Branwell Brontë in Australia

 THE AUSTRALIAN BRONTË ASSOCIATION 

 The Australian Brontë Association meets in Sydney five times a year. Meetings are held at the Castlereagh Boutique Hotel (near Town Hall Station) from 10:30am to 12:00 noon, though we serve morning tea from 10:00am. Those who wish to do so, have a light lunch at the hotel. At each meeting, a paper on some aspect of the Brontës' life and work is presented. There is a meeting charge of $5 (members and non-members). 

2017 Meeting Program 

The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë 

26 June 1817 – 24 September 1848 

1 April The Life & Art of Branwell Brontë – Prof Christine Alexander 

Branwell was a promising writer and artist with a rich imagination. Although he was the first of the Brontë siblings to appear in print, he would never gain money or success and was destined to live in the shadow of his three sisters. Mrs Gaskell described his best-known painting, now hanging in the National Portrait Gallery, as a “rough, common-looking” thing. Christine will discuss the life and art of this extraordinary man.

3 June Wuthering Heights – A/Prof Debra Adelaide 

Debra, author of The Women’s Pages, will look closely at the function of the reader in the novel, and discuss some of its iterations (eg Sylvia Plath’s poem, Kate Bush’s song). 

26 June Branwell Brontë Bicentenary Dinner 

6:30 for 7.00pm The Adam Room, Castlereagh Boutique Hotel 

5 August Branwell Brontë & Friends – introduced by Dr Christopher Cooper 

Branwell’s friends were both famous and infamous, ranging from prominent literary and fine arts men to mill owners, boaties and those who worked on the railways and, of course, Mrs Robinson.

7 October Gypsies in Europe – Souha Korbatieh 

Heathcliff is referred to as “that gipsy brat” and Rochester masquerades as “the Sybil” in his own home “to tell the gentry their fortunes”. Souha will examine the history of the gypsies in Europe and what such references tell us about the central characters, themes and issues of both novels whilst highlighting the plight of marginal classes and the dangers of romantic imaginings. 

2 December ABA/Dickens Christmas Lunch 

12:00 – 3:00pm The Grand Dining Room (Cello’s), Castlereagh Boutique Hotel 

Red House Museum has now closed

Red House Museum is now closed permanently. Its last day of opening to the public was Wednesday 21 December 2016. Kirklees Council included the historic building and its upkeep in a money-saving reorganisation of its Museums Service (along with other museums), thus saving itself the official sum of £531,000. The future of the collections (apart from storage) is not clear at the moment.

The Council is now gathering expressions of interest to take over the running of the building. So, if any readers of this blog know of a community-based group or organisation...  here is the link:

http://www.kirklees.gov.uk/beta/community-assets/community-asset-transfers.aspx

A reminder - this is what it was like to walk in at opening time on a typical day:

To Walk Invisible - "experts delighted"

Read this terrific write-up from the Keighley News!

There's also another interesting article about James Norton and his non-appearance here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/12/10/james-norton-makes-surprise-appearance-bbc-bronte-drama-only/

Remember - it's at 9pm on Thursday 29 December - BBC1 - Watch and record to watch again.

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To Walk Invisible - Preview in Hebden Bridge

Chloe Pirrie, Charlie Murphy and Finn Atkins

"Brontë fans in Yorkshire have the opportunity to be part of a very special preview screening of To Walk Invisible, BBC One’s original one-off drama written and directed by multi BAFTA winner Sally Wainwright, which was filmed in and around Yorkshire." This is part of an announcement to be found on a BBC  page which can be found here.

Sally Wainwright will be there too, in conversation with 5 live's Anna Foster, along with Executive Producer Faith Penhale.

Tickets will be allocated by random draw, with three quarters of them going to West Yorkshire postcodes and a quarter going to the rest of the UK. You can register at any time until Monday 21 November, and you can apply for a maximum of two tickets.

The screening is at Hebden Bridge Picture House 6pm Tuesday 13 December.

Blake Morrison in Brussels

Writer Blake Morrison spoke to the thriving Brussels Brontë Group recently. Helen McEwan sent us this report, which also appears on our sister blog - the Brussels Brontë Blog.

Blake Morrison began his talk by drawing out parallels between his own childhood and the Brontës’. He told us about growing up near Skipton close to the Yorkshire-Lancashire border, in an old rectory at the top of the village, not far from Pendle Hill where the ‘Pendle Witches’ famous in local legend were hanged in 1612. His mother was Irish and his father, as a doctor (in fact both parents were doctors) was an important man in the village just as Patrick Brontë the parson was in Haworth. He told us about reading Jane Eyre in secret as a teenager – in secret because it was not considered boys’ reading in the laddish Yorkshire culture of the time; it was not on the curriculum at the boys’ grammar school he attended – and about the affinity he felt with the young Jane and the novel’s power as a book for young adults. Blake told us how he found out that his mother was hiding her copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in her bedside table around the same time that he was hiding his of Jane Eyre (a novel that when it first came out was also regarded as a ‘naughty’ book!).

