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Saturday, April 14, 2018

Keighley News announces new events at the Brontë Parsonage Museum:
Brontë biographer Elizabeth Gaskell will drop into the Brontë Parsonage on Thursday April 19.
Mrs Gaskell, a well-known novelist in her own right, will join Haworth Church sexton John Brown to speak with visitors about their friendship with the Brontë family.
Costumed guides will play both the historical figures during the latest Late Night Thursday at the Brontë Parsonage Museum, running until 8pm.
Admission to the Haworth museum is free to local people after 5.30pm, if they take along proof of residence in the BD22, BD21 or BD20 postcode areas or Thornton.
The last admission is 7.30pm.
The monthly Brontë Treasures session will be at the museum on April 27 at 2pm, when a curator will offer visitors unique access to treasures from the Brontë Society collection.
The same day sees the latest Parsonage Unwrapped session at 7.30pm, when Dr Emma Storr will speak about life and death in smelly, crowded and unsanitary Haworth in the 1840s. (David Knights)
One particular event, Kate Whiteford's Wings of Desire is featured with special attention:
 Kate Whiteford has used aerial photography to create a bird’s eye view of the landscape around the Parsonage and across the moors to Top Withens, reputedly the setting for Emily’s novel Wuthering Heights.
Whiteford will meditate upon the iconography of the bird of prey, its metaphorical properties and association with fight or flight, escape and predation.
The exhibition also includes a series of new works on paper, and a ‘hawkcam’ will allow Brontë enthusiasts to view the moors from the comfort of their armchair. (...)
SMJ Falconry will visit Parson’s Field behind the museum on May 27 to introduce visitors to some of the birds of prey that feature in Kate Whiteford’s film, including the tiny merlin hawk similar to Emily’s Nero.
Visitors will be able to witness flying displays with a variety of incredible birds, from the amazing speed of Peregrine falcons to the fantastic ability for red kites.
During the session, which runs from 10am to 4pm, people will be able to handle the birds and talk with SMJ Falconry’s specialist team.
The activity is free with admission to the museum, as is a Wild Wednesday! family workshop to be held on May 30 inside the museum.
The title is Flights of Fancy, and it will focus on Emily’s love of birds and her novel Wuthering Heights, where many birds are mentioned, such as larks, lapwings, linnets and cuckoos. (David Knights)
Actress Rose McGowan's ten favourite books in Vulture:
Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë
“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being, with an independent will; which I now exert to leave you.”
This is an important book that as a young girl showed me that we can be indomitable, regardless of whether we are seen or not.
Broadway World Pittsburgh reviews the current PICT production of Alan Stanford's Jane Eyre:
"What you are about to see is not Jane Eyre," director and adaptor Alan Stanford intoned evocatively during his pre-show lecture at opening night of what I THOUGHT was PICT'S Jane Eyre. Immediately explaining, he wryly stated, "This is a play, an adaptation of a novel. It is not the novel. Jane Eyre is a rather large book, big enough to kill a rat." (...)
A highly condensed but incredibly whole-seeing adaptation, at two and a half hours Stanford's acclaimed Jane Eyre feels like a whole story as opposed to Cliff Notes or a Wishbone special (hey, actors- remember Wishbone, the dog with a better resume than any of us will ever have?). A full-grown Jane (Cary Anne Spear) writes her memoirs of her eventful earlier life, first as a wayward and independent child (Caroline Lucas) and then as a principled but impulsive young woman (Karen Baum). The conceit of three Janes allows some of the novel's prose stylings (I cannot confirm if any are direct quotes, or simply in keeping with the book's language) to shine through. Spear's adult Jane serves less as narrator than as internal monologue for much of the show, reflecting what Baum's protagonist Jane cannot or does not say. It's a clever conceit that works for the material- one can't imagine applying this technique to a more florid, verbose novelist like Dickens, but Jane Eyre is just prosaic enough to make it work. (Read more) (Greg Kerestan)
Emily Brontë at 200 on RTÉ:
Emily Brontë was born 200 years ago this year. Her most notable work, Wuthering Heights, is still widely read and discussed today. Niall MacMonagle joined Today with Sean O’Rourke to discuss Brontë’s life and work. (...)
"Wuthering Heights is unique. There is no other book like this strange, powerful, violent love story. And Cathy and Heathcliff, they’re like no other lovers in literature. Everything about Wuthering Heights is strange."
Listen back to the whole segment on Emily Brontë on Today with Sean O’Rourke here.
