Bookmark this independent blog

Monday 5 March 2012

Charlotte Brontë's The Secret in Italian



Maddalena De Leo send us news of the recent publication in Italian of her translation of The Secret. She also mentions how happy she is to know that the Red House has been saved. She made a point of visiting it in 2009, and was one of those who emailed her opinion during the campaign to keep it from enforced closure.

News release:
The juvenile work The Secret by Charlotte Brontë has been published in Italian for the first time on 2nd March. The translator and editor of the little book published by Albus is Prof. Maddalena De Leo who already translated and edited Brontë’s Henry Hastings in 2009 also for Albusedizioni and other Juvenilia as Mina Laury and Stancliffe Hotel etc. (Ripostes).

The Secret focuses on Charlotte’s heroine, Marian Hume, the child bride of the dark, brooding and temperamental Marquis of Douro (also known as Arthur Wellesley II and the Duke of Zamorna, the oldest son of Charlotte’s hero, the fictionalized Duke of Wellington). The story is narrated by the Marquis’ younger brother, Charles Wellesley.

The manuscript of The Secret was first documented by Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte’s biographer, who probably saw it just after her death. The first page of The Secret was reproduced in Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë, which was published in 1857. The manuscript was also included in Shorter’s The Brontës: Life and Letters, which was published in 1908.

No information is available on the manuscript’s whereabouts between 1915 and 1973, and it was presumed lost. However, the manuscript was rediscovered among the personal papers of Evelyn Wadsworth Symington, wife of United States Senator Stuart Symington, after her death in 1973.

The Italian book can boast a colourful cover and an exhaustive introduction by the editor herself.

Charlotte Brontë, Il segreto, translated into Italian and edited by Maddalena De Leo, Albusedizioni, 2012, pp. 78, euros 7,5
The book is available on Albusedizioni site

Charlotte Brontë's French

Sue Lonoff writes:
How good was Charlotte Brontë’s French in 'L’Ingratitude'?  As we know, it is a very early devoir, written a month and a day after Charlotte and Emily arrived at the Pensionnat Heger. 


In this text of fifty-eight lines, Brian Bracken has identified fourteen errors. However, eight of the fourteen are the same error: Charlotte used the imperfect tense rather than the passé simple. For example, she wrote ‘mangeait’, ‘he was eating’ rather than ‘mangea’, ‘he ate’. She made one mistake in gender (‘un’ rather than ‘une’ odeur) and one in pronoun case (‘le faisait’ rather than ‘lui faisait). She hyphenated a word incorrectly; she forgot to make ‘grand’ plural before ‘seigneurs’; she put an adjective before instead of after its noun; and she used one plural verb rather than a singular. 


Errors of this kind are commonly made by English people writing in French. Still, ‘L’Ingratitude’ shows that Charlotte came to Brussels with a fairly solid grammar base and an extensive vocabulary. Her French was not yet supple. ‘L’Ingratitude’ is stiffer than the essays she would write subsequently. Its punctuation is also erratic, but that is an issue in all of her writing, English or French. Nevertheless, she shows her teacher that she can write with imagination and charm
 

Sunday 4 March 2012

L'Ingratitude - translated by Sue Lonoff (Harvard)

This is the link to the full text of Charlotte Brontë's homework in The London Review of Books. Perhaps it should be published in the future as a little booklet with illustrations...
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n05/charlotte-bronte/lingratitude?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=3405&hq_e=el&hq_m=1549840&hq_l=4&hq_v=a538576075

Sunday 26 February 2012

Hartshead fundraiser


Christa Ackroyd, Brontë Society member and presenter on BBC TV Look North, is to give a talk about the Brontës at Hartshead Church on Saturday 31 March starting at 7.30pm. For tickets  £7.50 with refreshments contact John Ferret  - Ecrb@Live.co.uk   & 01924 403602. This is raise  funds for the church. (from Imelda Marsden)

(Patrick Brontë was parson at St Peter's, Hartshead (near Cleckheaton, now part of Kirklees) between 1811 and 1815. He met his future wife Maria Branwell in Rawdon, now part of Leeds, about twelve miles from Hartshead, in 1811. They married in Guiseley, also now in Leeds.)

Saturday 25 February 2012

Contemporary Gothic


A Horror of Great Darkness: Gothic from the Brontës to Twilight was the main title for yesterday's one day conference for AS and A2 students*, exploring the relationship between the Brontës and Gothic, and how the genre continues to influence contemporary culture. It was particularly relevant to the AQA Literature B syllabus, but was also invaluable to all students wishing to gain a broader critical perspective on both nineteenth century literature, and the understanding of genre.

