Hidden Gems

This is the Coast Radio reminds us of an interesting event taking place in Scarborough in a couple of weeks:

It's Scarborough's Big Ideas By The Sea festival over the next two weeks. (...)

The Big Ideas Festival features bell ringing, with a 'big dig' involving members of the public and a tribute to Anne Brontë ahead of the 175th anniversary of her death, on 28th May. (Andrew Snaith)

Collider vindicates the great Roger Corman's The Tomb of Ligeia 1964 Edgar Allan Poe adaptation:

This dour, low-key possession story is one not often adapted, mostly because it's so short. Still, the best one is a 1964 classic by the icon of cult cinema, Roger Corman, who just sadly passed away. The Tomb of Ligeia is the final entry into Corman's Poe Cycle, and by far the most obscure story he decided to adapt. He and writer Robert Towne ran into the issue of having to expand the story, so they took a tale of a man's descent into grief and made a hidden gem with notes from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca, and enough weird psychological complexes and Byronic hero shenanigans to enthrall anyone looking for a darker take on the regency romance. (Rhianna Malas)

The Independent reviews the new season of Bridgerton:

The fact that the BBC hasn’t commissioned an Austen adaptation in years – not to mention an Eliot or a Brontë or whisper it… a Trollope – implies “a crisis, or at least transition, in the genre of literary costume drama”, as the writer and broadcaster Mark Lawson argued last year. The in-depth, slow-burn adaptation that crams in the minutiae of the novel– for a textbook example, see Andrew Davies’ 2005 version of Bleak House, starring Gillian Anderson and Anna Maxwell Martin – seems to have fallen entirely out of style. Perhaps it is simply too expensive for a British broadcaster to broach these days, without the mega-budgets boasted by streamers.

The Irish Independent interviews the writer Moya Roddy:

Your favourite literary character?

Like a bad friend I love them and leave them, but the characters of Elizabeth Bennett, Jane Eyre, Tess, Anna Karenina are among my abiding favourites.

An alert for today, May 19, in Beverly, MA:

The Paul Madore Chorale presents a concert of music and poetry celebrating the earth and the life it supports. The three parts of the program are A Year in New England, Siesta, and Hello Earth, with poets ranging from Emily Brontë through Walt Whitman to Robert Frost. Their words have been set to music by such varied composers as Randall Thompson, Englebert Humperdinck, and Ola Gjeilo. Come join us for an exciting afternoon of music both classic and new. The performance is Sunday, May 19, 2024, at 3 pm at the First Baptist Church, 221 Cabot Street, Beverly, MA 01915.  (Patch Salem)

And another one for tomorrow, May 20, in Southampton, NY:

Classic Movie: Wuthering Heights (1939)

Mon, May 20, 2024 at 5:45 PM

Rogers Memorial Library, 91 Coopers Farm Rd, Southampton, NY, 11968

This adaptation of the Emily Brontë novel set in 19th-century England tells the classic tale of unfortunate lovers Heathcliff and Cathy, who despite their deep love for each other, are forced by circumstance and prejudice to live their lives apart. The film starred Merle Oberon, Sir Laurence Olivier, Hugh Williams, and David Niven, and received eight Academy Awards nominations, winning for Best Cinematography. (Patch Southampton)

GoldDerby publishes a top 15 of Laurence Olivier's films including Wuthering Heights 1939, of course:

7. Wuthering Heights 1939

Literary purists were appalled by this adaptation of Emily Brontë’s novel, which only depicts 16 of its 34 chapters, slashing an entire crop of characters from the narrative. Yet director William Wyler perfectly captures the gloomy, tragic mood of the book, thanks in large part to Gregg Toland’s atmospheric black-and-white cinematography (which won the Oscar). Olivier and Merle Oberon perfectly embody Heathcliff and Cathy, the doomed couple at the story’s center. The film does an expert job recreating Victorian England (with Thousand Oaks, CA, standing in for those windy hills), while the operatic performances make our hearts swoon. “Wuthering Heights” earned seven additional Oscar bids, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor for Olivier (he lost to Robert Donat in “Goodbye, Mr. Chips”). (Zach Laws & Chris Beachum)

Nexos reviews a Spanish translation of a selection of the poetry of Lorine Niedecker quoting from a 1947 letter where she said: 'The Brontës/had their moors, I have/my marshes!

El Español (Spain) reviews Bird by Andrea Arnold as seen at the Cannes Film Festival:

Bird es posiblemente su mejor película, lo que no es moco de pavo si pensamos en obras como Fish Tank (2009) o American Honey (2016), que a este cronista nunca le han convencido del todo –sí, sin embargo, su inspirada adaptación de Cumbres borrascosas–. (Carlos Reviriego) (Translation)

Through the Eyes of the Brontës goes "Back to Lively Banagher, Ireland".

Brontë Studies. Volume 49. Issues 1-2

The new (double) issue of Brontë Studies (Volume 49  Issues 1-2  January-April 2024) is available online. We provide you with the table of contents and abstracts:

Editorial Introduction
pp. 1-5 Author: Claire O’Callaghan

Odd and incorrect’: Convention and Jane Eyre’s Feminist Legacy
pp. 6-23 Author: Katharine Hobbs
Abstract:
This article investigates the Victorian reception of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and the collision of literary criticism with political commentary. Brontë’s novel has always had a reputation for being politically troublesome, but no one seems to know why. My essay develops two claims. First, I argue that the novel’s political slipperiness stems from its critics’ inability to agree on what the work actually is. Jane Eyre provoked contradictory judgements from readers who could not reconcile it with existing frameworks of literary convention. The stakes were high, as attempts to define the novel’s genre fused with attempts to produce a coherent sense of literary and social history. Second, I argue that the liberal feminist subject that modern criticism projects backwards onto Jane Eyre did not exist for Victorian readers, and that Brontë’s governess heroine instead activates a historically fraught relationship between character, type, and women’s economic and legal roles. Rather than addressing Jane Eyre directly, I treat it as the absent centre of a debate over convention, waged in reviews, pamphlets and essays, that merged literary criticism with political commentary and set crucial precedents for mid-Victorian legal debates on the woman question.

Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Horace’s Ars Poetica, Lines 179–88: Nelly Dean as Tragic Nuntius
pp 24-37 Author: Russell M. Hillier
Abstract
A manuscript in the Hugh Walpole Collection of King’s School, Canterbury, attributed to Emily Brontë, consists of translations from Virgil’s Aeneid and Horace’s Ars Poetica. In his groundbreaking analysis of the manuscript, Edward Chitham detects in Brontë’s translation of Horace’s treatise her indebtedness to its precepts on drama and he suggests that the role of chorus applies to Nelly Dean as the principal narrator in Wuthering Heights (1847). Expanding on Chitham’s findings, the article proposes that Nelly Dean more plausibly fulfils the role of a tragic nuntius or messenger. The main principle of the Ars Poetica is decorum, or literary propriety, and Horace instructs that it is decorous for extreme tragic violence to be represented through the nuntius’s reported speech. Nelly delivers an account of and presides over each of Wuthering Heights’s eleven reported deaths and, in accordance with Horatian standards of making known tragic catastrophe, acts as tragic nuntius. Brontë’s formal choices for Wuthering Heights would seem to conform to Horace’s advice that it is decorous for tragic events to be reported rather than performed on stage.

‘I thought unaccountably of fairy tales’: Jane Eyre, Form, and the Fairy Tale Bildungsroman
pp. 38-51 Author: Daniel Dougherty
Abstract:
Frequently Jane Eyre (1847) has been compared to various fairy tales, many of which are seemingly woven through the plot and characters of the novel. Largely unremarked upon however is the effect of those fairy tales on the form of the novel itself, particularly as those fairy tales collide with the Bildungsroman genre. Rather than reaffirming the telos-driven nature of both the fairy tale and the Bildungsroman, Charlotte Brontë, through Jane as narrator and protagonist, questions the narrative finality of both genres through their combination. The resultant Bildungsroman actively eschews any potential ossification of Jane as she invents and reinvents herself in her narration and deployment of narrative forms. Rather than a singular finished figure at the end of the novel, Jane offers a spectrum of identities that continue to grow and change from their initial contexts.

Charlotte Brontë’s Villette and the Book of Esther: A Pioneering Hermeneutic on Sexism and Xenophobia
pp. 52-68 Author: Channah Damatov
Abstract:
Anne Brontë’s deliberate exposition in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall of gendered violence as the consequence of the structurally embedded sexism in the Victorian patriarchal socio-legal system is a daring example of feminist critique that was ahead of its time. This article examines the afterlife of Brontë’s feminism in Sam Baker’s The Woman Who Ran (2016), a neo-Victorian domestic noir thriller which re(dis)covers and repurposes Brontë’s novel for contemporary women readers. Baker uncovers the ongoing crisis of domestic violence and sexism in professional spheres that persist despite the progress achieved by Western feminist movements to secure women’s rights in the last century. We argue that The Woman Who Ran demonstrates just how generative Anne Brontë’s writing remains for conceptualising feminist issues in the twenty-first century.

Anti-Hierarchical Development in Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey
pp. 69-82 Author: Amanda Auerbach
Abstract:
This article offers an allegorical interpretation of the ostensibly realist elements of Anne Brontë’s 1847 novel Agnes Grey. Read non-allegorically, Agnes Grey appears to depict the triumph of the governess Agnes’s moral will over her desires that conflict with her duties, as occurs in the Bildungsroman. But the novel can also be seen as using Agnes’s evolving relationship with her pupils to consider the ideal way to prioritise and respond to the various impulses of the self and various members of a social community. The plot can then be seen as progressing towards the anti-hierarchical model of self and community that Brontë deems most ethical. This community largely corresponds to Talia Schaffer’s community of care.

Futuristic Flight: Science beside the Emotive in the Early Writing of Charlotte Brontë
pp. 83-98 Author: Julie Elizabeth Young
Abstract:
As a solitary mention within her juvenilia tale ‘Tales of the Islanders’ (1829), Charlotte Brontë’s fictitious reference to air balloon flight suggests a wider social and literary context for its author’s understanding of this new scientific phenomenon. This article examines the wider textual presence of this awe-inspiring invention and how her seemingly simple reference to balloons ultimately aligns her from an early age to a wider, Romantic female discourse, particularly to the writing of Mary Shelley. The prevalent references to balloon flight in newspapers, magazines and books available to Brontë at the time, imply a familiarity with these dialogues, which is ultimately suggestive of the material she read and was subsequently inspired by to include in her own writing. Brontë’s reference to balloons associates her work with a Romantic discourse contemporary to her, specifically a female one, which situates her as a young writer alert to the literary dialogue of the time, hinting at a style she would later use in her novels, one which juxtaposed scientific invention in the Industrial Age beside an emotive poetic voice.

Penistone Crags, Ponden Kirk and the Fairies of Wuthering Heights
pp. 99-115 Author: Simon Young
Abstract:
Penistone Crags in Wuthering Heights (1847) has long and, I argue, correctly been identified with Ponden Kirk on Haworth Moor. This article compares the folklore of Ponden Kirk with the fictional folklore associated with Penistone Crags, looking at the real-world and literary traditions in relation to beliefs surrounding the South Pennines. It suggests that some details of fairylore in Wuthering Heights—both the fairies in the ‘Fairy Cave’ and Catherine’s elf-bolts—are based on early to mid-nineteenth-century Haworth folklore. The article finishes with an appendix on the Gytrash (a legendary being familiar from Jane Eyre).

Symbolic Meanings of Violets in Villette
pp. 116-128 Author: Miwa Uhara
Abstract:
Charlotte Brontë bestows symbolic meanings in her novels on some of the vegetation based on their popular meanings and images, and she would have expected contemporary readers to know the meanings of such vegetation. Villette (1853) is marked by the symbolical use of violets. Supported by the image of violets from the language of flowers that was popular in nineteenth-century Britain, this article explores several meanings at play in Brontë’s symbolic use of violets. Firstly, she uses a violet to contrast Paulina’s beauty with Ginevra’s. Secondly, M. Paul Emanuel also communicates his messages through violets. Thirdly, Lucy Snowe reminds us of Lucy Gray from Wordsworth’s poems because both women are associated with violets. And finally, M. Paul is linked to violets to both accentuate his Napoleonic characteristics and to symbolise his short life, evoking Hamlet. They imply his death and the end of his relationship with Lucy, an ending which is not clearly described at the end of the novel.

All true histories contain instruction’: Truth and Everyday Heroism in Agnes Grey
pp. 129-138 Author: Rosa Ortiz Notario
Abstract:
The writings of the Brontës have frequently been studied in relation to conceptions of heroism. More specifically, critics have focused on the influence of war heroes such as the Duke of Wellington or Napoleon in the early writings of the siblings, principally those authored by Charlotte and Branwell Brontë. This article, however, explores the conception of ‘everyday heroism’ in Anne Brontë’s novel Agnes Grey (1847). It argues that the ordinary characters portrayed in Brontë’s work embody qualities usually associated with the heroic. Further, the analysis of heroism can reveal new insights into the representation of gender roles and class relations in the novel.

