The Intrepidity of Charlotte Brontë

Keighley News publishes a brief report about the recent half-term activities at the Brontë Parsonage Museum (remember?):
Picture: Pictured, from left, are Benjamin Somers Heslam, nine, Samuel Somers Heslam and Thomas Knight, both 11. Source.

Families enjoyed a creepy-crawly time at the Brontë Parsonage Museum during half term.
Adults and children took part in a "churchyard challenge" at the Haworth museum, which involved following a graveyard trail.
Along the route they could explore the undergrowth and catch bugs, recording how many different kinds they found.
The museum also put on a series of guided walks around Haworth for the half-term spring break and allowed children to decorate their own "Brontë bag" at a drop-in craft activity day. A spokesman for the museum said that guests experienced what it was like to live in the village at the time of the Brontës.
All the attractions were included in the entry price to the museum.

We read in The Mirfield Reporter about a sponsored walk with a Brontë contest:

l NAMES for a sponsored history walk to raise money Mirfield charity the Hollybank Trust will be taken at Mirfield Family History Day. The walk is to take place on September 7. Everyone who enters is in with a chance to win a family ticket to the Bronte Parsonage Museum, Haworth. Bronte Society member Imelda Marsden will be at the library to take names for the walk and also provide more information about the society. (Lauren Chadwick)

Mirfield plays its own part in the Brontë story as the first Roe Head School was located there.

The Seattle Times reviews once again Margot Livesey's The House on Fountain Street:

In part three, Dara meets a violinist, Edward, and falls madly in love with him, ignoring the fact that he is still living with his ex-girlfriend and that they have a child together. Faint echoes of Jane Eyre here. In fairness to Dara, Edward does keep insisting that he will leave his current arrangement when... , and Dara believes him. (Valerie Ryan)

It's interesting that Sebastian Faulk's take on James Bond (Devil May Care) reminds the reviewers of Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (this is not the first time they are linked). From The Independent:

A strain of Gothic horror runs through many British accounts of Jamaica, notably Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea. Jamaican plantation lands, with their romantic air of neglect and preponderance of "sex and machete fights", fascinated Fleming. (Ian Thompson)

We read on the Indian website Greater Kashmir a review of Jane Eyre that contrasts and complements the piece of news we posted yesterday about Jane Eyre in Pakistan:

It is indeed a fascinating novel which raises many questions after we have finished reading it. Jane Eyre and E. F. Rochester have been brought alive in the pages of this novel; and the course of their lives keeps us glued to those pages. And at the end, we marvel at the happenings and the intrepidity of the authoress Charlotte Bronte. This thought provoking novel still shocks its conservative readers. (Manzur Akash)

Books in My Life - Alan's Labor of Love reviews Laura Joh Rowland's The Secret Adventures of Charlotte Brontë:

The story is a fantasy revolving around historical and made up people during the time that Great Britain was involved in the Opium war with China. Very interesting story; Charlotte witnesses a murder finds herself in a world that she had never experienced before. There is danger, romance and plenty of tense action as Charlotte and her sisters help solve what becomes a national crises. (Alan)

Quod She posts together Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights, the Puppini Sisters's cover and Monty Python's unsurpassed semaphore version of Wuthering Heights.

Categories: Books, Brontë Parsonage Museum, Jane Eyre, Humour, Music, References, Wide Sargasso Sea, Wuthering Heights