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 17 september 2011

Voice of the Valleys

We want to introduce a new monthly community newspaper serving the Haworth area: Voice of the Valleys.The changing world of the media means that most of us now look online for our news, views and information. Here at Voice of the Valleys we aim to bring you the best of all worlds by combining an online magazine with some of the traditional newspaper values. Our first Voice of the Valleys newspaper is now available. It is a free full colour, tabloid which is "by the community for the community". Read it HERE , the pages will take a few minutes to load depending on your connection speed but it's worth waiting for!
We will bring you local news and features, pictures and sounds from an area including Keighley, Haworth, Oakworth, Oxenhope, Cross Roads, Stanbury and beyond. Areas rich in history, tourism and business which attract visitors from all over the world. Our readership will be world-wide meaning that advertisers have an outlet which no single hard copy publication can ever give with a much longer shelf life and at a fraction of the cost charged by low circulation traditional media.
We want everyone to be involved and will accept contributions from across the broad spectrum of our communities to make us a publication "by the people for the people".
E-mail us on voiceofthevalleys@gmail.com or call 07092 103738 so we can hear your voice.
Voice of the Valleys

Haworth, Oxenhope & Stanbury From Old Photographs Volume 1. A Review


The pictures and Steven Wood's concise yet thorough descriptions take us to places that no longer exist (as elsewhere in England the 1960s were demolishing-crazy in Haworth) and which would have been familiar to the Brontës, a regular feature of their daily lives, particularly with their father's profession. Of particular interest are the pictures connected to Haworth's old church, the church where the Brontë family worshipped. Some of the pictures we hadn't seen before and we certainly didn't know a few things about it and what became of some of its parts. Likewise, some very interesting pictures of the first Brontë Museum are to be seen.

woensdag 14 september 2011

Wuthering Heights



A production of Emily Brontë's classic Wuthering Heights backed by Screen Yorkshire has scooped accolades at an international film festival.
Wuthering Heights was shot throughout North Yorkshire and supported by Screen Yorkshire, which invested in the production as well as providing crewing and locations support.
Andrea Arnold's interpretation of Wuthering Heights has won Best Cinematography at the 68th Venice International Film Festival with the Yorkshire landscape being described as "another character".
Locations that feature in the film include: Thwaite, Cotescue Park, Coverham, and Moor Close Farm, Muker, Swaledale.
Hugo Heppell, head of production at Screen Yorkshire, said: "Andrea was absolute in her desire to make the film in Yorkshire and this award shows how important it was to her vision for this unique film. We are looking forward to this film being talked about throughout the autumn."

Brontë Studies. Volume 36, Issue 3

The new issue of Brontë Studies (Volume 36, Issue 3, September 2011) is already available online.

dinsdag 13 september 2011


The day I visit, the people of Haworth will enjoy an advance screening of the new big-screen version of Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre, starring Mia Wasikowska as a not-so-plain Jane and Michael Fassbender as her brooding employer, Mr Rochester. To celebrate the film’s release, the Sunday Express was given exclusive access to the archives of the family’s former home, now the Brontë Parsonage Museum.
Library and collections officer Sarah Laycock has raided the archives for a selection of treasured artefacts off limits to the public, displayed in plastic folders on tissue-covered lecterns and handled by Sarah wearing surgical gloves. Only about two per cent of the collection is on display at any one time.
The Brontë legend grew up in the wake of Charlotte’s 1847 classic novel Jane Eyre; Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights was published in the same year as was their sister Anne’s Agnes Grey. The novels of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, their male alter egos, represented an unprecedented outpouring of talent from one household.
The most moving piece of memorabilia in the Parsonage collection is the only known letter in which Charlotte refers to the fact that her siblings died in such close succession, written on black-bordered mourning stationery to her friend Letitia Wheelwright. The Brontë Society paid £70,000 for the letter when it came up for auction, its tiny, faded script barely decipherable.
“We are also shown two of the miniscule books, about 1.5ins long, that Charlotte and Branwell made out of sugar bags or wallpaper fragments and hand-bound themselves. Unless you were among the collection of toy soldiers for whom the stories were intended, you would need a magnifying glass to decipher the minute script. Their size serves a dual purpose. “Sometimes the content was a little bit inappropriate, quite gruesome, like children being hanged. They didn’t want their father to be able to read it!”
Charlotte’s talent for drawing and painting is also relatively unknown but evident on a pencil drawing of Bolton Abbey, which was even exhibited in a Leeds art gallery, and a watercolour, Wild Roses From Nature.
A letter written to her best friend Ellen Nussey in 1843 shows a small caricature of them both in which Charlotte portrays herself as an ugly dwarf character.

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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