Editorial - Reviews Section

Editorial. Reviews Section
p 139-140 Author: Carolyne Van Der Meer

Book Reviews

The Brontë Society Conference, The Brontës and the Wild, 9 September 2023

pp 141-144 Author: Rose Dawn Gant

Brontë Festival of Women’s Writing, Women of the Wild, 22–24 September 2023

pp. 145-146 Author: Rose Dawn Gant

Wuthering Heights directed by Bryan Ferriter

pp. 146-148 Author: Patsy Stoneman

Oblivion: The Lost Diaries of Branwell Brontë: A Novel in Three Volumes

pp. 148-150 Author: Bob Duckett

The Novelist of Wildfell Hall: A New Life of Anne Brontë
pp 150-153 Author: Bob Duckett

Caldebroc
pp 153-155 Author: Tony Williams

The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag

pp 155-156 Author: Sarah Powell

Walking with Anne Brontë, Insights and Reflections: An Anthology

pp 156-159 Author: Peter Cook

Announcements

Call for Articles: Brontë Studies Special Issue: The Brontës and the Wild

pp 160-161

Brontë Studies Early Career Research Essay Prize

pp 162-163

Brontë Studies is pleased to invite submissions for the 2024 iteration of the Brontë Studies Early Career Research Essay Prize. The prize aims to encourage new scholarship in the field of Brontë studies, recognise and reward outstanding achievement by new researchers, and support the professional development of the next generation of Brontë scholars.

The prize was established in honour of Margaret Smith. She remains one of the most important Brontë scholars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As well as (co-)editing scholarly editions of Jane Eyre, Shirley, Villette and The Professor, and co-editing The Oxford Companion to the Brontës with Christine Alexander, Smith is widely regarded for her field-defining volumes of The Letters of Charlotte Brontë (1995, 2000, 2005). Alongside numerous other publications and contributions to the Brontë Society, Smith published many original articles and reviews in Brontë Studies over the years. Her minutely researched, comprehensive and scrupulous work will continue to be an indispensable resource and inspiration for current and future generations of Brontë scholars.

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A Parsonage of One's Own

You can have your very own Brontë Parsonage as The Westmoreland Gazette reports that a similar building by the same architect is now for sale.

A striking country residence, echoing architectural nuances of the Brontë sisters' family home, is up for sale in Cumbria's Crosby Garrett.

Mossgill House is a property bearing a rich history and architectural symmetry with the Bronte's famous 'Parsonage' house in Haworth, Yorkshire.

The house was designed by the same architect responsible for curating the Parsonage home, with both featuring an identical entrance hall.

David Britton, managing director of David Britton Estates, said: "I love properties with a rich heritage and a tale to tell, and Mossgill House ticks all the boxes.

"The connection to the Brontë family is fascinating; parts of Mossgill are a direct replica of The Parsonage, which is now a popular tourist attraction.

"This property is substantial, with an acre of fantastic grounds.

"It’s full of history, charm, and a real touch of class."

Built around 1747, Mossgill was frequently visited by sisters Charlotte, Emily, and their father, Patrick Brontë, who was a close acquaintance of the Rev. William Fawcett, Mossgill's resident during that period. (Erin Gaskell)

Well, we don't know about those frequent visits, though.

Broadway World interviews Julie Benko who plays Jane in Theatre Raleigh's Jane Eyre the Musical.

What initially drew you to the role of Jane Eyre, and how did you feel when you were cast?  

There's a reason this story has remained popular for almost 200 years and gets a new screen adaptation every decade or so. It's timeless. I loved the idea of portraying not only a classic heroine but a deeply unconventional one. Jane is a strong, unique, complex, passionate character. But I can't deny how overwhelmed I felt when I saw the script! Jane almost never leaves the stage - we still haven't figured out where I can get a sip of water during Act 1! But, like Jane, I love a challenge. So there's a lot of joy in figuring out how to climb that mountain (or, in our case, those moors). 

How have you been preparing to portray Jane Eyre, and what aspects of her character do you find most compelling?

I've been re-reading the book and watching all the various film and TV adaptations. (So far, the 2006 BBC miniseries starring Ruth Wilson is my favorite for the Jane/Rochester relationship and the acting, but the 1996 Zeffirelli film has my favorite sets and some great scenes.) Jane is a fascinating character because she does everything on her own terms. She's quite serious. (She doesn't have Fanny Brice's sense of humor, that's for sure!) She comes from nothing and spends her childhood enduring trauma after trauma: the loss of her parents, abuse from her extended family, shaming and isolation at school. And yet she builds a good life for herself. She's honest, strong, and whip-smart, with a forthright confidence that belies her youth. She's not perfect; she can be judgmental, moralistic, and prickly. To watch someone with such a strong ethical code fall in love with such an enigmatic, flawed character as Rochester makes for thrilling drama. 

How does the musical adaptation of Jane Eyre enhance the story, and what are some of your favorite musical numbers from the production?

The book was one of the first novels to be written from the first-person point of view, so you are aware of everything that Jane is thinking. That adapts very well to the musical theater form, because the music gives voice to so much of Jane's inner monologue, which is often replaced in film adaptations with long gazes, mournful silences, and odd voiceover interjections. And because Jane's intensity of feeling is so strong, it's a natural fit for Paul Gordon and John Caird's sweeping score.

Can you describe a specific scene or moment in Jane Eyre that you find particularly powerful or moving?

We haven't even staged it yet, but every time I sing through the finale alone in my hotel room I can't stop crying. It's just so moving. When I imagine Rochester singing to the baby about how scared he is to be a parent but he'll keep trying to "be brave enough for love..." Even typing it, I'm getting weepy! [...]

How do you hope to connect with the audience through your portrayal of Jane Eyre in this production?

I'm especially excited that we are live-capturing this production, since it means that we will get to connect with audiences beyond whoever can fit in the (quite intimate) room with us. This is such a gorgeous piece and I'm ready for the world to discover (or rediscover) it.

What do you think makes Theatre Raleigh's production of Jane Eyre unique, and why should audiences come to see it?

The space is so beautifully intimate that audiences will feel inside the story with us, no matter where they sit. It's also incredible to see what this troupe of 11 actors can do. Almost everyone plays at least two roles (many play more!). It's truly a celebration of The Theatre and of what we can create using our imaginations, language, and music.

There is so much magic in the simplicity and playfulness of this kind of storytelling. Megan McGinnis is doing such a beautiful job of making this classic romance feel exciting, current, poignant, and honest. And John Caird and Paul Gordon are flying in to work on it as well. When do you get to re-develop shows with the authors?! How special is that?! This is going to be an incredible production and I'm so lucky to be a part of it! (Joshua Wright)

In an interview for The Independent, actor Rafe Spall paraphrases (freely) from Wuthering Heights.

