Un entretien entre Sally Wainwright et Tracy Chevalier sur les soeurs Brontë

Le journal The Guardian vient de publier un entretien entre la scénariste Sally Wainwright et l'écrivain Tracy Chevalier. Il est passionnant à lire, surtout qu'elles tombent assez peu souvent d'accord. Elles n'ont par exemple pas la même sœur Brontë préférée ...

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The shadow of the Parsonage, the Brontë family’s Yorkshire home, falls close to Sowerby Bridge where writer Sally Wainwright grew up. She visited often, and even at the age of six, the small rooms in which the siblings wrote their novels and verses acted on her imagination. Her television dramas – including Happy Valley and Last Tango in Halifax – explore half-submerged family dynamics. No wonder, with a massive Brontë library at home, she felt the BBC’s invitation to make a two-hour drama about their lives was something she “had always wanted”. To Walk Invisible is an exploration of the sisters’ imaginations and the intense atmosphere in which they flared, fuelled in part by their brother Branwell’s drug and alcohol addictions, and his routine eruptions.
A similar interest led Tracy Chevalier away from her day job as a novelist of historical fiction to curate Charlotte Brontë’s bicentenary exhibition at the Parsonage. But neither Chevalier nor Wainwright talk about the Brontës as if they are objects of professional interest. They call them by their first names, quibble over their merits and speculate about how their lives might have gone if they had lived longer. At a talk in Edinburgh this summer, Wainwright described them as the ultimate “dysfunctional sitcom family”, although when she and Chevalier meet she says she thinks “sitcom” is wrong. Then she decides “dysfunctional” is wrong, too. “They had issues,” Chevalier helps, before advancing a theory of her own about the sisters – that every fan has their favourite – which makes the Brontës sound a bit like the Spice Girls. She tests it out on Wainwright.