Blake went on to tell us how he came to write his play about the Brontës, We are three sisters. First he recounted how an earlier Brontë-inspired stage production, a musical version of Wuthering Heights he wrote in 1986, was never performed; four other musical versions of the novel were doing the rounds at the time and in the end Heathcliff with lyrics by Tim Rice, starring Cliff Richard, was the only one to be staged. To give us a taste of his own version of Wuthering Heights, Blake read us the ballad Isabella’s Song, which starts:

As I stepped out one summer night
to feed my white ring-dove
a shadow fell across the gate
and swore undying love.

The shadow stretched out tall and slim,
its face was black as night.
It spoke to me of wedding-rings
and bridesmaids bathed in light ….

The full poem can be read in his book of verse A discoverie of Witches (2012) prompted by the Pennine landscape in which he grew up. In a very different mood, the collection also includes the Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper, an exploration - in dialect - of the deeds and motives of Peter Sutcliffe, convicted of killing 13 women in 1981. Morrison has never shrunk from tackling such subjects, and has written a book on the James Bulger murder case.

Turning to the genesis of his play We Are Three Sisters, in which he took up the challenge of re-writing Chekhov’s play with Charlotte, Emily and Anne as the sisters, Blake told us that when a theatre critic friend first suggested the idea to him, he dismissed it as ‘bonkers’. He was however persuaded to go ahead with the project by the artistic director of the theatre company Northern Broadsides, which staged the play in 2011.

Sophia di Martino, Catherine Kinsella and Rebecca Hutchinson as the Brontës in Northern Broadsides' production of Blake Morrison's We Are Three Sisters. Photograph: Nobby Clark 

In Blake’s play, Moscow, to which Chekhov’s three sisters long to go, has become London, and, similarly, various characters in the Chekhov play are replaced by equivalent characters from the Brontës’ circle (their doctor, Patrick’s curate). Blake explained that although he used the Brontës own words in his text where possible, the use of Chekhov’s play as a basis meant he had to take some liberties with the Brontës’ life story, with sometimes amusing results. For example, in his play the woman with whom Branwell is believed to have had an affair, his employer’s wife Lydia Robinson, turns up at the Parsonage, which she never visited in real life. Members of our group read out extracts from two scenes in the play: Charlotte and Anne telling Emily about their trip to reveal their identity to the publisher George Smith in London, and Charlotte telling her father about the publication of Jane Eyre.

Contrary to the common perception of the Brontës’ lives as eventless, Blake found them full of interest and drama and wanted to show Haworth as less bleak than it is generally portrayed. His play has many touches of humour and he describes it as a ‘tragi-comedy’, much like the original Chekhov.

--> In the course of the talk, in addition to some of his poems, Blake read us extracts from his memoir And when did you last see your father? Made into a film in 2007 starring Jim Broadbent and Colin Firth, it contains many memories of his childhood. By the end of his time with us we had gained many insights into his personal background and the wide range of his literary output as well as becoming acquainted with his Brontë play.

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Winifred Gérin - a talk in Bath

 

Review of the book here

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Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights - at The West Yorkshire Playhouse

Solomon Glave as Heathcliff

Andrea Arnold's brutally realistic take on Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights made waves in 2011 and is still making waves today, from the responses of the seventy or so in the audience of the Courtyard Theatre of the West Yorkshire Playhouse last night - which consisted mainly of one enthusiastic school party. It was an excellent choice to stimulate debate and raise questions, especially if A Levels are in mind.

An impressively knowledgeable panel was assembled on the stage under the title Brontës on Stage and Screen, to discuss artists' approaches to Brontë adaptations. Linda Marshall-Griffiths spoke about her reading of Villette and the way it influenced her interpretation of it, David Nixon, Artistic Director of Northern Ballet, said that he turned back to the original novel frequently during the process of creating a dance version, Nancy Meckler from Shared Experience recalled her wildly successful collaborations with Polly Teale and Michael Lawrence, Reader in Film Studies at the University of Sussex, spoke eloquently about Andrea Arnold's methods and motivations, and the way the film attacked existing conventions on how classical literature was represented on screen.