Rafe Spall is talking about love. “I’m lucky enough to know what love feels like,” he says, “because I’m a parent. There’s a line in Wuthering Heights – I’m paraphrasing, obviously – where Heathcliff says to Cathy, ‘Don’t you love me?’ And she says, ‘I don’t love you. You are me. I am you.’ When I think about my children, I think about that, a lot. It’s that sort of indescribable love.” (Charlotte O’Sullivan)

The Film Stage reviews Andrea Arnold's new film Bird.

 The director has gestured toward magical realism in her work before (think of the white horse in Fish Tank or the elemental yearning of her Wuthering Heights) but this first foray into anthropomorphism feels strangely surface-level and does more to break the film’s spell than enhance it. (Rory O'Connor)

The Saturday Paper reviews the novel Ordinary Human Love by Melissa Goode.

The cover art may reproduce a neoclassical marble sculpture, rather than a topless male model, and the novel itself might reference canonical works – Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre – but these intertexts are like red herrings. Goode’s novel, despite being about an affair, and one that ostensibly crosses class boundaries, is unfortunately not of their league. This is a romance in the universal sense of the term. (Maria Takolander)

Financial Times reviews the exhibition Now You See Us at Tate Britain.

Tellingly, even Georgian celebrity Angelica Kauffman kept tightly to neoclassical patriarchal themes, and her female figures are unthreatening, insipid — “Andromache Fainting”, women swooning at “The Return of Telemachus”. In the 19th century, the successful Pre-Raphaelite Marie Spartali Stillman painted heroines as dreamy, passive and flower-encircled (“The Rose from Armida’s Garden”) as those by her male colleagues. How fascinating that the Victorian novel boasts pioneering feminist heroines — Jane Eyre, Dorothea Brooke — while women painters remained shackled by convention. (Jackie Wullschläger)

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Fame and Fortune

An online alert for next Wednesday, May 22. A joint event of the Brontë Parsonage Museum and The Elizabeth Gaskell's House:

Elizabeth Gaskell and Charlotte Brontë - Fame and Fortune

Wednesday 22 May 2024, 19.00 h

An online talk in partnership with Elizabeth Gaskell's House

Literary success brought great acclaim to authors Elizabeth Gaskell and Charlotte Brontë; their debut novels, 'Mary Barton' and 'Jane Eyre', attracted huge public attention. Both found themselves thrust into a new world of Victorian celebrity.

So, how did these two gifted writers handle their new-found fame? Was Elizabeth Gaskell always keen for company? How did Charlotte Brontë’s legendary shyness affect her experience? And what did the world make of these two very different women?

Join Anthony Burton from the Gaskell Society and Andrew Stodolny from the Brontë Parsonage Museum for a look at the celebrity world of two giants of English literature.

This talk is the last in our season of events about Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell in partnership with Elizabeth Gaskell’s house.

This online event will take place via Zoom. This is a live event and will not be recorded.

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Raging Charlotte

So, it's almost all about the new season of Bridgerton today. Tanya Gold writes in The New Statesman,

And what a typical female writer Penelope Featherington (Nicola Couglan) is: shy, over-weight, awkward (when sex comes to her, she falls over in the street and lands on a shoe). Since the last journalist to grace a worldwide TV hit was Carrie Bradshaw of Sex in the City, who thought that if you bought the right desk the right novel would follow, I love Penelope with a weird intensity. She is close in spirit to anti-social Jane Austen (she hated Bath) and raging Charlotte Brontë (she hated children), though her object of hatred is herself, at least until she picks up a quill.  

According to The Telegraph (India),

this Regency-era drama is more about courtship, less about marriage, and the focus this season is on what happens between Penelope and Colin. Their romance is like a leaf out of the pages of Jane Austen’s Persuasion or Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, sticking to the trope of a highly coveted man falling for the most unexpected, least noticeable woman. (Sanghamitra Chatterjee)

And according to The Irish Examiner,

The things Bridgerton does well, however, it does very, very well. The dynamic between Colin and Penelope – high-status guy falls for apparently undesirable girl – is stock (see everything from Jane Eyre to She’s All That), but here it hasn’t lost one iota of its centuries-old appeal. That’s partly to do with the acting: Coughlan is sensational as a woman who wallows in humiliation but cannot bring herself to relinquish hope, while Ruth Gemmell and Polly Walker’s performances as the meddling mamas of the Bridgerton and Featherington clans give the show its meatiness. (Rachel Aroesti)

The BBC shares (again) its KS4 / GCSE English Literature on Jane Eyre: a musical summary of the characters, plot and themes found in the novel.

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Jane Eyre in New London

A new production of Jane Eyre opens today in New London, CT. The adaptation was first premiered as a ZOOM film in 2020 and now has a stage production:

Jane Eyre

Adapted by Julie Butters from the novel by Charlotte Brontë

Directed by Victor Chiburis

May 17-19, 24-26

Fridays and Saturdays at 7pm

Sundays at 2pm

The Shaw Mansion

11 Blinman Street

New London, CT

Jane Eyre, an orphan in early nineteenth-century England, overcomes a loveless childhood to become governess to the ward of the enigmatic Mr. Rochester. Jane soon believes she’s found the home and the love she’s always yearned for, but Mr. Rochester’s dark secrets threaten to keep them apart. Blending gothic romance with a powerful story of personal growth, Jane Eyre explores one woman’s struggle to find love and independence despite barriers of gender, class, and circumstance. Leading the cast are Julie Butters of Salem, Mass., as Jane, Eric Michaelian of New London, Conn., as Mr. Rochester.

“Jane is fiercely determined to control her own destiny and stay true to her convictions despite immense external pressure,” says Butters, who adapted Jane Eyre and, previously, Little Women for Flock. “That makes her as compelling today as in 1847 when the novel was published.”

Originally set to be performed in New London’s historic Shaw Mansion in 2020, the production was waylaid due to the global pandemic and adapted into a Zoom film. Now in 2024, the show finally gets its live debut at the Shaw Mansion. This will be the first Shaw performance for Flock since 2019’s Pride & Prejudice.

Further information in The Day. 

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The intensity of the Brontë heroes

Mental Floss has selected '10 of the Greatest Love Stories in Novels' including

9. Jane Eyre (1847) // Charlotte Brontë

Jane Eyre’s road to romance with Edward Rochester is long and windy. Jane lives a troubled, and at times tragic, life—but her refusal to stray from her principles allows her to ultimately find the love she has longed for. Several parts of the novel were inspired by Brontë’s own life: Like the main character, she too had once attended a cruel school and worked as a governess; Brontë also once visited an estate that had its own “madwoman” hidden away. (Kerry Wolfe)

Observer recommends '10 Must-Read Retellings of the Best Classic Books' and no, it's not Wide Sargasso Sea that's on the list.

