Brontë craftsmanship

A contributor to Literary Hub recommends Karen Powell's Fifteen Wild Decembers 'If You Want to Understand the Enduring Appeal of Wuthering Heights'.

There is a meme circling online asking whether you’re an Emily Brontë or a Charlotte Brontë person. Every thirteen-year-old girl must decide, according to the post, with the implication that the way you answer that question at thirteen will determine the rest of your life. I was a Charlotte person, unambiguously. Charlotte’s world made sense to me in the way I needed the world to make sense at that age, offering self-respect, moral clarity, and—most importantly for my teenage self—a love story that felt earned. Jane Eyre taught me that suffering could be metabolized into dignity, that integrity was its own reward. I found Emily’s novel disturbing in a way I couldn’t quite name and kept my distance from it for years. Decades, really.

Emerald Fennell’s new film adaptation has brought Wuthering Heights back into the conversation, and I suspect a lot of people are returning to Emily Brontë right now, or encountering her for the first time. Before you see it—or alongside it, or instead of it, depending on your disposition—I’d recommend picking up Karen Powell’s 2023 novel Fifteen Wild Decembers. It is the best preparation I know for that encounter, because far from softening Emily’s brutal vision or making Wuthering Heights more palatable, it offers something I didn’t have as a young reader: the context of what Emily Brontë was actually writing about, and why.

Powell’s novel is narrated in  Emily’s voice, and centers her role as primary caretaker for her brother Branwell during the years she was writing Wuthering Heights. Branwell Brontë—once the family’s great hope, the son on whom all expectations rested—spent those years in a spiral of alcohol and laudanum addiction, humiliated by a failed love affair with a married employer, cycling through rages and remorse, through binges and vows of sobriety that lasted until they didn’t. He died in September 1848, just months after Emily’s novel was published. She followed him that December.

What Powell renders so precisely is the dailiness of that care. Emily hauling Branwell home from drinking, supporting what she drily describes as “two grown men up the stairs, one half-blind, the other incapable”—her father, whose eyesight was failing, and her brother, who could barely stand. Emily scrubbing a soiled rug in the back kitchen the morning after, while Charlotte’s voice comes at her “sour as an underripe plum,” asking why she can’t make Branwell clean up after himself. The landlord at the inn, looking doubtfully at Emily as Branwell is shouldered to the door, shirt half-untucked, one sleeve of his coat hanging empty: You’ll manage? And Emily managing, as she always does, turning him in the right direction and tacking their way home.

These scenes are not dramatic in any conventional sense. They are repetitive by design, because that is what this kind of caregiving actually is—the same crisis with minor variations, the same hope extinguished in roughly the same way, the same morning after. Powell understands that the accumulation of these moments is itself a form of knowledge, and that Emily was accumulating it in real time while writing one of the strangest novels in the English language. (Ellen O'Connell Whittet)

The Guardian asks bookish questions to writer Florence Knapp.

The writer who changed my mind

During the long summer between GCSEs and A-levels, reading felt, for the first time, like work. I trudged through Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, resenting the densely worded pages and Jane’s interminable stay at Lowood. But in class, when we began to analyse it chapter by chapter, it came alive for me. I think that was the year I started to notice the craftsmanship in how something was written.

The Bark takes readers behind the scenes of the forthcoming Bearden Theatre production of Jane Eyre, which opens on April 23rd.

This year’s spring play is doing more than just retelling a story.

In Bearden’s production of Jane Eyre, Jane is followed from early childhood to late adolescence. Bearden theatre will portray this development through the use of two actors. This play showcases a unique collaboration between Jane as a child and Jane as she ages into adulthood to seamlessly portray one character across different points in time.

Junior McKenna Webb (young Jane) and senior Caroline Alley (young adult Jane) have taken on the roles of the same character at different times in life, mainly focusing on matching each other’s mannerisms and personalities to create a smooth transition after the shift in age.

“I just kind of watch what Caroline does and see how she moves in her facial expressions and what I can do to enhance that even more because young Jane is just a more vibrant version of older Jane,” Webb said.

Webb describes young Jane as relentless, shaped by the hardships during her childhood and school highlighting the character’s emotional intensity and raw honesty.

Alley uses this to build on to the foundation of young Jane with a more controlled and reflective version of the character. 

“She still speaks her mind, but more respectfully,” Alley said.

This shift in mannerisms reflects Jane’s growth and maturation, especially after learning about forgiveness and restraint from formative role models in her life.

Despite the differences between the two versions of this character, both Webb and Alley worked to maintain a clear connection between the portrayals of Jane. This was accomplished by studying shared traits such as intelligence, isolation, and emotional depth that remains consistent between them throughout the play.

Director Ms. Katie Alley underscores the importance of their connection and partnership to the storytelling of the production. 

“They will want to have some similar mannerisms and make sure their dialect is similar,” she said.

Through the careful work and observation of Jane and her journey, Webb and Alley are able to create a unified character and performance throughout the play. This collaboration between the two actresses highlights both their individual talents while also using their strong teamwork skills in bringing this complex character to life. (Kaelyn Martinez)

A musical adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden is about to open at York Theatre Royal and BBC features it.

But the Yorkshire described in The Secret Garden, [biographer Ann Thwaite] says, is "the Yorkshire of her imagination and the Yorkshire inspired by the Brontës".

"Frances Hodgson Burnett had certainly read both Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights and indeed probably all the Brontë novels," she says. (Seb Cheer)

Spanish TV presenter Marina Comes travelled to Haworth for her TV programme Zapeando.