Roaming Haworth Moor in quest of their alter ego

First, some reviews of books with Brontë references more or less relevant: Stevie Davies (author of Emily Brontë: Heretic or Four Dreamers and Emily) reviews Anne Donovan's Being Emily for The Guardian:

Like the world of Wuthering Heights, Being Emily is built on the grave of a mother: "with her gone, things had got intae a guddle". In Emily Brontë's novel, the guddle takes the form of a romantic maelstrom of volcanic proportions in which God and man are called into question by the needy protagonists, Catherine and Heathcliff; who, seeking one another, fly asunder.
What sane person would actually want to be Emily Brontë? Even Emily Brontë did not always seem to savour it. But generations of Brontë readers have entertained the same fantasy, roaming Haworth Moor in quest of their alter ego, to encounter foul weather and return with a head cold. Sociopathic, riven, angrily shy, Emily acknowledged as her sole law the desire to go "where my own nature would be leading". Homeward.
In Being Emily, Anne Donovan leaves behind (but never very far behind) the quirky conceit of Buddha Da, which featured both on the Whitbread First Novel and Orange Prize shortlists. The new novel is a tender, lyrical coming-of-age narrative, its people drawn with love in that singing Glasgow voice that is Donovan's signature and which threads and unites all her characters' voices. Fiona O'Connell grows up the bookish and dreamy daughter of a Catholic family in which she has always played a maternal role, nurturing her almost supernaturally irritating identical twin sisters, Rona and Mona, and encouraging her sweet but helpless father. All the O'Connells are marked by mourning, as they suffer the death of the mother in childbirth.
Thinking herself into the mindspace of Emily Brontë is a way for the child Fiona to cultivate artistic identity and to call her soul her own in the midst of heaving domestic tumult. "Ah'd read that she baked the family's bread and learned German at the same time, book in fronty her." Emily, who probably spoke with an Irish-inflected Yorkshire brogue and could write a feisty, peaty Yorkshire vernacular, had created a subversive fastness for creative identity at the heart of family life. Fiona is mad on Emily. She goes to Haworth. Later, visiting the National Portrait Gallery, she sees that Branwell's portrait of Emily is a lie - a romanticisation. This is one step on the path to releasing her from Emily's ghost.
Being Emily commits itself, in the end, to a forgiving and rational vision of the world as it is: that is, to not being Emily (a more exact title, perhaps). Mother-loss pitches the O'Connells into the guddle of homelessness: "Mammy'd made it hame, and since she'd gone it wasnae hame any mair." Bitterly Fiona blames her grieving, alcoholic father when the flat burns down. Echoes of Wuthering Heights suffuse the narrative, but in the wistful minor key. As Heathcliff is to Cathy Earnshaw, so Jaswinder is to Fiona. Jas is a free-thinking Sikh who has also experienced loss. As they bend above a book, one sees "two heids, his hair dark and shiny and straight, mines tangled curls the colour of tea". Like Cathy, Fiona betrays her own heart - with Jas's brother, the flighty, sitar-playing Amrik. Mythic elements recur. Amrik, like a captured silkie, a fallen angel, cannot be expected to behave like a human being. His arrival in Fiona's life is that of "a force of nature, a great unstoppable wave destroying everything" - and results in her worst nightmare, an aborted foetus.
Not very Edgar Linton. A desolate girl's love-choice is described as a matter of life and death, heaven and hell, but Donovan calms the heroic Brontë tempest by infusing it with a saving humour, tolerance and good sense. Fiona grows up, as Catherine Earnshaw never will. At root, the novel is a portrait of the artist as a young woman. Out of the struggle and mess of her loss, Fiona produces an angry visual art with its own integrity: the broken heads of Barbie dolls superimposed on idyllic landscapes; a burning doll's house. Movingly, Fiona grows out of being Emily to become simply Fiona, her mother's daughter: "I had to rely on the spirit inside me, the one she'd helped to shape and form."

The Aberdeen Press & Journal reviews John Harwood's The Seance:

Written in a typical Victorian style, this novel is a must-read for fans of classic Victorian novels such as Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights. As John Harwood is a university English professor in Australia, it is not so surprising that he has taken inspiration from such great authors as Mary Shelley and Emily Bronte. (Jenny Thompson)

Jeannette Winterson suggests in The Times readings to shed some light on grief:

I went home and read Tennyson's In Memoriam, Emily Dickinson, Christina Rosetti, certain passages from Wuthering Heights. We all have our own list, I guess.

Stephenie Meyer's Brontëiteness appears once again in The Age. This time is the author herself saying:

Talking from her home in Phoenix, Arizona, Meyer, 34, says Twilight took her three months to write. She's the first to agree that her rapid transformation was surprising and says her love of literature had a lot to do with it. "I've read thousands of books, especially Austen, Shakespeare and the Brontes. It was as if I'd stored up all these words and now I had a story of my own." (Frances Atkinson)

Author Mark Blagrave is interviewed in The Telegraph-Journal (Canada). Jane Eyre is among his top-ten of books:

4. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte...
for its captivating characters and nearly unrelenting darkness; and for that very late-breaking moment when someone we thought was telling the story from outside suddenly becomes the main character with these simple words: "Reader, I married him."

Brief blogosphere mentions: Literaturblog von Nomadenseele posts about Agnes Grey, in German; Contemporary Traditions does the same with Jane Eyre; Hime-Sema No Heya discusses Wuthering Heights 1939.

And finally some news from our periodic section devoted to the fascinating world of the Brontë horses. The Independent (Ireland) publishes this enigmatic comment:

Fourth to Prima Luce on her recent Curragh comeback, Sharleez might have more scope for improvement than narrow Naas scorer Charlotte Bronte which was unable to make an impact in better company at Leopardstown last Sunday. (Damien McElroy)

Categories: Agnes Grey, Books, Brontëites, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, References, Weirdo, Wuthering Heights