Wuthering Heights and the Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Werewolves

The Telegraph and Argus recommends '5 Yorkshire locations all book lovers need to visit' sadly misspelling Haworth.

Howarth

Where? The home of the Brontë sisters

“The Brontë parsonage museum was the home of the Brontë siblings, including Charlotte, Emily and Anne, who famously wrote classics such as Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

“The Brontë sisters lived most of their lives in the parsonage in Haworth.

“The home is now a museum where visitors can step into the rooms where the sisters wrote their novels and letters, see the clothes they wore and the drawings they once drew.” (Molly Court)

The Telegraph and Argus also features an exhibition of local artists at The Bingley Gallery.

The stark beauty of Yorkshire’s upland moors is the main focus of a new exhibition of work by Leeds-based artist Judith Levin at The Bingley Gallery.

These are scenes where you might expect the Brontë sisters, or less romantically perhaps, a trio of Last of The Summer Wine characters to make their appearance.

However, the paintings remain uninhabited landscapes where you can imagine the song of the skylark or perhaps, as one visitor commented, the sensation of cold water seeping into your boots. (David Starley)

Christa Ackroyd mourns the loss of the Sycamore Gap tree to vandalism and mentions other favourite trees of hers as well as the Brontë birthplace in The Yorkshire Post.

They are planted on the edge of a once derelict graveyard on what was a old toll road for wool traders travelling in and out of the burgeoning city of Bradford. The overgrown site and it’s hidden past was saved by my lovely friend Steve and is tended by him and his volunteers.

That graveyard was beside a simple church, The Old Bell Chapel, where Patrick Brontë came to preach in Thornton 200 years ago with his wife and his two young children. By the time he left a few years later bound for greater things in Haworth, his family had grown with the birth of Charlotte, Emily, Anne and their brother Branwell.

Before he ventured over the wild moors to his new parish, the Reverend Patrick Brontë planted eight small saplings, each representing himself his wife and his six children. Today they tower over the site of the derelict church ruins. And I love them for all the romance in their story.

So why am I telling you this. Because in the next week or so local residents including Steve and myself are launching a campaign to save the humble home where the Bronte sisters were born and lived just a stone’s throw from that graveyard, a little terraced house on Market Street.

They plan to open it up to visitors, particularly young people from Bradford and beyond, so they too can learn the valuable lesson the three famous sisters taught us, that no matter where you are born, no matter how humble your origins, with belief, hard work and a refusal to take no for answer you can achieve.

Saving the Brontë birthplace won’t change the world. Just like the cutting down one tree won’t end it.

But if one young person is inspired by three girls who were laughed at when they said they wanted to become writers but went on to become the greatest literary family in the world tackling such taboo subjects as gender, race and class two centuries ago, then it is worth all the effort and hard work this dedicated band are putting in.

And when they launch their community share offer very soon on www.brontebirthplace.com I hope you will join them.

At the moment the Brontë birthplace with its blue plaque stands sad, forlorn and empty. The campaigners plan for it to be reopened in time for Bradford’s City of culture in 2025. You will even be able to sleep in the same bedrooms where the girls once dreamed their dreams and sit awhile by the very fireplace besides which they were born.

Above all, that little house with all its history needs once more to echo to the sound of creativity and laughter as it did in the days of the Brontës.

They were the reason I started writing. They were the reason as a young girl in Bradford I began to realise that there’s more to life than worrying about whether you are dressed in the latest fashion or having a good time, that the pen really is mightier than the sword when I picked up their books. And that we should never be afraid to tackle things we see which are wrong.

Sometimes all it takes is preserving a piece of the past to give someone a glimpse of their future. There were never any writers mightier in my book than three little girls born in front of the fireplace in a house in Thornton you probably didn’t even know existed.

That little house needs saving for Yorkshire, for the nation but particularly for a much maligned city as it moves towards what could be the greatest year in its cultural history since the Brontës took up their pens. And that, dear readers, as Charlotte once wrote, is a legacy worth preserving. Sometimes a tree is more than just a tree. And a house is more than just a building.

The Wall Street Journal reviews Tim Powers's dark take on the Brontë family: My Brother's Keeper.

And while “My Brother’s Keeper” could have been called “Wuthering Heights and the Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Werewolves” (along the lines of the Austen send-up “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies”), this is not exactly a parody.

The book begins with a familiar spooky conceit: A trio of children play a game of make-believe in order to see the dead. In this case the youngsters are Anne, Emily and Branwell Brontë (Charlotte stays at home). In time, the siblings will learn that they may have unwittingly sold their souls to a malevolent spirit that their father accidentally brought over from Ireland to their Yorkshire home, where the apparition seeks to unite itself with its equally powerful (and dead) sister.

Years pass until, one day, an adult Emily finds a wounded, grumpy man out on the moors—and so begins the adventure: Alcuin Curzon is a reluctant werewolf, involved against his will in the death of his fiancée. He seeks revenge against a tribe of evil shapeshifters. The previously mentioned evil spirit is their master, keen to collect on the debt owed to him by the Brontës.

“My Brother’s Keeper” is at its strongest when deftly mixing real-world biography with the stuff of horror; the Brontës’ father really was from Ireland, born with the surname Brunty, a fact that is important to the plot. The details of the Brontë siblings’ early years are on target: The family was richly imaginative and literate. Even before their celebrated novels, they wrote plays, books and poetry set in a shared fantasy world they invented. The Yorkshire housekeeper, Tabby, who entertains them with local stories of haunts and fairies, is also drawn from biographical fact.

