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Thursday, March 07, 2019

Happy World Book Day! The Telegraph celebrates by listing '10 amazing literary locations you can visit in real life', including
Yorkshire Moors, England
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847)
Dante Gabriel Rossetti called Wuthering Heights ‘a fiend of a book’ where ‘the action is laid in hell’. That ‘hell’ is the Yorkshire Moors, a bleakly beautiful swathe of hills and heath that provides the setting and defines the mood. The titular house is believed to be based on Top Withens, a 16th-century farmhouse near Haworth; its structure doesn’t match but its location does. Walk across the moor from Haworth parsonage – now the Brontë Museum – to the exposed stone ruin and it’s easy to think yourself into Emily’s pages. (Sarah Baxter)
The Know reviews The Moors at Arvada Center.
Oh, those Brontë sisters, they may not have the cottage industry of adaptations Jane Austen has, but Charlotte and Emily (and Anne) do all right. [...]
This lark being inspired by the Brontës, writing figures mightily into the household tensions. A diarist, Huldey aches to share her observations. Agatha has a knack for seductive letters.
Annie Barbour brings a fine belligerence to the maid Marjory. Or is it Mallory? There’s slapstick confusion about her identities as well as her ailments. As “The Moors” begins to pair its characters — the Mastiff and A Moor-Hen, Agatha and Emilie — Marjory stops dodging her household duties and starts manipulating Huldey. [...]
Meghan Anderson Doyle’s costumes are fetching and often witty. The domineering Agatha is encased in a black dress until she undergoes an unexpected transformation with a wee bit of help from Emilie. A Moor-Hen wears aviator goggles and perhaps the finest boots to be found onstage this season. Beneath a full moon, Huldey strips down to a get-up befitting the showstopper she imagines herself to be.
Unquenchable need thrums at the heart of “The Moors.” Agatha enlists Emilie in an effort to secure the family legacy. At the encouragement of Marjory, Huldey courts fame. If she can’t achieve that, Marjory nudges her toward a Sweeney Todd kind of infamy. And Mastiff, well he hopes to tend to A Moor-Hen for the rest of his days.
“This won’t end well,” A Moor-Hen tells Mastiff at one point. She’s right, of course.  Yet, director Anthony Powell and his ensemble pull off a peculiar and fine achievement. As “The Moors” grows darker, it also gets lighter. As it starts to take seriously its bizarre twosomes, it grows more tender — and absurd. The duos court and/or conspire, the play make its way toward the inevitable and the surprising. (Lisa Kennedy)
More from the stage, as The Austin Chronicle reviews Hyde Park Theatre's A Doll's House, Part 2.
In Lucas Hnath's taut sequel, set 15 years after her departure, Nora is a brazenly independent and self-confident writer of feminist fiction working under a man's pseudonym à la Emily Jane Brontë's Ellis Bell. She has come home to get a divorce from her husband, Torvald, which would officially set her free from the binding ties she walked away from in the first place. (Bob Abelman)
The New Arab reviews the book Black Milk. On Motherhood and Writing by Elif Shafak in which
The chapters about her fingerwomen intertwine with stories of more or less famous female writers, from whose lives she draws inspiration and teachings. Each woman she discusses is chosen for a purpose, ranging from Virginia Woolf, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, George Eliot, the Brontë sisters, Toni Morrison, Sylvia Plath all the way to Fatma Aliye and other influential Turkish writers. (Ilham Essalih)
Bustle reviews L.E.L.: The Lost Life and Scandalous Death of the Celebrated "Female Byron" by Lucasta Miller.
During her brief tenure at the top of England's literary pyramid, L.E.L. was celebrated for her daring, her romanticism, and her passion, and her fans included the Brontës, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Edgar Allan Poe, Heinrich Heine, and Virginia Woolf. (Sadie Trombetta)
The Cut features writer Halle Butler.
When I first emailed Butler, I asked for lists of what she’d been reading when she wrote Jillian and The New Me. They’re eclectic: Patricia Highsmith, mythology, pickup artist forums, Bukowski, tracts from the occult bookstore, Joyce, Charlotte Brontë, true-crime, Google results for “how to feel better,” Jean Rhys, and the Ask a Manager blog. (Sylvie McNamara)
The Times has an article on the Tate Britain exhibition that shows how Vincent Van Gogh's stay in London influenced his art.
Van Gogh mentions more than 100 English novels and poems in his letters. He read Shakespeare — “My God, how beautiful Shakespeare is! Who is mysterious like him? His language and style can indeed be compared to an artist’s brush, quivering with fear and emotion” — George Eliot, Thomas Carlyle, Daniel Defoe, Charlotte Brontë and Edward (“It was a dark and stormy night . . .”) Bulwer-Lytton. He read John Keats, Christina Rossetti and Tennyson. (Laura Freeman)
It is almost ten years since we highlighted the Brontë bits in his letters.

Education Week Teacher suggests how to incorporate comics of/about classic novels into the classroom.
Teachers can also juxtapose graphic novels and their text-based counterparts. For example, Jane, the Fox, and Me by Fanny Britt and Isabelle Arsenault interweaves the story of ostracized, modern-day student Helene with scenes from Jane Eyre.
Ask students: Why would the author/illustrator select this particular scene from Jane Eyre and include it at this moment (over others)? Does this visual representation of the original novel differ from the way you envisioned it? Do you think this author/illustrator effectively preserved characterization? The tone and mood of the scene? The author’s message?
Students should be pushed to defend their responses using evidence from both texts. Students could also be challenged to create and defend their own graphic panel of a particular scene from a text-based work, which would challenge them to make important decisions regarding selection of images, text inclusion, color, and shading. This lesson promotes skills like developing a claim and supporting a claim with evidence, while also encouraging creativity. (Paige Classey Przybylski)
Ahead of International Women's Day, several Spanish websites mention the Brontës: Vix mentions the fact that they felt the need to hide behind pseudonyms. Diario Información lists them among other key women writers. Woman includes the I am no bird quote from Jane Eyre among 20 other feminist quotes.

The Yorkshire Post recommends '17 books set in Yorkshire that everyone should read', the first of which is of course Wuthering Heights. The Independent has an article on Ponden Hall being on the market. Finally, the new Bonnets at Dawn podcast on Emily Brontë is now available and was recorded live at the Brontë Parsonage Museum.

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