World Book Day

It's World Book Day today, so we hope you're having a nice one. The Guardian celebrates by sharing '10 lovely literary retreats for bookworms', one of which is

A room of one’s own, Cornwall

Penzance’s historic Chapel Street has many a literary connection. From the house in which Maria Branwell, mother of the Brontë writing clan, grew up, to the Admiral Benbow pub – said to have inspired the inn of the same name in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island – the street promises rich pickings for visiting bookworms. Not least at Women in Word, the bookshop of the Hypatia Trust. Sitting towards the top of the street, it specialises in women’s fiction and nonfiction and includes titles by local writers. Behind it is a stylish two-bedroom holiday apartment, income from which supports the Trust’s work.

Three nights from £373.50 for four people, self-catering, hypatia-trust.org.uk (Rhiannon Batten)

But The Guardian also has sad news as it reports that

Only 2% of GCSE students study a book written by a female author, according to research by campaigners who are urging exam boards to diversify their set text lists to curb the rise of misogynistic views. [...]

The most common books authored by women on the approved text lists across exam boards between 2018 and 2022 were Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, the campaigners found.

These two novels are among the longest on set lists, at 624 and 448 pages respectively, and the campaigners said teachers were disincentivised from choosing them over shorter, more accessible books. (Rachel Hall)

Nylon interviews Frances O'Connor.

Brontë purists, of course, are taking issue with O’Connor’s creative liberties (how could Emily possibly have – gasp – hot sex?), but for historical accuracy can take a backseat when it comes to timeless human conditions. [...]

Where did this film start for you? Did you always want to make an Emily Brontë film?

I've been wanting to write and direct for a while and I've been working on the script for a while. I knew for my first thing I wanted it to be about Emily because I felt like I've always located in her a sense of being authentic and being true to who I am, even if what that is feels different. I think we all feel that we're different, ultimately. I just think she's also a really beautiful kind of role model for people in terms of being yourself. The other thing is I've always just wondered who she was as a person. She's quite a mysterious figure, so spending time with her on film was a great way of thinking about her and getting to know her a bit better. Even though, ultimately, I felt after the film, I still feel I don't really know her, but that's all right. She's elusive. [...]

Some reviews have been talking about how creative liberties were taken. If you can't already tell, I'm not a Brontë purist. I didn't even know any of that, but also wouldn't have cared. But what is that about? Are people just being protective?

I think some people don't like that she's not a virgin. They want to keep her in a glass case. They don't want her to go out and have a good time. I really have loved reading some of the reviews that have been like, "How dare you?" because to have such an extreme reaction means that it affected them and it means that they've maybe got their own relationship with Emily Brontë and they've placed her up on a shelf where they feel that she should stay.

There's a mask scene in the first 20 minutes where a dead mother comes to visit, or in imagination does, but if you still feel like you are watching a biopic at that point, I really feel like that's on you. This is a film that's exploring the idea of Emily. Scenes from Wuthering Heights are in the film and her poetry are in the film. There's a love triangle in the film, there's a love triangle in Wuthering Heights. It’s a mix of different things. In the same way that Emily wrote what she felt, that's what I wanted to do. I've got to say, it fills me full of delight to be honest. I'm coming into the story with such respect for Emily and so much love for her, and I know when I break the rules, and I know why I'm breaking the rules.

I'm doing the film to speak to people in your generation. If you like the film and you respond to it and it ties into your life and who you are in the middle of working out who you are, then I'm so happy – and that's what art should do, that's what film should do. To just watch a character through a glass case, what's the point? What's interesting is Emily kept all her reviews in her desk and there were lots of people who'd written kind of “how dare you?” reviews. She got them out and read them every now and then to kind of have a laugh, so I feel like she'd probably feel the same way as me. (Sophia June)

The Arts Fuse reviews the film.

The lives of novelists and poets are a frequent subject for cinematic storytelling. Powerful literature, the kind that appeals to readers over the centuries, inevitably inspires visual and emotional fantasies. And that has led to film adaptations: lending concrete voices and visuals to what had been creatures of the imagination, confined to the page. Wuthering Heights is one of those novels that many of us (outside of English majors) might have first encountered as a film, starring Merle Oberon and Lawrence Olivier as the doomed lovers Catherine and Heathcliff. Emily Brontë’ wrote only one novel (under the pen name Ellis Bell) and it is considered one of English literature’s great Gothic romances. Brontë died young, at 30, and in Emily, screenwriter and director Frances O’Connor has spun an origin story for her brilliance that plumbs the emotional depths of her life, including familial strife and tumultuous romance.

