John McCain's brush with the Brontës

Wouldn't the Brontës have loved to welcome a member of the Royal Family into their home? Well, let them polish the silver and get the china tea set ready for a special visitor: the Duke of Kent will be marking the 80th anniversary of the Brontë Parsonage Museum next July 10 as reported by the Telegraph and Argus.

Royalty is to grace two tourist attractions, which this year are celebrating special milestones.
The Duke of Kent is to visit the Keighley & Worth Valley Railway and the Bronte Parsonage Museum at Haworth on Thursday, July 10.
The heritage steam railway is this year commemorating its 40th birthday and marked the event with a special festival of steam at the weekend which drew large numbers of visitors. The Bronte literary museum at Haworth – where sisters Charlotte, Emily and Anne wrote their classic novels – is 80 years old this year.
Andrew McCarthy, acting director of the museum, said: “The Duke is visiting us in our 80th year. We have yet to finalise the details but we expect him to be here about 45 minutes. We will provide a reception and are inviting donors and trustees and children from Haworth Primary School.”

EDIT: Keighley News also reports it.

We don't know whether John McCain would be too thrilled about such a visit if it were to take place. The Washington Times and a zillion other news sites explain why:

Who is Heathcliff?
The name of the doomed romantic hero in Emily Bronte's novel "Wuthering Heights" eluded John McCain more than 40 years ago, robbing him of a second straight win as a contestant on the televised quiz show "Jeopardy," the Republican presidential hopeful said Monday.
Riding aboard his Straight Talk Express campaign bus, McCain, well-read and a trivia buff, recalled his two-day appearance on the popular program in 1965. He won the game the first day, and lost the next day in the final round.
So, what was the Final Jeopardy question that tripped him up?
The famously competitive Arizona senator recalled it exactly. "Cathy loved him, but married Edgar Linton instead."
McCain said he knew the name of the book, but that his answer "What is Wuthering Heights?" led to his elimination. (Beth Fouhy)

Tsk, tsk. Now we know what the mean when they talk about airing the dark laundry in public during the campaign :P

The South African interviews Anli Serfontein, author of the book From Rock to Kraut. When asked about her literature of choice she goes on to explain what her family reading atmosphere is like.

My teenage daughter is all into Jane Austin [sic] and the Bronte sisters – she calls it 19th century Mills and Boons. (Liezl Maclean)

Erm - are you sure she's really reading those books and not actual Mills and Boons romances camouflaged as classics?

The Birmingham Post reviews last Sunday's opening concert in Tardebigge’s Celebrating English Song series.

Soprano Patricia Rozario and pianist Mark Bebbington, their collaboration rewarding, natural and easy, responded to these sensitive miniatures with an intelligence and empathy which informed their performances throughout an afternoon which also included Britten, Gurney and Ireland.
Though pleasantly creamy, Rozario’s phrasing allowed her clarity of diction to point key words, and Bebbington’s accompaniments were always deft and thoughtfully characterised. And nowhere were these traits more in evidence than in John Joubert’s Six Poems by Emily Bronte, each convincingly inevitable in its treatment, and emotionally searching from beginning to end.
The conclusion is a powerful treatment of the hymn of faith which is No Coward Soul is Mine, the stamina and intellect-sapping piano backcloth unifying the soprano’s ecstatic utterances. But there were also the lows, with Five Eliot Landscapes by the then 19-year-old Thomas Ades. (Christopher Morley)

And finally the Brontë Parsonage Blog has a call for papers for a special issue of LISA e-journal, to be published in the first quarter of 2009: Jane Eyre: text, context, urtext:

[This issue] intends to reexamine Jane Eyre, its context, its text and its scope as an urtext, in order to exploit the full richness of the novel and to allow the readers to become immersed once more in this major text of nineteenth-century British literature. (Read more)

Categories: Brontë Parsonage Museum, In the News, Jane Eyre, Music, Poetry, Scholar, Weirdo, Wuthering Heights