'Speak I must'

More reviews of Emily today. From La estatuilla (Spain):

No todo es logrado en esta primera propuesta de la cineasta británica, ya que el ritmo es disparejo, lo cual propicia el alargamiento innecesario de la película. Por otro lado, Emily es el único personaje que realmente importa debido al insuficiente desarrollo de sus acompañantes. Si bien el relato toma algunos elementos reales sobre la autora para combinarlos con ficción, es clara la ambigüedad e imprecisión que la propia imaginación provoca en cuanto a fechas, personas y vivencias. 

“Emily” es un buen debut cinematográfico y también le suma a granel a la prometedora y audaz carrera de Emma Mackey. Es posible la inconformidad de algunos seguidores de Brontë, pero sin lugar a dudas es un interesante y emocional acercamiento a esta importante autora. (Oscar Andrew) (Translation)

From CineMedios (Spain):

Esto nos lleva a que O’Connor nos cuente esta historia ficticia con elementos de literatura gótica que podemos ver en lo sombrío y claustrofóbico de su ambientación y en el actuar tan apasionado y moralmente gris de los personajes. También hay rasgos de romanticismo en los ideales que la cineasta adhiere en la personalidad de Brontë, finalmente las características de estas corrientes están presentes en su obra. Cualquiera que esté familiarizado con Cumbres Borrascosas rápidamente se dará cuenta de los paralelos que hay entre esa historia y lo que estamos viendo en Emily, como si fueran reflejos una de otra.

Así que no, no son hechos reales, Emily Brontë probablemente no tuvo un candente y secreto romance, tal vez su relación con sus hermanas, su hermano y su padre no fue tan complicada, seguramente tampoco hubo traiciones que llenaron de desdicha a la familia. Sin embargo sí escribió de temas similares y por eso lo que nos muestra O’Connor en Emily sí nos da una buena impresión de quien pudo haber sido Emily Brontë, como mujer, como hermana, como artista. Lo mismo se siente con la actuación de Emma Mackey, que si bien parte de lo que dicta la historia de la película, al final se siente como una interpretación leal de Brontë.

Si bien es cuestionable contar historias ficticias de gente real, a mi me parece bastante valiente que una persona como Frances O’Connor con toda la información a la mano y aún con toda su admiración a Brontë y su obra, decidió hacer de Emily una gran mentira que nos hace sentir algo real. No será fiel a la historia, pero al menos es respetuosa. Y por lo tanto es un producto mucho más interesante que cualquier biopic genérico que cualquier otro cineasta pudo haber hecho. (Luis Enrique Jiménez) (Translation)

Panda Ancha (Mexico) and D2 (Norway) also feature the film.

The Oxford University Press blog discusses literature and mental health.

Literature has us think differently, with a subtler emotional lexicon. Here, from another CRILS research study, is a mixed community group in a local London library reading Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre aloud together. “Get out of the room; return to the nursery” says the unkind aunt to the orphaned child, on the brink of sending her away to boarding school. “I got up, I went to the door,” Jane recalls, and then, “I came back again.” Instead of going on seamlessly as normal, she will not cross the threshold into her new future before coming back again to do justice to her past: 

Speak I must … ‘I will say the very thought of you makes me sick, and that you treated me with miserable cruelty.’

‘How dare you affirm that, Jane Eyre?’

‘How dare I, Mrs. Reed? How dare I? Because it is the truth. You think I have no feelings, and that I can do without one bit of love or kindness; but I cannot live so.’

Jack, a 50 year-old born in the West Indies, says a moment after: 

She was on her way out, then she thought, ‘No I’m going to tell, to come back and just tell her.’ I don’t think she thought through whatever she was gonna say but … she’d actually been hurt — it’s not physical but like it — certain things that they say, rock your inner core [puts fist onto chest] … but she said back what … what was in her mind, and the words kept flowing. 

Then, through all of an immigrant’s experience, he adds: ‘I don’t see her as a 10-year-old girl.’ The almost physical identification across race, class, age, culture, and history, is a surprise—more powerful than something more determinedly relevant. 

