Anne Brontë's 'little jewels of wisdom'

Keighley News features Nicky Peacock, the new writer in residence at the Brontë Parsonage Museum.

Working with the local community and Brontë enthusiasts worldwide, she'll create pieces inspired by the legendary literary family.

Nicky has been a Brontë fan since she was a young girl, and even produced 'little books' in the style of those created by her heroines.

"I am so excited about taking on this incredible role – but also a little overwhelmed at the huge responsibility of creating new work for the museum and the loyal Bronte fans," she said.

"I'm fascinated by the whole family, and looking at Haworth through their eyes will be a joy.

"Lots of the work I’m planning has the community at its core and I can’t wait to meet the locals and visitors that will bring it all to life."

Rebecca Yorke, the museum's interim director, said: "Nicky’s application really showed an understanding of – and passion for – the Brontë family and how they lived. We were keen for this year’s writer in residence to really embed themselves in our community here and produce some moving and engaging work." (Alistair Shand)

A columnist from The Guardian has found 'little jewels of wisdom' in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

I find I’m reading whole novels mainly to unearth little jewels of wisdom to shed light on what I’ve been feeling; feelings that I’ve been unable to articulate myself. For some reason I picked up The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. A bit flabby in the middle, if I may say so, but generally I was transfixed by what started to seem like the greatest love story ever told. The plot soon starts to fade, and all you are left with is how it made you feel. This is nice, but what makes it all worthwhile is those specific insights that I make sure to harvest and go back to. For instance, Helen says of her new life in the big city: “At first, I was delighted with the novelty and excitement of our London life; but soon I began to weary of its mingled turbulence and constraint.”

A few months later, I chanced upon Anne Brontë’s resting place in Scarborough. Standing over her grave, I looked up this little passage and appreciated anew how intensely it resonated with my own feelings about London. And there the poor young woman lay, gone 173 years and still making new friends. That’s quite something. (Adrian Chiles)

Brussels Times looks back on the time 'When the Brontë sisters strolled the boulevards of Brussels'.

The Belgian capital barely acknowledges its link with the two most famous Brontë sisters, Charlotte and Emily. A plaque commemorates their stay here in 1842-43, at a girls’ boarding school called the Pensionnat Heger, which stood on the site now occupied by Bozar, the Centre for Fine Arts. However, it is placed high up near Bozar’s entrance: most concertgoers pouring through the doors are oblivious of it, as are most tourists.

It is a pity the city is so silent about its Brontë link. Visitors are unlikely to have heard about the connection before they come. Mention the Brontës and how many people picture the sisters strolling on the boulevards in Brussels?

Yet they did – and so do some of their fictional characters. Although it is not hard to see why the connection can be missed. Charlotte wrote two novels set in Brussels and based on her time in the city: her first, The Professor, which was not published until 1857, two years after her death; and her fourth and last, Villette (1853). But neither were bestsellers like Jane Eyre. Many literary pundits rate Villette as her most interesting book, but, sadly, no feature film has ever been made about its heroine Lucy Snowe, a sharply observant expat experiencing loneliness and frustration as a teacher at a pensionnat.

That Charlotte Brontë’s link with Brussels is not better known is partly her own doing: she underplayed the location. In The Professor, a tale of a young English teacher who falls in love with one of his pupils, the setting is explicitly identified as Brussels. But in Villette, a more closely autobiographical novel, the city where Charlotte herself fell in love is disguised under a fictional name: the ‘continental capital’ she calls ‘Villette’ is Brussels in all but name. [...]

Other city landmarks described by Charlotte in her Brussels novels are still standing. We can walk in the park where Lucy, under the influence of an opiate, wanders in a hallucinatory scene during a night-time fête commemorating the Labassecourien (for which read, Belgian) Revolution. We can visit the Chapelle Royale off Place Royale where the sisters worshipped, as did the Protestant Leopold I, and pause in Rue Royale to look up at the statue of General Belliard, the French ambassador who helped to negotiate Belgium’s independence in the 1830 Revolution. That rising was still a recent memory in the Brontës’ time and Charlotte mentions the monument to the fallen patriots in Place des Martyrs.

So, not all the Brontë-era Brussels has disappeared. And around Bozar, if you look hard, you can find fragments of the old streets the Brontës walked on that have miraculously survived: Rue Villa Hermosa and Rue Terarken. In their time, a steep narrow flight of steps, behind the Belliard statue, led down to Rue d’Isabelle (a more modern flight leads down to Rue Baron Horta today). In imagination, I’ve often descended those vanished steps into the Brontës’ neighbourhood in Brussels, which I’ve reconstructed in my mind from old photos and from descriptions in The Professor and Villette.