Jane Steele by Lyndsay Faye

There are a lot of ways to update the classics, but converting a meek Victorian orphan into a serial killer has to be among the most creative. “Reader, I murdered him,” announces Jane Steele, early in the novel that bears her name. Lyndsay Faye harnesses the rage women feel, both on and off the page, at being at the mercy of the patriarchy. The resulting work of satirical historical fiction not only channels Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre but also Charles Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby and Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. Wicked fun. (Jessica Allen)

A contributor to The Daily Star writes about being a 'romance reader'.

The young adult series The Princess Diaries (HarperTrophy, 2000) by May [sic] Cabot was my first foray into any sort of romance during my preteens. However, Brontë and Austen were the gateway to my fascination for not only romance genre, but also a particular brand within it, mostly featuring Byronic heroes with a touch of dark, broody and mysterious demeanors. Add some banter, troubled past, a mix of possessiveness and jealousy—and you had me at hello. [...]

The intensity of the Brontë heroes, on the other hand, personified the Byronic trait to me. While Mr. Rochester, for me, was the only redeemable quality of Jane Eyre (Smith, Elder & Co. 1847), a book whose plot and pacing underwhelmed, Heathcliff, despite being an anti-hero, made Wuthering Heights (1847) far more interesting to me with his volatility. (Towrin Zaman)

IndieWire discusses how Bridgerton has 'Changed How Period Shows Dress'.

But if one looks at costumes from Regency romances 10 or 15 years before “Bridgerton” first aired in 2020  — your “Pride & Prejudice” circa 2005, your 2011 “Jane Eyre” — that visual language of Regency romances is a little different than it is now. One finds lots of Regency heroines in white or muted colors, with rather modest fabric patterns, and at least sometimes wearing the bonnets and cloaks that were part of women’s dress in that era. Shiny fabrics, richer colors, and bigger or more geometric, sculpted shapes appear rarely and only for the high society women we are meant to regard with suspicion.  

“Bridgerton” goes much farther and way harder. The show has created a heightened, alternate version of Regency England, and its costumes echo that in their more fantastic, stylized approach to clothing. (Sarah Shachat)

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Dark Masterpiece

A Thursday Talk at the Brontë Parsonage Museum:

Charlotte Brontë's Dark Masterpiece

Thu May 16th 2:00pm - 2:45pm

The Old School Room, Church St, Haworth, Keighley BD22 8DR, UK

Villette, Charlotte’s final novel, is a haunted book: haunted by its author, being deeply autobiographical, and haunted by a city – one Charlotte knew she would never see again and which, for us, no longer exists. This talk explores the writing of Villette, its impact and its afterlife.

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'Books seem to me to be magic, and I wanted to be part of the magic'

Many of the obituaries of author Alice Munro mention the Brontës. From The Globe and Mail:

Munro has created a complex world that nourishes readers in different ways as they too love, suffer and cope with life’s inevitable exigencies. The stories themselves don’t change, but we intuit new insights with each rereading, a quality that Virginia Woolf recognized in an earlier literary artist, Charlotte Brontë.

In Woolf’s 1916 essay (collected in Genius and Ink) to mark the centenary of Brontë's birth, she wrote about “the peculiarity which real works of art possess in common.” When reading Brontë, Woolf argued that it was impossible “to lift your eyes from the page” because she “has you by the hand and forces you along her road, seeing the things she sees and as she sees them. She is never absent for a moment, nor does she attempt to conceal herself or to disguise her voice.” That is the reaction I have when I read Munro: that she is, as Woolf said of Brontë, “primarily the recorder of feelings and not of thoughts.”

Munro explained her process in a rare onstage interview in 2008 with Deborah Treisman, fiction editor of The New Yorker. She said that she imagines her stories visually (a quality that Woolf admired in Brontë's writing) often focusing on an image or an incident or the effect characters may have on each other. And then she might sit and stare out the window for days “just letting things get settled in my head” before struggling to write anything down. (Sandra Martin)

From The Times:

She wrote verses, worked at an endless outlandish novel, and, aged 14, seized with delight upon Wuthering Heights, a chance arrival from the Book of the Month Club. 

From Time magazine:

Munro fell in love with reading as a young girl, and started writing poetry after she discovered Alfred Tennyson’s work. One of her favorite books was Wuthering Heights. (Annabel Gutterman)

From CNN:

Born in 1931 in Wingham, Ontario, Munro grew up on what she described as the “collapsing enterprise of a fox and mink farm, just beyond the most disreputable part of town” in a 1994 interview with “The Paris Review.” Amid familial struggles, Munro found an escape in reading as a child. Her early enthusiasm for renowned writers such as Emily Brontë, Charles Dickens, and Lucy Maud Montgomery, among others, reflected an appreciation for literature beyond her age.

“Books seem to me to be magic, and I wanted to be part of the magic.” she told The Guardian of her childhood reading habits. “Books were so important to me. They were far more important than life.” (Yahya Salem)

And maybe we can mention this old post of ours.

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Elizabeth Gaskell and Charlotte Brontë - A Friendship (again)

Another online alert for today, May 15:

Elizabeth Gaskell and Charlotte Brontë - A Friendship

Wednesday 15 May 2024, 19.00 h

An online talk in partnership with Elizabeth Gaskell's House

Female authors Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell were opposites in many ways. Yet they were profoundly interested in each other's work and lives. Their first meeting in the Lake District in 1850 led to a real friendship. This introductory talk explores the relationship between these two icons of nineteenth-century literature.

Vice-Chair of the Gaskell Society, Libby Tempest, examines letters, writing, and contemporary accounts to try and discover what held the friendship between these two extraordinary women together.

This talk is part of a short season of events in partnership with Elizabeth Gaskell’s House.

 

Please note, this is a repeat of the sold-out 2021 talk.

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Wuthering Bytes

Broadway World shares a video of the first look at  Julie Benko in rehearsals for Theatre Raleigh's production of Jane Eyre the Musical, which opens on May 29th.

Rehearsals have begun for Jane Eyre. Starring Broadway superstars, Julie Benko and Matt Bogart, direction by Megan McGinnis. Written by John Caird and Paul Gordon. Get your first look at the cast in action!

Jane Eyre brings Charlotte Brontë's great love story comes to life with music. The musical was nominated for five Tony Awards in 2001. 

