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Sunday, September 04, 2016

Keighley News talks about the upcoming Charlotte Brontë exhibition in New York:
The Morgan Library in New York is this autumn hosting an exhibition to mark the 200th anniversary of the Jane Eyre novelist’s birth.
The Brontë Parsonage Museum has loaned several items from its extensive collections for the show, including a dress worn by Charlotte when she visited fellow writer William Thackeray.
Rebecca Yorke, the Haworth’s museum’s communications and marketing head, said: “Charlotte couldn’t have imagined, when she wore the dress nearly 170 years ago, that it would one day go on display on the other side of the world!”
The exhibition, Charlotte Brontë: An Independent Will, is running from September 9 to January 2 next year.
The Morgan Library said the exhibition was a historic collaboration between two of the world’s finest repositories of Brontëana.
A spokesman said: “It brings together literary manuscripts, intimate letters, and rare printed books from the Morgan’s rich collection with personal artifacts, drawings, and photographs from the Brontë Parsonage Museum.
“Highlights include Brontë’s earliest surviving miniature manuscript, her portable writing desk and paint box, one of her own dresses, and a pair of her ankle boots.
“Also on view—for the first time in North America—will be a portion of the manuscript of Jane Eyre, from the collection of the British Library.
“It is open to the unforgettable scene in which Jane tells Rochester, ‘I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will; which I now exert to leave you.’” (David Knights)
Keighley Online carries an article about next weekend's Brontë Festival of Women’s Writing:
Brontë Creative Partner Tracy Chevalier and Jessie Burton, author of The Miniaturist, are part of the line-up at the sixth Brontë Festival of Women’s Writing next weekend.
The two acclaimed novelists will be joined by the museum’s 2016 Writer in Residence, Grace McCleen, on Saturday 10 September at West Lane Baptist Centre in Haworth
The topic of the evening, entitled The Magic of the Miniature, is small things: how they affect us emotionally, how we write about them and the significance of them in Charlotte Brontë’s life. (...)
On Sunday 11 September the hilarious comedy duo LipService are leading Withering Walks around Haworth.
A strictly limited audience will explore the ginnels and cobbles of the village to uncover little known facts about the Brontë family. Only a few tickets for these exclusive tours remain, so immediate booking is recommended.
This year’s festival, part of the museum’s contemporary arts programme, is being held in partnership with best-selling writing magazine Mslexia and includes a number of workshops.
Only a few places remain for these, but on Friday 9 September, writers aspiring for publication have the opportunity to join Mslexia’s founder and editor Debbie Taylor in discussion with editors from Bluemoose Books, Peepal Tree Press and Comma Press.
The free event takes place at Haworth’s Cobbles and Clay Café at 7pm and will be followed by an open-mic session.
The weekend will also see the launch of a collection of new poems by Grace McCleen, inspired by her time as writer in residence at the Brontë Parsonage Museum. Available to purchase from the museum shop, Every Sounding Line is illustrated with images captured by Grace on her walks to Top Withins. Extracts of the poems will be displayed as text installations inside the Parsonage alongside the Brontë exhibits that inspired them. The exhibition will run until the end of the year.
Lauren Livesey, Arts Officer at the Brontë Parsonage Museum, said: “Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë were pioneers of women’s writing and continue to inspire contemporary literature in limitless ways. Our festival continues to grow and we are thrilled to be working with Tracy Chevalier and Mslexia to present a really varied and exciting programme in Charlotte’s bicentenary year.” 
And another upcoming alert in the Halifax Courier:
Northern Ballet returns to Leeds for the first time in more than a decade with a tale of passionate and obsessive love in ‘Wuthering Heights’. Based on Emily Brontë’s romantic masterpiece, the dramatic adaptation will be performed at West Yorkshire Playhouse from September 6 to 10, starting the venue’s Brontë Season. Martha Leebolt will dance the role of Cathy with Tobias Batley as Heathcliff. The ballet will be choregraphed by David Nixon who said: “Emily Brontë’s ‘Wuthering Heights’ is not a book you read and put back on the shelf. “It is a story that absorbs you, creating powerful imagery that stays with you long after you turn the last page. In my adaptation of this timeless tale, I have brought to life the key elements of the narrative, focusing on the intensity and devastation of the relationship between Cathy and Heathcliff.”
