There's still a little time to pay an online visit to the Parsonage shop before Christmas - how about a Jane Eyre card for your favourite fellow aficionado? Or would you prefer something to do with Wuthering Heights? A 2016 calendar? Visit the shop here.
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Saturday 19 December 2015
Jane Eyre Christmas Card
There's still a little time to pay an online visit to the Parsonage shop before Christmas - how about a Jane Eyre card for your favourite fellow aficionado? Or would you prefer something to do with Wuthering Heights? A 2016 calendar? Visit the shop here.
Tuesday 15 December 2015
Ferndean Manor under threat
Wycoller Hall |
Called Wycoller Hall in real life, Ferndean Manor is the centrepiece of the gorgeously romantic Wycoller hamlet clustered around a stream at the heart of Wycoller Country Park. Its moody scenery and residents inspired the Brontës.
Lancashire County Council, which cares for the ruined Hall, the Brontë Way and the surrounding countryside is planning to completely close down the management, maintenance and ranger service. Visitors will no longer be able to see the great aisled barn or use the countryside activity centre. The visitor toilets will close and the privately run cafe and shop are unlikely to survive. Wycoller hamlet is Lancashire's prettiest visitor destination with thousands of visitors served by dozens of volunteers - who want to do more to promote the place. It is managed by countryside ranger with a modest budget. Any cost savings from closing it down will be negligible and the volunteers scattered.
Click here to sign the petition
Monday 9 November 2015
Robin Walker's Bicentenary composition: “Letter to Brussels”
Pamela Nash writes:
Robin Walker |
In Charlotte Brontë's Villette, the protagonist Lucy Snowe wrestled with the grief of unattainable love and "dreamed strangely of disturbed earth, and of hair, still golden and living, obtruded through coffin chinks." A family record passed down to the composer Robin Walker
echoes the imagery: his great-great-grandfather, in attending Charlotte's
funeral, recalled seeing a violet-coloured (hair?) ribbon hanging out of her
coffin*. A potent yet simple detail
which provides for us a rarefied token of a tragic end, and whilst the Villette
comparison lends a further frisson to the pathos of her death, the real tragedy
perhaps lies in the paradox between the unrequited love in the pages of the
author's work and that played out in her own life; while Lucy Snowe managed to
repress the tyranny of desire - the “bottled storm” - Charlotte Brontë herself could not, as her letters to Constantin Heger
reveal.
Nothwithstanding his ancestral connection, Robin Walker
finds a powerful artistic affinity with Charlotte through these letters to
Heger, and in commemoration of her bicentenary, he has composed a song setting
of two of the letters for soprano and piano.
Having also produced a song-cycle of five of Emily Brontë's poems (premiered in 2014), he continues to draw
inspiration and solace from the work of both sisters, arising partly out of a
sense of “fellow feeling” and partly out of the absolute contemporary relevance
of their work to him as a composer. He
identifies particularly with the emotional evaluation within their writing -
the processing of experience through feeling - and, like the Brontës, his own compositional processes are founded in an
instinctual response to both discipline and passion.
It is the meeting of these elements which
forms the equilibrium in the new song: although structurally a conflation of
the two Heger letters, the wording is completely preserved and the approach to
crafting the music reflective of the letters' own expressive shape:
“introduction - desperate statement - then, calm.” Robin's response to the texts was nothing
short of visceral: “I felt the force, the beating heart; that completely
understandable rage at unrequited love for a man who gave her a unique taste of
power and affection.” What interested
him most however - and what he dramatised in the song - was the conflict within
Charlotte's “inner life”: behind all her expostulating was a desperate need to
escape the stifling constraints of Protestantism and the patriarchy of her
father. “She is externalising her own
drama, with the purpose of relieving herself; through writing the letters,
Charlotte overcomes her state of mind - from a state of uncertainty and
turbulence to one of stability and sanity, but with literary restraint and
structural control. That containment and
rationalising of the emotional response is the same process that we as
composers have to undergo in order to make it recognisable as emotion to
others: the transmutation of what it is to be alive, into an artefact.”
* See Betty Emmaline Walker, The
Green Lanes: A Westmorland Childhood (York, 1998), pp. 49-50
Friday 6 November 2015
Winifred Gérin, biographer of the Brontës
To
celebrate the Brontë bicentenaries, Helen MacEwan has written a new book
exploring the life of one of their most important biographers. On 21 November
at Waterstones Piccadilly, she will be launching Winifred Gérin, biographer
of the Brontës (publication date 15 November).