Benko will be joined onstage by previously announced Matt Bogart, who will play the role of Rochester and directed last season's Theatre Raleigh production of Jersey Boys. Bogart is a television, film and Broadway actor with numerous credits, including playing The Four Seasons' bass player Nick Massi in Jersey Boys on Broadway for more than six years. (Joshua Wright)

The Yorkshire Post reports that the aptly named tech festival Wuthering Bytes will return to Hebden Bridge on August 23rd.

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Rethinking Tuberculosis

 A Zoom alert for tomorrow, May 15:

Summer Series: Medical and Digital Humanities 

Online Lectures hosted by the Literature and Science Forum

15 May  (15:00 BST)  Dr Claire O'Callaghan (Loughborough University)

'An arrest  of the disease might yet be procured': Rethinking Anne Brontë, Tuberculosisa, and Victorian Medicine

Zoom link and further information.

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Cathy in Yorkshire, Jane in Texas

Far Out Magazine travels through Yorkshire in five films and one of them is

Wuthering Heights (Andrea Arnold, 2011)

If you like Haworth’s central street, full of independent shops and eateries, then why not visit the Brontë parsonage too? It’s on the doorstep of the village centre, and it’s where Charlotte, Anne and Emily wrote most of their work. Emily Brontë famously wrote Wuthering Heights here, taking inspiration from the local moors, which play a crucial role in the novel. It has been adapted for the screen numerous times, but Andrea Arnold, known for her social realist works like Red Road and Fish Tank, did a great job in 2011.

The film, which stars Kaya Scodelario and James Howson exposes the beautiful darkness of the Yorkshire countryside, with several North and West Yorkshire locations featuring. Places like Thwaite and Coverham, both of which are beautiful villages, were used as filming locations, but go to any outstanding area of the Yorkshire Dales, especially on a foggy day, and you’re bound to feel like Cathy herself. (Aimee Ferrier)

The Marshall News Messenger features the last show of the season at ETBU Theatre and Music Arts: Jane Eyre the Musical.

East Texas Baptist University’s School of Communication and Performing Arts closed out the 2023-24 production season with “Jane Eyre,” a tragic-poetic musical drama adapted from the beloved novel of the same name written by Charlotte Brontë April 18-21 at Memorial City Hall in downtown Marshall.

The show was directed by Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts Rouba Palmer with musical direction by Assistant Professor of Music Judith Shelton. The live orchestra was conducted by Assistant Professor of Music Pat Antinone.

“I have always loved the story of Jane Eyre, and when I heard the music score, I fell in love with the music, too,” Palmer said. “We worked hard to highlight the themes of redemption, forgiveness and overcoming adversity in hopes of inspiring audience members with a central message to persist in righteousness even when circumstances are at odds.” [...]

With poignant musical numbers and powerful performances, the show captured the essence of Brontë’s timeless story, offering audiences a compelling portrayal of one woman’s quest for independence and belonging in a society bound by conventions and constraints. The cast and crew also worked diligently to emphasize several strong Christian themes infused throughout the production.

“Forgiveness, redemption, judgment, mercy and how God tempers the former with the latter to visit us with salvation are some of the more prominent ideas highlighted in the show,” Shelton said. “It’s been my desire to direct this show for a very long time, so getting to direct the music was a joyful experience for me. The cast was receptive to my suggestions and quick to respond to the musical needs and direction I was moving. The challenge primarily lay in making such a large score and such heavy singing material accessible to the students.”

Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts Jake Yenish oversaw the technical and scenic designs of the production and shared how the combined involvement of cast and crew, students, and faculty ultimately brought the compelling and creative show to life.

“As a liberal arts institution, our students have the opportunity to be deeply involved in as many aspects of the production as they’re willing to,” Yenish said. “Looking at the playbill, the names of the cast also appear in the production staff, and vice versa. Our students are the primary motivating source for the work we are able to accomplish. It is their sweat and their muscle that physically produced the design of the show.”

AnneBrontë.org highlights a letter by Charlotte Brontë in which she lays down the qualifications a teacher needs in her opinion.

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Final Event for the Un Libro Tante Scuole Initiative in Turin

The National Student Reading Project "Un Libro Tante Scuole" (One Book, Many Schools) culminates with a special event dedicated to Emily Brontë's "Wuthering Heights." On Saturday, May 13th, from 10:00 am to 12:00 pm, the Auditorium of the Congress Center at the Salone Internazionale del Libro in Turin will host the final meeting of this literary journey.

The event, organized in collaboration with Chora Media, Consulta delle Fondazioni di Origine Bancarie del Piemonte e della Liguria, Intesa Sanpaolo, and Mondadori, will feature  Valentina Farinaccio, Antonella Lattanzi, and Liliana Rampello. These prominent authors will guide students through an exploration of Brontë's timeless work and its enduring themes.

Liliana Rampello, author of the introduction to the special edition of "Wuthering Heights" distributed to students, will share her insights on the importance of this classic in the formation of young readers. Antonella Lattanzi will offer a unique perspective o
n the novel's narrative and iconic characters.

The event will be interactive, with Valentina Farinaccio moderating a discussion where students can share their impressions and reviews published on the Bookblog during these months of shared reading.

This initiative, promoted by the Turin International Book Fair and the Ministry of Education and Merit, aims to reintroduce Italian youth to the enduring value of classic literature. Through "Wuthering Heights," students have immersed themselves in a world of overwhelming passions, while discovering universal themes such as self-determination and self-discovery.

13 maggio, Ore 10:00-12:00
Un Libro Tante Scuole: Cime Tempestose di Emily Brontë
Incontro finale del progetto di lettura condivisa
Auditorium, Centro Congressi

Con
Valentina Farinaccio, Antonella Lattanzi e Liliana Rampello

In collaborazione con
Chora Media, Consulta delle Fondazioni di Origine Bancarie del Piemonte e della Liguria, Intesa Sanpaolo e Mondadori

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I am Cathy

The Eastern Daily Press publishes an article about Edward Bowles (1882-1967) who was the manager of the Empire Cinema in Great Yarmouth. This remarkable picture goes with the article:

Waiting for Heatcliffe (sic)? A fine way to promote Wuthering Heights at The Empire in the late 30s. (Derek James) 

DowntoEarth publishes an excerpt of The Hill of Enchantment: The Story of My Life as a Writer by Ruskin Bond:

The greatest of writers often worked in solitude or isolation, either from choice or because there was no choice: Dostoevsky from a prison cell; Thoreau from the wilderness of Walden; Steveman from a remote island in the Pacific; Victor Hugo from his exile on the island of Guernsey (where I saw his study and desk, still carefully preserved); Emily Brontë and her sisters from a lonely parsonage on the Yorkshire moors; William Blake from a humble country cottage.

