Wuther-free Zone

The Yorkshire Post presents the exhibition by Helen Burrows, A Brontë Reader, currently at the Dean Clough Gallery in Halifax (February 9-April 4):

Picture: The Brontë Bridge by Helen Burrows

Now here’s a novelty – photographs of Haworth 
with no-one in sight. Even the West Yorkshire village-cum-town’s main street – the Golden Mile of Brontë tourism – is deserted. No coach parties, no day-trippers, no shop window-browsers, no ice-cream scoffers.
Instead, Helen Burrow’s pictures – on show at the Dean Clough gallery in Halifax – offer a quieter, more private vision of the Brontës’ lives and legacy. Ranging widely across the North of England and beyond, they’re a personal, romantic take on places familiar to the sisters, with some of them as dark (in tone and mood) as the emotions the books often portray.
What makes these 40 or so black-and-white photographs even more striking is that they’re taken with what Lancaster-based Helen calls her “toy camera”: made in Hong Kong and costing her £35 on the internet.
Her fascination for the Brontës goes back to childhood. She read Jane Eyre when she was 14 and studied Wuthering Heights at A-Level. “I was carried away by the wildness of the moors and by Cathy’s declaration, ‘Nelly, I am Heathcliff’,” she says in A Brontë Reader, an anthology of writing by and about the sisters that accompanies the exhibition.
The matter rested there until ten years ago, when her husband and fellow photographer George Coupe took pictures to illustrate a one-woman play about Charlotte.
“He got permission to photograph the actress in period costume inside the Haworth Parsonage,” says Helen, who took up photography after retiring as a mental health nurse. “I’d been to the village and the graveyard before, but never to the house. George and I went before it opened to the public, so it was just us, the actress and the young woman showing us round.” (...)
Helen also has sophisticated cameras, but here she wanted to explore the Holga’s pictorial potential. Not everyone quite gets it, though. “A man at the exhibition opening said to me: ‘I can see that you can get things in focus if you want, so why don’t you all the time?’” She explained why.
As befits a member of the Lancashire Monochrome group of photographers, dedicated to pictures in black-and-white, she has deliberately avoided colour. “Monochrome lets you see the form of things,” she says. “You’re not distracted by the colour. And I’m aware of what will work in black-and-white.”
The approach lends a brooding power to the images of the winding paths across the moors that were such a preoccupation of the Brontës. “People talk about the ‘bleak’ moors at Haworth, but they’re not bleak to me,” says Helen. “They’re friendly moors; not like Saddleworth.”
And they’re as deserted as the images of Haworth itself. “I’m not concerned with the people who come to Haworth now,” she says. “And it’s easier than you might think to avoid having people in a picture.” She likes to visit in winter, when the trees in the churchyard aren’t in full leaf. “Bare trees have beautiful shapes as well as letting more light through,” she says. “And there are fewer people about then.” Particularly on foggy November mornings, when Haworth is a dark, still, wuther-free zone.

The Telegraph & Argus presents the book Haworth Timelines by Paul Chrystal:

 A horse stands patiently waiting on a street corner, its cart pulling a milk churn. Two flat-capped old men, one puffing on a pipe, pass the time in a sunny spot beside a telephone box. Three young workers pause to smile for the camera in a weaving shed.
These evocative images of times gone by are among many contained in Haworth Timelines, a book by Yorkshire-based local history author Paul Chrystal, that looks back at the village over time.
It focuses upon the period when the community’s most famous residents, the Brontës, lived there. They arrived in April 1820, when Patrick, their father took up the post of curate.
‘When Patrick Brontë arrived he inherited a parish blighted by unemployment,’ writes Chrystal, adding that Haworth men typically had two jobs to make ends meet.
He goes on to describe the harsh living eked out either in agriculture or textiles. ‘Food was relatively scarce, often little more than gruel or porridge, resulting in widespread vitamin deficiency. As noted, public hygiene was atrocious: lavatories were crude. The facilities at the parsonage were no more than a plank across a hole in a hut at the rear, with a lower plank for the children.’
Dental health was poor. Charlotte Brontë in her thirties was described by Elizabeth Gaskell as having a ‘toothless jaw’, a ‘large mouth and many teeth gone’.
The paperback includes Haworth before the Brontës, with sections on the Parsonage and the village’s chapels and schools.
Chrystal refers to Charlotte Brontë’s complaint as to the ‘apparent ignorance of the Haworth people’, yet adds that ‘this is hard to reconcile with the strides various church officials, not least her own father, made in advancing educational opportunities in the village.’
The wild, moorlands associated with the Brontë novels were how many people saw Haworth, but there was another side to it. Chrystal refers to author John Bowen’s work ‘Walking the landscape of Wuthering Heights’, in which he says ‘it is important to remember that Haworth was a modern working town with several mills and a good deal of industrial unrest. ‘ (...)
Chrystal devotes a section to the Parsonage and the Brontë Society, which over the years has presided over a number of refurbishments, the latest of which was completed in 2013. The house was ‘faithfully redecorated’ using contemporary descriptions, surviving invoices and accounts, plus other evidence, to achieve its 1850s look. Most of the furniture is authentic, collected by the Brontë Society from the 1890s. (Emma Clayton)