At the end of the truncated cul-de-sac of Rue Terarken, which stops abruptly at a delivery entrance to Bozar, a thrill lies in wait for those with the sharp eyes of a Lucy Snowe. On the wall next to this back entrance is a replica of the round blue literary plaques seen on writers’ houses all over Britain. Like the one by Bozar’s front entrance, it commemorates the Brontës’ stay. But this plaque is unofficial, placed in 2004 by a Dutch fan who wanted to give the Brontës a memorial in one of the streets that existed in their time.

Shortly after, in 2006, I founded the Brussels Brontë Group with fellow Brontë admirers to promote the literary link. We have organised guided walks and numerous events to celebrate the connection and over the years we’ve approached city authorities with ideas for ways of making it more visible. But our proposals for a major exhibition or a statue have yet to be picked up. In Haworth, everything yells, ‘The Brontës lived here!’. In Brussels, the passage of the sisters through the city can seem like a secret only known to a few.

There’s a charm in that, of course. Because if you’re one of those chosen few, you’ll find yourself, one day, in a cobbled street so tiny hardly anyone knows it’s there, gazing at a home-made plaque and marvelling at the thought that the Brontë sisters trod those cobbles.

The Lincoln Courier shares what locals are reading.

“Jane, the Fox, and Me” by Fanny Britt and Isabelle Arsenault

Hélène is a young girl being ruthlessly bullied by her former friends in school.  She escapes them by reading her favorite book, Jane Eyre, and finds comfort and connection with the eponymous protagonist.  On a camping trip, Hélène meets a fox and feels connected to it, but one of her bullies shoos it away.  Soon a new girl named Géraldine moves into town and Hélène befriends her.  While this story shows the extreme human cruelty that children are capable of, it also shows that a connection to anything, a fictional character, an animal, or just a friend can numb the cruelty and sadness of life and make it worth living.

The Upcoming discusses the new TV-series adaptation of Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveller's Wife and wonders about literary adaptations of the same works happening time and again.

The question is: is this latest adaptation necessary and does it offer anything new? In a market clamouring for our valuable attention, viewers can afford to be – in fact, must be – quite discerning with what they choose to spend their time on. Unless an adaptation of a well-known and loved work brings something radically new, it can feel dreary to go over well-trodden paths for those already familiar with the story. In an experimental hand, there can be the shock of innovation – think Andrea Arnold’s feature version of Wuthering Heights, where Heathcliff drops the c-bomb on a love rival. That could never have happened in the 19th century, no matter how wild and windswept the folk involved were, but what it lacked in era-specific realism it made up for in wayward artistry.  (Jessica Wall)

Far Out magazine lists 'Six films that inspired classic Kate Bush songs' and one of them obviously is

Wuthering Heights (1939) – ‘Wuthering Heights’

What better place to start than Bush’s debut single? Starting life in the charts as a teenager, Bush quickly became heralded as one of Britain’s finest songwriters after she penned and performed the gigantic classic ‘Wuthering Heights’, a track which shot to number one and made Bush the first woman to both write and record a chart-topping single. She told Record Mirror in 1978, “Great subject matter for a song. I loved writing it. It was a real challenge to precis the whole mood of a book into such a short piece of prose.”

Bush continued, “Also, when I was a child, I was always called Cathy, not Kate, and I just found myself able to relate to her as a character. It’s so important to put yourself in the role of the person in a song. There’s no half measures. When I sing that song, I am Cathy. (Her face collapses back into smile.) Gosh, I sound so intense. ‘Wuthering Heights’, is so important to me. It had to be the single. To me, it was the only one.” While the song had certainly started out as a homage to the book, it was a movie that sealed the deal.

The story goes that Bush didn’t read Emily Brontë’s book but caught the final ten minutes of the 1967 BBC mini-series based on the famous novel, writing the entire song in just under a few hours. “When I was in Canada, I found out that Lindsay Kemp, my dance teacher, was in town,” she confessed, “Only ten minutes away by car, so I went to see him. When I came back, I had this urge to switch on the TV – it was about one in the morning – because I knew the film of Wuthering Heights would be on. I tuned in to a thirties gangster film, then flicked through the channels, playing channel roulette, until I found it. I came in at the moment Cathy was dying, so that’s all I saw of the film. It was an amazing coincidence.” (Jack Whatley)

An article on 'Charlotte Brontë and Teaching Global Christianity' on Patheos.