The Enduring Appeal of the Brontës in Popular Art Forms

Although last year's exhibition in the Bonnell Room at the Bronte Parsonage Museum, 'A Passionate Response', did not appeal to some of the purists in the Bronte Society, it is a fact, nevertheless, that even while Charlotte was still living the theatre had begun to playa part in the Bronte story. Charlotte, indeed, asked W. Smith Williams for a review of the stage adaptation of Jane Eyre in 1848 which was entitled 'Jane Eyre, The Secrets of Thornfield House'. Since that very first production of Jane Eyre there has grown up an entire industry of arts and entertainment related to Bronte productions. Stage productions of the novels, initially mainly of Jane Eyre, were followed by productions of Wuthering Heights and, later, by The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. These continued to be popular plays with repertory companies and audiences throughout the later nineteenth and early twentieth century. With the advent of moving pictures the two most popular novels were brought to the attention of a new and much wider public audience. The first silent movie of Jane Eyre was made in 1909, an Italian production, and it could be argued that it is through the theatre, but mainly through the cinema and, later, television, that the lives and works of the Brontes have remained so popular with the public at large. Witness, for example, the upsurge of visitors to the Parsonage following the latest Bronte television production on the children's Blue Peter programme in March of this year. Perhaps Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights are popular novels, but how many people outside the Bronte Society really know much about the lives of the family? Following on from the first cinematic productions there does appear to have been a huge increase in the interest taken in the lives of the Brontes, leading to the publication of fictionalized novels about them, culminating in the 1930S with numerous 'factional' plays such as 'Wild Decembers' (1932), 'Moor Born' (1934) and 'Stone Walls' (1936), reaching its zenith in 1933 with no less than eight plays staged. It goes without saying that some of the books and plays veered to a rather romanticized image of the sisters, but they did bring to a wider audience