For Folk's Sake reviews the album Lines by The Unthanks:

 Lines 3: Emily Brontë is the one that will get the most mainstream attention. Ten poems written by Brontë and set to music by McNally, composed on Brontë’s original piano (dating from around 1810). Written at night after the Brontë Parsonage in Haworth had spent its day as a working museum. All the pieces are stripped down to the sisters’ voices and a single piano and allow the words the room to breathe in their sparing arrangements. ‘Shall Earth No More Inspire Me’, ‘High Waving Heather’ and ‘The Night Is Darkening Around Me’ work particularly well. It ends on ‘I’m Happiest When Most Away’ which is just one of the most beautiful songs that the band have ever committed to tape.
No review could do this collection justice. It’s filled with love and celebration. I would urge anyone reading this to give this a listen and then go and spread the word. And then go and find out more about the women that it’s been inspired by. (Mark Buckley)

Women.com and contemporary gothic romances:

While it began much earlier gothic romance became popularized by novels like Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë and Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. Even today, gothic romance novelsremain a popular genre. (Kelley O'Brien)

Gamasutra reviews Cassie McQuater, game developer:

Giving the women characters new perspectives and environments became a way to help me cope with it, and also tied in to the women lineage/family history narrative in the game: about my grandma and her games, my mother and her "Black Room" meditations, and my own personal childhood reading bad romantic fiction that idealizes dangerous men (I’m looking at you, "Wuthering Heights"). For me, and for Black Room, without giving away too much, this culminated in the apparition of Lilith - a female demon who is the antithesis of the Bible’s Eve.

Hayden Herald and sleeping well:

A lack of adequate sleep also affects us psychologically, as well. It contributes to all major psychiatric conditions. As Charlotte Brontë, the writer, once wrote: a ruffled mind makes a restless pillow. (Helen)

Diario de Sevilla (Spain) has some books that you should read:

Cumbres borrascosas, de Emily Brontë
La relación entre Heathcliff y Catherine es el tema central de Cumbres Borrascosas, un clásico de la literatura inglesa con una estructura casi inédita en su fecha de publicación. (Paloma Ruiz, Fátima García and Teresa Galán) (Translation)

Geek Junior (in French) reviews the French translation of the Aline Brosh McKenna & Ramón K. Pérez's graphic novel Jane:

Graphiquement réussie, cette BD conserve tout l’élan romanesque de l’œuvre originale tout en offrant une construction avec un joli suspens. Une belle revisite qui ne nécessite pas d’avoir lu l’histoire de Charlotte Brontë mais qui peut donner envie de s’y plonger ensuite. (Mariel Balbuena Vallejos) (Translation)

L'Encre Noir (in French) describes Maryse Condé:

La migration des coeurs (1995), inspiré du roman d’Emily Brontë Les Hauts de Hurlevent (Wuthering Heights en anglais) transpose l’intrigue et les personnages dans la Guadeloupe. Restant fidèle au roman de Brontë, Maryse lui confère une identité complétement guadeloupéenne. Dans Célanire cou-coupé (2000), Maryse expose l’existence et le caractère des guadeloupéens des années 1880-1910. (C. Nadia Caneus) (Translation)

Diario Opinión (Ecuador) and toxic romanticism:

La trama de "Wuthering Heights" se centra en la cuestión de si el atractivo romántico de Heathcliff es realmente tóxico. (Ross Douthat) (Translation)

Diario Perfil (Argentina) talks about Abismos de Pasión 1954. on VOD at Qubit TV:

****1/2 La mejor parte de la carrera de Luis Buñuel está en su estancia mexicana, donde, amparado por el melodrama, construyó sus películas más perfectas, incluso muchas de las más transgresoras y experimentales. “Abismos de pasión” es una versión algo libre de “Cumbres Borrascosas” y decide ir al extremo del desafuero todo el tiempo, a tal punto que, en ocasiones, no sabemos si lo que estamos viendo es en serio o en broma.  (Leonardo D'Espósito) (Translation)

Eye for Film interviews costume designer Batsheva Hay:

Anne-Katrin Titze: Did you see Roma?
BH: I did, yeah, I loved it. And then I always re-watch Wuthering Heights, the one with Laurence Olivier.
AKT: And Merle Oberon.

GraphoMania (Italy) reviews Wide Sargasso Sea. The Adrift Journal posts on 'Shooting Wuthering Heights out of the Canon: on race, class, gender and gossip'. Madison Diaz posts about Jane Eyre 2011 vs the original novel.