I've dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas: they've gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the color of my mind.
Emily Bronte
Wuthering Heights

zaterdag 15 mei 2010

Wuthering Heights TV costumes visit Brontë Parsonage Museum at Haworth


Fans of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights might like to visit the Brontë Parsonage Museum in the coming months as it plays host to some of the costumes from the latest TV adaptation of the classic novel.


Outfits seen in ITV's bank holiday costume drama, including dresses worn by Charlotte Riley as Cathy and the dramatic long black coat of Heathcliff, played with suitably brooding menace by Tom Hardy, are being displayed within the period rooms of the Museum.

Emily Brontë's only novel, Wuthering Heights, tells the story of the passionate but thwarted love between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw and, perhaps more than any novel of the Brontë sisters, draws upon the bleak backdrop of the Yorkshire Moors to create a desolate, Gothic atmosphere

vrijdag 14 mei 2010

The parlour


This is the room in Haworth Parsonage, variously known as the dining room, the drawing room or the parlour, in which the Brontë sisters used to write and discuss their work with each other. When the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte's friend and future biographer, first visited in September 1853, she was struck by its exquisite cleanliness and neatness. In contrast to the "bleak cold colours" of the Yorkshire moors outside, "the room looked the perfection of warmth, snugness and comfort, crimson predominating in the furniture".
Despite having published Jane Eyre, Shirley and Villette pseudonymously, Charlotte had, by that time, become a - somewhat reluctant - literary celebrity. Gaskell noted the portrait of her over the fireplace, commissioned by her publisher from the fashionable artist George Richmond. The experience of sitting for it had been a trial for the self-conscious Charlotte, who had collapsed into mortified tears when asked by the artist to remove something odd from the top of her head (he thought it was possibly a bit off the inside of her hat, but it may have been, even more embarrassingly, an unsuccessful hairpiece). Richmond nevertheless captured the fire in Charlotte's eyes, even if he flattered and conventionalised the rest of her face, which Gaskell found plain, with missing teeth and irregular features.

Despite the welcoming warmth of the décor, the parlour retained an aura of melancholy. Charlotte's sisters Emily and Anne had died in 1848 and 1849 - Emily is said to have died on the sofa in this room - and the space seemed to resonate with a sense of loss. After Gaskell had retired for bed in the room directly above, she could hear Charlotte's footsteps in the parlour. The servant told her how the three sisters had been used to walking round the table as they talked late into the night: "Miss Emily walked as long as she could, and when she died Miss Anne and Miss Brontë took it up - and now my heart aches to hear Miss Brontë walking, walking on alone."

donderdag 13 mei 2010

Girl Power: de Brontë zusjes als actiefiguren

Film



Op het moment zijn de opnames nog in volle gang, de film komt naar verwachting in 2011 in de bioscoop. De cast is indrukwekkend: naast rijzende ster Wasikowska zullen ook Jamie Bell (Billy Elliot) als St. John Rivers, Michael Fassbender (Inglourious Basterds) als Mr. Rochester, Judi Dench als Mrs. Fairfax en Sally Hawkins (Happy-Go-Lucky, Persasion) als Mrs. Reed meespelen. Imogen Poots (Miss Austen Regrets) speelt Blanche Ingram.

(Bron: Firstshowing.net)

Selected Letters Of Charlotte Bronte by Margaret Smith

These letters give an insight into the life of a writer whose novels continue to be bestsellers. They reveal much about Charlotte Bronte's personal life, her family relationships, and the society in which she lived. Many of her early letters are written with vigour, vivacity, and an engaging aptitude for self-mockery. In contrast, her letters to her 'master', the Belgian schoolteacher Constantin Heger, reveal her intense, obsessive longing for some response from him. Other letters are deeply moving, when Charlotte endures the agony of her brother's and sisters' untimely deaths. We learn also of the progress of her writing, including the astonishing success of Jane Eyre, and of her contacts with her publishers, including the young George Smith; and we recognize in her letters the life-experiences which are transmuted into the art of her novels. Contemporary society is brilliantly described in her letters from London, when she writes of her encounters with famous writers and with critics of her novels. We hear too of her visits to art galleries, operas, and the Great Exhibition of 1851 at the Crystal Palace.Dramatic letters written in December 1852 convey the 'turbulence of feeling' in the Haworth curate Arthur Nicholls's proposal of marriage to her and in Mr Bronte's violent reaction to it; and we subsequently hear of her secret correspondence with her suitor, her father's eventual consent, and her tragically brief happy marriage, cut short by her death in March 1855.