Students from a number of schools attended workshops, listened to lectures, toured the Parsonage (what else?) and muddied their feet in the graveyard. Efficiently organised mainly by Sue Newby, contributors included Dr Sue Chaplin from the University of Leeds and Dr Catherine Spooner from the University of Lancaster.

Richard Wilcocks writes:
Dr Spooner, dressed appropriately in black, was very much on the same wavelength as her appreciative, overwhelmingly female audience, some of whom (from Altrincham in Cheshire) have promised to send their comments to this blog. Let's hope they do. With the help of a Powerpoint and references to a variety of novels and collections of the past few years (Angela Carter's name cropping up frequently), her main point was that the gothic in all its manifestations has always had a connection with adolescence, with the crossover towards adulthood. 'Threatened virginity'  was a key phrase.

Films on her list included The Woman in Black and Let The Right One In, both of which I would class as significantly disturbing, with a strong 'lingering' quality, especially the second one, in which young Oscar's virginity is threatened by the athletic Eli, who lost hers to the original Transylvanian vampires centuries ago. "Gothic is rampant throughout the contemporary music scene," said Dr Spooner, talking about the persona constructed by 'Mama Monster' Lady Gaga, whose actual music is pretty mainstream pop, and bringing up publicity photos of Marilyn Manson.  "And it's a golden age for gothic television too, there is so much. Think of Vampire Diaries and all the Buffy episodes for a start."


Twilight books are mentioned constantly by her students. She must get tired of her subject sometimes, but is full of professional patience. ( "Perceptions of the gothic are constantly changing... You can't expect the gothic of the nineteenth century to stay as the norm... Today's vampires are different... It depends on how old you are.. It doesn't matter all that much how incredible the situations are or how awful the plotting is...") The Hartley Collins designers were quick to appreciate changing perceptions when they created covers for Wuthering Heights ('Love never dies') and  Jane Eyre ('You can't choose who you fall in love with') which might lure new young readers towards the originals.


*For the benefit of readers outside England and Wales, this means that they are aged between sixteen and eighteen. In the US, they would be studying for APs or SAT II exams.




Pictured - Dr Spooner, and a group of students from Adams' Grammar School in Newport, Shropshire, with Catherine Prince (in red), who showed them round the graveyard.







Wednesday 8 February 2012

Red House: cabinet sees sense

Richard Wilcocks writes:
Good news! At the cabinet meeting at Huddersfield Town Hall yesterday afternoon it was recommended that the Red House Museum should not close. All the friends and campaigners who have been so wonderfully active in the past couple of weeks can now breathe more easily for a while, hoping that Kirklees Council as a whole will do the right thing when it meets on 22 February. Thanks to everybody who has been in touch, especially to you, Gordon North - your local knowledge is impressively wide-ranging and your alacrity is admirable.


The cabinet made it clear that there should be a new business plan for all the museums in the authority which would include ways of making museums pay their way. This means admission charges, increasing visitor numbers and allowing weddings to take place. All of which is much better than a crassly simple closure plan.


English Heritage has been approached to get the ball rolling to make Red House into a Grade One listed building. It is a Grade Two at the moment. Grade One status could be awarded not because of the architecture but because of the history. Let us hope for this, because it means that new grants would be available.


Kirklees press release.

Wednesday 1 February 2012

Parsonage re-opens today


The Brontë Parsonage re-opens today following a hectic month of activity including maintenance work, cleaning, conservation and development of new displays. The new displays feature several early Bronte manuscripts, including one of the four, tiny editions of the second series of Charlotte Brontë’s Young Men’s magazine,written when she was 13 years old. A fifth edition was sold at Sotheby’s last December for nearly £700,000, with the museum narrowly losing out to the Musée des Lettres et Manuscrits, Paris.

Following a surge of renewed interest in the Brontës, with the high profile manuscript sale and two new Brontë movie adaptations in the second half of 2011, the museum is gearing up for another busy year.

We were delighted to see our visitor numbers rise last year by over 8% and with over 250 bookings for 2012 already, it’s clear that visitors will be coming to Haworth in significant numbers, from within the UK but also from overseas. We have some wonderful exhibitions and events planned that will make their visit here very special.

Andrew McCarthy
Director, Brontë Parsonage Museum

The next few weeks offers a final chance to see an exhibition dedicated to the Brontës’ remarkable father, Patrick, which will be followed by a new exhibition looking at the fascinating history of the museum’s collection. There will also be an exhibition of costumes from last year’s film adaptation of Jane Eyre, and exhibitions of work by artists Rebecca Chesney and Simon Warner

These will focus on ‘weather’ and its historic and contemporary associations with the Brontës, and the moorland Brontë location, Top Withens. The Top Withens exhibition will include a survey of photographic images of this iconic site, as well as a sketch of Top Withens by the celebrated poet Sylvia Plath. There is also a packed programme of events with visiting authors.

