Spring walks

Diane Fare from the Brontë Parsonage Museum tells Keighley News about the latest goings-on.

As I write this, we’re all looking forward to celebrating Patrick Brontë’s birthday on – appropriately enough – St Patrick’s Day.
Everyone is welcome to call into the Old School Room in Haworth between noon and 4pm to help us celebrate. There may even be a birthday cake!
This is an opportunity to find out how you can get involved in a new community project which wants to look at what Haworth was like in the time of the Brontës.
It’s interesting to think about what Patrick (an avid social campaigner) would have made of modern-day Haworth, and what he would be campaigning for today.
There will be a family-friendly drop-in craft activity for those who like to get creative: artist Rachel Lee will be creating landscapes using encaustic wax, so come along and have a go.
And prior to the birthday celebration, there will be a Patrick Brontë Celebration Service at St Michael and All Angels Church at 11am, and Rev Peter Mullins extends a warm welcome to all. Entrance to the School Room is free – and all are welcome – so please do pop in and say hello.
If you’re reading this after St Patrick’s Day and missed out on the fun, we have an event on Saturday March 23 which will appeal to fans of crime fiction – and others beside!
Bestselling author Elly Griffiths is the mind behind the Dr Ruth Galloway series of crime novels, and she’ll be in Haworth to discuss her latest book, The Stone Circle.
Her character Dr Ruth Galloway is a forensic archaeologist and single mother who is thrown together with DCI Harry Nelson to solve strange and baffling murders.
Intrigued? If so, Elly Griffiths will be at West Lane Baptist Church at 2pm, talking about her creation and the series. Tickets are selling fast, and cost £7/£5/£2.
On the final Friday of the month – March 29 – we have our monthly Parsonage Unwrapped, and this one is entitled ‘Breaking the Mould’, referring to the unconventional streak that runs through the Brontë family, and manifests itself in the work of the Brontë sisters.
These events take place in the intimacy of our research library, and places are limited, so the evening is a real treat – a perfect gift for Mothers’ Day for any Brontë fans! Tickets cost £22.50/£20.
And our free Tuesday talk on April 2 focuses on Patrick’s career as Minister. Had he had the opportunity, he may well have chosen a different career path, but he did embrace the ministry both enthusiastically and energetically. He was curate in five parishes before arriving in Haworth, and the talk explores his journey.
From April we switch to summer opening hours, and as such we’ll be offering the free talk at 11.30am and 2pm.
Tickets for Elly Griffiths and Parsonage Unwrapped can be bought at www.bronte.org.uk/whats-on or call 01535 640192. More from me next time on Easter holiday activities and our plans for the second half of the year!

Keighley News also lists forthcoming organised walks in the area:

Anne Brontë is a simple title of an April 7 walk lasting seven miles on a varied, circular route around Haworth on good paths.
Meet Barbara Walker at 10.30am at Haworth Parish Church, at the top of Main Street come and expect a visit the quaint hamlet of Newsholme Dean and the Anne Brontë Stone. The walk has been devised by Michael Stewart. (David Knights)

And The Times recommends '20 best spring walks in the UK', including

3. Padiham, Gawthorpe Hall and the Brontë Way, Lancashire
How hard is it? 5 miles; easy, field paths
Splendidly bleak and baronial, the Tudor pile of Gawthorpe Hall was the ancestral home of the Shuttleworth family, friends and supporters of Charlotte Brontë — she visited them here in the 1850s. You reach the hall from Padiham by way of a path between the town’s former textile mills and the River Calder. There are fine prospects from Gawthorpe Hall’s thickly wooded grounds down to the Calder in its flat-bottomed valley. The Brontë Way footpath takes you along a hillside, with tremendous views northwards to the bulky silhouette of Pendle Hill. Down to cross the Calder, before a final easy stretch brings you back to the river and the mills on the outskirts of Padiham.
Map OS Explorer OL21
Start Padiham Bridge, Padiham BB12 8QN (OS ref SD 795337)
The walk Riverside path east for 300m; right across river; Stockbridge Drive to Gawthorpe Hall. Habergham Drive-Brontë Way via Hollins Farm to cross River Calder. Burnley Way to Padiham.
Lunch Four Alls Inn, Higham (01282 778063, fourallsinn.co.uk), on A6068, 2½ miles north of Padiham.
Getting there Bus M1 (Padiham-Barnoldswick), M2 (Clitheroe-Colne). Road: Padiham is on the A671 Burnley-Clitheroe.
More information visitlancashire.com; Walking with the Brontës in West Yorkshire by Norman and June Buckley (£8.99, Frances Lincoln) (Christopher Somerville)

The New York Times reviews Lyndall Gordon's Outsiders. Five Women Writers Who Changed the World.

