Keighley News talks about the upcoming Brontë Festival of Women Writers at the Parsonage:
A packed programme of events is planned as the Brontë Festival of Women’s Writing celebrates its 10th anniversary.
Poet Hollie McNish, winner of the Ted Hughes Award, will open the festival next Thursday, July 29.
There will then be a long weekend of activities – mainly online – featuring women writers, artists and performers from across the world.
Twenty-one creative writing workshops, virtual drawing events, online theatre performances, in-conversation sessions and face-to-face activities will take place.
Rebecca Yorke, interim director of the Brontë Parsonage Museum at Haworth, said: “We are incredibly excited to be bringing the festival back and that a writer as in-demand as Hollie will open the event in fitting style – her taboo-busting poems and short stories which challenge our perceptions feel appropriate and familiar to fans of the Brontës’ work.
“The museum has an international following, so hosting some events online has the added benefit of literary fans from across the world being able to join us and enjoy the diverse programme that includes some of the most interesting and distinctive women writing right now.”
Since its inception, the festival – which wasn’t held last year due to the pandemic – has become an acclaimed fixture on the literary calendar.
Highlights this year will include – on the opening day – Hollie McNish in conversation with playwright and journalist Samantha Ellis and reading from her much-anticipated new collection, Slug...and other things I’ve been told to hate. (...) (Alistair Shand)
France Info's Histoires d'info. Les beaux perdants is about Emily Brontë. But they get a bit fuzzy about the anniversaries:
Emily Brontë, l’auteure qui n’a pas vu son succès
Ils ont subi un ou des échecs et ils ont été célèbres. Thomas Snégaroff nous fait revivre les moments les plus épiques de leur vie. Mercredi, l'auteure du livre "Les Hauts de Hurlevent" est décédée à l'âge de 30 ans avant que son oeuvre devienne un succés littéraire. (Translation)
Vogue and living your Anglophile dreams (in a Airbnb):
So for those who have been dreaming of thrifting in Shoreditch, visiting the fashion exhibits at the Victoria & Albert Museum, explore the hallowed halls of Buckingham Palace, and strolling through Hyde Park, you can officially start planning the trip your Anglophile heart desires, and wholeheartedly embrace the dynamic city around you. (To quote Charlotte Brontë, “I like the spirit of this great London which I feel around me.”) (Elise Taylor)
Newsweek lists movies with the most remakes:
Jane Eyre
Brontë and Austen novels are constantly remade for the big and small screens, and Jane Eyre is no exception.
Charlotte Brontë's 1847 classic has been remade into a feature film on 17 occasions, from television movies to Indian adaptations, since 1934.
The most recent film came in 2011, when Mia Wasikowska played the heroine. (Emma Kelly)
Tonight’s second feature is the 1943 adaptation of the quintessential Gothic governess story — Charlotte Brontë’s classic 1847 novel Jane Eyre. The book had already been adapted into several films, mainly silent ones, by 1943, but this version remains one of the best-known and best-executed productions, with a screenplay by John Houseman, Aldous Huxley and Robert Stevenson. Joan Fontaine stars as the title character, who takes a job as governess for a young girl at the gloomy, isolated Thornfield Hall. There she finds mysteries surrounding the place and its equally shadowy and brooding owner, Edward Rochester (Orson Welles). (Jeff Pfeiffer)
Jenny Lee: And the book you would take to a desert island?
O.K.: This is difficult. As any writer will tell you it's hard to choose favourites with books. It would be a tough whittling the list down between Wuthering Heights, Silence of the Lambs, or Stephen King's Misery. Oh, and any of Tana French's or Donna Tartt's. I'll accept the extra baggage fees.
The Globe and Mail (Canada) publishes the obituary of the local (Sydney-by-the-Sea) resident Kathleen Griffith, war bride originally from Haworth. Lovely story:
At her finest, Kathleen would regale with winding and detail-rich stories of her youth in West Yorkshire, with loving parents, one sibling and her family’s allotment garden near the birthplace of Anne, Emily and Charlotte Brontë. For much of her adult life she read a book a day, undoubtedly influenced by the literary landscape of her childhood: Her father served in the First World War and exchanged nods around the neighbourhood with fellow veteran and noted scribe J.B. Priestley. Kathleen Smart was married by Father John O’Connor, the real-life inspiration for G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown. To prepare for service with the Royal Army Pay Corps during the Second World War, Kathleen marched over the moors at Haworth, and was so enchanted with the setting for Wuthering Heights that she later named her first child Catherine. (Joanne Will)
The Eastern Daily Press reports just another brick in cancel culture hysteria. Now decolonise has become synonyme for suppress. Always the easy way.
