New Statesman reviews the book
Outsiders: Five Women Writers Who Changed the World by Lyndall Gordon:
Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Olive Schreiner, Shelley and Woolf: these are the women Gordon calls “Outsiders”, women who struggled against the conventions of their time to live the lives they wished to live. Gordon is an imaginative and rigorous biographer who has already addressed the lives of Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Brontë and Woolf in full-length books, but the pleasure in this compact volume is the way in which she weaves these lives together, building links across the generations. (...)
One of Gordon’s strengths is always to recognise the tension inherent in biography’s form: finally, how can we know anything? Evidence of anyone’s life is only ever fragmentary. “Twenty-five years ago a biographer tried to nail Emily Brontë as anorexic; now it’s Asperger’s syndrome. It was ever thus. The personal will remain largely unknown,” she writes. (Erica Wagner)
The Huffington Post interviews the writer
Fiona Mozley:
Place is so key to this narrative; it both sets the tone and helps to build the suspense. How did you decide on the setting for this novel? (Brandi Megan Granett)
The setting for this novel was probably the easiest decision I had to make during its creation. Long before ‘Elmet’ was a novel, and long before it was a collection of poems by Ted Hughes, it was the name of the old Brittonic kingdom that covered the area in the north of England that is now the southern and western parts of Yorkshire, just south of York (that’s the original York, not the new one!). (...) Yorkshire has a grand literary heritage. It was the home of the Brontë sisters, and Dracula washed up in his coffin at Whitby, on the Yorkshire coastline.
New Jersey Stage announces a new reading of Stephen Kaplan's
Branwell (and the other Brontës) play next January:
Monday, January 15 – “Brandwell (sic) and the Other Bronte” by Stephen Kaplan. The Brontë siblings (Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne) had incredibly vivid imaginations that allowed them to create such masterpieces as Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. However, it is in their own private fantasy worlds, first invented when they were children, that they find their most inspired outlets. With a clear set of rules, they escape to these worlds whenever fancy pleases them. But when reality threatens to crash in, the siblings start changing the rules in order to avoid the inevitable and fight to keep their cherished worlds alive. Though set in the past, Branwell (and the other Brontës): an autobiography edited by Charlotte Brontë is about how, throughout time, we tell stories that can unite us all together in our humanity.
The Lancashire Post recommends some children's books like
Girls Who Rocked The World by Michelle Roehm McCann and Amelie Welden:
Whether designing famous monuments, fighting for the freedom of their country or becoming political pioneers, these gutsy girls have changed the way we view the world and ourselves. From Florence Nightingale to Anna Pavlova, Coco Chanel to Eva Perón, and the Brontë Sisters to Indira Gandhi, this book features women from across history and around the globe who have all achieved remarkable things. (Pam Norfolk)
Marriage proposals in
The Canberra Times:
When someone blithely accepts a man's proposal of marriage (as Ryan Bolger this week famously accepted the public proposal of Tim Wilson MP) how can they be sure that the proposer is not already married? What if, at home, he has a mad spouse locked up in a secret room?
Well-read readers will recognise at once this reference to Charlotte Brontë's great gothic novel Jane Eyre. This week's great, gothic proposal scene in the House of Representatives has sent me scampering to some of the many websites that celebrate (sometimes with shudders of horror) proposal scenes in great literature.
In Jane Eyre and after Mr Rochester's tortured proposal to Jane (and her tortured acceptance of it) a giant tree is smash-tackled by a bolt of lightning. We find that this is an omen, a display of divine indignation, for it emerges Rochester is already married, albeit to a madwoman locked away in a remote wing of Rochester's lonely mansion. (Ian Warden)
The Conversation reviews the recent adaptation of Margaret Atwood's
Alias Grace by Sarah Polley:
Second, popular costume dramas tend to conclude with the heroine’s marriage to a more affluent man. Although educated, privileged men might initially appear stuffy or difficult (such as Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice or Edward Rochester in Jane Eyre) but they eventually show their softer side by falling in love with the heroine and offering her a better life. (Roberta Garrett)
Point Park Globe reviews the play
You on the Moors Now:
The plot of “You on the Moors Now” is centered around four of the most well-known female characters in classic literature: Jane Eyre (Aenya Ulke), Jo March (Shannon Donovan), Elizabeth Bennett (Julia Small) and Catherine Earnshaw (Madeline Watkins). But these aren’t exactly like the stories you remember from high school. Instead of romantic garden proposals and “ardent” love, “You on the Moors Now” tells an alternate tale, set in a world where the women said “No.” In doing so, our female protagonists both literally and metaphorically reject the life written for them in favor of choosing the livesthey want to lead. (Erin Hyatt)
Keighley News presents the singer and songwriter
Isaac Tyler:
Isaac Tyler, 20, will this month show a hometown audience what the fuss is about, as well as guesting on another new recording.
