Where Sabrina, the Teenage Witch finds A Room of Her Own

Sarah Barrett's newly released A Room of their Own opens today our newsround as it is featured today in Keighley News:

Rare photographs illustrate a new book marking the 80th anniversary of the Brontë Parsonage Museum.
A Room of Their Own celebrates the museum's past and features never-before-seen see pictures from its archives.
Sarah Barrett's £4.50 book offers a short history of each of the rooms in the former home of the Brontë sisters.
There is also information and the garden on the cellar, plus information about Brontë family members, servants and visitors to the house.
The 24-page book, completed with a chronology and bibliography, is on sale at the museum in Haworth. (David Knights)

The Akron Beacon Journal reviews the on going exhibition in the Akron Art Museum, Ohio :

Bill Brandt: Shadows and Substance
May 31, 2008 - August 24, 2008
Isroff and Bidwell Galleries

Bill Brandt, England’s greatest twentieth-century photographer, began as a photojournalist and became a poet of light and shadow. Decade by decade, Brandt (1904 – 1983) moved toward evermore radical dualities of black and white, not just in his new photographs but also in his printing of older images. This resulted in his own reinterpretation of his earlier work. Bill Brandt: Shadows and Substance presents 67 photographs from throughout the artist’s career. All are vintage prints, providing a rare opportunity to see the work as the artist originally conceived it.

As we have posted before, one of Bill Brandt's subjects was Brontë country:

Brandt also documented the countryside as landscapes steeped in the English literary tradition, capturing the settings of famous British writers, such as Emily Bronte's immortalization of the bleakness of the Yorkshire moors.
It took him several tries, but he finally found his image after a winter hailstorm frosted the moors and a high wind flattened the scant vegetation, resulting in Top Withens (''Wuthering Heights''), Yorkshire Moors (1945). (Dorothy Shinn)

Now, some book reviews. The Japan Times reviews The Last Concubine by Leslie Downer but has a slightly biased image of Wuthering Heights:

These include a meaningful encounter with an unkempt but attractively Heathcliff-like masterless ronin. When it came to such men, "She felt a strong fascination for these unfamiliar creatures with their odd, slightly repellent odor. Men though they were, they were of much lower status, so much so that the fact she was a woman and they men was rarely relevant."
Or so it seems at first — but it is a law governing such epic sagas as this that the well-born heroine should eventually end up in such alien arms. It was thus in "Wuthering Heights" that Catherine Earnshaw is last seen in the hirsute embrace of the lowly Heathcliff, and this is what romance heroines have been doing ever since.
Emily Bronte's recipe has proved a lasting one and it continues to nurture, at its lower end, the Harlequin romance series and, at its higher end, this exciting historical novel. One could call it a "bodice-ripper" except that the ladies of the shogun wore no bodices — how about "obi-slasher"? (Donald Richie)

The other reviews are of well known books in these newsrounds: Margot Livesey's The House on Fountain Street in The Globe and Mail:

Less satisfying to the reader are the overt parallels between The House on Fortune Street and Jane Eyre, as well as Great Expectations. The 19th-century flavour of the narrative, its mirroring of similar tropes of discovery and disappointment and betrayal, is so obvious as to overwhelm its strengths. (Aritha Van Herk)

And Ruth Brandon's Governess: The Lives and Times of the real Jane Eyres:

The appeal of fiction's most famous governess — Jane Eyre — is the romance, of course. Take away the happy ending and what have you got?
Well, you've got the penury and abuse that made up the lives of most actual governesses in 19th-century Britain. Luckily for historian Brandon, the fascination of history does not depend on happy endings, although there is enough melodrama and injustice to fill a Thomas Hardy novel or two. Or six. (Lynn Harnett in The Seacost)

Inspire Emotion posts a letter from Charlotte Brontë to M. Heger and highlights her drawings. Chainless Soul has posted several posts recently that deserves attention: comments about some Brontës poems, Wuthering Heights and how Sabrina, the Teenage Witch meets Wuthering Heights (in the episode The Long and Winding Short Cut, 3x22, 4/30/1999, written by Carrie Honigblum & Renee Phillips, complete transcript here)

Categories: Art-Exhibitions, Books, Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, Poetry, References, Wuthering Heights