Emily's wild imagination

The Daily Beast features Emily.

Emily is a biopic that takes healthy liberties with history, but much like the surrealist Princess Diana movie Spencer, it exudes poetic love for the mercurial woman at its center—played here by a mesmerizing Emma Mackey. Unlike Spencer, however, Emily is a lot of fun to watch. [...]

“Emily was someone who had a real sense of her own power,” O’Connor says. “She had this wild imagination, and she had this huge intelligence. She was very musical. For me, the themes of Emily are about authenticity and being OK with being different, and celebrating that. If you can really own that, that’s how you’re going to find your own voice and be able to say something that’s going to enrich the collective.” [...]

Throughout the film, you’re swept along by the passion of a woman who is so thoroughly herself, whether she’s making up stories while lolling alone on a grassy knoll, or craning her neck with anticipation as she watches her soon-to-be lover approaching the cabin he’s selected for a secret rendezvous.

Perhaps it’s not fashionable in our irony-poisoned era, but Emily is an instant classic, especially for young women coming to terms with their talent and with themselves.

“The main message of the film is just to be true to yourself, even if it’s not reflected back to you,” O’Connor says. “That’s where good art comes from.” (Helen Holmes)

Broadway World interviews Sam Archer who plays Lockwood, Edgar Linton and The Moors in Wise Children's Wuthering Heights.

What are the challenges of playing multiple roles in Wuthering Heights?

I play 3 different characters in the show. Lockwood, Edgar Linton and the Moors. It's a challenge but also lots of fun to play multiple characters and I also get the chance to do a bit of comedy and drama. Both Lockwood and Edgar are well spoken and a bit silly at the beginning, so I have to use my physicality to differentiate between them. It is a gift of a show.

Can you tell us a little about the cast and creative team for the production?

This is my third production I've worked on with Emma Rice and Wise Children and each one has been an absolute joy. The cast, creative team and technical team are the best in the business and while we've been in America, every backstage and local team have been brilliant and really looked after us.

During rehearsals Emma creates a space where everyone is made to feel respected and able to contribute. We are free to play and explore and make the show our own.

The cast is so diverse and I think this is what makes the show so rich and interesting. Also my wife is in the show and it's been great to perform on stage together again and we have our 17 month old boy with us. It's been an epic adventure! I'm so grateful to the company and the american producers for making it possible.

The technical team at Wise Children really are the ones that hold everything together. Not only are they fantastic at what they do but they look after us and are all such lovely people!

What would you like audiences to know about the show?

You don't need to have read the novel to enjoy the show. Be prepared to be taken on an epic journey full of laughs and drama. (Marina Kennedy)

Inspired by the Roald Dahl controversy, Publishers Weekly's Shelf Talker looks back on similar cases.

The case of the second edition of Wuthering Heights, rearranged and muted by Charlotte Brontë who worried that readers might find the original edition sent for publication by her sister Emily to be monstrous, was more of an outlier. (Kenny Brechner)

National Geographic has an article on Messalina, emperor Claudius' third wife.

When Charlotte Brontë needed to describe the mad wife in the attic in Jane Eyre, Brontë likened her to a German vampire as well as Messalina. Of all the scandalous women who violated Roman gender roles, Messalina has come down through history as the most scandalous of all. (Emma Southon)

BuzzFeed shares '20 Incredible Facts About The Books You Were Forced To Read In School' and one of them is

20. Jane Eyre's publisher had no idea the author was a woman until Charlotte Brontë was forced to meet her editors in person.

Charlotte Brontë wrote under the pseudonym Currer Bell to distance herself from her writing. She was so particular about hiding her identity that her publishers were shocked to discover she was a woman. They had corresponded by letter until Charlotte and her sister Anne were forced to meet their editors in person. (Myan Mercado) 

Far Out Magazine lists 'The 10 best songs inspired by books' and one of them is of course:

‘Wuthering Heights’ – Kate Bush  

Born on the same day as the author of Wuthering Heights’ Emily Brontë, albeit over 100 years apart, Bush had an affinity with the written word that would permeate all her songs. But none more so than this record breaker (making Bush the first female to write and record a chart-topping single), which saw Bush take Brontë’s characters into the modern world. 

The song was written in 1977 when “there was a full moon, the curtains were open and it came quite easily,” as Bush told her fan club in 1979. Bush lifted lines straight from Brontë’s work as she used Earnshaw’s plea, “Let me in! I’m so cold”, among other quotations from the novel. It’s clear that Bush truly connected with the song, and in fact, the novel too. 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 smiles.) 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.” (Jack Whatley)

According to a contributor to The Spectrum, the original soundtrack of Pride and Prejudice (1995) by Carl Davis is

also the perfect music for running down a hallway with a candle and pretending to be Jane Eyre. (Marie Sayler)

CN Traveler recommends '9 books to spark your wanderlust in 2023' and one of them is

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

This year, I revisited a book I was assigned in high school when it caught my eye on a shelf in New York's McNally Jackson Nolita, showcased with a group of “eerie” titles in the month of October. In the 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea, Dominican-British author Jean Rhys gives the infamous madwoman in the attic from Jane Eyre a story, and a life. The feminist, post-colonial prequel is set in the Caribbean, part one in Jamaica during the protagonist’s childhood, and part two in Dominica during her toxic honeymoon with Mr. Rochester. The descriptions of these islands are at once beautiful and haunting. Take, for example: “The road climbed upward. On one side the wall of green, on the other a steep drop to the ravine below. We pulled up and looked at the hills, the mountains, and the blue-green sea. There was a soft warm wind blowing but I understand why the porter had called it a wild place. Not only wild but menacing. Those hills would close in on you.” These locations are not romanticised – they’re integral to the story Rhys tells about race, power, and assimilation – and in that way, this read will prompt your interest in them in more ways than one. (Alex Erdekian)

Literary Hub has an article on 'How the Victorians Created the Modern English Novel'.