Promoting Brontë Country

A columnist from The Yorkshire Post hopes that the film The Railway Children Return helps bring back tourists to Brontë Country.

 And it can’t fail to show Yorkshire at its finest. The film, shot on picturesque locations such as Oakworth Station and the Brontë Parsonage, is produced by Jemma Rodgers, who used to live in Haworth. We must wait until 2023, it’s reported, until a new tourism body for Yorkshire is launched. Until then, this new film will do an excellent job of promoting our region. I’ve already had emails from friends in London enquiring what it’s like to stay in Haworth, where the Brontë Parsonage suffered loss of visitor income during the pandemic. According to the director, the settings – gritty and rugged and resilient and passionate – define the film’s feel, while the region’s heritage railways are “a gift”. This will hopefully provide the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway, a five-mile long volunteer-run heritage railway in the Worth Valley, with a much-needed boost, raising its profile and coffers. It will also promote tourism in Haworth and the surrounding villages and countryside, and even further afield across the region. (Jayne Dowle)

Electric Lit recommends the work of writer K Ming-Chang.

And Chang’s chapbook, Bone House, is similarly discombobulating, while simultaneously honed and precise, languishing (but only briefly—it’s a novelette) in a queer Taiwanese-American retelling of Wuthering Heights. (Bryan Washington)

A contributor to Daily Kos makes up things about the writing of Jane Eyre while trying (and in our opinion failing) to be funny.

We read Jane Eyre. While the girls – who all identified with the poverty-stricken girls’ school student and tutor – rolled their eyes in sympathy with poor ol’ Jane and sighed heavily over her, I wondered why Mr. Rochester did not toss his lunatic wife out of the Thornfield Hall tower and ride off into the sunset with Jane. He was an English Regency gentleman…they could get away with that behavior. I could not stand the book. Luckily for me, I had the Classics Illustrated comic version, which told the bulk of the story in solid cartoons. However, this abridgement deleted a side plot that added little to the original book but length.

The ending was also a dirty trick on the reader, with some solicitor turning up to tell Jane that her uncle had kicked the bucket and left Jane his entire estate of £20,000, which is $2.24 million today. Nice deal. Jane then heard Rochester’s mysterious voice (through the curtains, I guess), hopped on a horse, and rode to Thornfield Hall to find the building burned down, and Rochester minus a hand and vision. Apparently his nutball wife started a fire and Rochester braved the blaze to save his servants, at considerable personal expense. Mrs. Rochester was one of the fatalities. What a concept, huh?

Anyway, Rochester proposes marriage to Jane once again, they get married, and a few years later, he regains sight in one eye, so that he can see their newborn son. The 12-year-old girls in my class, all from ultra-chic Greenwich Village’s upper-middle class, moaned, mooned, and sighed over this improbable ending, hoping it would happen to them – that they would meet some dashing, wealthy, handsome man, who was least more mature than their schoolmates, who would sweep them off their feet. Actually, they were right: they met men like that, and the Queen Bee became a bigshot Hollywood producer. By the way, after I wrote this section, I had to reach for an antacid tablet. I think I had to do the same thing at the actual time.

Sarah Hardman was very puzzled as to why I had the whole book memorized except for those few chapters, and did so badly on that section of the test. I shrugged my shoulders and told her the truth.

She nodded her head. I guess she realized that a guy who was fascinated by Chindits in Burma and Christy Mathewson with the Giants would have no interest in a Victorian-era romance involving the idle rich and the idle poor. I got an excellent grade anyway.

As it turns out, apparently Charlotte Bronté [sic] added the chapters I never read because, like most novels of the time, it did not come out in a single book, but was serialized in three volumes. It was supposed to end on thus-and-such a date. But Bronté got a note from her agent, Seymour Percentage, which was the period equivalent of this: “Bill Thackeray went on a bender and punted the new book he’s supposed to start on February 29th. Can you stretch Jane Eyre out to the week before? I’m sure you can. Who loves you, baby?”

Therefore, Ms. Bronté, after popping a few antacids herself, dreamed up some unnecessary chapters, and shrugged, saying that at least she would earn more money from a book that only overheated teenage girls in middle-school English classes read centuries hence. Wikipedia says the book has important messages about Victorian society, religion, and feminism. Apparently it has spurred sequels and spinoffs. Why not? Star Trek is a whole industry, complete with Klingonese.

Meanwhile, we were hit in class and on tests with questions about that and other mandatory reads, like “Why do you think Jane Eyre fell in love with Mr. Rochester?” Maybe because he possessed more money than the Rockefellers have and boasted chiseled abs. (Nightflyer)

The T 

Black Nerds Create recommends What Souls Are Made Of: A Wuthering Heights Remix by Tasha Suri.