We rather imagine that today is a day where very few interesting or uninteresting news to report today in the UK tabloid world. It's the only plausible explanation for The Sun deciding to print this:
A family out walking on a Yorkshire moorland claim to have captured a Star Trek-shaped UFO flying overhead.
The dark grey object, which appears to have a halo around it, was snapped by Nicole Smith, 19, on her smartphone during a family day out to Bronte waterfalls, in West Yorkshire.
She was with her parents Catherine and Shane at the time and was shocked when she discovered the UFO on one of her photos.
Her mum Catherine, 49, from Normanton, said: “We went for a day out in Haworth and decided to drive to the moor and parked near a footpath leading to Bronte waterfalls.
“It was a good two and a half mile walk from where the car was parked.
The Observer interviews singer and songwriter Héloïse Letissier, aka Christine and the Queens:
Her parents weren’t stagey, and educated themselves out of working-class families – her father is an English professor, and her mother teaches French and Latin. She recently bought a place nearby, and invited them up from Nantes, her hometown. “They were shrinking,” she says, hugging herself, “looking around like, ‘You can’t afford that’, and I was like, ‘Yes, I can!’” Literature was the only thing they pushed on her. Jane Eyre ruined high school. “I was basically searching for Rochester. Writing letters, wanting connections through the mind. The dudes were searching for boobs, nice girls.” She wails. “I was like, no! Let’s be connected to death!” (...)
In 2010 she took herself to London. In Soho, she stumbled into gay club Madame Jojo’s (since shut down) and watched a shambolic drag act. The three queens adopted this agonised waif, teaching her that theatre could be anything at all; to bend rules, rather then fulfil them. They encouraged her to adopt a persona and write songs, and dismissed her self-pity. “It killed the drama, actually. They’re like, ‘So, you got dumped … and?’ I was escaping the Jane Eyre: ‘There is no Rochester!’” (Laura Snapes)
The Observer also takes a look at female war poets from Middle East. Including Bejan Matur and Maram al-Masri:
Matur’s verse is more mystical: it sublimates the political and politicises the sublime; it locates her people’s wandering within a philosophical meditation on both the meaning and emptiness of being. While Masri’s verse is modern, and modern war poetry of the cruellest order, Matur’s evokes the Romantics, Coleridge and Emily Brontë. (...)
Both [Maureen] Freely and translator Ruth Christie invoke Wuthering Heights in Matur’s references to “mansions howling with winds”. As with Beckett, whom Matur admires, “I understood /time passes./Going is not going/staying is not staying”. (Ed Vulliamy)
The Sunday Times traces a profile of the actor Rufus Sewell:
In the early 1990s, he was the brooding beefcake of choice for costume-drama casting directors. You could easily picture him as Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, but he first made his name as Will Ladislaw in the BBC’s Middlemarch (1994), then as Seth Starkadder.
Life4ever reviews the latest album by Let's Eat Grandma, I Gemini:
For one thing, Let’s East Grandma is actually two seventeen year old girls from Norwich who have an aura of the twins which featured in The Shining almost grown up, but equally Rosa Walton and Jenny Hollingworth claim to never have heard of any of the artists responsible for the so-called primal elements of their music. Live, they employ all manner of multi-instrumental kernels – accordion, xylophone, drum machines – giving the impression of some kind of orchestra of the damned, all Macbethian Bruja, cutting across moods and textures like Wuthering Heights on a bad kitten trip. (Andy Peterson)
Fuzion Productions on being destructive in love:
Why is a rude and excessively arrogant man like Heathcliffe (sic) (Wuthering Heights) is regarded as one of the most romantic classic heroes despite the fact that he didn't let Catherine rest in peace even after her death?
Articolo21 (Italy) reviews the film The Light Between Oceans:
L’urlo assordante del vento, principale protagonista del film così come del romanzo di Emily Brontë, accompagna la faticosa risalita di Isabel al faro, e impedisce a Thomas di sentire i richiami disperati della ragazza, piegata in due dai dolori dell’aborto imminente.  (Lucia Tempestini) (Translation)
A short story published on Akşam (Turkey) with a Brontë reference; Svenska Dagbladet (Sweden) talks about orphans in literature and mentions Jane Eyre; Whyte Happened Next reviews Jane Eyre.

1 comment:

  1. The Charlotte Brontë exhibit at the Morgan Library NYC
    will be a once in a life time event

    Iconic Brontë items have been gathered from from

    The Brontë Parsonage
    The National Portrait Gallery
    The British Museum
    and Brontë items from the Morgan Library's
    own collection .

    I'm already weak with anticipation!

    ReplyDelete