Collider reviews the film Barbarian 2022 :

So, after all the trouble that Tess has caused the Mother, why does she get to live? The answer lies in that little book titled Jane Eyre that AJ briefly pulls out of Tess’ luggage earlier in the film. A huge subplot of the novel involves a woman, Bertha, held against her will in the attic of her husband’s home. She manages to wander the house at night and is mistaken as a ghost by Jane, the new object of her husband’s affection. This little Easter egg adds an extra layer to the film’s interrogation of the historical and social treatment of women. Frank, the former owner of the house, was able to keep dozens of women locked up right underneath the noses of his neighbors without so much as a second glance. Even after the neighborhood deteriorated, Frank’s legacy of torture remained. (Raquel Hollman and Emma Kiely)

Rachel Cooke publishes an eulogy of the recently deceased Shirley Conran in The Guardian:

I’m not the only one to feel this. Ask any woman of a certain age and sensibility to tell you their favourite books about friendship – I’ve done this a lot lately, because I’ve been editing an anthology on the subject – and nine times out of 10, they will say Jane Eyre and Lace, putting no paper between the two. The obituary writers can joke all they like about that scene with the sheikh and the goldfish, but the unavoidable truth is that she’s as much of a touchstone for some of us as Charlotte Brontë.

Let's put on our clickbait-y suit and announce: the terrible secret that the Archbishop of Canterbury doesn't want you to know. The Times publishes an interview with Rowan William with shocking revelations:

Blanca Schofield: First book I couldn’t finish

R.W.: I don’t think I got anywhere with Great Expectations as a child. Recently it’s Ulysses — I keep trying. I’ve never read Jane Eyre cover to cover.

The Telegraph India on writers and acute ailments. Death is technically an acute ailment, we suppose. A rather extreme one:

Death alone could stop creation. Keats could not escape tuberculosis, neither could Anne and Emily Brontë; Mozart died early possibly as a consequence of an childhood attack of rheumatic fever. 

This columnist of La Nación (Argentina) quotes Anne Brontë:

Todas las historias verídicas encierran una enseñanza, aunque en algunos casos cueste encontrar el tesoro y, aun al hallarlo, resulte tan minúsculo que ese fruto seco y marchito apenas compense el esfuerzo de romper la cáscara, advierte la novelista y poetisa británica Anne Brontë, quien previno sobre la utilidad o no de su novela. (Isabel Gamboa Barboza) (Translation)

Saarbrücker Zeitung (Germany) interviews Mithu Sanyal:

Mithu Sanyal liest am Montag in Saarbrücken aus ihrem Bestseller „Identitti“. Keine Karte für die ausverkaufte Lesung bekommen? Wir haben mit Sanyal vorab über den Irrwitz von Identitätswirren gesprochen, aber auch über obsessives Lesen und Emily Brontë. (Sophia Schülke) (Translation)

Espresso (Germany) makes a list of classics that if published today for the first time would have been controversial. Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights are both in there: 

„Jane Eyre“, Charlotte Brontë

In dem 1847 veröffentlichten Roman Jane Eyre werden gesellschaftliche Normen dargestellt, die uns heute sehr veraltet erscheinen. Bertha, die Frau einer der Hauptfiguren, wird für verrückt gehalten und weggesperrt, weil sie sich nicht so verhält, wie es sich für eine richtige viktorianische Frau gehört. Sie wird sogar als Vampir und bekleidete Hyäne beschrieben. Außerdem haben die Bedürfnisse der Männer Vorrang vor denen der Frauen - eine ganz andere Sichtweise als die, die wir im 21. Jahrhundert haben.

„Sturmhöhe“, Emily Brontë

Sturmhöhe gilt als einer der größten Romane, die je in englischer Sprache geschrieben wurden, und erzählt die Geschichte des ungleichen Liebespaares Catherine und Heathcliff. Heathcliff wird von seinem Adoptivbruder wie ein Diener behandelt und setzt später einen Kreislauf des Missbrauchs fort. Manchmal wird er auch körperlich gewalttätig. Damit dieses Werk für das moderne Empfinden geeignet ist, müsste ein Großteil der Gewalt und des Klassismus abgeschwächt werden. (Roxane Jérôme) (Translation)

The Lancashire Telegraph announces that The Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever will return to Preston next July 21st. Diario Hoy (Argentina) publishes a short article about the Brontës who call them "little puppets with no master" and publishes a picture of some three women who are not the Brontës. Despite it all, the article is not so bad. The Deccan Herald quotes Emily Brontë saying “May is the month of expectation, the month of wishes, the month of hope,”. The thing is, she never wrote that, as far as we know.

Actualitté (France) announces that Quitter Hurlevent de Laurence Werner David is on the shortlist for the Prix François Billetdoux 2024.

Finally, a heart-wrenching story we read in The Saint Anselm Crier:

Students and faculty members of the English department gathered in the garden outside of Bradley House to plant Bleeding Heart flowers in honor of the recently deceased English major Caroline Rogers. Professor Meg Cronin organized the planting in coordination with the physical plant team. 

Professor Cronin taught Caroline in her class “The Brontës,” where their final exam was scheduled during the time of the planting. “Our final was scheduled for this afternoon, but after her death, I knew we needed to do something different,” Professor Cronin said. “We could not sit in that room without her and take a final exam.” Many of Caroline’s classmates attended the planting and worked with one another to place six Bleeding Heart flowers in the Bradley House garden. (...)

After students planted the flowers, they gathered around to read a poem by Emily Brontë called “No Coward Soul is Mine.” Students then stayed for a brief moment of silence for prayer and reflection in front of the memorial that they had just created. (Patrick McGann)

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Emily Brontë, Teenage Necromancer

Emily Brontë, Teenage Necromancer by Don Zolidis, a horror comedy play released in 2022, is now making the rounds in the school theater circuit. Last year it was performed at the Salesianum School Thea
ter in Wilmington, DE:

Starting in less than one week—Salesianum School Theater is incredibly excited to be able to present Emily Brontë, Teenage Necromancer, on Saturday, October 28th, and Sunday, October 29th. The show is a partly true account of Emily Brontë, who died of tuberculosis at 30. According to this play, when she was in high school, she was a ghost hunter! In this family-friendly horror story, Emily and her sisters, Charlotte and Anne, confront the local phantom at their boarding school and solve a decades-old mystery

Next year, there are two confirmed productions: 

FEB 07, 2025 - FEB 09, 2025 Silver Line Theatre Exchange STAUNTON, VA United States
MAR 15, 2024 - MAR 15, 2024 Santa Catalina School Monterey, CA   United States   

These are the details:

Emily Brontë, Teenage Necromancer

by Don Zolidis

Horror Comedy|90 - 100 minutes

8 W, 4 M,  (12-24 actors possible)

Set: A slightly crumbling mansion

1835. Northern England. The moors. A terrifying phantom has appeared at the Roe Head School for Girls, terrorizing its students and driving the school near to extinction. It’s up to star pupil Emily Brontë, and her sisters Anne and Charlotte, to discern the true nature of the haunting, using their unique talents—which happen to include necromancy. A gothic, hilarious ride through English literature that needs magic, ghosts, and fog, featuring an undead goose, a lovesick ghost, and a talking meat pudding.