Read the review on this blog from five years ago

Watch the official trailer here:

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Review - Villette at the West Yorkshire Playhouse

Review by Richard Wilcocks

Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, which was recognised by knowledgeable readers in nineteenth century Brussels as a close parallel for what actually happened when its author was teaching cosseted Catholic girls in the Pennsionat, is not generally esteemed for its plot, but for its exquisite characterisations and the way the shy, repressed, unmarried and fiercely Protestant central character Lucy Snowe gives vent to her thoughts and emotions throughout the novel. It is outstanding in Victorian literature for its psychological intensity and its honest scrutiny of female consciousness.

There are few dramatic possibilities in it, compared to Jane Eyre, but it has, apparently, been successfully adapted for radio. Stage and film versions have been sparse in number and unmemorable. Therefore, the version scripted by Linda Marshall-Griffiths for the Courtyard Theatre of the West Yorkshire Playhouse as part of its current Brontë Season was keenly anticipated by many, especially people who have read the novel. On the night I saw it, most of the Parsonage staff were there. There had been a few clichéd journalistic comments previously along the lines of “Brontë purists might not like this…” because this version is set in the future. The summary of the new version sounded promisingly interesting, and Linda Marshall-Griffiths is undoubtedly bold, brave and imaginative. In her own words:

“In re-imagining Villette, I asked myself who is the invisible woman now, who would she be in the future? I began thinking of a clone – easily disposed of, created like a worker-ant, identical and made purely to work. A clone that survived a pandemic that killed her two identical sisters. As Charlotte Brontë used to catch glimpses of what she thought was her sisters in paintings and crowds, my Lucy Snowe is haunted by her own face and the past that both terrorises and holds her. I moved the setting of Villette onto an archeological dig in the future. Lucy Snowe flees her past to become part of a team looking for the bones of the Lady of Villette – a survivor herself, she may hold the key to an ebola-like virus…”  (from the YYP leaflet)

In the event, this play would have been most easily followed by those Brontë purists, the ones in spotless white perhaps, the ones who could compare the characters in the novel with those on stage and follow the storyline, which on the whole adheres to the original pattern. There are just five actors on stage (theatre economics of course), and much has been cut – inevitably. For example Ginevra Fanshawe, here ‘Gin’ (and Polly) is played by Amelia Donkor as a hedonistic dancer and slinky party-goer who prefers to go to the Day of the Dead celebrations rather than hang around in a boring laboratory.

Day of the Dead? Is there a Mexican connection? Is it a linking reference to the bones of the Lady of Villette in the onstage archeological trench? Not clear. It is just one of the things which lead to possible confusion, because the play is hard to get to grips with and occasionally incoherent. Disbelief is not easily suspended. The characters are sketchy and do not develop: Beck, for example, the equivalent of Madame Beck, Charlotte Brontë’s version of the sly wife of the man she loved, is played simply as a kind of workplace bully with an obsession for surveillance by a very under-used Catherine Cusack. Nana Amoo-Gottfried gives us the makings of a good, amiable John Bretton, and should also have been offered more material through which to display his talents.

Amelia Donkor (Gin) and Laura Elsworthy (Lucy Snowe)

After the first quarter of an hour or so, when I was wondering whether this was something out of Doctor Who, Laura Elsworthy, playing Lucy Snowe, was filling me with admiration for her strenuous efforts to portray a journey out of repression and into the realm of love, but she became wearing after a while, especially towards the end of the over-long first half, when she is placed at a raised front corner and engages directly with the audience. As an actor, she must have had some problems getting into the mind of one of three identical clones created by a scientist father (her two sisters, named Esme and Ashe, are dead) or showing that she has real sparks of humanity. Elsworthy does her best with what she is given, but her clunky, awkward utterances, her jerky movements and her lengthy agony-stricken diatribes, delivered expressionist-style, are just too much. And where did that Catholic priest come from? A dream? Mexico?

The second half gave some relief. Lucy became much more human, and the audience even laughed as she sat on a blanket and opened a picnic basket with the gauche Paul (Philip Cairns) to participate in a comically awkward conversation, perhaps the best part of the play. Neither of the characters knew what a picnic was, they had previously admitted, but the basket was to hand and they soon found out.

The admirable boldness of the playwright’s vision made this production watchable. On the night I saw it, a group of what seemed to be sixth formers were chatting noisily afterwards. They had not read the original and confessed to being confused, but they liked the play as a strange puzzle – and they were most intrigued by the enigmatic ending. It might make a good television version one day.

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Jessie Burton, Grace McCleen and little books

Isabel Stirk writes:

Quite a few years ago I purchased a replica set of toy soldiers from the museum shop at the Parsonage for my godson. He enjoyed many hours of imaginative play with them - there were make believe battles, disasters and a few wore a set of badly made uniforms made by yours truly!