Red House Campaign - momentum grows

Richard Wilcocks writes:
The Area Committee met yesterday evening in Cleckheaton Town Hall, and received a deputation of people who were deeply concerned about the threat to the existence of the Red House Museum. The public was very well represented - in fact the room was packed, every seat taken. Eight of the nine Spen Valley councillors sat in the front row, listening with what I took, fondly perhaps, to be approval. One of them sent apologies for being unavoidably absent. We must remember that the full Council consists of sixty-nine members. 


Find out exactly who they are, here.


All of the deputation speakers were asked not to take up too much time and to avoid repeating points. On behalf of the Brontë Society, I gave brief details of the friendship between Charlotte Brontë and Mary Taylor, read descriptions of Briarmains taken from Shirley and generally repeated points made previously on this blog, adding that we were "horrified" by this proposal which had been "sprung upon us at short notice". Peter Jackson, on behalf of the Little Gomersal Community Association, using a set of well-prepared notes, made it quite clear that the proposal to close Red House was very unwelcome in the area, short-sighted and badly thought-out. Local historian Gordon North spoke about the radically-minded Taylors and the impact they made in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, and in particular about Mary Taylor, a brave and strong-willed woman who had sailed to New Zealand in 1845 and who was treated with great respect in that country. Red House is often visited by New Zealanders. He also spoke about the excellent and imaginative educational resources on the site. Member of the Brontë Society Imelda Marsden added her voice, urging all councillors present to take heed of a swelling tide of indignation. The local press made copious notes.


All of the speakers were complimented by the chair of the area committee for sticking to the rules - and all of them were applauded enthusiastically. We were then told that the 'cabinet' meeting on 7 February to look at the proposal would be held in Huddersfield, and that it would be open to the public. More about this later.


According to reports, letters and emails have been arriving from abroad - including from Australia. I have emailed friends in New Zealand to add their voices. Joan Bellamy was on Radio Leeds's Breakfast Show yesterday morning, BBC Look North took viewers on a tour of the house and the issue has been featured in a number of newspapers. Various politicians are coming on board, including Michael McGowan, former MEP for Leeds.

Sunday 29 January 2012

Red House: speak to councillors

A public meeting of the Spen Valley Area Committee of Kirklees Council is scheduled for this Tuesday (31 January) in the Cleckheaton Town Hall, Bradford Road, BD19 3RH at 7pm. As the 'cabinet' meeting of the Council on 7 February is going to be closed to the public, this is one of few chances left to actually speak with councillors in the hope of influencing them to keep the Red House Museum in Gomersal open.

If you can make it, meet at 6.30pm outside the front entrance.

Must their world disappear in stages?

ISM writes
We must protect the views the Brontës loved was the headline to an article which appeared in last Saturday’s (21 January) Telegraph Weekend. Well of course anyone who knows the area which gave such inspiration to that literary family would agree wholeheartedly. Apparently not Bradford Council which is including Haworth and its neighbouring Worth Valley villages in the plans to see 48,500 houses built within its boundaries by 2028.

Andrew McCarthy, director of the Brontë Parsonage Museum is quoted in the article as saying that the Brontës themselves lived on the dividing line between industry and untamed moorland and that the walk to enter another world is not very far. 

The fear is that this world will disappear in stages. The Reverend Peter Mayo-Smith, vicar of the village’s St Michael and All Angels church, which has been the victim of criminals and vandals who have stripped lead from the roof three times in the last eighteen months, says he finds solace in walks on the moor. Even when the wind is strong and the rain lashing he describes these lonely expanses as wonderful.

Charlotte Brontë, after her sister’s death, wrote how Emily too loved the moors and found in the bleak solitude many and dear delights and not the least and best loved was liberty. 

Just as the Brontës were always drawn back to the area for inspiration, those of us who follow in their footsteps hope that if there has to be future development it will be done sensibly and with respect.  

Wednesday 25 January 2012

More Precious Than Rubies - Red House Museum


Last week, Kirklees Council made public its budget proposals. 

In addition to the recently publicised reduction in the opening times of Museums and Galleries across Kirklees, the proposals now include the complete closure of Red House Museum in Gomersal.

If these proposals are passed, Red House would be closed in September and the buildings sold - not necessarily as a museum.

Red House was built in 1660 and was the home of the Taylor Family until 1920.  It has important Brontë connections and is now furnished as a home in the 1830s when Charlotte Brontë was a frequent visitor.  Red House, the Taylor family and the Spen Valley area were all featured in Charlotte Brontë's novel Shirley.  

