mail carry the story as well. And Wexford People (Ireland) is proud of Charlie Murphy playing Anne.

There are more Brontë things to see and do in Yorkshire this weekend as Nouse reports:
One highlight is the ‘Brontë Cobbled Classic Cycle Saturday’ (21st May) which follows a 55 mile route around Brontë country, focusing on 2 famed cobble climbs. (Becca Challis)
Vox features two modern retellings of two classic novels Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice as Jane Steele and Eligible, respectively.
You can’t do the same thing with Jane Eyre. Brontë wasn’t writing anything like a romantic comedy or a comedy of manners — she was writing a gothic romance that was also an aspirational marriage plot. And by gothic, I don’t mean something that would appeal to a Hot Topic–obsessed teen. I mean gothic as in the literary form that developed in the 18th century out of the romantic tradition, all sublimated rage and sexuality hidden in secluded country houses where men with tragic dark pasts stood broodingly on the ramparts.
Today, we love a good gothic romance — but we don’t usually love to see it paired with a marriage plot. We want the gothic love story to be tortured and tragic and doomed, and we’d rather the gothic hero be punished for his sins, not rewarded with marriage to the heroine. So we like Phantom of the Opera, as long as Christine ends up with Raul, not the Phantom. Flowers in the Attic is a trashy fave, but no one wants the Dollanganger siblings to get married. In Crimson Peak, the swoony, Rochester-quoting hero gets — spoiler alert — a knife to the face.
In a contemporary gothic romance, you understand the attraction, but the narrative must condemn and thwart it.
Jane Eyre never condemns the love story between Jane and Rochester, madwoman in the attic be damned. It never asks the reader to condemn the story, either. That’s just not how marriage plots work. Jane Eyre does not function if the book does not believe wholeheartedly in the rightness of Jane and Rochester’s marriage.
So when you try to turn Jane Eyre into a contemporary romance, you have to fight against either the gothic elements or the marriage plot. The results are uncomfortable. You end up with books like Jane, a YA novel that recasts Rochester as a 40-year-old rock star and Jane as his 19-year-old nanny. Or you end up with a web series like The Autobiography of Jane Eyre, where Jane is a nurse turned private tutor and Rochester a wealthy businessman. These adaptations hit the romantic element hard — but they they have no idea how to reconcile the romance with the gothic, and so the romance fails.
In a straightforward 21st-century romantic drama, it’s creepy for a wealthy, middle-aged man with a child to pursue his teenage employee. And it’s straight-up disturbing that he has his secret crazy wife locked in the attic in an era of humane mental hospitals and no-fault divorces. We don’t want that guy to have a happy ending. We want to see him punished.
That’s why the best modernization of Jane Eyre that I know of is the 2009 film An Education, which knows that if you're identifying your 20th-century schoolgirl heroine’s love interest as a "Mr. Rochester figure," you are identifying him as a villain. (Constance Grady) (Read more)
The Guardian has selected the 'Top 10 fictional houses with personality' and one of them is
3. Wuthering Heights. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
A dark, bleak house described as though it was a person. Mirroring Heathcliff’s dark, forbidding character, the house sits and sulks, at once exposed and yet hidden from view of Thrushcross Hall, its grander, more prepossessing neighbour. (Tom Easton)
The Jewish Chronicle features composer BB Cooper:
There, she wrote her first musical, which ended up touring through the mid-1990s before landing in the West End.
"One of my tutors saw that I had the ability to compose and we were both mad about the Brontës, especially Charlotte. So I wrote a musical about the Brontës." (Jessica Weinstein)
On the Facebook Wall of the Brontë Society Sezione Italiana we can read the results of the 2016 Premio letterario De Leo - Brontë:
Sezione Lettera:
1° classificato
Selene Chilla (Lettera da Bruxelles)
2° classificato
Luisa M.C. Sala (In caduta libera)
3° classificato
Sarah Cogni (Ad un'anima che brilla mossa dal vento della brughiera)
Sezione Poesia:
1° classificato
Maria Rosaria Surico (Charlotte Brontë - C.B. acrostic)
2° classificato
Carla Maria Casula (Culla di un'eco eterna)
3° classificato
Flora Zito (In attesa del finale...)
Pri mentions the fact that in fiction it's mostly women who suffer from mental illnesses such as in Jane Eyre. Fusion links to a podcast on fanfiction which refers to the Brontës' writing Real Person Fiction in their youth. The Toast has another Mallory Ortberg funny article on the use of French in Jane Eyre. Books and Things vlogs about Jane Eyre and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.Books, Tea time & Sweet apple pie (in French) reviews Jolien Janzing's De Meester's French edition.

3 comments:

  1. The production looks amazing. BBC is in their full on, fab Victorian mode. Can't wait!

    I was just to Charlotte's exhibit at The National Portrait Gallery in London. I eagerly went up to the rarely displayed 1850 George Richmond portrait of Charlotte and got an enormous shock. It looks like no print of the drawing I have ever seen.

    In the prints of Richmond's drawing,Charlotte often seems to be cross and appears to be frowning disapprovingly. But her expression in the original drawing is nothing like that at all.Richmond rendered Charlotte looking to her left with a delighted, excited, surprise.

    This is the look Charlotte had when Katie Winkworth started singing those Scottish songs.It's the glowing effect Gaskill spoke of when CB became enthralled upon a subject and forgot herself. Her mouth is beginning to smile...seeing the original was a revelation

    Why the prints look so different from the Richmond piece is a mystery to me. But I can see why Mr. Nicholls disapproved of the print. It was not solely due to his love of privacy.

    The rest of the show is a fine collection of Bronte material, from the Parsonage itself and NPG portraits of those who greatly influenced the Brontes ...plus Branwell's famous painting of his three sisters and the Emily fragment.

    My only complaints are there is no image of Patrick Bronte and the caption under Arthur Bell Nicholls earliest known photo, says it maybe from the 1860's after he left the church and married again ...but in the photo he's a young man wearing a clerical collar.

    But over all, it's a terrific show with great Bronte items ,handsomely displayed with excellent captions. Charlotte would be thrilled.



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  2. I was googling the film and found your piece. I cannot wait for this film! Filmed in York as well; I didn't know. Micklegate will make a great set. love the Brontes.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I was googling the film and found your piece. I cannot wait for this film! Filmed in York as well; I didn't know. Micklegate will make a great set. love the Brontes.

    ReplyDelete