A governess would spell Haworth right

Let's begin with a couple of reviews of Other People's Daughters by Ruth Brandon. The first one by The Independent:

Not even Charlotte Brontë's most famous heroine had a story to match the tangled lives of these real-life governesses. (...)
Charlotte Brontë, creator of one of fiction's most famous governesses, Jane Eyre, was herself one, and pressed the experience into fierce creative service. But, as Ruth Brandon compellingly describes in Other People's Daughters, the plain facts were as dramatic and often more traumatic. (Salley Vickers)

And The Telegraph:

Nineteenth-century novels that contain one of these troubled creatures form a genre of their own (think of The Turn of the Screw, Jane Eyre, Agnes Grey, The Eustace Diamonds).
Mrs Pryor, the governess in Charlotte Brontë's Shirley, realised that men saw her as 'a tabooed woman' to whom 'they were interdicted from granting the usual privileges of the sex', and it is this taboo which fascinates Brandon. A tabooed subject, she argues, is 'mysteriously and threateningly desirable. So the governess... today ranks alongside the nun as a sexual fetish: the most powerless of women transmogrified, by an ironic twist of fate, into the dominatrix'. (Frances Wilson)

By the way, The Independent on Sunday apologizes for its Howarth-instead-of-Haworth spelling mistake last week in this article:

We had a headline that managed to misspell the name of one of Yorkshire's most famous towns – revered as the place where the Brontë sisters were brought up and one of the North's greatest literary shrines ("Brontë moor and Inca Mountain. More similar than you think, says Howarth's [sic] twinning group").
"Don't you know or don't you care?" fumes John Metcalfe from Baildon. "It's Haworth, not Howarth. Typical southern ignorance. You probably come from the same school that misspells Middlesbrough 'Middlesborough' and pronounces Newcastle 'Newc-arse-sell". "What's so exciting," snarls Stuart Binns from Northallerton, "about Haworth being twinned with some trendy travel destination like Machu Picchu? I'd rather spend my hols in the Pennines any day."
Sensible choice, Mr Binns. But this was merely a slip – unforgivable, admittedly – for which we apologise. No slight intended. And as for "southern softies", it's worth pointing out that the editor-in-chief of 'The Independent' is Manchester born and bred, and that the editor of this newspaper is a proud Scot. (Michael Williams)

Another book review that mentions the Brontës is from the Baltimore Sun: The Third Angel by Alice Hoffman (an inveterate Brontëite).

There is always someone dead or dying in a Hoffman novel; the metaphor of the mortality and immortality of love is one of her most compelling literary conceits. The ghosts in Hoffman's novels are palpably real, as is the one in The Third Angel. These ghosts evoke and invoke the transitory nature of love; they are breathlessly alive with their eternal, pulsing emotion driving them on, haunting their beloved as well as the reader, just as Heathcliff did Cathy - and generations of readers - on the English moor. (...)
Some critics have minimized the complexity of Hoffman's work by referring to her, with a barely disguised sneer, as a romance writer. Well, Hoffman is a romance writer, but then so were Flaubert, Proust, the Bronte sisters and Jane Austen. (Victoria A. Brownworth)

The Indianapolis Business Journal traces a profile of Jill Long Thompson, who runs for the
Democrat candidacy in the 2008 Indiana gubernatorial election.

As a child, Thompson read the Bronte sisters and dreamed of becoming a professional baton twirler. (Peter Schnitzler)

GulfNews discusses why we are more fascinated by evil, by negativity than by positivity:

Look at literature, the most unforgettable characters are those that personified evil - Macbeth, Heathcliff, Ebenezer Scrooge. Perhaps we remember them because in the end they were redeemed. (Suchitra Bajpai Chaudhary)

Heathcliff's redemption? Maybe in some twisted way... but Macbeth's?

Renata Cordeiro posts a Portuguese translation of the Reminiscences of Charlotte Brontë by Ellen Nussey. What an Awesome Title talks briefly about Wuthering Heights 1939 and La Terrasse writes a review of The Professor:

S. read this recently and was surprised to find how much she disliked it. The problem was the narrator, William Crimsworth, whom she found self-absorbed and xenophobic (not good qualities in a teacher abroad). (Chris)

While William Crimsworth is not our favourite Brontë character for many reasons it should be born in mind that his attitudes, his views of the world are defined by the context in which he was born. Judging a character from a modern-day viewpoint is not wrong per se but judging him solely on that basis might leave us with a confused understanding of him. While William Crimsworth may not have been the most amiable of characters back in the 19th century he had also his good, unconventional points as is the fact that he consents to his wife continuing to work after marriage, for instance.

Finally, Justine Picardie, author of Daphne, has posted on her blog about last Friday's event at the Brontë Parsonage Museum. She promises more... soon, we hope:

(...) What made it even more emotional (for me, at least) was that the Parsonage had brought out the original manuscripts of Branwell Bronte's poems that Daphne had purchased from Symington, and later donated to the Parsonage (or perhaps returned them to their rightful home, given the shady circumstances under which Symington had acquired them). Added to which, one of Symington's nephews was in the audience last night, and afterwards, he told me a story that I had never heard before, about Alex Symington's murky involvement with a forged Bronte letter... So the story I told in "Daphne" had a sequel last night...

Categories: Books, Haworth, In the News, References, Talks, The Professor, Translations