Stranger Heights

Keighley News presents the upcoming exhibition at the Brontë Parsonage Museum, How My Light is Spent:

A renowned screenwriter is shining a new light on both Patrick Brontë and the secret cellar of the famous father’s Haworth home.
Frank Cottrell-Boyce has created an “illuminating” new installation as part of celebrations for the 200th anniversary of Patrick becoming the village’s church minister.
How My Light is Spent as placed in the cellar of the Brontë Parsonage Museum, a room never before open to the public.
How My Light Is Spent will run from August 10 to November 1 and is free with admission to the museum.
Cottrell-Boyce is the Brontë Society’s creative partner for 2019, as part of the year of events celebrating the father of novelists Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte. (...)
How My Light is Spent will explore Patrick Brontë’s memories as he recovered from a cataract operation, without anaesthetic, at the age of 70, having already outlived his wife and two of his children.
For the first time, visitors will be able to enter the Parsonage cellar where they will experience an immersive sensory installation that combines elements of theatre, light and sound.
Cottrell-Boyce said: “I first came to the Parsonage on a family day out and I wanted to help create something there that would be an enjoyable part of a family visit.
“Something that would be exciting as well as illuminating. Something that would give you something to talk about on the way home in the car or on the train.
“Something with a bit of mystery and magic that would be accessible to the youngest but would satisfy the oldest.”
How My Light Is Spent will allow audiences to share Patrick’s experience of darkness, hear the memories he held dear and see the dreams and visions he shared with Charlotte, who had cared for him following the operation.
It was at this time that she began to write Jane Eyre. (...)
Harry Jelley, Audience Development Officer at the Brontë Society, said How My Light Is Spent had been a hugely collaborative project with many creative minds coming together to make something magical happen at the museum..
He added: It’s been brilliant working with Frank Cottrell-Boyce as he explored the life of Patrick Brontë and devised this poignant, enchanting experience.
“The artists, Jo Pocock, Illuminos and Lumen, have each brought their own imaginations and skill to the project to create an installation which has deeply emotional themes and an otherworldly feeling.
“We think our visitors will be wowed when they step inside this fantastic world.” (David Knights)

Ox Magazine reviews the current outdoor Wuthering Heights production in Oxford:

It seems rather callous to be chomping away on Babybels as someone wastes away before you, but such is the way when you can bring a picnic along to an outdoor production of Wuthering Heights. Lamplighter Drama has joined forces with Oxford Shakespeare Companyto stage the Emily Brontë classic, as adapted by April de Angelis, in Wadham College Gardens (far too pretty for the story). The aforementioned thinning character is of course Cathy, played by Alice Welby who excellently illustrates her childishness and mental worsening. Opposite, Tyler Conti captures Heathcliff’s vulnerability and heartache, even if on a few occasions his Yorkshire accent goes a bit south (not wholly unlikely, I guess, given the amount of time he spends with the very southern Cathy). (Sam Bennett)

The Chicago Tribune mentions the Brontës:

Sisters can make for fascinating reading and study. Here are a few examples: the Bouviers, more familiarly known as Jackie Kennedy Onassis and Lee Radziwill; the six outlandish Mitford sisters of British aristocracy in the 1930s; the Bronte sisters—Charlotte, Emily and Anne — without whom we would not have “Jane Eyre,” “Wuthering Heights” or “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,” respectively. (Sara Clarkson)

An article from 1907 resurfaces in The New York Times:

Women authors appearing on best-seller lists alongside men? “Startling,” The New York Times called it in 1907.
Even more than appearing alongside them, successful books by women are beginning to “threaten the supremacy of man in the best-seller class,” the article went on.
But that’s not necessarily a bad thing, the article said. In fact, these men are even willing to “hobnob” with these women — namely George Eliot, Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë — “now and again.” (Maya Salam)

Bloody Disgusting imagines how Stranger Things would be if it was based on the nostalgia of a different decade:

The horror trends of the 1940s were based heavily in classic literature, as they were imitating a lot of the success of 1930s horror films (Dracula, et al). As such, the 1940s Stranger Things would pay homage to producer Val Lewton, and appear to come out of RKO. It would be inspired very directly by, say, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Set in Haiti, Eleven (a Simone Simon type), is a local psychic who runs her own business reading minds and floating objects for wealthy travelers. She is the analogue for Catherine. Will, a bitter local raised in luxury and suffering from lung ailments, is the stand-in for Heathcliff. Will’s mother is, in this version of things, an embittered Miss Havisham type (who, I know, is from Great Expectations; don’t @ me). When Will is sucked into The Upside Down by an ancient local curse, Catherine is destitute and flees into the arms of Dustin (a Dwight Frye-in-his-final-role-type). Fast-forward a generation, and Eleven’s young daughter, also psychic, makes good with Will’s less bitter son. Will returns just in time to see the inter-generational reconciliation. The last shot is a Demogorgon eating Will. (Witney Seibold)

WPR recommends summer reads:

Novelist Margaret Atwood — best known for the eerily prescient dystopian novel "The Handmaid’s Tale" — recommends "Wide Sargasso Sea" by Jean Rhys.
The story is one of the very first novels in which a minor character from another well-known novel takes center stage — in this case, the mad wife from Charlotte Brontë’s "Jane Eyre."
Like Atwood's own work, Rhys uses her characters to explore the power dynamics of men and women set against a dystopian world.

Bookriot posts about the writings of Adrienne Rich:

As more and more accounts of gross abuse injustice in higher education are revealed, her essays on Jane Eyre and Emily Dickinson grow in importance. And as we grapple with divisions in feminism, like the two gay male feminist English professors at Penn State who have argued their own academic freedom to slur and dead name are more important than the identities and safety of their students, we can turn, like Cheryl Strayed, to Dream of a Common Language and have it guide the way. (Holly Genovese)

Jornal Opção (in Portuguese) talks with the writer Lobo Antunes:

O escritor tam­bém apre­cia “os pri­mei­ros li­vros” de Var­gas Llo­as; “Três Tris­tes Ti­gres”, de Guil­ler­mo Ca­bre­ra In­fan­te; al­guns li­vros de John Le Car­ré e os “dois úl­ti­mos li­vros” de Phi­lip Roth (as en­tre­vis­tas do li­vro fo­ram fei­tas em se­tem­bro de 2008). Sen­te in­ve­ja de Li­ev Tols­tói, Joseph Con­rad e Emily Bron­të, “por­que são es­cri­to­res que de fa­to es­pan­tam, que têm coi­sas mag­ní­fi­cas”. (Euler de França Belem) (Translation)

Dewsbury Reporter reports the upcoming performance of Chapterhouse Theatre's Wuthering Heights production in Oakwell Hall. Forever Young Adult reviews My Plain Jane. Jane Eyre's Library (in Spanish) has a transcript of the first chapter of the first Spanish (sort of) translation of Jane Eyre: Juana Eyre, Memorias de una Aya. It was published as a serialized story in the Cuban newspaper El Diario de la Marina in 1850 (which as a matter of fact translated a previous French adaptation of the novel)

RTÉ, The Irish Times, The Journal, Heart, HLN (Belgium), New Zealand Herald, Upsala Nya Tidning (Sweden), AFP Deutschland (Germany)  post about the Most Wuthering Heights Day.