Thank God she only had time for one

The Brontë Parsonage Museum has resisted quite well the difficulties of 2008 according to Keighley News:

Most tourist attractions in Keighley and Haworth have held their own despite a difficult year’s business.
Popular visitor destinations contacted by the Keighley News have reported receiving similar numbers of tourists last year as they did in 2007, defying the economic slump.
Andrew McCarthy, museum director at Haworth’s Brontë Parsonage, said 72,000 people visited it in 2008 compared with 75,000 people the previous year.
He said: “We were quite pleased because in May of last year we were actually 20 per cent down on the previous year.
“We managed to make up a lot of ground.
“For the first time we had an exhibition focusing on Emily Brontë. That ran through the summer and generated a lot of interest.
“We re-open on February 1 with a completely refurbished exhibition area — the first time that’s happened for 30 years.”(Miran Rahman)

The Spoof!'s contributor ChrisAshby13 isn't probably one of last year's visitors:

A radical new perspective on Emily Bronte's seminal and sole creative work was offered by critics at the London Review of Books' annual assembly last night. Various academics, based at Oxford University, argued that the novel was "unerringly boring, pretentious and overworked," "ridiculously long" and "boring, goddamit, boring."
"Nothing happens in almost four-hundred pages," Professor Seamen expostulated. "The whole thing's just shite. There's no other way to describe it. Pure, unadulterated shite."
Booker Prize winning author, Ian McEwan, agreed wholeheartedly. "Okay, there's a death somewhere in the middle, but she skirts over it in about a paragraph. Where's the emotion? She's fine with spending five-thousand words describing a fucking house, for Christ's sake, but a death - there's nothing, anywhere. What the hell is wrong with this bitch?"
Bronte is known to have lived a traumatic existence, her less successful brother drinking himself to death before she herself died prematurely; Seamen, who is currently penning a radical new autobiography of the novelist, suggests that, "maybe her brother was on to something," and, "thank god she only had time for one."
The conference ground to an awkward halt.

The composer Frédéric Chaslin is interviewed in Levante (Spain) and talks about the origins of his Wuthering Heights operatic project (with libretto by PH Fisher):

Desde entonces el tiempo no ha pasado en balde este pianista y compositor además de director. "Lo más importante ha sido la gran evolución que se ha producido en mi lenguaje compositivo". El cambio ha venido sobre todo motivado por la meditación sobre el contacto del artista con el público: "Al cabo de veinte años de escribir música para un público muy reducido de especialistas en lo que llamamos la música contemporánea, un buen día me levanté por la mañana con la consciencia de que aquella no era la música que yo quería escribir, ni la que quería escuchar, ni por supuesto la que quería escuchar el público". El resultado más prominente de ese viraje ha sido la ópera Cumbres borrascosas, compuesta entre 2007 y 2008, y grabada en disco en el Palau de les Arts el pasado septiembre. "Es una música romántica, con influencias pop". (A.B.M.) (Google translation)

The publication of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith suggests new titles to the Toronto Star:

An author named Seth Grahame-Smith publishes a book called Pride and Prejudice and Zombies Excellent news. Maybe I can finally get someone to take a look at my manuscripts for The Sun Also Rises on Your Festering Innards, The Wuthering Heights of Bloodsucking and Great Expectations of Great Decapitations. Oh, and Werewolves ate Jane Eyre. You have no idea how I've suffered for my unrecognized art. (Malene Arpe)

The New York Times talks about a sort of Algonquin Round Table reenactment with the presence of, among others, Jamaica Kincaid who:

Ms. Kincaid, who grew up idolizing Charlotte Brontë, told the students: “The writers I read were all dead. I didn’t know people seriously kept writing in the 20th century.” (Amanda M. Fairbanks)

A very curious confusion (a short-circuit of plainness quotes) occurs in this chronicle of a trip to China in The Star (Malaysia):

It was only during the tour that we really come to know her as a person and what she had in store for us. It was then, too, that I realised the truth of what Garth Dalmain (in Jane Eyre) said: “Plainness is not ugliness ... when (she) rose to speak, (her) face changed ... the beauty of (her) soul shone through ...” (Norma Alias)

The quote comes Florence L. Barclay's The Rosary (1909).

The Guardian describes the Austrian singer Soap&Skin like this:

"She resembles a tragically rebellious heroine flung into the present like a shivering ghost of a Bronte sister, far too worldly-wise for such a young slip of a girl." (Paul Lester)

Also in the The Observer we notice in this review of Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon the report on the appearances of W.M. Thackeray in film. Both of them are in Brontë biopics:

On top of several versions of Vanity Fair, Thackeray has had three cinematic outings, two minor, one major. The first occurs in the 1946 Brontë sisters biopic Devotion, as Thackeray (Sidney Greenstreet) escorts Charlotte Brontë (Olivia de Havilland) around literary London. Approaching a chop house, they pass a spade-bearded gentleman, and the following immortal exchange ensues: "Morning, Dickens" - "Morning, Thackeray." The second is to be found in André Téchiné's Les Soeurs Brontë (1979) where Charlotte (Marie-France Pisier) on her triumphant visit to London is escorted by Thackeray, who is played - in his only movie appearance so far that I know of - by the great semiotician Roland Barthes. As someone remarked at the time, this was rather like Michael Winner persuading FR Leavis to play Flaubert in a biopic of the Goncourt brothers. (Philip French)

Oti Rodríguez Marchante reviews Jane Campion's 1993 film The Piano in ABC (Spain) and mentions the Brontës:

Y cuando el granjero tosco y áspero que interpreta Harvey Keitel llega a un peculiar pacto con la mujer a cambio de rescatar el piano y dejar que lo toque, el nervio de la trama adquiere tonalidades y ecos que recuerdan a la obra de H D Lawrence «El amante de Lady Chatterley», en una hermosa confusión con ese aroma melancólico de las Brönte (sic). (Google translation)

L'Express (France) devotes an article to Stephenie Meyer's saga:

Certes, Bella est une gamine cultivée, incollable sur Macbeth, inconditionnelle de Jane Austen et des soeurs Brontë, reconnaissant immédiatement le Clair de lune de Debussy (Edward épaté), ne s'intéressant ni aux fringues ni aux soirées entre filles. (Delphine Peras) (Google translation)

Word Wise is reading Jane Eyre and selects several of his favourite words, For the Love of Paper posts some pictures of a recent production of Polly Teale's Jane Eyre in Auckland, New Zealand

Categories: Brontë Parsonage Museum, Humour, Jane Eyre, Music, Opera, References, Theatre, Wuthering Heights