Gordon is best known for her brilliant studies of Woolf, Charlotte Brontë and Emily Dickinson. As a biographer, she’s been a visionary herself, mind-reading her way into these figures’ creative processes. She displays the same insight here, reading “Frankenstein” as Mary Shelley’s effort to confront her estrangement from her father, and suggesting that Heathcliff in “Wuthering Heights” may have been Emily Brontë’s embodiment of “Nature itself, red in tooth and claw.” But this is a slighter book than her previous ones: Its attempts to bring the lives together aren’t sustained, and it can feel as if too much is lost in the brief studies of such well-known names.
Gordon’s voice is most lyrical and assured in her conclusions. Schreiner’s dreams of women “are like dispatches from an unmapped land”; both Heathcliff and Frankenstein’s Creature “lurk at the periphery, waiting to make their incursions into our domestic enclosures.” I wanted more gems like these, and more on the resonance of these women’s stories today. (Lara Feigel)

The Wall Street Journal reviews it too.

The Telegraph interviews mother and daughter Siri Hustvedt and Sophie Auster.

Nevertheless, she is ferociously well-read. Every night throughout her childhood, Hustvedt would read aloud to her: together they covered Austen, the Brontës, and Dickens, to name a few. “And then I had to cut the cord when I was 13, although I really didn’t want to!” Sophie laughs. (Heather Hodson)

Infobae (Spain) features the book Brujas literarias by Taisia Kitaiskaia, illustrated by Katy Horan.

"¿Qué es lo que le susurran las hormigas a Emily [Brontë] mientras trepan a los árboles destruídos de allá afuera"; "El fantasma de Shirley [Jackson] ronda el pasillo helado en la tienda abierta las veinticuatro horas a las tres de la madrugada"; "Eileen [Chang] prepara un hechizo para escapar de la opresión de la familia y las costumbres"; "Harta de ser mujer, Forugh [Farrojzad] se convierte en una acacia"; son algunas de las frases que pueden leerse en este pequeño mapeo -arbitrario como todo muestreo- que busca incentivar a la lectura. (Mariana Kozodij) (Translation)

Vanilla Magazine (Italy) recalls the fact that Emily Dickinson was a Brontëite.

Legge centinaia di opere dei suoi contemporanei, soprattutto quelle di scrittrici inglesi come George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell o le sorelle Brontë, per le quali ha una vera adorazione. Una delle sue ultime letture, tanto anelata (ha tempestato gli editori di lettere per averla, nonostante le sofferenze della malattia che la condurrà alla morte), è una biografia di Emily Brontë. (Roberto Cocchis) (Translation)

That Shelf interviews film director Danishka Esterhazy about her film Level 16.

Did Level 16 build off you’d seen before? You mentioned that you did the exercises with imagining sequels. No, it didn’t build on other films. I had inspirations–visual and thematic inspirations. I actually drew a lot of inspiration from Jane Eyre, the Charlotte Brontë novel, because I always loved the setting of Lowood, the orphanage for young girls, and how very dire that situation was for them. That was a touch point for Level 16. There are subtle elements of Victoriana in the story, but then also my deep love of science fiction and dystopian fiction, like Logan’s Run, which was wild 70s’ dystopia. I loved that contained world of the domed city and the weird set of rules, like the colored clothing they wore to symbolize their age or the life clocks in their palms. Those two inspirations fuelled my research and my brainstorming. (Pat Mullen)

Syfy argues that Maleficient is 'the only live-action Disney remake that will stand the test of time'.

If the other Disney live-action remakes are pantomimes, Maleficent is true drama. It is to Sleeping Beauty what Wide Sargasso Sea was to Jane Eyre. (Clare McBride)