Festivals and friends

Ireland Live / ClareLive (and loyal reader @Joanne Wilcock) on what to expect of this year's Charlotte Brontë Festival in Kilkee, Ireland:

Following on from the "wonderful success" of last year's inaugural Charlotte Brontë Festival, Kilkee Civic Trust are delighted to announce that this year's festival will take place again at Culturlann Sweeney in Kilkee.

The festival honouring the visit of renowned classic author Charlotte Brontë to the west Clare town, just over 170 years ago, will take place September 13-15.

An array of Brontë experts, including Dr Claire O'Callaghan and Dr Michael Stewart, will share their knowledge and expertise on the famous literary family, which included Charlotte's sisters, and fellow authors and poets, Emily and Anne.

These talks will be coupled with a play 'Walking Invisible With You' written and directed by playwright Jenny Bassett, two musical interludes performed by Dr.Michael O'Dowd (author of Charlotte Bronte An Irish Odyssey) and his wife Christine (nee Patterson) followed by the sweet melodious voices of the Gunas under the baton of Choral Director Rhoda Cleary.

To round up the week-end a heritage walk will take place on Sunday, September 15, at noon titled Walking in the footsteps of Charlotte and Arthur, led by renowned local historian John Williams. (Ellen Gough)

Literary Review features The Virago Book of Friendship, edited by Rachel Cooke.

The Virago Book of Friendship is an anthology of writings centred on friendships between women. The lack of gender specificity in the title takes us to the nub of the problem: friendships between women exist in life but not in literature, at least not in literature from before 1940, when Vera Brittain paid tribute to Winifred Holtby in Testament of Friendship. There are sisters galore in 18th- and 19th-century novels, but not the kind of ‘bosom friend’ that Anne Shirley longs for in Anne of Green Gables, or the support groups described in Sex and the City and Bridget Jones’s Diary. 

What about Anna Howe and Clarissa, you cry, or Helen Burns and Jane Eyre, or Elizabeth Bennet and Charlotte Lucas in Pride and Prejudice? The friendship in Clarissa (1748) between Samuel Richardson’s tragic heroine and Anna, her great confidante, is derided as much as it is celebrated. While Colonel Morden believes their relationship an exception to the rule that friendship is ‘too fervent a flame for female minds to manage’, Robert Lovelace, who is pursuing Clarissa, considers their tittle-tattle ‘nothing but chaff and stubble’. Where women are concerned, Lovelace argues, friendship is ‘a mere word … a cork-bottomed shuttlecock’. ‘When a man comes in between the pretended inseparables,’ friendship ‘is given up’. The truth of this theory is never tested because, after Lovelace rapes her, Clarissa dies. Helen Burns also dies, while Charlotte Lucas marries Mr Collins. If it’s hard to imagine Elizabeth’s friendship with Charlotte surviving her marriage, it’s not because the relationship is a cork--bottomed shuttlecock but because she loathes Charlotte’s husband. (Frances Wilson)