Also on site are the recreated 1830s gardens, the restored Barn which illustrates the numerous Brontë connections in the area and the renovated Cartsheds which houses the 'Spen Valley Stories' gallery.

Last year the site received almost 30,000 visitors and was recently awarded its second Sandford Award for the quality of its heritage educational services for schools.  The site is an important asset for Kirklees and local businesses as a tourist destination which attracts visitors from all over the world to the area.

Unlike Council Services which can be cut and reinstated in better economic times, if the proposal to close and sell the site were passed an extremely important part of Spen Valley's heritage would be lost forever.
Richard Wilcocks writes:
So the Communities and Leisure Service department of Kirklees Council is recommending that the Red House Museum in Gomersal should be closed down in less than nine months. Just like that! Once again, a local authority is calculating that a short-term capital gain and a removal of dedicated museum staff is going to make up for the loss of one of Kirklees’s few tourist attractions, which is much more than a museum and a learning centre. It could be put on a list of national treasures. It is important not only for those dismissed in the official impact statement as ‘Brontë enthusiasts’ (note that these come after the local businesses in the sentence) but for anyone who believes that the most fitting memorial to Mary Taylor, a highly significant historical figure, not only because of her lifelong friendship with Charlotte Brontë, is the museum situated in her house. Perhaps that should be national memorial – let’s move beyond the parochial.

I well remember a book launch of about a decade ago, held in the Red House grounds: Joan Bellamy, who was at the time a member of Brontë Society Council, had just published More Precious than Rubies, a title which has Mary Taylor, Friend of Charlotte Brontë, Strong Minded Woman underneath it. All present were complimentary about Red House, its exhibitions and the expertise to be found within its red-brick walls, and they were not just being polite. It was described as a great aid for those concerned with education – and if proof is needed that the place is still a great aid, look online at this document. Explaining her title, Joan said that it could easily apply to the museum as well, which she greatly admired.

Now the treasure could be sold off – apparently, one quick-off-the-mark developer has already suggested that the seventeenth century building could be converted into very desirable flats, and that a chic little bistro could be put into it as well.

The Council Cabinet are to meet on 7th February.  There is to be no public consultation but they are inviting 'public dialogue'.  The whole set of proposals – including overviews of the council spending and the approach of each directorate – is available on the Council website .

Comments can be made on the website, via a local Councillor or by e-mail to consultation@kirklees.gov.uk

Brontë Society Chair Sally McDonald is busy writing letters about this, and plenty of other people (no, you don’t have to be a Society member) are using their keyboards to send emails. You as well? Letters to newspaper editors, protests to local MPs, messages to local radio and television – you could affect the outcome. The list below is not exhaustive, so please include your own contacts. You don’t have to be resident in Kirklees. Or England.


BBC Look North – christa.ackroyd@bbc.co.uk

Calendar – ITV Yorkshire – calendar@itv.com

Radio Leeds – layla.painter@bbc.co.uk

Yorkshire Post – yp.newsdesk@ypn.co.uk

Yorkshire Evening Post – eped@ypn.co.uk

Huddersfield Daily Examiner – editor@examiner.co.uk

Batley & Birstall News – batleyeditorial@ywng.co.uk

News Editor of Spenborough Guardian – Margaret.heward@ywng.co.uk

Mirfield Reporter – dewsburyeditorial@ywng.co.uk

News Team at Morley Observer – Erica.madelin@ypn.co.uk


Tuesday 10 January 2012

Buy a Stella Vine print




Stella Vine is considered by some to be a ‘controversial’ artist because her portraits are of figures ranging from model Kate Moss to footballer Didier Drogba, and her Warhol-related style could be described as ‘child-like.’ Television art pundit Waldemar Januszczak described her as having “a combination of empathy and cynicism that can be startling”.

She is currently painting a portrait of the Brontë sisters to raise much-needed funds for St Michael and All Angels Church in Haworth, which has just a few days left to raise £27,000: English Heritage has set 20 January as the deadline for its offer to add a further £100,000.

The church roof needed seeing to even before thieves stripped lead from it – three times in the last eighteen months. English Heritage gave church fundraisers a target of £65,000 and brave efforts have been made – but there is still that £27,000 to go.

You can buy a print made from the painting for just £150, and your advance orders are important, for the reason mentioned above. There will be a total of one hundred only. To order one, email your details to stellavinestudio@gmail.com or go to this website

Wednesday 28 December 2011

More on the manuscript...

Colin Randall (ex-Daily Telegraph, contributor to Abu Dhabi's The National, lives in France) has written a full and clear account of the events at Sotheby's for his France Salut blog:


http://www.francesalut.com/2011/12/bronte-in-paris-shame-about-haworth.html#more


It seems that the the French museum would be very willing to lend the little book to the Parsonage for an exhibition at some time in the future, and that it would have been willing to go up to a million pounds...

