‘Look how busy Haworth is and how long ago the Brontë sisters died’

The Times features theatre director Emma Rice.

She survived a very public early exit from running Shakespeare’s Globe. She got through a hoo-ha about winning Arts Council funding for the theatre company she set up immediately afterwards. And after that, Emma Rice’s company prospered with her rambunctious yet heartfelt reinventions of old stories such as Angela Carter’s Wise Children (also the name of the company), Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.

Yet last year Rice decided it was time to shut up shop. Wuthering Heights was still touring, indeed playing to more people than any other Wise Children show, in Britain and beyond. It got rave reviews too. But putting on theatre at the tail end of Covid was hard. And Rice ran into what felt like an endless series of “trip hazards”, as she calls them as she sits with me in (spoiler alert: happy ending ahoy) Wise Children’s cosy new permanent home in Frome, Somerset. (Dominic Maxwell)

The Telegraph has an article on Holmfirth, a small town in West Yorkshire which owes its popularity to the TV show Last of the Summer Wine.

But [Laura Booth, who has owned Sid’s Cafe, a key location in Last of the Summer Wine, for 17 years] worries about the future. “Last of the Summer Wine isn’t in that prime-time slot any more but it’s part of TV history. Colin, the coach driver, said, years ago, ‘Look how busy Haworth is and how long ago the Brontë sisters died.’ Hopefully we can stick around as long as they have.” (Emma Sibbles)

Woman's World recommends and ranks some classic films available on Amazon Prime.

7. Wuthering Heights (1939)

Emily Brontë’s classic novel comes to life in this fantastic period romance-drama that is, trust us, much more engrossing than skimming through the book’s CliffsNotes. It stars Merle Oberon as Cathy, Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff and David Niven, who complicates things, of course, as Edgar Linton.

The film won an Oscar for Best Cinematography, and it was nominated for  seven others (including for Olivier and director William Wyler). As its original New York Times review notes, “It is, unquestionably, one of the most distinguished pictures of the year, one of the finest ever produced by Mr. [Samuel] Goldwyn, and one you should decide to see.” (Ron Kelly)

AnneBrontë.org features 'Charlotte Brontë’s Fascinating Letter To Hartley Coleridge'.