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Toilets, homework and retellings

The Telegraph and Argus also echoes the story about the Brontë Parsonage Museum receiving a grant to install toilets at long last.

A £100,000 grant has been awarded to improve visitor facilities at the Brontë Parsonage Museum.

The money will help pay for the installation of fully-accessible toilets and Changing Places provision at the Haworth attraction.

Thousands of people from across the world visit the one-time home of the famous literary siblings, where the sisters wrote their famous works, every year.

But the Brontë Society, which runs the museum, says a current lack of facilities is presenting a "huge barrier" in relation to accessibility.

The new funding – from Arts Council England, through the Government-backed Capital Investment Programme – together with money already secured from the Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture Cultural Capital Fund, will enable the improvements to go ahead.

Once constructed, the Changing Places facility will be the first of its kind in the immediate area. The provision caters for people – and their carers – with profound and multiple learning disabilities, as well other disabilities that severely limit mobility, who are unable to use standard toilets.

Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Parsonage Museum, says: "We are thrilled at Arts Council England’s decision to award us this funding and are very appreciative of its support.

"Visitor facilities are an essential part of a day or evening out, and the current lack of facilities is a huge barrier to access.

"This development will have a significant, positive impact on the thousands of people who visit our museum each year.

"We are looking forward to construction commencing this summer and having the new facilities in place ready for Bradford’s important year as UK City of Culture in 2025." (Alistair Shand)

A Miami Herald article highlights the problems caused by trying to block websites not suitable for kids in schools.

Like Perez, Rockwood School District sophomore Brooke O'Dell most frequently runs into blocked websites when doing homework. Sometimes she can't access PDFs she wants to read. Her workaround is to pull out her phone, find the webpage using her own cellular data, navigate to the file she wants, email it to herself, and then go back to her school-issued Chromebook to open it. When it's website text she's interested in, O'Dell uses the Google Drive app on her phone to copy-and-paste text into a Google Doc that she can later access from her Chromebook. She recently had to do this while working on a literary criticism project about the book "Jane Eyre." (Tara Garcia Mathewson)

Times Now News has selected '10 Classic Books and Their Modern Retellings' including both

2. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë and Jane Steele by Lyndsay Faye

'Jane Eyre' is an 1847 novel that explores themes of morality, religion, and feminism through the life of an orphaned girl who becomes a governess. Lyndsay Faye’s 'Jane Steele' reimagines the titular character as a serial killer in Victorian England who, like Brontë's Jane, seeks justice and moral reconciliation, yet does so by taking matters into her own hands in a darkly humorous twist. [...]

6. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë and Wuthering High by Cara Lockwood

This dark tale of passionate and destructive love between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff is transformed in "Wuthering High" into a story set in a boarding school on the California coast. The novel explores similar themes of love, revenge, and the supernatural, making it accessible to a teenage audience.

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Wuthering Heights Screening in Bradford

A special screening of Wuthering Heights 2011 in Bradford:

Wuthering Heights 2011

Director: Andrea Arnold   

Cast: Kaya Scodelario, James Howson, Nichola Burley, Oliver Milburn 

Saturday 11 May 2024, 17.30

Theatre in the Mill, University of, Bradford BD7 1DP, United Kingdom

Academy Award-winning writer-director Andrea Arnold’s elemental take on Emily Brontë’s classic novel. 

A Yorkshire hill farmer on a visit to Liverpool finds a homeless boy on the streets. He takes him home to live as part of his family on the isolated Yorkshire moors where the boy forges an obsessive relationship with the farmer’s daughter. 

Shot on location in North Yorkshire, Andrea Arnold’s take on Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel of the same name is a gritty and naturalistic adaptation, emphasising the visceral, passionate bond shared by Cathy and Heathcliff.

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Toilets, book bans and murderous mums

Museums Association lists all the recipients of the £24m arts council funding including the Brontë Parsonage Museum:

The Bronte Society

£100,000 to install fully accessible, environmentally sustainable toilets at the museum in Haworth, Yorkshire. (Geraldine Kendall Adams)

A columnist from The Canberra Times  discusses Cumberland City Council's deplorable ban on same-sex parents books.

I loved reading Day of the Triffds back when I was a girl. It didn't make me want to poison people or even devour them. I loved reading Wuthering Heights at the time but didn't wish to be a single person in that extremely frightening book. I've read a bunch of books to my children and they didn't grow up to be wild things, run chocolate factories or become muddle-headed. That, they have left to their aging mother. (Jenna Price)

Yes, the fact that children understand the concept of fiction is still something many people haven't come to terms with.

Bloody Disgusting features the latest episode of the podcast The Lady Killers: A Feminine Rage Podcast on Evil Dead Rise (2023).

The Lady Killers continue Murderous Moms Month by dissecting the taboo terrors in Lee Cronin’s shocking film. Co-hosts Jenn Adams, Mae Shults, and Rocco T. Thompson discuss their favorite franchise entries, the most upsetting kills, problematic narrative choices, and their undying affinity for wood chippers and chainsaws. Why is a killer mom so upsetting? What should Beth do about her impending arrival? Should we all read Wuthering Heights and is there anything Staffanie can’t do? They’ll chew on these questions and more as they celebrate a film that may or may not mean more to them than pizza. (Jenn Adams)

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Wuthering Heights in Köln

A new production of Wuthering Heights opens today. May 10th.

A co-production of Sommerblut Kulturfestival und Theater im Bauturm

Wuthering Heights
by Emily Brontë

Director Frederik Werth

Set Design Maria Strauc

Assistant Director Judith Freitag | With Anja Kunz
mann and Alina Rohde
May 10-17

Long marginalized as a Victorian sentimental trifle and remembered mainly through Kate Bush's song, Emily Brontë's 1847 novel Wuthering Heights (usually translated into German as Sturmhöhe) has been experiencing an astonishing renaissance for some time now. For Mithu Sanyal, it is even "the postmodern novel of the 19th century." Director Frederik Werth will reinterpret the dark story of a wild, sometimes brutal love set against a rugged landscape, and close one of the narrative gaps in the novel in an unexpected way. In a multimedia theater performance, the narrative positions of the novel by the safe fireplace will be questioned against our own perspectives: the true crime podcast.

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