 Bol Com € 42,99

woensdag 12 mei 2010

Wedding of Charlotte Bronte. Mrs Gaskell: ""She looks like a snow-drop""

 
Ik heb het boek
Charlotte Bronte
van Rebecca Fraser
uit de bibliotheek gehaald
ik vond daar een paar foto's in
die ik niet eerder had gezien
zoals deze


""Charlotte was eenvoudig gekleed
in een witte mousselinen jurk
met fraai groen borduursel
een kanten mantel
en een wit kapje
afgezet met kant 
en een lichte band
bloemetjes en blaadjes""

Zo beschrijft Juliet Barker
in haar boek de Brontes
de trouwkleren van Charlotte
de foto toont aan hoe het eruit heeft gezien

In het boek van Juliette Barker
staat bij de noten

De trouwjurk van Charlotte werd bewaard door  mijnheer Nichols, die hem naliet aan zijn nicht, jufrouw Charlotte Bronte Nichols, met de instructie dat zij hem voor haar dood moest verbranden, zodat zij niet kon worden verkocht, maar Miss Nichols eigen nicht, Margaret Ross, zag de jurk en gaf er een beschrijving van, waardoor er een copie kon worden gemaakt, die in 1976 in het Parsonage Museum  werd tentoongesteld. De hoed en de mantel bevinden zich in het BPM.

Andere foto's uit dit boek
Sieraden en schoenen van Charlotte Bronte



The Parlour

The Parlour

Parsonage

Parsonage

Charlotte Bronte

Presently the door opened, and in came a superannuated mastiff, followed by an old gentleman very like Miss Bronte, who shook hands with us, and then went to call his daughter. A long interval, during which we coaxed the old dog, and looked at a picture of Miss Bronte, by Richmond, the solitary ornament of the room, looking strangely out of place on the bare walls, and at the books on the little shelves, most of them evidently the gift of the authors since Miss Bronte's celebrity. Presently she came in, and welcomed us very kindly, and took me upstairs to take off my bonnet, and herself brought me water and towels. The uncarpeted stone stairs and floors, the old drawers propped on wood, were all scrupulously clean and neat. When we went into the parlour again, we began talking very comfortably, when the door opened and Mr. Bronte looked in; seeing his daughter there, I suppose he thought it was all right, and he retreated to his study on the opposite side of the passage; presently emerging again to bring W---- a country newspaper. This was his last appearance till we went. Miss Bronte spoke with the greatest warmth of Miss Martineau, and of the good she had gained from her. Well! we talked about various things; the character of the people, - about her solitude, etc., till she left the room to help about dinner, I suppose, for she did not return for an age. The old dog had vanished; a fat curly-haired dog honoured us with his company for some time, but finally manifested a wish to get out, so we were left alone. At last she returned, followed by the maid and dinner, which made us all more comfortable; and we had some very pleasant conversation, in the midst of which time passed quicker than we supposed, for at last W---- found that it was half-past three, and we had fourteen or fifteen miles before us. So we hurried off, having obtained from her a promise to pay us a visit in the spring... ------------------- "She cannot see well, and does little beside knitting. The way she weakened her eyesight was this: When she was sixteen or seventeen, she wanted much to draw; and she copied nimini-pimini copper-plate engravings out of annuals, ('stippling,' don't the artists call it?) every little point put in, till at the end of six months she had produced an exquisitely faithful copy of the engraving. She wanted to learn to express her ideas by drawing. After she had tried to draw stories, and not succeeded, she took the better mode of writing; but in so small a hand, that it is almost impossible to decipher what she wrote at this time.

