Walking with Jane Eyre

The Sunday Times has an article today about the best English walks for book lovers. Including one directly related to Jane Eyre:

JANE EYRE
Hathersage, Derbyshire
“I heard a bell chime — a church bell . . . A glittering stream ran zig-zag through the varied shades of green.”
Here’s a surprise. You won’t find Jane Eyre wandering the wuthering wilds of Haworth Moor with Heathcliff and Cathy. Instead, the hunt for her begins 50 miles south, among the gritstone tors of the Peak District.
Charlotte Brontë dreamt up Jane while holidaying at Hathersage vicarage in 1845. Nearby North Lees Hall was her model for Thornfield, home of the enigmatic Mr Rochester; while Hathersage itself became Morton, Jane’s hamlet “set among romantic hills”.
The walk we’re re-creating comes at a turning point in the story, when our heroine, wedding plans scuttled by the madwoman in the attic, flees Thornfield at dawn and finds herself adrift in the wilderness at Whitcross, in “a north-midland shire, dusk with moorland, ridged with mountain”.
Whitcross was really Moscar Cross, five miles north of Hathersage — bypassed by today’s A57, the road is now a lonesome farm track. The hike south from here to Hathersage is lovely, along a path skirting the foot of bleakly beautiful Stanage Edge. It’s easy to imagine poor Jane making her rough bed here, under a “moss-blackened granite crag”.
Follow the path away from the Edge towards the church spire: curiously, the route now passes North Lees Hall — which Jane had only just escaped in the novel. Approaching Hathersage church, take a path up through woods to Moorseats, fictionalised as Moor House, to which Jane struggled in the darkness — and where she found sanctuary at last.
The details: Jane’s walk begins at grid reference SK224885; you’ll need OS Explorer map OL1. The classy Cavendish Hotel (01246 582311, cavendish-hotel.net ) at nearby Chatsworth has doubles from £155, room-only. (Vincent Crump)

The Yorkshire Post interviews the so-called Priestess of Rhubarb (yes, you read that right) Janet Oldroyd Hulme:

Name your favourite Yorkshire book/author/artist/CD/performer.
Wuthering Heights. I love the imaginative Brontë sisters and their bizarrely off-centre brother. So much creativity from a little family living in a remote village in Yorkshire. The film, in black and white, with Olivier, is still a huge weepie for me, a sentimental favourite. I read the book over and over.

The Charlotte Gazette talks about the upcoming fictional account of Emily's life by Denise Giardina, Emily's Ghost:

Giardina has a new one Charleston author Denise Giardina will soon have a new book out. "Emilys Ghost: A Novel of the Bronte Sisters," published by W.W. Norton & Co., is due out in July. According to a news release from the publishers:
Enigmatic, intelligent, and fiercely independent, Emily Brontë refuses to bow to the conventions of her day: she is distrustful of marriage, prefers freedom above all else, and walks alone at night on the moors above the isolated rural village of Haworth. But Emily’s life, along with the rest of the Brontë family, is turned upside down with the arrival of an idealistic clergyman named William Weightman. Weightman champions poor mill workers’ rights, mingles with radical labor agitators, and captivates Haworth—and the Brontës especially—with his energy and charm. An improbable friendship between Weightman and Emily develops into a fiery but unconsummated love affair—and when tragedy strikes, the relationship continues, like the love story at the heart of Wuthering Heights, beyond the grave.

Denise Giardina, whose fiction has been described as “brilliant . . . heart-wrenching, tough and tender” (Los Angeles Times Book Review), writes a stirring story about faith, passion, longing, and romantic solitude.

The Baltimore Sun discusses how the web 2.0 can change the book world and slips this question (with an obvious answer in our opinion):

Could Lord of the Flies, Jane Eyre or the Harry Potter books be written by committee? Does the "wisdom of the crowd" extend to the creative process? (Dave Rosenthal)

On the blogosphere, The Pink Chandelier is re-reading Wuthering Heights although probably not in the 1943 edition that is being pictured on Roaring Design, I Read That Book recommends Jane Eyre and Break Free of the Box is trying hard, but not very succesfully, in reading Villette.

Categories: Books, Brontëites, Fiction, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights