We might get to see a statue of the Brontës in Haworth in the future as proposed at a meeting of the village's parish council. From
The Telegraph and Argus:
Lorne Campbell, a member of the public present at a Haworth, Cross Roads and Stanbury Parish Council, said the village lacks any obvious roadside signage to inform visitors of this literary family's historic presence.
He said: "There's a sign that says Haworth is the world's first Fairtrade village," he added. "But nothing for the Brontës, despite them being such a massive, monumental name with worldwide significance.
"You could drive through the village without seeing anything about them. I think we're missing a trick here."
He argued a highly visible statue of Emily, Anne and Charlotte Brontë at an obvious location in Haworth could address this, adding he understood funding would need to be found. [...]
Referring to a lack of distinct signage to signal Haworth's individual identity, he said: "We've got Bradford district council signs, but nothing from the parish council like Keighley Town Council has done."
Parish council chairman Cllr David Mahon said he would get in touch with the Brontë Society to investigate how the statue idea could be progressed. (Miran Rahman)
The Telegraph tells about walking on the Haworth moors while listening to The Unthanks' musical take on Emily Brontë's poetry.
The audio begins with a flock of seagulls, a slammed door, the sound of footprints, a ticking clock and Emily leaving the Parsonage and heading for the hills.
I stride past the graves and through the kissing gate as the music begins. The first track, Shall Earth No More Inspire Thee, brims with Brontë’s sensitivity to her natural surroundings, and has a remarkable timelessness.
“I know my mountain breezes / Enchant and soothe thee still,” says a Mother Earth figure. It is easy to imagine how the landscape encouraged Brontë to find meaning and metaphor in her environment.
Giant pattern-cutter trees line the avenue and their silhouettes add to a wild, expansive sense of space. Looking closer, the walls along Balcony Path crawl with lime green moss and chartreuse lichen. Both Wuthering Heights, Brontë's only novel, and her poetry show a soul deeply entwined with nature (“I was at peace, and drank your beams / As they were life to me”). [...]
Songwriter Adrian McNally found that while much of Emily’s early poetry was profound, there was a sense that she was refining herself and would probably be mortified if she knew we could read her complete poetic efforts today.
“She was a writer who didn’t expect to be read,” he says. “But you can see the truth of the writer before they have an audience, there is no self-consciousness.” Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell – the pseudonyms of Brontë sisters – was first published in 1846. It sold just two copies but in reviews, the poetry of Emily – writing as Ellis Bell – was singled out as the finest. McNally looked for poems that “weren’t so steeped in the language of the time” and eventually whittled it down to 10.
The walk is just 40 minutes or so but the hill is steep so I am grateful for the wondrous blend of Rachel and Becky Unthanks’ close, intimate harmonies and spoken interjections from Rachel and McNally, who point out landmarks and a few biographical details.
While we know little about Emily, a solitary, introverted and much-mythologised literary figure who died at the age of 30, we do know that she eschewed company to walk on the moors and be alone with her thoughts, feelings and imagination, her “spirit wandering wide / Through infinite immensity”, as she wrote in I’m Happiest When Most Away.
I reach the trig point of Penistone Hill, looking across to Top Withins farm, the ruined house which is said to have inspired Wuthering Heights. I’m glad of the big, muffled headphones: an icy, biting wind is howling about my cheeks but there are breaks in the clouds where sunbeams illuminate the landscape. The heather is in wintry maroon, the gold grasses undulate in the wind.
I descend the hill to O Evening, Why is Thy Light So Sad? which I learn Emily may have intended to be a song. One can imagine the same for lots of her poems. Indeed, Charlotte Brontë described her sister's poetry as having a “peculiar music - wild melancholy and elevating.” Hear her rhythmic sensibilities in My Lady’s Grave: “The linnet in the rocky dells / The moor-lark in the air / The bee among the heather bells / That hide my lady fair.”
There are certain themes in Emily’s poetry which lend themselves well to a folk interpretation, such as rebirth, optimism, regeneration and the mind wishing to be free from the body. McNally found High Waving Heather particularly powerful, with its flow of momentum about the power of nature. “It captures the landscape so well,” he said.
McNally took the traditional folk approach of marrying place to music, using emotions, atmosphere and choice of instrument. To convey the “lonely oneness of Emily and the moors”, he decided to use a single musical voice, her piano.
“Playing it and hearing it echo around in her silent home was an ideal creative experience that lent a feeling of isolation and intensity to my writing,” he said. It is a rare example of a five-octave cabinet piano probably made in London between 1810 and 1815. The piano took a while to get used to – it only depresses a couple of millimetres and must be played gently – but it had a sound that McNally had been searching for all his life. He wrote the music for the whole record in his first evening on the keys Brontë played on.
In She Dried Her Tears, McNally thought consciously about music from the time, influenced by Charles Hazlewood’s production of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, which the Brontë’s would have been familiar with. Remembrance nods to traditional Irish singing by using the melody of The Voice Squad’s version of I Am Stretched On Your Grave (1991). [...]
“As a band we’re not unknown ourselves for shying away from dark material, but Emily is so relentlessly dark that I feel she bore no self consciousness or thought for the reader whatsoever, which gives her work a truth and integrity. It's this unapologetic honesty that I think makes her work endure.”
“She out-darked us, we met our match with Emily,” he said. But the music and voices of the Unthanks are also gorgeous, stirring and, with the sound of the creaking of her actual piano, incredibly evocative.
Listening to Emily’s words, which are given space with sparse melodies and crisp harmonies, while walking in her footsteps is extraordinarily immersive.
To know she would have looked at the same shadows, the same light, the same undulations of the hills and peaks is a transportative experience.
Up on Penistone Hill in particular, you have the very physical experience of being on the moor, combined with the sound of a group who have thought deeply about reflecting landscape in music for years, and then of course the words of Emily who, as Virginia Woolf wrote, only had to speak of the moor to “make the wind blow and the thunder roar”. (Lucy Jones)
More on listening to the Brontës as
US Magazine recommends audiobooks to help you fall asleep.
Coming in a range as wide as literature itself, everyone can find an audiobook to suit their own tastes and needs. Whether seeking a beautiful narration of a classic, like Thandie Newton’s reading of Jane Eyre, a childhood favorite like Jim Dale reading Harry Potter or perhaps a popular self-help book like The Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo or even the extremely popular Becoming by Michelle Obama, there’s truly something for everyone.
The Boar discusses quotes for literary tattoos.
I also would like to get “I remembered that the real world was wide” from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre as it serves as a reminder that there is a big world waiting to be explored, and I love it’s hopefulness. (Lucy Martin)
Coincidentally,
iDiva recommends '8 Book Quotes That Are Perfect Tattoo Inspiration For Feminists'.
“I am no bird, and no net ensnares me”
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
In this novel, Jane Eyre is a governess who is bogged down by her situation. When she is involved in a relationship with a man of a higher status, she still chooses her self-respect over his promise of a privileged life. The entire quote essentially makes for the best breakup line in the world. “I have spoken my mind, and can go anywhere now… 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." Mic, DROP! (Stuti Bhattacharya)
Il Bosone (Italy) tries to choose between online and physical bookshops and tells a funny anecdote about trying to find
Villette at an actual Italian bookshop.
Un giorno, in una bella libreria, chiesi se avessero “Villette” di C. Brontë. La commessa mi osservò qualche istante e, dopo aver digitato frettolosamente qualcosa al suo computer, alzò i suoi occhi su di me con rammarico e mi disse… Mi dispiace, non abbiamo nulla sui pistacchi. (Ninielmys) (Translation)
Le populaire du centre (France) has an article on Charlotte Brontë's first French translator.
El periódico (Spain) quotes from a letter from Charlotte to Ellen Nussey.
Jane Eyre's Library (in Spanish) features a facsimile edition of the first edition of
Jane Eyre.
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