Inviting the most introverted writers to a dinner party

We love this original answer to a standard question given by writer Rick Riordan when asked bookish questions by The New York Times.

You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?

I don’t do dinner parties, so I would probably invite the most introverted writers I could think of — perhaps Charlotte Brontë, Jane Austen and Emily Dickinson — because none of them would show up. Then we could enjoy a quiet evening at home by ourselves, reading by the fire.

The Gazette has an article on the American premiere of Brontë: The World Without.

Riverside Theatre audiences will learn more about the sisters who wrote “Jane Eyre,” “Wuthering Heights” and “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,” when “Brontë: The World Without” makes its American premiere in Iowa City from Nov. 30 to Dec. 10, 2023.

Knight initially wrote to the playwright’s representative, got a copy of the script, “and loved it,” he said.

“I just love the Brontë sisters. I've been to their home in Haworth (England), and I've just always found their story so fascinating,” he said. “In fact, Chekhov was thinking about the Brontë sisters when he wrote ‘Three Sisters.’ ” [...]

Even though it’s not a holiday-themed show, director Juliana Frey-Mendez sees parallels through the family dynamics playing out in the home in which Charlotte, Emily and Anne grew up in the early 19th century. Except for times when they served as governesses, they lived with their father, a minister, and their brother who led a troubled life, Knight noted.

“I think everybody knows what it's like to navigate family, and to have to sort of wrestle with how much you love someone and how much they're frustrating you,” said Frey-Mendez, 34. An Iowa City native, she now lives in Columbia, Mo., where she works as an adjunct professor at the University of Missouri, as well as a freelance director.

“Yes, it's a story about these three sisters, but it's also a story about what it means to be an author and artist, a storyteller, and what it means to stay true to your authentic voice in the face of so many pressures that are working against you.

“For me, the title of the play is really telling. It's ‘Brontë: A World Without,’ and these women really were at war in many ways with the society that was telling them how to behave, telling them how to think, telling them what they were good at, telling them what was right and what was wrong,” she said.

“And I think that the fact that we have these stories and that they have endured is really a testament to the human spirit, and to the resilience of the imagination. To be able to dream what could be in a world of your own making is not just something that artists and creatives need to hear. But I think we as people need to remember that there is great power in collective imagining.”

The play will evoke a range of emotions, so “come ready to laugh, to cry, to take in some beautiful sights and sounds,” Frey-Mendez said.

“The sound has been composed specifically for this production,” she noted.

Audiences will be seated on either side of the playing space, creating a long alley that serves not only as a room in the Bronte home, but also moves the sisters back and forth time and space, via projections.

The action takes place over three years, when the sisters are reunited after being apart, on through the publishing of their novels, “and how success changes the dynamic,” Frey-Mendez said.

“I'm really excited not just for people to see the space and the acting, but also just to experience the projections, and the way we are thinking about shadow and sort of creating this haunting Gothic, Victorian experience,” she added. (Diana Nollen)

The Darlington and Stockton Times has a 'young reporter' write about 'The prose and poetry of Yorkshire'.

Possibly three of the most influential authors of the literary canon, Charlotte, Anne and Emily Brontë were sisters, born in Thornton and later associated with Howarth [sic], a village in the West Riding of Yorkshire, where they lived in the parsonage with their brother Branwell. Charlotte’s Jane Eyre was the first of the novels to find success, followed by Emily’s Wuthering Heights and Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, all three now acknowledged as classics. Whilst all three novels are set in rural England, of the sisters it is Emily’s Wuthering Heights that has a significant setting. The gothic novel centres the themes of obsession, violence and death as it focuses on the love affair between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff against the backdrop of the bleak and windy North York moors. There are two main settings, the first the aristocratic manor Thrushcross Grange, which is juxtaposed by the second, the barren farmhouse of Wuthering Heights. Brontë based the farmhouse, a dilapidated and isolated structure, on Top Withens, a ruin on the moors near Haworth (pictured). The novel, inspired by our local environment, became a gargantuan success within literature, influencing the genres of gothic literature and black romanticism forever, and becoming almost mythical in its status as a classical text. (Méabh O'Cofaigh)

According to Her Campus, Jane Eyre is one of '6 Books About Women Who Struggle with Mental Health'.

2. Jane Eyre

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bront_e, written in 1847, follows an orphaned girl Jane and her time as a teacher to the niece of Mr. Rochester, the lord of Thornbury. In that time, they fall in love, but horrifying complications arise. Mr. Rochester is already married to a woman named Bertha. Bertha is a Creole woman he married who went “mad.” Similar to the idea in heart of darkness, after moving to a country strange and alien to her, she begins to develop clear signs of mental illness. She exhibits impulsive violence and emotional instability. She of all the women on this list is the most heart-breaking. Instead of seeking help, Mr. Rochester locks her in the attic and has a servant sit on guard making sure she never gets out, like a caged animal. (Steph C)