The Times reviews Property: A Collection by Lionel Shriver:
When the heroine does get her man, her house, her garden, any sweetness or soppiness is vinegared. The Self-Seeing Sycamore was commissioned for Reader, I Married Him, a collection of stories inspired by Jane Eyre. Shriver’s solution isn’t so much “Reader, I married him,” as, “Reader, I watched the Downton Christmas special with him.” The modern Mr Rochester draws the line at Poldark. (Laura Freeman)
Financial Times talks about rediscovering lost manuscripts of our favourite authors:
This month (?), the Brontë Society will publish two previously undiscovered works by Charlotte Brontë. Many “lost works” turn up in archives or among a writer’s boxed papers. But the 77-line poem and a 74-line story that Charlotte is thought to have written when she was about 17 had a more colourful journey.
They had been stuffed together with other papers into the pages of the stout, two-volume The Remains of Henry Kirke White by Robert Southey, a book belonging to Charlotte’s mother, Maria Brontë. It was part of a large box of goods, saved from shipwreck (just before Maria Brontë’s marriage in 1812).
According to news reports, it was sold by the family in 1861 to a private collector in the US and then bought by the Society in 2015. You can sense the excitement among the thousands of hardcore Brontë fans, but in our secret hearts, what we want from unpublished and newly discovered works is more of what we loved in the first place — another Jane Eyre. (Nilanjana Roy)
The East London & Sussex Guardian highlights the upcoming performances of Jane Eyre. An Autobiography in Chelmsford:
Struggling to think, live and love beyond the stifling expectations of duty, class and convention, governess Jane Eyre and Master Edward Rochester take a dark journey towards sensual and intellectual liberation. Told through Jane’s eyes, English literature’s most celebrated autobiographical novel shocked the Victorians, and Charlotte Brontë’s gothic subversion of fairy-tale romance is now distilled for the stage – under its full title – by writer/director Elton Townend Jones. Performer Rebecca Vaughan embodies everywoman Jane – and several other characters – in this intimate study of love’s realities. (Kelly Pells)
France Net Infos reports the publication of a recent collector edition of Brontë novels and a biography:
Denise le Dantec répare ici bien des clichés que je pouvais me faire d’une fille de pasteur vivant avec ses frère et sœurs, perdue dans les landes venteuses du Yorkshire : une « Jane Eyre » par excellence. Ainsi, tel un roman, alternant récit, poèmes et dialogues imaginaires – pourtant si réels – entre frère et sœurs, l’auteur nous emmène avec beaucoup de poésie sur les pas d’Emily. Des pas nous faisant traverser ces landes si chères à ses yeux, à la fois source d’ « inspiration » de sa richesse poétique et d’ « expiration » de ses sentiments les plus profonds. (Jessica Rodriguez) (Translation)
WGAL recommends books written by women:
Wide Sargasso Sea
Jean Rhys was already an accomplished writer when she decided to write Wide Sargasso Sea near the end of her life. Known for being a fierce rule breaker, Rhys struggled with poverty, alcoholism, depression, and discontent with a patriarchal society. Wide Sargasso Sea features many of those themes as she focuses on a prominent character from the past: The madwoman in the attic from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.
iDiva lists 'awesome but psycho female characters in films who are actually kind of amazing':
The madwoman in the attic, Jane Eyre
We get a short glimpse of Bertha Mason, Mr Rochester’s first wife, in the movie Jane Eyre. From the Caribbean, she is sexually uninhibited, lacking the Victorian reserve and mannerisms of conservative women like Jane Eyre. Locked away in the corner of a big mansion, we are told she is the “madwoman in the attic.” A prisoner of Rochester, she represents the “whore” to Jane Eyre’s “angel.” Strong, powerful, and filled with all the rage and intensity we don’t see in Jane, she is everything that the feminine and dutiful Jane isn’t, making her the perfect example of a woman who is deemed psychotic because she is untameable.
The real question therefore remains, who wouldn’t go into a rage-filled frenzy if they were placed in a strange country, in a strange house, in a room in the attic, denied all passion and love? (Stuti Bhattacharya)
The Newport Plain Talk reviews In the Shadow of Agatha Christie. Classic Crime Fiction by Forgotten Female Writers: 1850-1917 by Leslie S. Klinger:
Klinger then introduces us to fifteen women writers, giving brief biographical sketches of each followed by a single story penned by these talented women. Of the fifteen, I had only heard of four, prior to reading this book: Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, Baroness Orczy, Anna Katherine Green, and Susan Glaspell.