Nearly two hundred years earlier Branwell Brontë’s original toy soldiers were having adventures of their own, written about in books the Brontë children made themselves which were less than thirteen centimetres square. The hand writing was proportionately small which created no difficulty for the children as they were all- Charlotte the most- short sighted.  These little books have always fascinated visitors to the museum and have played a big part in this year’s exhibition, curated by Tracy Chevalier, Charlotte Great and Small.

On Saturday evening (10 September), in Haworth, an appreciative audience heard Tracy Chevalier talking to two writers who have both written about miniatures.

Jessie Burton spoke about her debut novel, The Miniaturist, which is set in seventeenth century Amsterdam, and how she was inspired by a visit to the Rijksmuseum. Her novel is based on a doll’s house she saw there which had belonged to the wife of a silk merchant- Petronella Oortman - who had furnished it lavishly. It was interesting to learn that Burton herself had been given a miniature writing desk by a friend on which was placed a tiny replica book with the title Jane Eyre to be joined later by another tiny book Burton’s own The Miniaturist.

Grace McCleen, who is writer-in-residence at the Brontë Parsonage Museum for 2016, said she had always been interested in miniaturisation, and making miniatures, sometimes up to fourteen hours at a time, had helped her through a period of illness. She too spoke about, and read from, her own award winning debut novel The Land of Decoration. The narrator is a ten year old girl who, with her father, is a member of a fundamentalist sect who lives in a small town. To escape from the bullying she has to endure she recreates the town as an elaborate model in her bedroom.

The usual questions and answers followed and there were differing theories put forward as to why people create miniatures and why the Brontë children created their own miniature books. In the case of the Brontës I feel it may have been an escape and as they followed their heroes in their adventures they had found for a short time their own sanctuary.  For a brief period they were free from the harsh realities of their lives. Lives where they had no mother, they had lost two sisters and lived within sight of a crowded graveyard. They would hear frequently the tolling of the church bell heralding that their father would soon be conducting the funeral of yet another Haworth resident who had succumbed to the ignorance, disease and privation which abounded in the hill top village at that time. 

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A case of plagiarism

Push Me Away plagiarises Emily’s Journal

Sarah Fermi writes:

I recently came across what looked like a very interesting book — Push Me Away, written by — Branwell Brontë (!).  I started to read the book, and it became even more interesting than I expected.  The primary story involves Branwell and his reincarnated double, John Eaglewood.  But there is also a supporting secondary story regarding Emily Brontë, and it was strangely familiar to me.  It appears to be based directly on events only ever described in my novel, Emily’s Journal.  This is a clear case of plagiarism.  Unfortunately, Dr Lambert-Hills, the actual author of Push Me Away, permits no true acknowledgments of his sources; the entire production is fictional including the owner of the copyright (Branwell Brontë); and the people included on the page of thanks are all fictional characters in the book. 

Sarah Fermi

So this is advice to anyone reading Push Me Away, who is wondering where the new material on Emily came from:  you can find it all in a work of plausible fiction, Emily’s Journal, by Sarah Fermi,  — available from Amazon, and from the Brontë Parsonage Museum Bookshop.  The work was based on several years of research, and there is a full account of which parts of the story are true, which are theoretical but probable, and which are fictional.

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Opening soon - 'Villette' in Leeds

Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, re-imagined by Linda Marshall-Griffiths, opens in the Courtyard Theatre at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds on Saturday 24 September 2016. A review will appear here soon afterwards, hopefully. This is from the Playhouse's publicity:

"Lucy Snowe, alone and abandoned, boards a boat in search of purpose. 

"Arriving at an archaeological site digging for the remains of the elusive Lady of Villette, she works alongside the beautiful Gin, the prying Beck, the charming Dr John and the remote Professor Paul, though Lucy remains an outsider.

"Absorbed in her work to find a cure for the next pandemic to secure humanity’s future, can she open herself up to the possibility of love and put the bones of the past behind her?

"On the 200th anniversary of Charlotte Brontë’s birth, West Yorkshire Playhouse celebrates her unique genius with a daring new adaptation by a fellow Yorkshire writer, Linda Marshall-Griffiths. With echoes of the illness and loss that wracked Brontë’s own life, both novel and play explore the redemptive power of love and the uncertainty of holding on to it."

On the following Thursday (29 September) at 6.30pm, also at the West Yorkshire Playhouse (Other Space), there will be a discussion in the style of a debate - Jane Eyre versus Villette. A similar event took place in Haworth during the AGM weekend in June, some readers of this blog will recall. This time, speakers for Jane Eyre will be Blake Morrison  and Sarah Perry, and speakers for Villette will be Sally Vickers and Ruth Robbins.

For full details of the Brontë Season at the WYP, go to its website here.

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