Tracy Chevalier: I was going to ask, are you a Charlotte or an Emily?
Sally Wainwright: [Laughing] Emily and Anne, really.
TC: One of the things I found out when I started spending time at the Parsonage is that Brontë fans tend to be a Charlotte or an Emily. And now coming up on the inside is Anne.
SW: I think she gets kicked out by the bigger personalities. I get the impression, reading between the many lines of Charlotte’s letters, that Emily and Charlotte have had quite a difficult relationship, that Charlotte wanted to be Emily’s best mate and Emily wasn’t having any of it. So I’ve dramatised them as being quite tricky with each other, and Anne being the glue that makes it work.
TC: She was the mediator.
SW: She was a bit more grown up actually. She’s the one who held down a job the longest, the one who dealt with real life more effectively than either Charlotte or Emily and certainly Branwell. I wanted to put Anne on the map so she is not just “the other one”. The reason I have a problem with Charlotte sometimes is the way she tried to apologise for Anne and Emily after they were dead, for not quite knowing what they were doing when they wrote their books. Of course they knew what they were doing.
TC: I see Charlotte from very much a writer’s point of view and I just find Jane Eyre a more solid piece of work. Wuthering Heights makes me want to throw it across the room.
SW: Really?
TC: Because it’s got this very strange structure …
SW: It’s a brilliant structure.
TC: It’s incredibly violent.
SW: It’s complex. People are complex. People are dark.
TC: But Jane Eyre is complex, too, in a way that lets the reader in more. I feel that Emily herself never made friends with people. She was uncompromising. And Wuthering Heights is also an uncompromising book and I found that a little exhausting. I think people who are Emilys – not necessarily you – are really into the incredibly passionate liaison between Heathcliff and Cathy whereas actually he’s an awful man.
SW: No, it’s a novel about domestic abuse. It’s weird it’s become this romantic novel: it isn’t. It’s a weird bond. I think that’s why I like Emily – she had such an unusual mind. I suppose I admire her, I aspire … You know, I could never be that clever. She was extraordinarily intelligent. I find the fact that she was so reclusive intriguing and compelling, and I’m attracted to this woman who was her own person. She wasn’t particularly feminine, and really ploughed her own furrow. This is where I part company with Charlotte. She had the makings of a great feminist, and then she let herself down.
TC: How?
SW: Well, giving up work when she got married.
TC: I think she was just enjoying being married and having a new role. I would love to have seen what happened if she had lived. I think she would have gone back to writing.
SW: What is exciting about Charlotte is that she was writing about female experience, and she was one of the first women to really do that, with Jane Eyre. She was writing about things women felt and thought that had never been written before.
TC: Is everybody brought up in Yorkshire steeped in this whole Brontë thing, or was it special to you?
SW: I don’t know that everybody’s steeped in it – but I was. It was the kind of thing my parents would do of a Sunday – take us somewhere like the Parsonage. I remember being really overwhelmed by the place. My mum saying, “That’s the settee that Emily died on”, and my sister saying, “Come on, we’re leaving”. But I was drawn to it. It had quite an oppressive feel to a child.
TC: To an adult, too! When you look out the front windows and you just see those graves ... Brrrr. When the BBC asked if you wanted to do a biopic, how did you decide what parts of their lives to dramatise?
SW: The last three years of their lives were so intense I didn’t have to invent a story, it was all there. I wanted to place Branwell centre, not to make him cool – what interested me was how he would have affected that household as an alcoholic. When we think of the Brontë sisters, we tend to think of him as this annoying little brother in the background. But in terms of their personal everyday lives he wasn’t in the background: he was an ever-present problem they had to deal with and live with.
TC: Every time I’d visit [the Parsonage], I’d go to the top of Penistone Hill and watch the set being slowly built. It was fascinating.
SW: It looked fabulous, but we had a few problems. It was a great place to build it because of the landscape, but then it was a really daft place because of the weather. It was just so windy up there and we should have known that. And then we had to use so much CGI we could have built it in Manchester. It’s a shame. At one point the council was going to buy it and use it as a tourist exhibit but by the time we finished filming it was actually falling down, due to the weather.
TC: Had you written anything historical about real people before?
SW: No, it was a first.
TC: Did you feel there were constraints?
SW: Writing dialogue in period! I was really nervous about getting it right. It took me ages to dare to start because I didn’t want it to feel like a period drama. I wanted it to feel alive. It was the first time I’d not written anything contemporary. I found that quite a challenge. Choosing which words I could get away with and still allow it to feel authentic. We had a long conversation about using the word “fuck”.
TC: Do they use that? Does Emily?
SW: Branwell does. I was sitting in the library at the Parsonage with Siv Jansson, who was my literary adviser. Ann Dinsdale [principal curator] was down the far end, and I whispered to Siv, “Do you think Branwell would have said ‘fuck’?” And Ann said, “Course he would!” I thought, “All right, I can use it then.” It’s about trying to get that balance between it feeling very vibrant and using language …
TC: ... respectful of the period? Welcome to my world! I try to solve it by paring it back and being as spare as I can. It is really hard to get that kind of purity that makes it feel timeless and yet somehow you sense the period in it. I love writing dialogue. I don’t like writing description very much. A screenplay is kind of all dialogue isn’t it?
SW: I put a lot of stage directions in. Kay Mellor once told me, “If you haven’t put it in the stage directions and it isn’t there, it’s your fault!” And I quite like writing stage directions. I’d quite like to have a crack at writing a novel at some point. I’ve thought about it a lot, but I don’t know if I’ve got the right … I’ve tried to write a novel several times and it always gets to page 30 and just stops.
TC: Well I’ve thought of writing a screenplay. I’ve even thought of stories, and then I’m kind of terrified. It feels so alien. What I was amazed by over the two years [working at the Parsonage] and what I cannot wait to see in To Walk Invisible are not the individuals but the relationship between them. Three sisters sat round a table and, within the space of two years, they wrote three bestsellers that are still in print today and still studied. Can you imagine anybody thinking of their siblings that they would all be successful and do the same thing? I think it must be to do with the atmosphere of the house, the sort of relationships they had.
SW: Of all the literary figures you can think of, even more than Shakespeare or Dickens, I think people are interested in the Brontës’ personal lives. They lived in obscurity but now they are megastars.

To Walk Invisible is on BBC1 at 9pm on 29 December. Reader, I Married Him, an anthology of short stories inspired by Jane Eyre and edited by Tracy Chevalier, is published by Borough Press.