Gaskell, I knew, penned the first biography of her friend Charlotte Brontë, at the behest of Bronte’s father Patrick. She also wrote several novels, including North & South, Cranford, and Wives & Daughters, which have been filmed as period mini-series often seen on PBS. But Gaskell as a short story writer was new to me. (Duay O'Neil)
We find this comment on The Writing Cooperative rather laughable:
However, authors use the concept of stories like Cinderella, and the novels of Jane Austen, and mix them up until they have something original. I’ve actually read a version of Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë, where her terrible Aunt Reed and horrid cousins were vampires. Yes, it was so bad I had to finish it. It was kind of like people slowing down to see a car accident. (Susan L. Stewart)
According to Vogue (Spain), Antía Van Weill (artist and member of the band Bifannah) is a Brontëite:
Conoces a tu pareja si... nombras el libro que relee una y otra vez.
Luis Basilio: El único que ha releído es Cumbres Borrascosas, de Emily Brontë. (Translation)
Harper's Bazaar (Germany) looks into the new fashion trends:
Um den Trend zu verstehen, lohnt sich ein Blick in die Modegeschichte. Die Brontë-Schwestern mischten mit ihren Heldinnen Jane Eyre, Helen Lawrence und Catherine Linton das viktorianische Zeitalter auf und ihre Romane gelten heute als Meisterwerke der Emanzipation. (Christine Korte) (Translation)
Visión del Cine (Argentina) reviews The Drunkard's Lament by Jim Finn:
 Jim Finn escribe y dirige un experimento musical sobre Cumbres borrascosas de Emily Brönte (sic). Con imágenes de video bastante viejas y algunas bastante maltrechas como fondo visual, The Drunkard’s Lament es un relato epistolar y musical entre el hermano de Emily Brönte (sic) y un amigo.
Branwell Brönte (sic) descubre que su hermana Emily está escribiendo su primera novela. Y descubre también que un personaje se parece demasiado a una visión poco favorecedora suya. Así se ofrece a editarla y a sugerir diferentes cambios. Esto lo discute a través de cartas con su amigo Francis Leyland.
El film presenta una carta narrada en voz en off y luego una canción al respecto, así unas cuantas veces, siempre primero con la leyenda que nos ayuda a situarnos en fecha y de quién a quién está dirigida. En cada una de ellas, Branwell sugiere absurdos cambios sobre el personaje del que se siente un modelo.
Finalmente nos terminamos encontrando ante un relato curioso y divertido, en gran parte también porque las canciones resultan algo más pegadizas de lo que esperábamos. (Jessica Johanna) (Translation)
Chilango Times (México) reviews the TV series Doctor Foster:
El tratamiento de la obsesión es verosímil. Durante toda la serie podemos relacionar la serie con obras como Luna amarga de Roman Polanski, la novela Cumbres Borrascosas de Emilie (sic) Brontë y, por supuesto, el mito clásico de Medea. (Gerardo Sánchez) (Translation)
For the Love of Books!! interviews the author Kirsty Ferry:
What’s your favourite novel from another author?
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. I love it. There are so many layers to it, and so many amazing speeches by Heathcliff and Cathy…it’s the book, probably more than any other, that made me want to be a ‘proper’ writer.
Associated Press reminds us how on April 14, 1939, the movie “Wuthering Heights,” starring Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier, premiered in New York. On Rai Radio 3 a complete reading by Anna Maria Guarnieri of a Italian translation of Wuthering Heights can be found. Israel Book Review reviews the book. Hathaways of Haworth explores the differences in sartorial taste between Charlotte Brontë and her creation Jane Eyre.

If you are interested in the Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever 2018 Day, this campaign is rather important:
This Pozible crowdfunder is a LAST CHANCE to get one of my loving reproductions of the outfit worn by Kate Bush in her 1978 'red dress version' music video for her smash hit Wuthering Heights.
For the past 3 years I have been supplying these costumes to men, women and children attending The Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever events around the world; I've loved dressing so many Cathys but it is a huge unpaid commitment for me and so this will be my last hurrah!
This is an ALL OR NOTHING campaign, if we don't reach the target for me to afford to do a minimum run then there will be no costumes this year, so if you want them PLEASE SPREAD THE WORD!
Time is very tight to ensure I get them to everyone well before the 14th July for this year's The Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever 2018.

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