The film’s opening credits play over dramatic vocal music, creating an odd, tense mood, and the first scene establishes a domestic life rife with conflict. In the Brontë family home, Emily (Sex Education’s Emma Mackey) has given a copy of her newly-published novel to her sister Charlotte, author of another Gothic romantic classic, Jane Eyre. Charlotte (played by Alexandra Dowling) is disgusted with what she has read and asks why Emily would write such a book, full of such horrible people who only care about themselves. Emily is silent and stoic at this outburst. Wuthering Heights was accepted for publication not long after Jane Eyre was published. The success of Charlotte’s book (written under the pen name Currer Bell) delayed the printing of Emily’s novel. The film hints at the artistic competition among the Brontë siblings. Anne also wrote a novel, Agnes Grey (with the pen name Acton Bell), and like Emily and Charlotte, was a published poet. The undercurrent of tension establishes an intriguing dynamic. [...]

The excellent cast is more than up to the task posed by this historical biopic. The chemistry between Emily and Weightman is electric, and the scenes of their sexual awakening are rendered with lush, sensual detail. Abel Korzeniowski’s (A Single Man, Nocturnal Animals) score is mostly compelling, but there are times when it feels inappropriately jolting. This unevenness in tone is also partly due to Frances O’Connor’s somewhat disjointed screenplay. The narrative is chronological, but the defining events in Emily’s young life are often dramatized in oddly random or abrupt ways. It would have been much more effective to build up to these epiphanic moments by exploring the unusual Brontë family dynamic a bit more deeply. Still, the film’s sweeping visuals serve as partial compensation, capturing the natural marvels of the landscape that inspired such iconic writing. The stone houses, rolling pastures, spreading trees, and storm-swept moors become characters in this origin story — which becomes the inspiration for one of English literature’s great doomed romances. For O’Connor (an Australian-British actress with a respectable career), the Gothic novelist is an artist who casts off repressive social norms and uses words to evoke (and exorcise) demons of terrible natural beauty.

As with Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, there is an obligatory scene in which we see Emily writing her novel, by hand and by candlelight. In O’Connor’s interpretation, Wuthering Heights is a work born of grief and rebellion, a declaration of a misfit’s right to be who she is, and a paean to lost love. Despite some occasional missteps of mood and underdeveloped subtexts, Emily traverses this vision of liberation with enormous sensitivity and daring. (Peg Aloi)

Los Angeles Review of Books features Netflix’s Love Is Blind.

George Eliot's Middlemarch (1872) begins with a marriage that disappoints and dissolves over time. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), by contrast, ends with a marriage between Jane and Rochester, a union that actually restores sight in one eye to a blind Rochester. The prototypical marriage plot in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) converges property consolidation with a happy union between Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet. Victorian literature, after Austen, often plays with marriage as an organizing plot device, a contract that either culminates the events of the novel or catalyzes them.

Netflix’s hit reality TV series Love Is Blind (2020­– ) is also obsessed with the marriage plot. The show, which describes itself onscreen as an “experiment,” takes Charlotte Brontë’s blind love literally. (Samantha Pergadia)

Out in Jersey reviews Wise Children's Wuthering Heights.

Wuthering Heights, in its various incarnations on the screen and for television — especially the 1939 film with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon as Heathcliff and Cathy — has been regarded as a tragic romance. In its play version here, as in the novel, the focus is more on the roots of revenge and domestic violence, especially that of the times in which the original novel was written. As such, it becomes a harder slog to go through for modern audiences.

Those with a taste for depictions of the social norms of mid-1800’s England, and those with a liking for modern British stagecraft, will no doubt be enthralled with McCarter Theatre Center’s production of Wuthering Heights. For all others, I would recommend spending an evening at home watching the 1939 film while snuggled under a blanket. (Allen Neuner)

Still on stage, Arizona Daily Star reviews Polly Teale's Brontë in Tucson.

The Scoundrel and Scamp production, directed with a sure hand by Bryan Rafael Falcón, has a solid cast. Dawn McMillan’s Charlotte slipped right into the role of the bossy big sister; Allison Akmajian made Emily’s suppressed rage and desire palpable; and Myani Watson shone as the self-righteous Anne. Hunter Hnat, who rarely disappoints, played several roles, including the drunken brother, Branwell. Tony Caprile’s principal role was as the father, Patrick, but he took on a number of other characters, giving them all distinction.

The trouble with this play is the script. Skipping back and forth in time made the story convoluted and confusing. Elizabeth Falcón was tasked with playing characters from the women’s novels, who appeared to underscore what the women were writing. You know, the free-spirited Catherine from “Wuthering Heights,” the mad Mrs. Robinson from “Jane Eyre.” The device was overwrought and kind of annoying. Although the Brontë family was fascinating, this over-long play never made us care much about them. 

That said, this production was packed with energy and talent. That almost made up for a weak script.(Kathleen Allen)

We have been reading reviews of Polly Teale's Brontë for many years and we would say this is the first time that it is called a 'weak script', which we don't think it is. At all.

Die Glocke (Germany) reviews the stage production of Wuthering Heights in Güttersloh.

The Brussels Brontë Blog has a post on a recent talk on interior design in Charlotte Brontë’s Belgian novels.