This urge to keep reimagining the sisters has kept them alive

The Stage interviews Gemma Whelan, who plays Charlotte in the about-to-open play Underdog: The Other Other Brontë.

“I’ve learned so much about the Brontës in the past few weeks,” says Gemma Whelan, on a break from rehearsals of Underdog: The Other Other Brontë, Sarah Gordon’s irreverent new play for the National Theatre and Northern Stage about the Brontë sisters, in which she plays Charlotte alongside Adele James who plays Emily and Rhiannon Clements as the oft-overlooked Anne. 

Whelan remembers being forced to read Jane Eyre at school and finding it “such a chore”. When revisiting the novel as an adult, however, in preparation for the role, she found it extraordinary. “I feel sad for the younger me that didn’t take it seriously,” she says.

Whelan has been immersing herself in the world of the Brontës. “Charlotte wrote that she wanted to be forever known. She wanted fame. She wanted notoriety. She wanted to be recognised for her work. She wanted to rub shoulders with the greats.” She was confident in her abilities, she was ambitious – and she was strong. 

When Whelan was playing the warrior Yara Greyjoy in the HBO fantasy-epic Game of Thrones, she was often asked about what it was like to play such a strong woman – a question she found frustrating, with its implication that women aren’t ordinarily strong. “Charlotte Brontë was similarly determined. She was feisty, fiery and fully aware. She was a person of the world,” Whelan says.

When Whelan’s agent sent her the script for Underdog, she was about 10 pages in when she knew she had to do it – “I devoured the whole thing.” While the play contains weighty themes, she says, “it’s also extremely funny and lightly held. It’s rambling, wonderful and wild, as well as deeply sad and moving”.

Since Elizabeth Gaskell’s posthumous biography of Charlotte was published in 1857, the Brontë sisters’ lives have, Whelan says, “been revised, reworked and reimagined by so many people that actually no one really has a hold on the reality anymore”. A mythology has built up around them – something Gordon’s play acknowledges and explores. At the same time, the position the sisters occupy in both literary history and the public imagination can lead to a sense of protectiveness over them. Given that their story has been reworked so often, says Whelan, “why not ruffle feathers as well?”. After all, Whelan adds, this urge to keep reimagining the sisters “has kept them alive”. (Natasha Tripney)

WAMU reviews Percival Everett’s novel James:

Admittedly, the strategy of thrusting a so-called supporting character into the spotlight of a reimagined classic has been done so often, it can feel a little tired: We’ve heard from (among a multitude of others) Ahab’s wife; Daisy Buchanan’s daughter; Father March, the patriarch of those Little Women; and Bertha Mason, that poor “madwoman” in the attic who terrorizes Jane Eyre. (Maureen Corrigan)

Also inspired by the same novel, The Week goes on to list the 'Best novels retold from a different character's point of view' and one of them is

'Wide Sargasso Sea', by Jean Rhys

Stretching the premise slightly is this prequel to "Jane Eyre" by Charlotte Brontë, although it does, of course, give "a voice and an identity to Mr Rochester's first wife, Antoinette – aka Bertha, the madwoman in the attic" and it has become a "gateway text to post-colonial and feminist theory", said the BBC. Antoinette is a "potent heroine, plucked half-formed from the shadowy margins of one of literature's best-loved romances". From "Jane Eyre" we "learn little about Bertha", only that she's "a monster who must be bound with rope, a white woman from the Caribbean whom Rochester was long ago pressured into marrying for her money", said Time. But Rhys, who grew up in the Caribbean, "presses on the silences in Brontë to give Bertha her own story" and "turns a menacing cipher into a grieving, plausible young woman". (Adrienne Wyper)

The Argonaut lists Wuthering Heights as one of '5 must-read Gothic novels'.A contributor to The Town Line recommends The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.