Thursday 15 December 2011

Manuscript will not come home


News Release from the Parsonage:

The Brontë Society has been thwarted in its attempts to return an important Charlotte Brontë manuscript to the writer’s home in Haworth, West Yorkshire, now the Brontë Parsonage Museum.

The manuscript, which went under the hammer at Sotheby’s in London on Thursday 15 December, was previously untraced and unpublished. It was expected to fetch between £200,000 - £300,000, though in the end sold for £580,000. The Society had been awarded a grant of £613,140 from the National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF), the UK’s fund of last resort for saving great heritage at risk. There was also support from the John Murray Archive, who pledged £20,000, the Friends of National Libraries, £10,000, and many donations in response to a public appeal launched by the Society. 

Unfortunately, this was not enough on the day as the hammer price plus the significant buyer’s commission took the final price to above the amount of money we could raise.

The miniature manuscript, or ‘little book’, measures just 35 x 61mm, but its 20 pages contain more than 4000 words of tiny script, produced by the young Charlotte Brontë in September 1830 when she was 14 years old. It is part of the second series of ‘The Young Men’s Magazines’ inspired by a set of toy soldiers bought for Branwell Brontë by his father in 1826. The series consists of six ‘little books’ four of which are already in the museum’s collection with the final one still remaining untraced.  

Bonnie Greer, President of the Brontë Society, said:

This 'Little Book' puts down in luminous prose not only the daydreams of a little Yorkshire girl, but it also contains the seed of the work of one of the greatest writers in the English language, Charlotte Brontë. It will not be going home, back to the place where it all began, the Parsonage at Haworth. 


Its presence there would have placed it not only at the heart of the proud community in which she was born and raised, but would have brought full circle a Yorkshire story, a Northern story, a British story, a world story. We are hugely grateful to all those who supported our bid to bring this wonderful manuscript back to Haworth, especially the National Heritage Memorial Fund.

These remarkable miniature manuscripts are amongst the most popular of exhibits with visitors to the Brontë Parsonage Museum, but also of great scholarly interest. In particular, they chart Charlotte Brontë’s development as a writer and reveal how many of her early themes carry over into her published novels. The first piece in this manuscript recounts how a murderer is driven to madness after being haunted by his victims, and how ‘an immense fire’ burning in his head causes his bed curtains to set alight, prefiguring the well-known scene in Jane Eyre, in which Rochester’s insane wife sets light to his bed curtains.

Andrew McCarthy, Director, Brontë Parsonage Museum, said:

This is unquestionably the most significant Brontë manuscript to come to light in decades and an important part of our broader literary heritage. It belongs in Haworth and we are bitterly disappointed that scholars and members of the public may now not have the opportunity to study and enjoy it as part of our public collection. We very much hope that we will be able to establish contact with the new owner.


* The manuscript was acquired by Le Musée des Lettres et Manuscrits, which is situated at 222, Boulevard St Germain in Paris. Apparently, there are plans to put it on display in January.

Tuesday 15 November 2011

Manuscript belongs in Haworth

News release:
The Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, West Yorkshire is appealing for help from funding bodies and members of the public to acquire an important Charlotte Brontë manuscript which is to be auctioned at Sothebys in London on Thursday 15 December. 

The manuscript, previously untraced and unpublished, is expected to fetch between £200,000 - £300,000 and contains three works by the young Charlotte Brontë, produced in September 1830 when she was 14 years old. It is part of a series of  manuscripts known as ‘The Young Men’s Magazines’ which were inspired by a box of toy soldiers bought for Branwell Brontë by his father in 1826.

The soldiers sparked a remarkable burst of creativity from the young Brontës who began creating stories which were handwritten into tiny books intended for the toy soldiers to ‘read’. Their minute scale and miniature details, such as title pages and advertisements, were modelled on a popular publication of the time, Blackwood’s Magazine. The Brontë Museum has the largest collection of these little manuscript books in the world and they are amongst the most popular exhibits with visitors and have also been the subject of much scholarly research in recent years.

The little books chart Charlotte Bronte’s development as a writer and reveal how many of her early themes carry over into her published novels. The first piece in the manuscript to be sold at Sotheby’s recounts how a murderer is driven to madness after being haunted by his victims, and how ‘an immense fire’ burning in his head causes his bed curtains to set alight, prefiguring the well-known scene in Charlotte’s novel, Jane Eyre, in which Rochester’s insane wife sets light to his bed curtains.
This manuscript is currently in a private collection and has never previously been published. It’s certainly the most significant Brontë manuscript to come to light in decades, but we should also see this as a national treasure with significance to our broader literary heritage. It would be very sad indeed if this wonderful manuscript were not repatriated or was again lost to a private collection. We feel very strongly that it belongs here in Haworth and we’re appealing for people to get in touch if they can help us raise the funds to make sure it does return, so that visitors can enjoy it, either here at the museum or through our on-line resources.

