A 'more shippable' Rochester

What'sOnStage shares the first pictures of Wise Children's Wuthering Heights, which are well worth a look.

Kandaka Moore (Zillah), Ash Hunter (Heathcliff), Nandi Bhebhe (The Moor), Lucy McCormick (Cathy) and Witney White (Frances Earnshaw/Young Cathy)

© Steve Tanner (Source)

Nerdist features Lauren Blackwood and her Jane Eyre retelling Within These Wicked Walls.

Jane Eyre is an influential yet unexpected entry into the gothic canon. Charlotte Brontë’s tale of a young orphaned girl hired by the enigmatic Mr. Rochester to care for a resident of the overbearing Thornfield Hall comes with dark drama and horrifying secrets. In her new take on the literary classic, Within These Wicked Walls, Lauren Blackwood leans into the horror of it all. She crafts a truly terrifying take on Brontë while bringing a unique voice all her own to the page-turning proceedings.

The story began to take shape after Blackwood watched Cary Joji Fukunaga’s 2011 Jane Eyre adaptation. “I’ve always loved the romantic tropes and the creepy atmosphere,” Blackwood told Nerdist. “I thought, why isn’t this house actually haunted? It has all the makings of a haunted house. And then there was an idea that I had separately. I love folklore and I’d discovered this lore of the Evil Eye in Ethiopia and somehow they just connected.”

Blackwood’s haunted house overflows with horrifying spirits and abhorrent creations. She pulled inspiration from within. She said, “I just thought of things that would scare me! If there could be a manifestation in each room of something that would freak me out, that would work.”

In the face of such supernatural power, you need a hero who can stand strong and hopefully at some point fall in love with the mysterious Rochester. That’s where Andromeda comes in. She’s a powerful, young exorcist Rochester hires to cleanse his house of the Evil Eye. “I knew she had to be a tough sort of person to survive this haunted house,” Blackwood explained. “So I gave her a backstory where she had to survive on being tough, not relying on affection or people to help her out, because she knew she had to handle this herself. But she’s also a little vulnerable and I think that helps to balance her out.” [...]

Brontë’s Rochester is one of literature’s most famous brooding leading men. But when she envisioned her Rochester, Blackwood had a plan. “I definitely wanted to make him a little more sympathetic,” Blackwood said. “And definitely more shippable! So that people won’t be like, ‘Ugh why does she like him?”

That began with crafting a far more sympathetic backstory for Magnus. She told us, “He’s a brat. But he’s grown up in such a way that he believes his father abandoned him. And his mother died when he was a baby. So he feels sort of this abandonment. Then he ends up being cursed and trapped in this castle, and he literally can’t look at anyone. And so all of that builds up and he kind of uses his entitlement as a defense mechanism. He’s very awful with people. So Andromeda is really the first time he gets to really truly interact with a person. Suddenly he’s like, ‘Oh I really didn’t know how to do this, but now I really want to know how to.'”

The relationship between Rochester and Andromeda sits at the heart of Within These Wicked Walls. It’s also Blackwood’s passion. Blackwood worked to bring the horror elements and the romance together. “The romance is my favorite part,” she gushed. “So, getting that balance was really about adding the scary because romance comes a little more naturally to me. And they’re in a haunted house, they’re under pressure, and they’re stuck together. In the same way she has to survive on the street, she has to survive in this haunted house, and she has to lean on Magnus. Both of them have learned very well throughout their life to sort of attach to good things and make the most of horrible situations.” (Rosie Knight)

Yesterday's New York Times' crossword puzzle by Ross Trudeau was in honour of the Brontë sisters.

This puzzle honors three writers (described in the revealer at 28D as the “literary trio found in the answers to this puzzle’s starred clues”). The first is found at 19A, which is clued with a literary reference of its own: “Children’s book whose title character says ‘If I can fool a bug, I can surely fool a man. People are not as smart as bugs.’” This title character is Charlotte of Charlotte's Web, who realizes that if she can fool a bug into being caught in her web, she could certainly fool a man into believing his pig is special. As an aside, I remember feeling pretty cranky as a child that the takeaway from a spider who writes things in her web was that the pig was the special one.

Unlike the first themer, the other two (and the revealer) are all Down entries. At 25D, we encounter the clue “Prominent left-leaning political action committee,” which is EMILY’S LIST. Astute solvers might recognize that CHARLOTTE and EMILY are the names of two famous writers who share a surname. The first name of one more writer, who also shares this surname, is found at 6D embedded in AUNTIE ANNE’S, whose pretzel kiosks were a staple of my misspent mall-rat youth. Returning to the revealer, we recognize that the literary trio embedded in the theme entries are THE BRONTËS: CHARLOTTE, EMILY and ANNE.

I appreciate the “tightness” of this theme. A tight theme is one that is defined narrowly enough that the connection between the theme entries and the revealer is crisp, and there are very few, if any, other entries that could have been included here but were not. For this theme, there were truly only three Brontë sisters who could have been included, and, beyond that, all three theme entries include possessive forms of the names. Neat!

Now that a Spanish woman writer has been revealed to be actually three men, the Spanish press is all about writers using pseudonyms, like the Brontës: La Vanguardia, Cope, El nacional, Público, Tribuna Salamanca, etc. Although Elle (Spain) seems a little confused:

En el siglo XIX era habitual que las mujeres artistas se ocultaran bajo seudónimos masculinos porque si no sus trabajos eran rechazados: Currer Bell era Emily Brontë, Ellis Bell fue Charlotte Brontë y A.M Bernard resultó ser Louisa May Alcott. (Begoña Alonso) (Translation)

Still, in Spain, yesterday was Women Writers' Day and Aragón Digital had an article about it:

«Todos podemos pensar en Emily Brontë, en María Zambrano, en Emilia Pardo Bazán, en Mary Shelley, en Jane Austen. Mujeres que triunfaron e hicieron auténticas obras maestras en la literatura. Y es que la literatura es el primer arte que se considera feminista», ha asegurado José Antonio Mayoral. (Cristina Morte Landa) (Translation)

Il Giornale (Italy) reviews Jay Kristoff's Empire of the Vampire book.

Non mancano nemmeno omaggi all'età romantica della letteratura inglese: in particolare c'è una scena che sembra uscita dalle pagine di Cime tempestose, il capolavoro di Emily Brontë. Questo fa sì che l'esperienza di lettura sia molto spesso disturbata da questi richiami fin troppo evidenti, che mettono in dubbio la credibilità del mondo inventato da Jay Kristoff, che spesso finisce con l'apparire come un'accozzaglia di elementi. (Erika Pomella) (Translation)

Emily Brontë's poem 'Fall, leaves, fall' is quoted by The Well and Surfer Today. Brussels Brontë Blog has a post on a recent talk on Education, independence and self-improvement by Dinah Birch, Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool.