Awards, Property Shows and Storyboards

The Brontë Parsonage Museum has again been shortlisted for the White Rose awards this year. Keighley News reports:

The building and its staff is one of seven locations listed in the "Large Attraction of the Year" category of this year's White Rose Awards.
It is the only place in the Keighley and Worth Valley area to reach this stage of the competition in 2017.
Kitty Wright, executive director at the parsonage, said: “We are all immensely proud that the museum has been shortlisted in the Large Attraction of the Year category.
"Our fantastic staff, both front of house and across the rest of the organisation, all work very hard to share the fascinating Brontë story and ensure our visitors have an unforgettable experience.
The building and its staff is one of seven locations listed in the "Large Attraction of the Year" category of this year's White Rose Awards.
It is the only place in the Keighley and Worth Valley area to reach this stage of the competition in 2017.
Kitty Wright, executive director at the parsonage, said: “We are all immensely proud that the museum has been shortlisted in the Large Attraction of the Year category.
"Our fantastic staff, both front of house and across the rest of the organisation, all work very hard to share the fascinating Brontë story and ensure our visitors have an unforgettable experience. (Miran Rahma)

Keighley News also reports the presence of two TV property shows (Escape to the Country and A Place in the Sun) at the Parsonage shooting some footage:

The Brontë Parsonage is to star in two popular TV property shows.
Film crews for Escape To The Country and A Place In The Sun descended on the Haworth museum on the same day.
Nicki Chapman, presenter of BBC’s Escape to the Country, visited the museum to record a feature for a West Yorkshire episode of the show.
Principal curator Ann Dinsdale talked to Nicki about the Brontë family and their life in Haworth before showing her around the museum.
Nicki also wrote a sentence from Wuthering Heights as part of a year-long project to create a new handwritten manuscript of Emily Brontë’s famous novel.
Rebecca Yorke, head of communications and marketing at the museum said: “We welcome many production companies to the museum but staff were particularly excited about Escape to the Country coming to film.
“As sometimes happens, filming overran slightly but Nicki was completely charming and chatted to the visitors who were waiting to explore the house.
“By complete coincidence, the crew from A Place In The Sun came later the same day to take some shots of the parsonage exterior for an episode also featuring Haworth.”
Escape to the Country and A Place in the Sun will be aired later this year. (David Knights)

Also, in The Telegraph & Argus, we read that a commemorative storyboard in honour to Branwell will be unveiled in Bradford soon:

Next week a storyboard dedicated to Branwell’s artwork will be unveiled at North Parade in Bradford, close to where he had a studio.
It will, says Bruce Barnes, who is behind the project, be the first monument to any of the Brontes in the city centre.
Barnes takes up the story: "Branwell Brontë has long been overshadowed by his more famous sisters whose novels reached an international audience. Although Branwell remains an enigma, his biographers and academics accept that one of the happier periods of his adult life was the year he spent in Bradford, from 1838-1839, working as an artist.
“While the town was on the brink of becoming a major industrial metropolis, it was riven by unrest with riots against draconian Poor Laws, and large Chartists meetings calling for social and democratic reform.
“From his studio and lodging on Fountain Street, Branwell painted portraits of local worthies, continued his contribution with Charlotte Brontë to the Tales of Angria, and wrote and sought publication of his poetry. He enjoyed the social scene in Bradford inns, such as the George Hotel in Market Street and the Queen’s in Bridge Street where artists and writers got together to talk and drink.
“And it’s at the top end of North Parade, on Bradford’s latest stretch of pubs and bars, that the Branwell Brontë storyboard will be unveiled by Councillor Sarah Ferriby on Saturday, July 1 between 12noon and 1pm, followed by a celebration in the City Gent from 1-2pm.
“Visitors will receive complimentary copies, while stocks last, of the Cartwright Hall exhibition catalogue Branwell Brontë & his Circle-Artistic, life in Bradford 1830-1850.”
Adds Bruce: “The storyboard includes images of some of Branwell’s Bradford portraits and draws the viewer’s attention to his now vanished studio on the side street, still referred to as Fountain Street.
“Nothing remains of the street that Branwell knew, but a 1940s photograph of Fountain Street with its housing forms the backdrop to the storyboard. It is the first public monument representing the Brontes in the city centre.”
The storyboarded, which is being unveiled as part of Bradford Literature Festival, features images of portraits Branwell completed at his studio in the city, along with explanatory text.
The unveiling will followed by refreshments and a reading in the City Gent from poetry and prose Branwell wrote during his stay in the town.

Broadway World recommends the Withering Heights performances in San Diego:

Withering Heights
Think that Bronte could have used a bit more humor when telling this story? This thiscomic retelling of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights is the show for you! Heathcliff and Catherine take to the Moors unlike anything before; the two actors will perform all fourteen roles in the play for an action-packed rendition of one of the most romantic novels of all time. (E.H. Reiter)

Devex interviews Adaobi “Ada” Nkeokelonye, author of the blog Fiction & Development who last month posted about the Brontës:

In Anne Brontë’s Victorian novels, for example, she finds insights into complex, counterintuitive aspects of human nature, such as why some women remain with abusive partners.
“In projecting issues of powerlessness and the importance of agency and space for any woman, Anne helps us understand why women stay; she exposes the stigma and discrimination suffered by divorcees and single mothers and their lack of social protection,” Nkeokelonye wrote in a post last month. (Michael Igoe)

The Saturday Paper reviews the film A Quiet Passion on Emily Dickinson:

Too often the film posits her as isolated in her views. But among many of her family and her friends, abolitionism was a shared belief. Equally, the only writers Dickinson reveres in the film are the Brontë sisters. But Dickinson is writing at a time when Whitman has published Leaves of Grass and Melville and Poe have initiated a revolution in the English language; I wanted to know if she was aware of their writing, what she thought of it. But by making her an iconoclast acceptable to a 21st-century audience, and by not offering a perspective on her relationship to this seismic moment in American letters, the film undermines her as a writer and intellectual. (Christos Tsiolkas) 

The Pool has some holiday reads for you:

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
The perfectly pitched story of Jane Eyre’s “madwoman in the attic”, Jean Rhys’s prequel takes Bertha – arguably the weakest link in Brontë’s classic – and brings her to warm, vivid, sympathetic life in the form of Antoinette Cosway. Way ahead of her time, Rhys takes a skewer to the society that condemns Bertha/Antoinette to an attic, while nurturing Jane’s beloved – coercive – Mr Rochester.

EarMilk has an article on the musical group The Aces:

We've come a long way from the Brontë sisters having to utilize male pen names in order to get published, but I think we can all agree the music industry is still imbalanced to some degree. And while it's unfortunate, these ladies are right to preempt any potential misogyny by pandering to the masses' stunted comprehensions of gendered naming conventions. (Anna Murphy)

Tulsa World reviews the musical Matilda by Tim Minchin:

Fortunately for Matilda, there is one teacher, Miss Honey (Jennifer Bowles), who is gobsmacked by Matilda’s precociousness — after all, the girl read about a dozen books, from “Nicholas Nickelby” and “Jane Eyre” to “The Cat in the Hat” the week before school started. She supplies Matilda with more books because the curriculum is too juvenile and does what she can to protect Matilda and the other children from Miss Trunchbull’s draconian discipline. (James D. Watts Jr)

HiFow visits Cornwall:

Two hours later on, I found myself among the black-faced sheep as I strolled the moors—like, straight-out-of-Brontë moors—at Coombeshead Farm. A few weeks before, the idyllic previous dairy farm experienced been turned into what need to be one of the country’s most food stuff-driven guesthouses by Tom Adams, chef of London’s Pitt Cue, and his friend April Bloomfield.

Battleroyal WithCheese reviews the film God's Own Country:

The elemental nature of the Yorkshire moors, as well as the lack of squeamishness in the filming of lambing scenes, is reminiscent of Andrea Arnold’s windswept adaptation of Wuthering Heights, and the grey toned British life is straight out of a Ken Loach movie. (Orla Smith)

Die Welt (Germany) lists several fictional biographies, including Jane Eyre:

Noch so ein Buch, das ich alle paar Jahre wieder lese – einfach wieder lesen muss. Wobei ich zugeben muss, dass mein Buchkonsum grundsätzlich ein Problem ist. Ich habe wenig andere Hobbys. Ich lese. Im College habe ich mich auf die Geschwister Brontë, Charlotte, Emily und Anne Brontë, die ja ein Leben lang unter männlichen Pseudonymen veröffentlicht haben, spezialisiert, und „Jane Eyre“ ist mein Lieblings-Brontë und einer der besten Romane in englischer Sprache überhaupt, wie ich finde. Ein Buch, das so intensiv und unerbittlich und dabei von den eigenen frustrierten Sehnsüchten verfolgt ist. Obwohl es im Jahr 1847 erschien, ist es mit dieser ganz speziellen Ichperspektive auf Gender und Klasse bis heute aktuell. (Translation)

Manga Forever (Italy) reviews Lady MacBeth:

E’ un film perfetto. Un film che avrebbe fatto la gioia tanto di Alfred Hitchcock quanto delle sorelle Brontë. E’ un film che non potete perdervi. (Matteo Regoli) (Translation)

Actualidad Literaria (Spain) lists epistolary novels like:

La inquilina de Wildfell Hall
Esta es la segunda novela epistolar de Anne Brontë. Fue publicada por primera vez en 1848 con el seudónimo de Acton Bell y está considerada como una de las primeras novelas feministas.
La ruinosa mansión de Wildfell Hall, después de muchos años de abandono, es habitada de nuevo por una misteriosa mujer y su hijo de corta edad. La nueva inquilina -una viuda, al parecer- no tarda en despertar recelos entre los vecinos por su carácter retraído y poco sociable, sus opiniones radicales y su belleza.
Estos recelos se acrecientan por la admiración que le profesa un joven e impetuoso agricultor. Pero la inquilina tiene un pasado más terrible y tormentoso de lo que la peor de las sospechas puede adivinar. (Mariola Díaz Cano-Arévalo) (Translation)

Ultima Voce (Italy):

Charlotte Brontë, figlia di un pastore protestante, la prima del trio di sorelle scrittrici (le altre sono Emily e Anne) scrisse agli inizi della carriera il racconto, pubblicato postumo, Il professore. Tre sono i suoi romanzi noti: “Jane Eyre”, “Shirley” e “Villette”.
Si discute su quale sia il capolavoro dell’autrice. A furor di popolo fu, e tuttora è, incoronato “Jane Eyre”. Una minoranza di critica (ad esempio, George Elliot) si rese colpevole di secessione, eleggendo invece l’ultimo lavoro compiuto di Charlotte: “Villette”. Raccontiamo in breve la trama delle due opere. (Federica DiRocco) (Translation)

Sunderland Echo has two free tickets for the Sally Cookson's Jane Eyre adaptation in Newcastle (next July 3-8) to give away; Tv2000 (Italy) announces the airing of Jane Eyre 2006 next June 26 and July 3. Hopeless Therapy reviews Wuthering Heights.