Andrew McCarthy
Director, Brontë Parsonage Museum

As an independent charity the museum is constantly trying to raise funds to support its work, a fundamental part of which is seeking to acquire such important Brontë material and making it accessible to the public.

It’s very difficult for us to compete in a market where these items can fetch such high prices and we need the support of organizations and individuals to make sure that they are returned to Haworth. If anyone feels they can make a financial contribution to help us, this would be very much appreciated

Andrew McCarthy
Director, Brontë Parsonage Museum



Monday 7 November 2011

Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights

Review by Richard Wilcocks:

Hareton disturbed me the most in this film based on Wuthering Heights. Dour before his time, he appears now and then in the early scenes, a dirty blonde-haired urchin, to gawp at visitors, or to witness violent abuse from the sidelines. In one scene, he is seen hanging up dogs by their collars, and we know where he got that from. The depiction of Hareton is one of the pointers to the ‘cruelty breeds cruelty’ message in Andrea Arnold’s film – and in Emily Brontë’s novel, if that can be seen, glibly, as a straight deliverer of messages. Considerable respect has been shown to the original: a fair amount of thought and research must have gone into finding out what might have been in Emily Brontë’s mind and how she saw her characters, and into the late eighteenth century in Yorkshire. Arnold has a brutally realistic vision, similar to the one she employed in her previous films Red Road (2006) and Fish Tank (2009) with their poor housing estates and tower blocks - and their 'outsider' protagonists. All the artefacts – stoneware jars, spades for digging out peat and so on – look as if they have been borrowed from a folk museum, the costumes appear to be authentic, and Heathcliff is black.

All perfectly credible. In the novel he is described variously as “a little Lascar” and “a dark-skinned gypsy in appearance” and he was found in the slaving port of Liverpool. The Lascars of the time were seamen who had been recruited from places like Bengal or Yemen, with thousands living in England in the time of the Brontës, many with white British wives. Gypsies, with distant roots in India, had been travelling around Europe for centuries. More to the point, Emily was well-acquainted with the evils of the Slave Trade (abolished in 1807, just after the action of Wuthering Heights) through her father, who had been helped out as a poor student at Cambridge by no less than William Wilberforce. She would have known about the magnificent Yorkshire mansions built with the wealth created on slave-powered plantations in Jamaica, Harewood House near Leeds for example, and about the Sill family of Dentdale, which owned two ships called The Dent and The Pickering. The Sills were said to have kept slaves instead of regular servants at West House, their large, colonial-style base in the Dales, now renamed Whernside Manor and redesignated as an outdoor pursuits centre. It is just a walk away from Cowan Bridge - I have done it. And the Sills must have known cotton magnate and pillar of the Anglican Church John Sidgwick, whose young children were such a tribulation for Charlotte Brontë during her time as a governess at Stone Gappe...

Watch the trailer

The unknown James Howson from Leeds was cast as the adult Heathcliff, with the equally unknown Solomon Glave as his young version. We do not find out which language he speaks when he first arrives, because there is very little by way of speaking in the whole film. It is not dialogue-free: a few sentences and phrases from the novel are employed, rather like the quotes a candidate might fish out for an A-level essay, with more of them in the film’s second half, after Heathcliff’s return, than in the first. At other times, the words which the characters use seem to have grown from improvisation sessions, giving the action a kind of Ken Loach feel at times. Those words are more brutal than in, say, Loach’s Kes, and come as quite a shock to those who are accustomed to dialogue which has been passed through a filter. To leave out most of Emily Brontë’s beautiful prose – and the second half of her story, as usual – are bold moves which a few literary folk might find outrageous. I can fully understand the opinions of those who might describe the film as ‘coarse and disagreeable’, but then the structure of the novel does not match the needs of the cinema. Unlike Cary Fukunaga, who retained as many of Charlotte’s words as possible in his Jane Eyre, Andrea Arnold has gone in an opposite direction, because she has decided not to bother with conventional costume dramas.

She does not go down the route of, for example, Penny Woolcock, who used a large number of Shakespeare’s words in her 1997 BBC Macbeth on the Estate, in which residents of the run-down Ladywood Estate in Birmingham together with a core of trained actors created an effective screen drama (all baseball bats and drug dealers) which brought out the violence and the moral issues in a classic text and related it to today. This Wuthering Heights relies on cinematography, the impact of fresh and young actors who have not been to drama school (eat your heart out, Stanislavski), an authentic period feel and a powerful, often startling harshness. Arnold has said that she “had to pick out the things that had resonance to me” and that she wanted to give the children plenty of time at the beginning.

