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Thursday, May 21, 2015

The Telegraph and Argus reports that
A video art installation celebrating a link between the industrial grandeur of Salts Mill with the literary magic of Haworth's Parsonage is being filmed in Saltaire.
Acclaimed contemporary artist Diane Howse, the Countess of Harewood, is re-making the connection between these two great places with The Silent Wild, an art work she is creating this week in the Mill's huge roof space.
The resulting work uses a detailed floor plan of the Parsonage dining room, has been produced with choreographer Carolyn Choa and dancer Daniel Hay-Gordon.
It will be shown at the Parsonage and at Salts Mill later this year, telling the unexpected connection between two of Yorkshire’s iconic buildings.
Sir James Roberts, the second owner of Salts and an entirely self made man, was born to a family of weavers in Oakworth near Haworth.
He attended the Sunday school of Reverend Patrick Bronte, and claimed to have met Charlotte Brontë in Haworth.
When the chance came up to purchase the Parsonage, Lady Roberts suggested that her husband do just that.
On August 4, 1928, Sir James and his wife presented the Parsonage to the Brontë Society, securing it for posterity. (Chris Tate)
The same newspaper also has an article on the BBC Brontë biopic project.

Another review of Patricia Park's Re Jane novel. On BookPage:
Re Jane is breezy and accessible, at its best when portraying Jane’s haplessness and frustration. “I traveled nearly seven thousand miles across the globe to escape societal censure only to end up in the second-largest Korean community in the Western World,” she says wryly of her childhood move to the U.S.
The Jane Eyre connection here is substantial (a key character even shares the pen name under which Brontë published her masterpiece), though not slavish, which makes sense given that Park’s interest in feminism goes beyond the Women’s Studies professor who plays an important role in the book. (...)
None of the conflicts here are resolved in particularly shocking ways, but Park’s portrait of Korean-American life feels authentic and is ultimately endearing. Charlotte Brontë would be proud. (Tom Deignan)
Describing the National Gallery's artist in residence, George Shaw, the Evening Standard says that,
Shaw is an infectiously passionate reader, a cinephile and music fan. His conversation teems with references to mavericks and geniuses of British and Irish culture, from Emily Brontë to Tony Hancock, Morrissey and Francis Bacon. (Ben Luke)
The Perth Courier features writer Cheryl Cooper:
Towards the end of high school, she encountered the inevitable question: what do you want to be after graduation?
“Well, I knew I wanted to be a writer,” she said simply.
She studied English and Education at Queen’s University in Kingston. She read the Brontë sisters, Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, and “my desire to write fiction was so strong.” (Desmond Devoy)
Much like this columnist from Jezebel's Groupthink.

Vulture reviews Nell Zink’s Mislaid.
Here’s the way the story goes: a rugged childhood in rural Virginia; a mother who told the child she didn’t write as well as the Brontës did at that age; a bachelor’s degree in philosophy; a peripatetic early adulthood that included a phase of homelessness, a stint as a bricklayer, secretarial work in New York, editorship of a zine, a couple of impetuous marriages, an expatriation to Europe; a correspondence, struck up over their mutual concern for the plight of migratory birds, with Jonathan Franzen, whose report on the mass poaching of songbirds in Cyprus she’d seen in The New Yorker; Franzen’s curiosity about whether she wrote fiction; her creative flowering after her mother’s death that freed her in middle age (she’s 51) to write the way she writes, Brontës be damned. (Christian Lorentzen)
According to Alibi's review of the film adaptation of Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd,
In the realm of 19th-century romantic literature, the works of Thomas Hardy have a bit more meat on the bone than your average English melodrama of love and marriage. In the more typical novels (let’s say, for the sake of argument, those of Jane Austen or the Brontë sisters), there’s an awful lot of sitting around, drinking tea and discussing of “whomever shall I marry?” It’s not that the characters in Hardy’s novels never broach the subject of marriage—but they rarely drink tea. And they’re just as likely to hurt each other, betray each other, kill each other and break one another’s hearts as they are to fall madly in love. (Devin D. O’Leary)
You know, Wuthering Heights--that peaceful, quiet novel where everyone just sits around drinking tea oh so civilly.

La libre (Belgium) reviews the film too and is not the first to mention Andrea Arnold's take on Wuthering Heights.
Fidèle à la trame d’Hardy, le cinéaste danois trouve un bel équilibre entre romantisme de l’histoire et une forme de naturalisme, notamment dans cette façon de filmer la nature, les animaux, les insectes… Un peu à la façon d’Andrea Arnold dans sa très forte adaptation des "Hauts de Hurlevent" d’Emily Brontë en 2012. (H. H.) (Translation)
On the other hand, Knack Focus, another Belgian site reviewing the film, doesn't see similarities, but differences.
In plaats van de woeste, modderige levendigheid van Andrea Arnolds Wuthering Heights (2011) krijgen we mooie plaatjes van bucolische taferelen. Maar verkijk je daar niet op. Gepolijst is hier niet synoniem met glad maar met verfijnd. (Niels Ruëll) (Translation)
Times Higher Education looks at Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae 25 years after it was first published and wonders,
Who else would have argued that Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem Christabel (1797) offers readers a vision of the “lesbian vampire” before enacting one of the “greatest transsexual self-transformations in literature”? Or that in Wuthering Heights (1847), a regular fixture of secondary English curricula, Emily Brontë regards “the body as the basis of gender” as “an affront to imagination and emotion”, and so attempts to “treat her sexual identity as an abstraction dwelling apart in another dimension of space and time”? (Nathan Smith)
Bustle lists '7 Incredible Storytellers in Literature' such as
Nelly Dean from Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
Nelly tells such a captivating story of Heathcliff and Catherine that readers get so wrapped up in it they sometimes even forget she existed in the book in the first place. Isn’t that the mark of an excellent storyteller: to put the story ahead of your own character? Mr. Lockwood is renting a space from aged Heathcliff, when Heathcliff starts to act totally bizarre about a ghost named Catherine. Lockwood is so confused, he finds the housekeeper Nelly and requests that she tell the entire tale about the family at Wuthering Heights, which she does. Never forget. (Caitlin White)
Bustle has also selected '8 Love Letters Written By Famous Women' including one from Charlotte Brontë to Constantin Heger.

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