Ce sujet a été ouvert 430 fois (oui, oui) et n'a eu aucune réponse. C'est dommage !

Merci de le faire remonter, je ne l'avais pas vu, je le lirai un peu plus tard.

De rien ! Ca aurait été dommage de passer de passer à côté.

C'est intéressant de voir de quelle sœur chacune se sent la plus proche, ça me donne d'ailleurs une idée de topic pour le forum.

J'ai la même opinion que Tracy Chevalier concernant Jane Eyre et Wuthering Heights
Tracy Chevalier :

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I see Charlotte from very much a writer’s point of view and I just find Jane Eyre a more solid piece of work. Wuthering Heights makes me want to throw it across the room.

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But Jane Eyre is complex, too, in a way that lets the reader in more. I feel that Emily herself never made friends with people. She was uncompromising. And Wuthering Heights is also an uncompromising book and I found that a little exhausting. I think people who are Emilys – not necessarily you – are really into the incredibly passionate liaison between Heathcliff and Cathy whereas actually he’s an awful man.

J'ai commencé aujourd'hui à regarder To walk invisible, je donnerais mon avis dès que je l'aurai terminé

Je suis plus Jane Eyre que Wuthering Heights même si je trouve Wuthering Heights fascinant et le style d'Emily magnifique.
Mais plus le temps passe, plus je trouve les écrits d'Anne intéressants et sous estimés.

Hâte d'avoir ton avis sur To Walk invisible ! Il faut d'ailleurs que je poste le mien.

Emjy a écrit:

Hâte d'avoir ton avis sur To Walk invisible ! Il faut d'ailleurs que je poste le mien.

Je viens à l'instant de finir de le regarder, je donne mon avis dès demain

Merci de le faire remonter.
Comme Diana, j'aime beaucoup ce qui est dit sur les trois soeurs, et en particulier la comparaison entre Jane Eyre et les Hauts de Hurlevent. Je suis d'accord avec le terme qui est utilisé pour Withering Heights : "uncompromising". C'est exactement la sensation que j'ai eu en le lisant. C'est un roman que je trouve très adolescent (dans le bon sens du terme), par sa passion et son engagement "sans compromis".

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. I think people who are Emilys – not necessarily you – are really into the incredibly passionate liaison between Heathcliff and Cathy whereas actually he’s an awful man.
SW: No, it’s a novel about domestic abuse. It’s weird it’s become this romantic novel: it isn’t. It’s a weird bond. I think that’s why I like Emily – she had such an unusual mind. I suppose I admire her, I aspire … You know, I could never be that clever. She was extraordinarily intelligent. I find the fact that she was so reclusive intriguing and compelling, and I’m attracted to this woman who was her own person. She wasn’t particularly feminine, and really ploughed her own furrow.

Je suis tellement d'accord avec Sally Wainwright sur l'aspect des abus domestiques (comme dans The tenant d'ailleurs) et sur son avis sur Emily.

J'espère qu'un jour Sally Wainwright écrira un livre

Je tombe par hasard sur ce topic, car j'ai fini de regarder la version 2011 de "Jane Eyre" hier.
L'interview me donne envie d'abord de relire les romans cités et surtout d'en savoir plus sur leurs vies respectives. J'ai juste un très vague souvenir du film de Téchiné.
Une thématique de plus à découvrir !

@ Barb : C'est super ! J'espère aussi que tu auras l'occasion de voir le téléfilm de Sally Wainwright, To Walk invisible, qui est pour moi le meilleur biopic des soeurs Brontë à l'heure actuelle. 

Je le note ainsi que d’autres sources trouvées sous “Bronte” dans le forum, que j’explore en ce moment, c’est très riche ! 🥳

Oui, en effet il y a de quoi faire !
Si tu as besoin de conseils n'hésite pas à demander, il y a beaucoup de Brontë maniacs par ici 

C’est ce qu’il me semble

Barb, je confirme pour To walk invisible (qu'on trouve en DVD en France sous le titre La vie des soeurs Brontë)
Et un grand merci d'avoir remonté le topic, car je n'avais pas lu cet entretien (1er post) et c'est vraiment passionnant !

J'ai regardé hier "To walk invisible" qui m'a beaucoup intéressée, je vais aller lire ce topic