This was a good move, because the children are by far the most interesting. Solomon Glave and Shannon Beer have “not acted before” (hasn't their school got a drama club?), but manage to be fascinating, holding everything together for an hour. Full marks to Arnold there. The story is told through sounds and sights:  we see the boy’s amazement and disorientation when he arrives, Cathy’s warm smile – the only warmth – a feather brushing a cheek, his hand on the horse’s rump when he rides behind her, his smelling of her hair, the weals on his back after a beating by Joseph, her mouth as she licks the blood from them, their crude and muddy sexual fumbling out on the moors. Sensual imagery with a vengeance! Raw teenage emotion in our faces! And I loved Shannon Beer’s wavering, charming rendition of Barbara Allen. She’s a proper wild, wicked slip of a girl.

Irish cinematographer Robbie Ryan won the Golden Osella Award at the last Venice Film Festival for Best Cinematography, deservedly. His low shots through clumps of sedge and his panoramas of the moors (filming took place on the bleaker areas around Hawes in the Yorkshire Dales) are stunning, but what is especially memorable is his selection of close-ups of the insects, flowers and small creatures to be found in the heather and under the bilberries. I was looking out for harebells, but did not notice any. Perhaps they were the wrong kind of flower here. The wind sounded right – I recognise that wind from personal experience – as it battered the microphone relentlessly. The wind seems never to stop. Such a contrast to the romantic music which Sam Goldwyn loved and which never stopped for Olivier and Oberon in William Wyler's 1939 version, the music which prompted the emotions for the audience!

I was appropriately taken aback by the images of slaughtered animals – a sheep has its jugular severed and a rabbit has its neck broken. I am hoping and trusting that Isabella’s dog was wearing some kind of harness when it was filmed being attached to a hook.

The creatures of the wild moors a couple of centuries ago have a strong present-times feel, because casting in this way has put racial prejudice in the forefront. Heathcliff is full of revengeful passions because he has been racially abused. The violent skinhead Hindley (Lee Shaw) is notably foul-mouthed when he does speak, like an adherent of some far-right organisation, and the enforced baptism scene shows that the church used to be pretty short on tender loving care when it came to new dark-skinned members of the congregation. The West Yorkshire accents are just right, and could be heard in many of the streets of 2011. I include my own street in Leeds.

In the second half, the adult Heathcliff (James Howson) does not spend long on relishing his revenge on Hindley, but that is not the only disappointment. Both James Howson and Kaya Scodelario, who plays the adult Cathy, bear only token resemblances to their child counterparts, and have far less presence. Cathy is not differentiated from Isabella enough, and seems to be unrelated to her younger self, which can not be explained away by her sojourn in the sophistication of Thrushcross Grange, where manners (and the mild weather) are always better. It is always raining at Wuthering Heights. Heathcliff seems clumsier and less sympathetic, a fact which is not helped by James Howson’s lack of acting experience (more forgivable in Solomon Glave), and the close-up shots of flowers and insects which sustained the first half become tiresome because they are repeated too often. Ironically, the increased amount of dialogue also becomes irritating, because it is not what we have become accustomed to. James Northcote’s acting as Edgar is fine and faultless, but seems out of place here, as if he has stepped out of another film.

And that other film could almost be the 1939 version which is at the other end of the spectrum. Still, the Andrea Arnold version is visually and acoustically stunning, ground breaking, worth seeing, and could even draw some in the audience towards reading the book, to discover all that dialogue. And all those harebells.




Sunday 6 November 2011

Look at this new blog

The Bronte Weather Project is a year long research residency by Rebecca Chesney based at the Parsonage which began in September 2011. During the residency Rebecca (a visual artist based in Preston) will be studying the local weather patterns and reading Brontë texts to find out how they were influenced and inspired by the weather.



Add caption



Tuesday 18 October 2011

Bonnie Greer- absolutely magnetic


Afternoon Tea with Bonnie Greer and the Brontës





























Richard Wilcocks writes:
This event was sold out soon after it was announced: the audience walked past a group of hopefuls sitting beside the ticket desk, but all seats in St Margaret’s Hall were filled. This was one of the most popular events at this year’s Ilkley Literature Festival. On each seat was a pamphlet for people who might have felt an urge to sign up for the Society.