I asked her whether she had ever taken opium, as the description given of its effects in Villette was so exactly like what I had experienced, - vivid and exaggerated presence of objects, of which the outlines were indistinct, or lost in golden mist, etc. She replied, that she had never, to her knowledge, taken a grain of it in any shape, but that she had followed the process she always adopted when she had to describe anything which had not fallen within her own experience; she had thought intently on it for many and many a night before falling to sleep, - wondering what it was like, or how it would be, - till at length, sometimes after the progress of her story had been arrested at this one point for weeks, she wakened up in the morning with all clear before her, as if she had in reality gone through the experience, and then could describe it, word for word, as it had happened. I cannot account for this psychologically; I only am sure that it was so, because she said it. ----------------------She thought much of her duty, and had loftier and clearer notions of it than most people, and held fast to them with more success. It was done, it seems to me, with much more difficulty than people have of stronger nerves, and better fortunes. All her life was but labour and pain; and she never threw down the burden for the sake of present pleasure. I don't know what use you can make of all I have said. I have written it with the strong desire to obtain appreciation for her. Yet, what does it matter? She herself appealed to the world's judgement for her use of some of the faculties she had, - not the best, - but still the only ones she could turn to strangers' benefit. They heartily, greedily enjoyed the fruits of her labours, and then found out she was much to be blamed for possessing such faculties. Why ask for a judgement on her from such a world?" elizabeth gaskell/charlotte bronte



Poem: No coward soul is mine

No coward soul is mine,
No trembler in the worlds storm-troubled sphere:
I see Heavens glories shine,
And faith shines equal, arming me from fear.


O God within my breast.
Almighty, ever-present Deity!
Life -- that in me has rest,
As I -- Undying Life -- have power in Thee!


Vain are the thousand creeds
That move mens hearts: unutterably vain;
Worthless as withered weeds,
Or idlest froth amid the boundless main,


To waken doubt in one
Holding so fast by Thine infinity;
So surely anchored on
The steadfast Rock of immortality.


With wide-embracing love
Thy Spirit animates eternal years,
Pervades and broods above,
Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates, and rears.


Though earth and man were gone,
And suns and universes ceased to be,
And Thou wert left alone,
Every existence would exist in Thee.


There is not room for Death,
Nor atom that his might could render void:
Thou -- Thou art Being and Breath,
And what Thou art may never be destroyed.


--
Emily Bronte

Family tree

The Bronte Family

Grandparents - paternal
Hugh Brunty was born 1755 and died circa 1808. He married Eleanor McClory, known as Alice in 1776.

Grandparents - maternal
Thomas Branwell (born 1746 died 5th April 1808) was married in 1768 to Anne Carne (baptised 27th April 1744 and died 19th December 1809).

Parents
Father was Patrick Bronte, the eldest of 10 children born to Hugh Brunty and Eleanor (Alice) McClory. He was born 17th March 1777 and died on 7th June 1861. Mother was Maria Branwell, who was born on 15th April 1783 and died on 15th September 1821.

Maria had a sister, Elizabeth who was known as Aunt Branwell. She was born in 1776 and died on 29th October 1842.

Patrick Bronte married Maria Branwell on 29th December 1812.

The Bronte Children
Patrick and Maria Bronte had six children.
The first child was Maria, who was born in 1814 and died on 6th June 1825.
The second daughter, Elizabeth was born on 8th February 1815 and died shortly after Maria on 15th June 1825. Charlotte was the third daughter, born on 21st April 1816.

Charlotte married Arthur Bell Nicholls (born 1818) on 29th June 1854. Charlotte died on 31st March 1855. Arthur lived until 2nd December 1906.

The first and only son born to Patrick and Maria was Patrick Branwell, who was born on 26th June 1817 and died on 24th September 1848.

Emily Jane, the fourth daughter was born on 30th July 1818 and died on 19th December 1848.

The sixth and last child was Anne, born on 17th January 1820 who died on 28th May 1849.

Top Withens in the snow.

Top Withens in the snow.

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