#hall sisters

[omg-hellgirl]

Jerry Hall and Rosy Hall photographed by Richard Young at Lord Glenconner's party, 1989.

[zal-cryptid]

An assortment of Dorley Hall characters

[rayatii]

A few years ago, I had the idea of making one of those movies about a girl who falls in love with some asshole “bad boy” with the idea that she can “fix him” with her good influence, but it’s portrayed in a realistic way, and instead of improving, he becomes more and more abusive, until she has to escape.

A couple of days ago, I started reading The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and finished it yesterday… and I realized that Anne Brontë already beat me to it 177 years ago.

[selenedistress]

Wow what a compelling story about relationships and identity! Plus I love the big cast of memorable and distinct characters. I swear, everyone feels like they have their own narrative voice and unique personality, with some incredibly entertaining dialogues and banter between them to boot. And the fact it's very, very gay definitely helps. I wonder what the author was up to before writing this...

...

homestuck fanfiction

[burningvelvet]

In a letter to W. S. Williams (14 August 1848), Charlotte Brontë compares Jane Eyre’s Rochester to the Byronic heroes of her sisters’ novels, Heathcliff from Emily’s Wuthering Heights and Huntingdon from Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall:

“You say Mr. Huntingdon reminds you of Mr. Rochester. Does he? Yet there is no likeness between the two; the foundation of each character is entirely different. Huntingdon is a specimen of the naturally selfish, sensual, superficial man, whose one merit of a joyous temperament only avails him while he is young and healthy, whose best days are his earliest, who never profits by experience, who is sure to grow worse the older he grows.

Mr. Rochester has a thoughtful nature and a very feeling heart; he is neither selfish nor self-indulgent; he is ill-educated, misguided; errs, when he does err, through rashness and inexperience: he lives for a time as too many other men live, but being radically better than most men, he does not like that degraded life, and is never happy in it. He is taught the severe lessons of experience and has sense to learn wisdom from them. Years improve him; the effervescence of youth foamed away, what is really good in him still remains. His nature is like wine of a good vintage, time cannot sour, but only mellows him. Such at least was the character I meant to portray.

Heathcliffe, again, of Wuthering Heights is quite another creation. He exemplifies the effects which a life of continued injustice and hard usage may produce on a naturally perverse, vindictive, and inexorable disposition. Carefully trained and kindly treated, the black gipsy-cub might possibly have been reared into a human being, but tyranny and ignorance made of him a mere demon. The worst of it is, some of his spirit seems breathed through the whole narrative in which he figures: it haunts every moor and glen, and beckons in every fir-tree of the Heights.”

Source: The Brontës Life and Letters (Clement King Shorter, 2013)

[haveyouseenthismovie-poll]

[literarylumin]

I'll walk where my own nature would be leading: it vexes me to choose another guide.

- Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

[adobongsiopao]

Caricature of Brontē siblings from an old issue of "Punch" magazine.

Source: The Official Bronte Group on Facebook

[pro-royalty]

Chloe x Halle

[evie-doesnt-write]

Revolutionary Girl Utena: Ep.22//Ep.34

[medea-of-colchis]

(...) Cupid's arrows not only had been too sharp for me, but they were barbed and deeply rooted, and I had not yet been able to wrench them from my heart.

By Anne Brontë, from The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

[omg-hellgirl]

Jerry Hall with her sisters, Cyndy (left) and Terry Hall, photographed by Harry Benson in New York, 1978.

[zal-cryptid]

Been reading Sisters of Dorley (rotting by brain). Doing my best to remember what these characters were described as looking like so I can better visualize them.

[wildfellweekly]

New Book Club for Autumn 2023!

Announcing Wildfell Weekly, a substack read-a-long for Anne Brontë's novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall!

You must go back with me to the autumn of 1827.

A new tenant has taken up residence in old Wildfell Hall and Mr. Gilbert Markham finds himself very intrigued. But the widow Mrs. Helen Graham is more than what she seems, and as rumors about her start to fly, she reveals to a doubting Gilbert the truth about the disastrous marriage she left behind.

Anne Brontë differed from her sisters Charlotte (Jane Eyre) and Emily (Wuthering Heights) in favoring a Realist rather than Romantic approach to her writing. In Tenant she explored themes of domestic violence, alcoholism and addiction, gender relations, motherhood and marriage, and the ability of women to define their own lives with an unflinching desire to depict what she saw to be true. While now considered among the first feminist novels, critics of Anne's day were shocked by a book they found coarse, brutal, and overly graphic.

So starting October 26, 2023 and until June 10, 2024, let's read together a story one nineteenth century critic called "utterly unfit to be put in the hands of girls"!

Find More Information about the Project and Subscribe Here!

[fictionadventurer]

Potential September Reading

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien (ideally in audio)

An English Squire by Christabel R. Coleridge

A Sherlock Holmes story (and/or a screen adaptation)

C.S. Lewis nonfiction

A sensation or mystery novel

A piece of one of the Psmith stories

Some kind of nonfiction book

[red-umbrella-811]

“All novels are, or should be, written for both men and women to read, and I am at a loss to conceive how a man should permit himself to write anything that would be really disgraceful to a woman, or why a woman should be censured for writing anything that would be proper and becoming for a man.”

— Anne Brontë