The heritage of the Brontës' acquaintances

The Yorkshire Evening Post has a letter from a reader about Mary Taylor's former home, Red House.

Take more care of our heritage
John Appleyard, Liversedge
It’s almost two years since the Red House Museum closed in Gomersal. This is an historic building which was home to the Taylor family, Charlotte Brontë was a visitor, as too was John Wesley the Methodist Minister. It had an international reputation with people visiting from Japan, New Zealand and Europe. It was revealed earlier this year by a Freedom of Information report that it costs slightly more to keep the museum closed than it does open. This is ludicrous and it’s time we took more care about the wonderful heritage that we have in Kirklees.

Indeed!

Source

And more Brontëana of sorts as ArtFixDaily features the AADLA Fine Art & Antiques Show in New York this weekend. This will be on display:

*What: Regency Cabinet, 1808
Why: This early 19th-century Japanned and parcel-gilt cabinet was a gift from Elizabeth Robinson to her young daughters, Mary and Jane, who would become aunts to children under the care of a governess, aka as novelist Anne Brontë.
Where: Hyde Park Antiques, Booth 4

Now for some comic relief, as The Onion takes on the Brontës:

In yet another example of the increasingly polarized cultural landscape, a new poll released Wednesday by Northwestern University found that Americans continue to be fiercely divided along Charlotte Brontë–Emily Brontë lines. “Emily still has a strong base in the heartland, but attributing her support to geography alone is an oversimplification,” said polling expert Molly Duffy, who explained that age especially now plays an important factor in Brontë identification with younger generations preferring Jane Eyre author Charlotte Brontë by a two-to-one margin. “We are also seeing Emily struggle in urban areas where people don’t seem to appreciate the ‘dog whistle’ of an affable character like Heathcliff returning from the city consumed by greed and spite. Then again, some progressives remain uncomfortable with Charlotte’s handling of mental illness via attic incarceration. It’s very much a mixed bag.” At press time, researchers confirmed that the least surprising result of the poll was that the majority of Maine’s population strongly preferred Anne.

The New York Review of Books has an article by Nell Stevens on her new book Mrs Gaskell and Me.

Gaskell was, in her day, as famous as the Brontës, Thackeray, and Trollope—all contemporaries who have, posthumously, gone on to outshine her. Her novels, among them Mary Barton, North and South, and Cranford, are careful depictions of class and place, often deeply and radically political. Her short stories and novellas are Gothic, playful, slippery, populated by witches and ghosts. That Gaskell is less well-known in the twenty-first century than she was in the nineteenth is perhaps owing to a sense that she was not a particularly interesting person. She lived in Manchester with a minister husband; she had four daughters; she went to church on Sundays. She did not roam the Yorkshire moors and die young, like the Brontës; she did not have a spouse in a Parisian asylum, like Thackeray. So disregarded is Mrs. Gaskell today that my American publisher rejected the British title of my memoir, Mrs. Gaskell & Me, because American readers wouldn’t know who she was; they preferred the broader sweep of The Victorian and the Romantic. [...]
If I could summon her spirit to ask for her forgiveness, or even, at a push, her blessing, I would. This is an impulse that Gaskell herself would have recognized. When Charlotte Brontë died, Gaskell, who had been her friend, was asked by Charlotte’s father to write his daughter’s biography. Gaskell embarked on the project seeking “to tell the truth… so that every line should go to its great purpose of making her known & valued.” It was an unachievable goal: the truth, when it came to Brontë, was disputed from all sides. Even Brontë’s husband condemned the biography, describing it as “a project, which in my eyes is little short of desecration.” But Brontë’s father assured Gaskell that she was on the right course: “Could my daughter speak from the tomb I feel certain she would laud our choice.” Gaining the dead’s permission to write about them was a preoccupation of the Victorian age, and, as my book entered the world, it became mine, too. [...]
The day after The Life of Charlotte Brontë was published, Gaskell left England for Italy. She hated reading reviews of her work, and had reason to suspect that the reaction to her biography of Brontë would be particularly strong: she had pulled no punches in her depictions of those she considered “villains” of the Brontë story: the master of the school where two of Charlotte’s sisters had become fatally ill, and the married woman with whom Branwell Brontë had had an affair. Rather than stay at home and face her public, she took her two eldest daughters to the house of American sculptor William Wetmore Story in Rome.

Vanity Fair asks poet, novelist and dancer Tishani Doshi ten questions.

For readers who loved Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods, what other books would you recommend? My friend Gary Shteyngart teaches a class called The Hysterical Male—Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Martin Amis et al, which is a hilarious hat tip to the madwoman in the attic. I’d like to revive that angel in the house and hand her a megaphone because we need to hear her voice real loud. So I’d recommend—Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, Ms Militancy by Meena Kandasamy, Selected Essays by Virginia Woolf, and The Vegetarian by Han Kang.

Optimist interviews writer Karen Witemeyer.

What’s your favorite under-appreciated novel? I don’t know that this is an under-appreciated novel except by my kids who were forced to read it in school, but my favorite classic of all time is Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. Poor Jane suffers so much over the course of that book, but she stays true to her faith and finds true love in the end. Even as a high school student, this made my romance-loving soul rejoice. (Zorah Green)

IndieWire reviews Netflix conspiracy thriller Bodyguard describing one of its main characters as follows:

This is not a remake of the 1992 Whitney Houston-Kevin Costner thriller “The Bodyguard,” although it does feature a hardened private security specialist David Budd (Madden) assigned to protect a high-profile woman, who in this case is the implacable Home Secretary Julia Montague (Hawes). Both are accustomed to taking charge and forge a wary professional alliance that eventually crosses into the personal. [...]
Part action hero, part brooding Heathcliff, Budd is a man whose skills for detection and defense have been honed by war. He also exhibits a remarkable humanity, such as in an early sequence involving a suicide bomber. (Hanh Nguyen)

Seattle Weekly shares 'a selection of the best horror movies you can stream at home this Halloween', including

I Walked with a Zombie
A nurse is hired to care for an invalid on a Caribbean island, and the proximity to voodoo proves an elegantly scary backdrop. Producer Val Lewton borrowed the story from Jane Eyre, but he and director Jacques Tourneur made the low-budget film into a poetic blend of light, shadow, and sound. This is one of my favorite movies. FilmStruck (Robert Horton)

Chronicle Live reviews the play Clear White Light, currently on stage at Live Theatre in Newcastle.

After a cracking first act, I did begin to wonder in the second half whether it might be in danger of becoming overblown and losing the plot after what felt like an almost Wuthering Heights moment of wind-lashed moorland madness. (Barbara Hodgson)

Finally, exciting news from the Brontë Parsonage on Twitter:

Advance copies of 'The Lost Manuscripts' have arrived in #Haworth! This beautiful publication features previously unpublished work by #CharlotteBronte. On sale 1 Nov. Pre-order online before 31 Oct and receive 15% discount off RRP #christmascomeearly https://t.co/X3sLJwMS9o pic.twitter.com/mEnG7sMTgE

— Brontë Parsonage (@BronteParsonage) October 24, 2018