“Speak I must” (not simply, “I must speak”) were the words that stuck with another group-member. Anne is a quiet middle-aged woman, saying some months after at an interview:

I am a little bit better at being confident now. If my partner says anything to me, I can talk back to him. Last Wednesday when I went into hospital he said, ‘You’re a disgrace as a woman.’ So when he sat down I said, ‘Do you get some pleasure out of…’ I wouldn’t have said it to him before, ‘Do you get some pleasure out of hurting me …?’

It wouldn’t have been so telling if she had not been able to point to those three particular words that helped get this out of her. Nor would it have been so powerful if she hadn’t had that stuttering difficulty in articulating “hurting me.” If these things seem smaller to you than the big themes, I don’t agree. “Nobody knows,” says Brontë in Jane Eyre, “how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth.” A little bit better at being confident now is very careful. (Philip Davis)

Book Riot recommends '13 Thrilling Queer Gothic Books' and one of them is

The WIfe in the Attic by Rose Lerner 

Jane Eyre is both an incredible book and one full of all kinds of problems. I enjoy reading books that engage with this text and choose different angles to explore. This book — great on audio if you’re into that — spoils the major plot detail of Jane Eyre right in its title. Even knowing that, you will find Sir Kit, the Mr. Rochester analogue, charismatic at first. You’ll watch with fascination as the Jane stand-in, Deborah, falls in love with the titular character and the two exact vengeance. As a bonus, this book is set in the same universe as Rose Lerner’s other Lively St. Lemeson books. (Isabelle Popp)

CBC interviews writer Ann-Marie MacDonald.

The language is clearly Brontë-esque in scope. What did the research and world-building process look like for Fayne?

I've always loved Victorian fiction. I came of age with the Brontës, and I'll never forget when my sister put Jane Eyre into my hands. It completed the triangle that has really shaped my life — three points of that triangle being Bugs Bunny, The Beatles and the Brontës.

I exist within that triangulation. Oddly, they're all Bs. I'm not sure why that is.

My research is immersive: I traveled and I spent time in Edinburgh and Glasgow. I spent months at the Osler Library of the History of Medicine at McGill University, delving into original documents, the history of medicine, especially the history of women and queer people and anyone whose gender is non-normative, gender nonconforming, bodily nonconforming people who are caught in the medical gaze. That holds true now very urgently as well.

In many ways, I've been able to tackle some very contemporary issues by putting them into the Victorian Gothic genre. Especially when you talk about gender nonconformity, queerness, women. The history of women in particular, caught in the medical gaze, is a harrowing one, and it's one of abiding interest to me. 

In order to create that immersive experience for the reader, so that they are that hopefully they feel, hopefully they forget that anyone wrote this book, hopefully they forget that they're reading a book, they're just taking this journey, they are present, as it unfolds. (Ryan B. Patrick)

El Español (Spain) interviews translator Elisenda Julibert, who has just published her first non-fiction book.

–Pensando en el famoso ensayo de La loca del desván, ¿la mujer siempre ha sido escrita/representada por el hombre?

Ha sido tradicionalmente descrita y representada por varones, pero desde hace siglo y medio hay autoras destacadas, las primeras ya consagradas por la tradición (pienso en las Brontë, Madame de Stäel, George Eliot, Colette, Woolf…). En La loca del desván se aborda el tema de las escritoras del siglo xix –cuando “la autoría femenina dejó de ser hasta cierto punto una anomalía”– y se analiza cómo tuvieron que liberarse de prejuicios de la época para poder escribir adoptando un punto de vista propio y ofrecer su perspectiva del mundo.

Creo que ese ejercicio está indisociablemente unido a la escritura y en esa medida no es extraño que tantas escritoras la asociaran con la emancipación, ni que, por otra parte, la emancipación diera tantas escritoras. Si escribir exige tratar de elaborar una mirada o una voz propias, y sustraerse a las ideas recibidas, los prejuicios, los clichés, los tópicos, las soluciones manidas, no es extraño que para muchas mujeres del siglo xix fuera  un espacio idóneo para buscar una auténtica emancipación de la mentalidad de su época: a la necesidad de ese espacio simbólico, no sólo material, creo que se refiere Woolf con la habitación propia. (Anna María Iglesia) (Translation)