Dancing Cats

The New York Times echoes the news of the £20,000 donation from the TS Eliot estate to the Brontë Parsonage Museum.                                            

   

Thanks in part to a donation from the estate of one of England’s most esteemed poets — and some dancing cats — the Brontë Parsonage Museum’s doors will remain open, for now.

The estate of T.S. Eliot has gifted the struggling museum, which reopened in late August after being closed since March, 20,000 pounds (or approximately $26,000) last week. The donation was first reported by the BBC.

The parsonage, located in Haworth, said it was facing a loss of expected income of more than £500,000 because of the coronavirus pandemic.

There is a connection between Eliot and the Brontës: The “Bradford millionaire” who appears in the Eliot poem “The Waste Land” is thought to be Sir James Roberts, a Yorkshire philanthropist who was also a customer at the bank where Eliot worked. Mr. Roberts donated Haworth Parsonage — once the home of the Brontë sisters, Charlotte, Emily and Anne — to the Brontë Society, which operates the museum, in 1928. Roberts knew the family as a child.

But the Eliot estate’s gift didn’t come with any fanfare: Rebecca Yorke, the head of communications and marketing at the Brontë Society, said she discovered the donation when it showed up on the museum’s crowdfunding campaign page with a message of support. “Realizing that it was from the T.S. Eliot estate was a very special moment,” she said.

Yorke said the Eliot estate  told the organization that the donation was possible thanks to the success of the Tony-winning Andrew Lloyd Webber musical “Cats,” which is based on Eliot’s playful 1939 poetry collection “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.” (Sarah Bahr)

We love how Broadway World focuses on the 'dancing cats': 'CATS Enables T.S. Eliot Estate to Issue £20,000 Gift to The Brontë Parsonage'. ActuaLitté (France) echoes the story, too.

LitHub interviews writer Sue Miller.

What was the first book you fell in love with?

It was Jane Eyre. For all the wrong reasons. Are there wrong reasons for loving a wonderful book? Yes. There are. I was twelve and it made me cry. Every time. And I read it over and over. Really, until it stopped making me cry.

I wish I could say that I noticed the steady thrumming of the prose, or the story of the slow making of a self from the most unlikely materials, but I didn’t. Then. Not until I started to read it over and over again, later.

Writer and comedian Sylvie Drapeau reveals that she was a teen Brontëite on Chatelaine.

Pourquoi écrire?

« L’envie d’écrire est venue très tôt dans ma vie, peut-être tout de suite avec l’amour de la lecture. Lorsque j’étais adolescente, les romans des sœurs Brontë (Jane Eyre, Les hauts de Hurlevent) m’ont éblouie ! Il m’a fallu longtemps, pourtant, avant d’oser plonger dans l’écriture, peut-être à cause justement de ce coup de foudre ressenti et de cette admiration éprouvée. » (Anne-Frédérique Hébert-Dolbec) (Translation)

Entertainment Weekly asks bookish questions to Jenna Bush.

The classic novel that I've pretended to read but never read

The Brontë sisters, I have to tell you. [Her twin sister] Barbara's always like, didn't you love that? And I'm like yes [laughs]. I think I did read Wuthering Heights but in general, I acted like I loved all of those books. I do love gothic literature, so I feel like those are the ones I should read. Every year I'm like, this summer I'm going to read all the classics. And another one is Moby Dick. I mean, have you ever read Moby Dick?

A movie adaptation I really love

Ironically: Jane Eyre. I loved the most recent version. (Seija Rankin)

La Depeche (France) vindicates George Eliot.

Dans le monde francophone, cette autrice n'a pas aujourd'hui la renommée de Jane Austen, des soeurs Brontë ou de Virginia Woolf. Pourtant elle la mériterait. (Translation)

Vulture reviews the first season of the TV series P-Valley.

P-Valley reminds me of the grand tradition of response fiction, books like Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, which retells the story of Jane Eyre from the perspective of Rochester’s wife, Bertha, or Wicked’s answer to The Wizard of Oz, or my current favorite, the animated Harley Quinn series. P-Valley isn’t a response to any one work, and it’s not the first time a stripper has been the main character rather than part of the background. It’s different from Striptease, though, or Magic Mike or even Hustlers. In those movies, the strippers get to be main characters because they’re in extraordinary circumstances, and P-Valley has no space for that. It’s too interested in the everyday reality of the Pynk, too focused on the specifics of needing to find child care while you’re dancing or how to manage your regulars. P-Valley isn’t a response to any one story; it’s a rebuttal to the assumption that strippers have to do something other than stripping if they want to be the main characters. (Kathryn VanArendonk)