But it’s equally delightful to encounter historically accurate details that have nothing to do with the Brontës, such as the complex mechanics of 19th-century firearms—even if Emily seems a little too nonchalant about firing one at bloodthirsty monsters out on the moor.

The internecine involvement of English werewolves, one-eyed cyclopes and heathen gods both Roman and Celtic sometimes makes the tale a little cumbersome—but “My Brother’s Keeper” is an eerie period piece perfectly well-suited to darkening October nights. (Liz Braswell)

A contributor to The Times has reread Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South.

Forget Heathcliff and Mr Darcy. By far the sexiest hero in 19th-century literature is John Thornton. That’s not just because I like a bit of economics and Thornton embodies capital in a book that offers the best contemporary account of the relations between labour and capital during the Industrial Revolution. It’s also because he is such a useful hero. He doesn’t stomp round the moors being poetic, nor lord it in his inherited pile making slightly sarcastic remarks at visitors. He’s the capable self-made type who confronts violent strikers, mollifies his difficult mother and gets the heroine out of trouble with the law even though he thinks she is involved with another man, all the while barely uttering a word except to tell her he loves her. Adorable. (Emma Duncan)

Advanced Television announces the return of Wonderland to Sky Arts:

The Wonderland factual TV series returns to Sky Arts this autumn with an all-new four-part series, Wonderland: Gothic, which explores the phenomenon of ‘Gothic’ and its themes of darkness, emotion, romance, mystery, and menace, and is filled with illustrations from literature, film, art, architecture, and performance.

Produced by Odyssey Television, Wonderland: Gothic premieres on Sky Arts at 9pm on November 7th and examines this highly visualised and persistent voice of a counterculture which has resisted and questioned rationality and authority. Represented by works as diverse as Dracula, Wuthering Heights, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Night of the Living Dead, Get Out and the extraordinary paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, Gothic has achieved mass popularity from its inception and feels as modern now as it did at its creation 250 years ago.  The legacies of slavery and colonialism haunt the Gothic and the worlds it portrays – the colonizer and the colonised, not least in the historic form of Imperial Gothic and the new emerging forms of Black Gothic.

The new four-part documentary series, Wonderland: Gothic combines biography, literary extracts, and interviews with leading academics and film director Tim Burton, together with excerpts from the many books and films made of Gothic work to explore what was behind these well-known Gothic stories.

Wonderland: Gothic is written, produced, directed, and features an original orchestral score by Odyssey Television’s Adrian Munsey.

Episode One

This first episode starts with the general characteristics of Gothic and the privileged racial position of the white race. It explores eighteenth-century Gothic which had its roots in a backlash against conformity from wealthy gay or bisexual young men including Horace Walpole, William Beckford, Matthew Lewis, with their renewed interest in both the medieval and in new forms of Gothic architecture.

It continues by looking at the influence and continuing traditions of the ‘Female Gothic’ notably Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, and Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca.

Mary Shelley’s remarkable prescience and insight in creating Frankenstein is illustrated together with details of her biography and her interest in the conflicts between nature and nurture.

Illustration follows from the work of the three Brontë sisters, the extraordinary character of Heathcliff, the radicalism of Anne Brontë and the life of Rebecca du Maurier and the powerful depiction of Rebecca on film by Alfred Hitchcock.

The episode concludes with the interest of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in spiritualism and the Gothic world of The Hound of the Baskervilles.

And more TV on The Times and Democrat:

Along with its "Creepy Cinema" lineups on Tuesday nights, Turner Classic Movies' celebration of the spooky season will also include Friday evenings devoted to films with various gothic themes. It kicks off tonight with several notable movies based on gothic literary classics. Leading things on is 1939's Wuthering Heights, an adaptation of Emily Brontë's 1847 novel, starring Best Actor Oscar nominee Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon. Next comes Jane Eyre (1944), another film based on a renowned 1847 novel by a Brontë sister, in this case Charlotte. It's led by Joan Fontaine and Orson Welles. 

El placer de la lectura (Spain) recommends Alba Donati's La libreria sulla collina.

Huyendo de la agitación de la ciudad, Alba Donati decidió cambiar el rumbo de su vida y regresar a su Lucignana natal, un pueblo de ciento ochenta habitantes en la campiña toscana. Tras lanzar una campaña de crowdfunding y pedir una donación de libros a las editoriales de Italia, en 2019 abrió las puertas de la librería Sopra la Penna. Su día a día transcurre entre recomendaciones de lecturas, pedidos e ideas para hacer de esa cabaña cerca del bosque un lugar único donde, además de las novedades literarias que Alba elige con mimo, el visitante se sumerge en un universo lleno de sorpresas: una estantería pirata para libros olvidados, calcetines con citas de Orgullo y prejuicio, calendarios de Emily Dickinson, o meriendas con un té que lleva el nombre de Charlotte Brontë y una mermelada que sabe a Alicia en el país de las maravillas . Y a su alrededor gravita otro universo: el de los clientes, amigos, ayudantes, vecinos y familiares para los que la librería en la colina, con su hermosa ventana al valle, se ha convertido en una enorme ventana al mundo. (Translation)

International Times has quite an article on Emily Brontë and her work.