Another dimension to the story of the Brontë family

Keighley News features the proposed plans for the Brontë birthplace in Thornton.

Campaigners launched a bid last year to bring the Thornton house into community ownership.

Now the group has submitted a planning application to Bradford Council to create space for workshops, events and visits by schools and literary groups.

The scheme would also see the property's bedrooms restored to how they'd have looked during the family’s time there, and converted into holiday lets.

Income from the lets would help pay for the building's upkeep.

The property has been run as a small museum in the past, but has spent much of its recent history in private ownership.

Latterly it has operated as a cafe, but the building is currently for sale.

The group behind the Brontë Birthplace plans is attempting to raise enough cash to take on the property and ensure it remains a place the community can enjoy.

A spokesperson says: "This is an extremely significant Grade II*-listed heritage building, yet over the last 35 years it has changed hands frequently.

"If it is to gain its rightful place in the history of this unique literary family, then it does now need to start enjoying the sort of stability already enjoyed by the likes of the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth.

"The proposed provision of ground-floor facilities to host events, workshops, outreach projects, school visits, and art and literary groups celebrating the Brontë legacy will be financed by the existing cafe and restaurant and the holiday lets.

"Our vision is that the Brontë Birthplace has the potential to put Thornton more prominently on the tourist map.

"For visitors and local people it will add another dimension to the story of the Brontë family in the Bradford district." (Alistair Shand)

Evening Standard describes this Ablo Blommeart original painting as follows:

It’s giving Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre and Great Expectations rolled into one deliciously moody print. A nostalgic work with a painterly greyscale, this abstract purchase is aimed at those with tempestuous taste.

Buy now £319, Fenwick (Tania Leslau)

High on Films discusses Jane Campion's 1986 movie Peel.

Resembling the aberration of ‘Wuthering Heights,’ Jane Campion approves a circumstantial revision of all Victorian standards of subjugation. The feminist project experiences the heat of the gender wars through a divisive and ‘factitious determination to be her own master.’ As the son gathers the ‘missing pieces’ of the peels, a coming-together camaraderie is inadvertently created between the father-son duo. (Pritha Banerjee)

Classical Music reviews Bernard Herrmann's Wuthering Heights – Suite; Echoes for Strings giving it 5 out of 5 stars.

Turning Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel Wuthering Heights into an opera was perhaps a logical step for him in 1943 (he’d just scored Fox’s Jane Eyre), though it was certainly a surprising one given the success he was enjoying on the radio and on the screen. Despite that success, Herrmann longed to be taken seriously as a composer (and conductor) and he launched himself into his opera, certain it would be a career-defining work. The result, a three-and-a-half-hour epic, was finally finished in 1951. Its gestation saw Herrmann obsess over Brontë’s world in between radio, film and conducting assignments. It took it’s toll, the period seeing the end of his first marriage and something close to a nervous breakdown. That the opera then went unstaged in his lifetime only added to Herrmann’s woes, though he mounted (and largely paid for) what is still the only recording of the complete work in 1966. [...]

In realising Wuthering Heights in music, Herrmann succeeded where Delius did not – he abandoned his own adaptation. This snapshot, stunningly recorded, serves as a tantalising sample of what it might be to go on Herrmann’s entire emotionally wrought journey. Perhaps we might one day see a new full recording? (Michael Beek)