It is likely that the urge came upon more than a few, because Parsonage Director Andrew Macarthy was pretty convincing as he talked about substantial improvements to the Museum and the many artists and authors who have participated in its Contemporary Arts programme. He was followed by the eloquent Liz Henry, who spoke on behalf of Brontë Society Council, welcoming Bonnie Greer and delivering a potted version of her résumé. Chair of Council Sally McDonald began the interview, and soon we were into Wuthering Heights.

“I saw the Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon version at age thirteen... when she said ‘I am Heathcliff’ I understood immediately... the novel brings a realization that we are the only species which knows we are going to come to an end, and it has a woman in it who talks directly about how she feels, about love...

This book doesn’t settle... we are taught that we have to ‘settle down’ when we are young... Emily was restless...”

Bonnie Greer related Emily’s condition to herself and her own writing, mentioning Obama Music and the restlessness of Chicago and explaining that when she wrote her novel Entropy, her dominant thoughts were of synaesthesia. “This is where you smell a word, or see a colour when you read a number...it’s the primitive mind which links everything up... Emily’s state of being was musicality.

All my work is synaesthetically created... Emily heard the music of her environment and it is captured in the words of Wuthering Heights.” Sally McDonald mentioned that the novel had been compared to an overture with a break in the middle.

“The Brontës have been prettified in the movie versions I have seen.... but these are Northern women! And it was appropriate that this man (Heathcliff) was black. Look at history, and Liverpool... this part of the world was tied up with slavery... Wilberforce and Douglass spoke at meetings in Yorkshire where abolitionists predominated... but there was support in the government for a secret deal with the Confederacy... Emily would have heard the abolitionist arguments...she was born in the same year as Frederick Douglass.”

In Jane Eyre I recognize that refusal not to look down when your betters are speaking to you – from my own childhood. It’s in Obama Music.”

Tea, scones and cakes followed, all supplied by volunteers from Council and Parsonage staff, and served to a background of music from the Canzona String Quartet, which visited the Parsonage Library to look at music belonging to and played by the Brontës. They found the original versions of some string quartet movements, which included Locke's overture to Macbeth and Worthy is the Lamb from Handel's Messiah


Everybody was deeply impressed by the whole event. Liz Henry (pictured below) told the Blog: “Bonnie Greer has an amazing ability to hold an audience. She is absolutely magnetic.”





















From the publicity department of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden:

ROH 2  in the Linbury Studio Theatre
Yes opens on  22 November

In 2009 the writer and cultural commentator Bonnie Greer was invited to appear on the BBC’s flagship political discussion programme Question Time alongside the leader of a right-wing nationalist political party. The BBC’s decision to transmit the programme, and Bonnie Greer’s decision to appear in it, provoked a storm of discussion. Bonnie has written the libretto for this brand-new 'docu-opera' by award-winning composer Errollyn Wallen, which is made from Bonnie’s own experiences and from the many public and private responses to the situation.  An ensemble of six musicians, including an electronic soundscape with the recorded voice of Errollyn Wallen,  will accompany a cast of eight singers, and Bonnie herself, to play out the emotional and political turmoil of a wide range of individual British citizens, each with their own personal and cultural perspective.

Monday 17 October 2011

October half-term happenings


News release from the Parsonage:
There are plenty of reasons to visit the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth this half-term week, with lots to see and lots of activities planned for younger visitors and families. With the critically acclaimed new film version of Jane Eyre in cinemas, the museum’s displays are focusing on its author, Charlotte Brontë; including new displays of her clothes, letters, manuscripts and personal treasures.  A new adaptation of Emily’s novel, Wuthering Heights is also released next month and the museum’s special exhibition, Genius: The Brontë Story, explores how these two great books came to be written, and also includes lots of interactive displays for children and families.

My Favourite Thing! will run throughout half-term, every day at 2pm, with members of staff at the museum and volunteers talking about the secret history of some of the most  remarkable items in the museum’s collection; whether it be a little book, a brass dog’s collar or Charlotte Brontë’s wedding bonnet, the talks will intrigue young and old alike.

There will also be the opportunity to join local artist, Rachel Lee, for a ‘drop-in’ family workshop on Tuesday 25th October. Rachel will be demonstrating an ingenious way of turning brightly coloured fleece into little felt creatures and helping children make their own fleecy, furry friend to take home with them. The event takes place throughout the day and is free with admission to the museum.

On the afternoon of Thursday 27th October, hugely popular children’s author Jacqueline Wilson, will be visiting Haworth to talk about her latest novel Sapphire Battersea and her love of the Brontës. This event is now fully booked.

The museum is open 11am until 5pm daily, with last admission at 4.30pm. www.bronte.info.

_____________________________________________________________________________
Contacts & Further Information:   
               
Andrew McCarthy (Director) – 01535 642323 – andrew.mccarthy@bronte.org.uk
____________________________________________________________________________