Having
written about the Brontës in Brussels, Helen first became interested in Gérin’s
life story because of her Belgian links and her special interest in Charlotte
Brontë’s Brussels period.
Winifred Gérin (1901-81) is known as the biographer
who moved to Haworth to write the lives of all four Brontë siblings, literally
treading in their footsteps as she researched them. But her ten years in
Haworth were just part of a romantic, eventful and sometimes tragic life.
Marriage to a Belgian cellist, Eugène Gérin, took
her to Paris and then, in 1939, to Brussels where the couple worked for the
British Embassy. Following the German invasion of 1940 they had various
hair-raising adventures in France, finally escaping to Britain where they
worked for Political Intelligence. After Eugène Gérin’s death in 1945, Winifred
sought consolation in writing poetry and plays until discovering both her
literary vocation and second love on a fateful first visit to Haworth.
Gérin went on to write biographies of Elizabeth
Gaskell, Anne Thackeray Ritchie and Horatia Nelson. She also wrote plays about
Jane Austen, Fanny Burney and Charlotte Brontë. This book is based on her
letters and her unpublished memoir.
Waterstones Piccadilly, 203-206 Piccadilly,
W1J 9HD
Saturday 21
November, 2 pm
Sunday 1 November 2015
Charlotte Brontë: A Life by Claire Harman - quotes from recent reviews
This is a comprehensive biography to enjoy and admire. Harman writes well and she is a fine and sensitive critic (The Times)
Finely judged and authoritative (Sunday Times Book of the Week)
Elegantly written, consistently perceptive (Daily Mail Book of the Week)
Superb retelling of Charlotte's story (...) admirably concise (The Spectator)
Harman... portrays Bronte's complexity and dark genius in elegant prose with deep human sympathy (The Lady)
Harman tells [Charlotte's] story with quick wit, a sharp sympathy, and a fire and fury of her own (Evening Standard)
Full of pleasing and piquant detail, scraps of passing recollection assembled from the various lives and letters in which the Brontes featured and from which we might reconstruct their world (Financial Times)
An extraordinary book, crammed with scholarship and glittering with trivia . . . Harman's book offers so many delights . . . This is a fantastic compendium (Independent on Sunday on 'Jane's Fame')
A shrewd but unstuffy critic, Harman's prose rings with good sense, affection and humour... [She] manages to be not only scholarly, but indecently entertaining. (Daily Mail on 'Jane's Fame')
Rich and colourful...Harman's book is a delight from beginning to end... This superb biography not only handles the familiar material with flair but goes further than previous biographies (Sunday Times on 'Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography')
Superbly readable... she has excellent taste. A marvellous and eventful read (Evening Standard on 'Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography')
There is no doubt that Harman is the first to treat this fascinating subject in an accessible, lively manner unshackled by academic jargon. It's the quality of the insights and the interpretations that make this book such a good read (Sunday Telegraph on Jane's Fame)
Finely judged and authoritative (Sunday Times Book of the Week)
Elegantly written, consistently perceptive (Daily Mail Book of the Week)
Superb retelling of Charlotte's story (...) admirably concise (The Spectator)
Harman... portrays Bronte's complexity and dark genius in elegant prose with deep human sympathy (The Lady)
Harman tells [Charlotte's] story with quick wit, a sharp sympathy, and a fire and fury of her own (Evening Standard)
Full of pleasing and piquant detail, scraps of passing recollection assembled from the various lives and letters in which the Brontes featured and from which we might reconstruct their world (Financial Times)
An extraordinary book, crammed with scholarship and glittering with trivia . . . Harman's book offers so many delights . . . This is a fantastic compendium (Independent on Sunday on 'Jane's Fame')
A shrewd but unstuffy critic, Harman's prose rings with good sense, affection and humour... [She] manages to be not only scholarly, but indecently entertaining. (Daily Mail on 'Jane's Fame')
Rich and colourful...Harman's book is a delight from beginning to end... This superb biography not only handles the familiar material with flair but goes further than previous biographies (Sunday Times on 'Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography')
Superbly readable... she has excellent taste. A marvellous and eventful read (Evening Standard on 'Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography')
There is no doubt that Harman is the first to treat this fascinating subject in an accessible, lively manner unshackled by academic jargon. It's the quality of the insights and the interpretations that make this book such a good read (Sunday Telegraph on Jane's Fame)
Claire Harman is the award-winning biographer of Sylvia Townsend Warner (1989), Fanny Burney (2000) and Robert Louis Stevenson (2005) and the author of the best-selling Jane's Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World (2009). She writes regularly for the literary press on both sides of the Atlantic and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2006.
Her most recent work is Charlotte Bronte: A Life.
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