A man can’t be lonely at Wuthering Heights

Burnley Express reviews the Octagon Theatre production of Jane Eyre:

Jessica Baglow and Michael Peavoy rise to the occasion with impeccable performances as Jane Eyre and Mr Rochester in this imaginative presentation of the Charlotte Brontë classic. Credit must therefore also go to Janys Chambers and Lorna French who came up with this latest adaptation but in turn they must share the credit with the whole creative team who brought all their talents to bear on bringing out what is delivered here. The two leading players are backed up admirably by a supporting cast that glides seamlessly from one role to the next to complete a polished performance all round. And if all that wasn’t enough, we surely had the stars of the next 50 years on show in the scenes of Jane Eyre’s childhood which yielded impressive introductions by the youngest members of the cast. (Kelvin Stuttard)

The Yorkshire Evening Post features the ruins of Top Withens:

It’s not hard to see where the Brontë sisters got inspiration for their bleak descriptions of Yorkshire – especially when you glance at this week’s picture, which shows the sun rising above the frosty ruins of Top Withens, Haworth, high in the Pennines. The landscape evokes images from Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, while the skeletal remains of the farmhouse stand forlorn and largely roofless, with only two nearby trees for company, their leafless branches scratching at an azure winter sky. Every year thousands of visitors to Haworth follow the three-mile moorland track to that ruined farmhouse, which is thought to have been built in the latter half of the 16th century. It was certainly inhabited when the Brontës were alive – in fact, it was inhabited right up to 1926. Although there is no direct mention of the farmhouse in any of the Brontë writings, comments made in 1827 by Birstall-born Ellen Nussey, a lifelong friend of Charlotte, seem to indicate the sisters would have been familiar with it and furthermore that it was used as the inspiration for the farmhouse of Wuthering Heights. If proof were needed that it remains a bleak spot, it came in March last year when the Calder Valley Mountain Rescue team notched up their 1,000th rescue after responding to reports of a woman having injured her leg in the area. Top Withens is also the turning point for the annual New Year’s Eve Auld Lang Syne race, organised by Calder Valley Fell Runners. The event attracts hundreds of entrants, many of whom take part in fancy dress, meeting at the old quarry at Penistone Hill, Haworth, before setting out across the windswept landscape toward the old farmhouse. Although there were no crops to harvest, Top Withens was an important outpost for the textile trade. The last of Top Withens’ residents was Ernest Roddie who moved in to the farm building in 1921. He reportedly once said: “A man can’t be lonely at Wuthering Heights. I’ve been here the worst half of the year and I’ve been surprised to see people here on the most wretched of days.”

Yesterday Google had a doodle celebrating Virginia Woolf's 136th birthday and sites such as Quartz and The Full Nine Yards commented on it and on Woolf's work, including her discussions of women writers. While The Mary Sue discusses the celebrations of women writers' birthday, mentioning Emily Brontë's bicentenary. Coincidentally, on Facebook the Brontë Society showed her signature (still under her maiden name Virginia Stephen) on November 24th, 1904 and also mentioned the fact that,

Woolf's comments on Emily (in an essay on Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, written in 1916, and published in The Common Reader) are the source of our 2018 exhibition title, 'Making Thunder Roar: Emily Brontë'. Woolf asserted that Emily possessed 'the rarest of all powers. She could free life from its dependence on facts; with a few touches indicate the spirit of a face so that it needs no body; by speaking of the moor make the wind blow and the thunder roar.'