The Brexit Brontë Our Times Deserve

Lancashire Post shares a Brontë-related walk:

This month sees the 200th anniversary of the birth of that remarkable talent in a remarkable family, Emily Brontë author of ‘Wuthering Heights’ which has been a cornerstone in the canon of English literature ever since it was published in 1847. Emily was born in Yorkshire but was briefly schooled at Cowan Bridge. The School for Clergy Daughters had been founded by the Reverend Carus Wilson at a time when few people believed that girls should be educated at all. Despite the enlightened principle that established it in practice it was a place of abuse and privation later bitterly recounted by Emily’s sister Charlotte in ‘Jane Eyre’. On Sundays the pupils were marched from Cowan Bridge to the church of St John the Baptist at Tunstall where they had to endure fire and brimstone sermons of their patron not once but twice on subsistence rations. For the Brontë family there was a tragic outcome from this regime when two of Emily’s sisters - Elizabeth and Marie - died from complications following an outbreak of typhus at the school. The walk described below in part follows the route to Tunstall Parish Church as well as exploring the lovely countryside nearby. (Bob Clare)

The Telegraph & Argus mentions the publication of The Brontë Family: Passionate Literary Geniuses by Karen Smith Kenyon:

An American based woman who lectures on the Brontes and their works has completed a new biography of the family.
Karen Smith Kenyon has written The Brontë Family; Passionate Literary Geniuses, which is being published this month by London-based Endeavour Media.
A spokesman for the publishers said: “The Brontë Family is a brief and accessible introduction to the siblings – including Branwell – and how their often difficult lives influenced the sisters’ novels in particular. (Miran Rahman)

What are the Vogue UK editors loving this week?

Hayley Maitland, Features Assistant
Emily has always been my favourite of the Brontë sisters, so I’m reading Wuthering Heights again ahead of the 200th anniversary of her birth this month. It’s an ever-so-slightly more nuanced study of romance than Love Island, which I’m also completely obsessed with - and has me dreaming of escaping the city for a trip to the Yorkshire moors.

The writer Dorothy Koomson chooses the collective upcoming book I am Heathcliff for summer reading in the Daily Mail.

DowntownNYC  talks about the upcoming auction at Peter Harrington of a first American edition of Wuthering Heights:

Wuthering Heights, by Emily is a literary work beloved for generations. July 30th marks what would have been Emily Brontë’s 200th birthday. Peter Harrington, the UK’s largest rare bookseller, is offering buyers the opportunity to purchase a first American edition of the novel, at auction, in honor of the occasion. The rare book firm is also offering a collection of poems composed by Emily, Charlotte and Anne Brontë, as well as library sets of ‘The Works of the Sisters Brontë.’ (Jenna Gyimesi)

Los Angeles Review of Books reviews A View of the Empire at Sunset:

In The Lost Child, he writes from the points of view of characters who are male and female, black and white, and also channels canonical British authors in a story whose cast of narrators includes not only Emily Brontë but her creation Heathcliff as well. (...)
In telling Rhys’s life (which spanned 1890–1979), Phillips does not even mention the novel that made her famous and landed her on thousands of reading lists, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). (...)
In Wide Sargasso Sea, the authoritative, long-term family servant Christophine tells Antoinette, the doomed Creole, “[w]oman must have spunks to live in this wicked world.” Antoinette, who lacks spunks, fades into a blank-eyed “doll” by the end of the chapter. In A View of the Empire at Sunset, a Dominican servant named Josephine tells young Gwen that “if you want to survive in this world you mustn’t let people read what you thinking. Now change your face […] Good, now your mouth is fixed I want you to look yonder with your eyes, and don’t blink. That is how your face must be when you talk with people, you hear? Make your eyes dead like so.” Fake indifference until you make it. (Erica Johnson)

The Brexit sitcom (now even with special guest stars, like the American rude rich cousin) is discussed in The New European. This description of the latest novel of Nadine Dorries made us ROTFLOL loco style:

The week’s unpleasantness has overshadowed the launch of Dorries’ new book, Shadows In Heaven, set in the west coast of Ireland during wartime. A masterpiece of in-depth research, the first 55 pages alone feature characters called Paddy, Seamus and Mrs Doyle, plus multiple mentions of twinkling eyes, red hair, whiskey, Guinness, stew, potatoes and variations on the phrase “so he does”.
There’s also the memorable sentence “her breasts ricocheted about like rocks in socks”, leaving readers to ponder how much time there can possibly be left before public demand forces Nadine to retreat from politics and devote herself full-time to literature, the Brexit Brontë our times truly deserve. (Steve Anglesey)