Isaac has been described by his publicist as a “modern Heathcliff” with a broody, aching voice and songs to match. (David Knights)
Variety reviews the film
Asphyxia (خفهگی) by Fereydoun Jeyrani :
And so a strange dynamic evolves in which the pale-eyed, freckled Sahra, plain under her uniform’s wimple, is the Jane Eyre befriending the apparently mad wife of Masoud’s brooding, glowering Rochester — a Gothic impression born out by the hospital’s frequent power cuts, which necessitate the use of candles and oil lamps in its echoey passageways. (Jessica Kiang)
The National (UAE) talks about pseudonyms:
Noms de plumes express other, more politicised concerns. Lest it be forgotten, J K Rowling is also a pen name of sorts, one that conceals the author’s unmistakably female first name, Joanne. This hide-and-seek with male and female has a long tradition. “We veiled our own names under those of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell; the ambiguous choice being dictated by a sort of conscientious scruple at assuming Christian names positively masculine, while we did not like to declare ourselves women, because – without at that time suspecting that our mode of writing and thinking was not what is called ‘feminine’ – we had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice.” So wrote Charlotte Brontë, explaining why the three Brontë sisters chose pen names: Charlotte was Currer, Emily decided on Ellis and Anne took Acton. The same conclusion about a misogynist literary culture informs Mary Ann Evans’ choice of George Eliot to publish Scenes of Clerical Life. The custom was satirised in the BBC sitcom Blackadder, which re-imagined Jane Austen as a “huge Yorkshireman with a beard like a rhododendron bush”.
Charlotte also notes that pseudonyms suited a trio who were “averse to publicity”, which returns us both to Rowling-Galbraith and chimes with many writers across the Middle East, who have pressing reasons to veil their identity. (James Kidd)
Daily Collegian on book endings:
But isn’t it better to have “The Great Gatsby” if you know you can temper it with “Jane Eyre?” Doesn’t “The Bell Jar” add to “The Handmaid’s Tale?” Don’t you think Sylvia would have liked Offred, and Jay Gatsby would have related to Rochester’s crazy twisted romance schemes? (Gabrielle Barone)
Dazeba News (in Italian) reviews an
Italian translation of The Professor:
“Il professore” è il primo romanzo di Charlotte Brontë. Ruota intorno al giovane William Crimsworth, unico protagonista maschile di tutta la produzione dell’autrice e io narrante della storia. William, ragazzo sensibile e colto, fugge da un’occupazione insoddisfacente nello Yorkshire e si trasferisce in Belgio per insegnare inglese presso un istituto femminile. (Bruna Alasia) (Translation)
Courrier International and
Benzine (in French) review the film
God's Own Country:
Seule la terre (God’s own country), son premier long-métrage, a été tourné au pays des sœurs Brontë : au pied de la chaîne montagneuse des Pennines, dans le Yorkshire. (Marie Béloeil) (Translation)
Francis Lee sait magnifier l’atmosphère et le caractère âpre des collines du Yorkshire (où il a grandi), transformées ici en écrin sauvage, en paysages poétiques propices aux amours clandestines et émois bouillonnants, telles les landes de Wuthering Heights chez Emily Brontë. (Michael Pige) (Translation)
lifehasafunnywayofsneakinguponyou posts about the upcoming novel
The Heights by Juliet Bell.
Arbrealettres is publishing some Emily Brontë poems translated into French by Pierre Leyris. The rules of the De Leo-Brontë 2018 awards have been posted on the
Sezione Italiana della Brontë Society Facebook Wall.
Finally a film alert for today at the
Edge Hill University, Lancashire:
Wuthering Heights 2011
6th Dec 2017 - 7:30pm
The Arts Centre
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