The 2021 creative writing prospectus says a module called Writing Across Borders will see students study the “emergence of modern English from a multilingual medieval society and its colonial expansion to Ireland, Africa, Asia and the Caribbean”.
However William Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton, Austen, the Brontës and James Joyce who were specifically named in the previous 2020 prospectus are no longer referred to. (...)
Universities are under pressure to reform curriculum content to ensure there is greater diversity in the texts studied, but moves to ‘decolonise’ courses have proved controversial.
Chris McGovern, chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, said: “Demonising great writers because they were white is an absurdity. Young people need to understand that a capacity for good or evil is not skin colour dependent.” (...)
A UEA spokesman said: “We welcome critical engagement from our students and recognise that it is at the heart of a university education to interrogate inherited cultural values and practices, and to debate what is at stake in the work we read and how we read it.
"The fact that our students are not afraid to challenge past and present injustices and structures of power is to be celebrated not vilified.” (Simon Parkin)
If only.
Metropolitan Magazine (Italy) recommends
Wuthering Heights:
Cime Tempestose, di Emily Brontë: Catherine e Heathcliff, un sentimento trepidante, un rapporto di odio e amore. Il giovane non può sposare la donna amata a causa della sua condizione sociale ed è diviso da questo amore tormentato e la rabbia verso il mondo circostante. Un amore che non avrà fine nemmeno quando Catherine morirà; Heathcliff continuerà ad essere ossessionato dalla figura dell’amata, affermando di vedere il suo fantasma aggirarsi per la brughiera inglese e la vecchia casa. Troverà pace con la morte, quando lo seppelliranno accanto alla tomba dell’amata. (Stella Grillo) (Translation)
In a creative melding of adaptation and biography, Isabel Greenberg illustrates the Brontë siblings' juvenilia alongside the real events of their childhoods in Glass Town: The Imaginary World of the Brontës (Abrams ComicArts, $24.99). Readers are granted a view of the young Brontës' lives that reflects the tragedy and mundanity of their shared childhood, but also demonstrates the means by which they imagine themselves into other worlds.
With pens, ink vials and paper, Branwell, Charlotte, Emily and Anne sit by their fireplace plotting, debating and dreaming in acts of collective imagination. They transform the vast English moors surrounding their home into Gondal, Angria and Glass Town. They populate their fictional landscape with characters like Zamorna, Lord Northangerland, Mary Percy and Quashia Quamina, each with their own rich history and narrative function. The dramas that unfold in Glass Town--stories of courtship, love, war and deception--are grand, inchoate products of pure childhood imagination. The lush fictional worlds that the young Brontës conjure together become as real to them as their waking worlds and follow them well into adulthood. Greenberg's illustrations, in deep purples and reds, are as moody and dreamlike as the Brontë canon. With this humane and enchanting portrait of Yorkshire's most prominent literary siblings, Greenberg secures her place among extraordinary talents in contemporary comics. (Emma Levy)
La Nazione Firenze (Italy) reports a concert by the Orchestra da Camara Fiorentina devoted to the films by Franco Zeffirelli, which included a performance of a theme of Jane Eyre 1996 (music by Claudio Capponi and Alessio Vlad).
Milenio (Mëxico) has an article about dogs and mentions a Keeper anecdote:
Dicen que Keeper, el perro de Emily Brontë, siguió el cortejo fúnebre de su dueña hasta la tumba, y que aulló por semanas a la puerta de su habitación, esperando que regresara. (Alfonso Valencia) (Translation)
TIM Gate (Italy) talks about the Honresfeld Library.
BuzzFeed has a
Gunpowder Milkshake test which includes a Charlotte Brontë mention. A Jane (Eyre) question on yesterday's
USA Today's Crossword. Bega District News gives details about the local performance of the Most
Wuthering Heights Day Ever.
Ebookobsessed reviews the upcoming
Mrs. Rochester's Ghost by Lindsay Marcott.
Lu Reviews Books does the same with Mimi Matthews's
John Eyre.
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