And now for something completely different. After the launching week of the Ministry of Silly Brexits, Roanoke-Chowan News-Herald discusses Monty Python:

I could go on and on talking about Monty Python sketches (“Wuthering Heights in Semaphore” is a personal favorite), but I just recommend checking it all out for yourself. (Holly Taylor)

More Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever. In  Madison, WI:

Regardless of gender, age or ability to dance, we’re all invited to don red dresses and undulate wildly and freely just like Kate Bush in the video to her 1978 hit song “Wuthering Heights” on Saturday afternoon at James Madison Park. The song, based on the Emily Brontë novel by the same name, is central to the Most “Wuthering Heights” Day Ever, an international dance event now in its third year. (Joel Patenaude in Madison Magazine)

In Townsville (Australia), Berlin (Germany):

Nun treffen sich die Bush-Fans in Kreuzberg: „Wir wollen auf dem wilden, windigen Moor des Görlis unsere heiße, gierige Stimmung austanzen und unsere Albträume verjagen“, heißt es in der Ankündigung des Flashmobs, zu dem parallel auch in anderen Städten aufgerufen wird. (Maike Schultz in Berliner Zeitung) (Translation)

Related to the MWHDE events. Brooklyn Vegan interviews Jonas Bjerre, singer of Mew, who discusses his favourite albums:

Kate Bush – Hounds Of Love
This album has “Running Up That Hill”, “Hounds Of Love”, and “Cloudbusting” on it. When I was about 9 or 10, I would sit in the back seat of my parents car, and they’d play Kate Bush over the sound system. She was my first crush, I think, not even knowing what she looked like, just the sound of her voice, and the worlds she created with her music. She wrote “Wuthering Heights” when she was just 18. Can you imagine? Incredible. I don’t tend to listen to Kate Bush that often, because the excitement is often followed by this depressed state in which I feel like I might as well just pack it in.

Mansplaining à la Catholic in Patheos's Suspended in Her Jar:

I have similarly been informed that yes, my true fulfilment and joy is in domesticity, whether I feel it or not. If I don’t feel it, I must be an unnatural woman (weirdly, this same argument was made to Charlotte Brontë by the poet laureate of England, so even very intelligent men can be very stupid about women). (Rebecca Bratten Weiss)

The extinction of the middle children in The New York Magazine:

It’s hard to imagine a world without so many of the middle children we know of, she says. There’s Nelson Mandela and Susan B. Anthony and David Letterman and Charles Darwin and Charlotte and Emily Brontë and Martin Luther King Jr. (Adam Sternbergh)

El País reviews the film Mary Shelley by Haifaa Al-Mansour:

Mi retina, mi oído, mi memoria y mi espíritu de solterón rancio guardan con infinito celo películas tan atractivas como Sentido y sensibilidad, Regreso a Howards End, Lo que queda del día y otras, Y tengo un recuerdo muy grato de adolescencia con una de las infinitas versiones de Jane Eyre, la que protagonizaba uno de mis actores favoritos, el Inmenso George G. Scott, y cuya preciosa banda sonora, sospecho que era uno de sus primeros trabajos, la firmaba el legendario John Williams. (Carlos Boyero) (Translation)

L'Ape Musicale (in Italian) reviews the performances of Brontë: The World Without at the Stratford Festival:

Interessante, per quanto non del tutto riuscita, l'idea di dedicare una pièce alla vita delle sorelle Brontë, sfortunate colonne portanti della narrativa anglosassone. (...)
Le attrici sono brave ma non straordinarie, almeno in questa produzione, in cui soprattutto Andrea Rankin (Anne) appare costantemente sopra le righe. (Giuliana Dal Piaz) (Translation)

On BBC Radio 4, In Our Time broadcasts again a 2015 episode on Jane Eyre:

The story of Jane Eyre is one of the best-known in English fiction. Jane is the orphan who survives a miserable early life, first with her aunt at Gateshead Hall and then at Lowood School. She leaves the school for Thornfield Hall, to become governess to the French ward of Mr Rochester. She and Rochester fall in love but, at their wedding, it is revealed he is married already and his wife, insane, is kept in Thornfield’s attic. When Jane Eyre was published in 1847, it was a great success and brought fame to Charlotte Brontë. Combined with Gothic mystery and horror, the book explores many themes, including the treatment of children, relations between men and women, religious faith and hypocrisy, individuality, morality, equality and the nature of true love.
With
Dinah Birch
Professor of English Literature and Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research at the University of Liverpool
Karen O’Brien
Vice Principal and Professor of English Literature at King's College London
Sara Lyons
Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of Kent

WithTheClassics vlogs about Jane Eyre.