The relevance of Charlotte Brontë today is untouched

We open today our newsround with an article in The Central Plains Herald-Leader. Its very existence is one of the reasons why this blog was born:

I should’ve been called Jane. Don’t get me wrong, Tara is a great name, and I’ve grown quite accustomed to it, but it is Jane that has influenced my life, and not just one Jane, but two, and because of that, Tuesday was an auspicious day for me — it was Charlotte Bronte’s birthday.
Charlotte was born in 1816 at Thornton, Bradford, Yorkshire in England. In 1847, she wrote a book that changed her life and the lives of many people after her: "Jane Eyre." This book, and the woman who wrote it, have made a huge impression on my life. (The other Jane who has influenced me, influenced Charlotte as well … Jane Austen, but that is a topic for another day). "Jane Eyre’s" influence over me is best described by someone else — a Victorian journalist named Margaret Oliphant, who put it better than I could: "Ten years ago we professed an orthodox system of novel-making. Our lovers were humble and devoted, when suddenly, without warning, ‘Jane Eyre’ stole upon the scene, and the most alarming revolution of modern times has followed the invasion of ‘Jane Eyre.’"
The story of "Jane Eyre" is the tale of a governess who goes to a horrific boarding school where she watches her best friend die, then she finds a job as a governess for a wealthy man, falls in love with him, is to marry him, discovers he is hiding his "crazy" first wife, Bertha, in the attic and leaves, once again having to find her own way in the world. I won’t divulge the rest of the story in order not to spoil it for those of you who haven’t had the luxury of diving into this book.
Charlotte’s book was no sentimental novel of manners; it was raw, gritty and real. Charlotte was angry when she wrote her famous novel. She was angry that as the unmarried daughter of a country clergyman with small means, the only options open to her were marriage, teaching or being a governess. Her story is considered by many to express unladylike female rage, born of all the oppression present in society, but it is more than that, too. For me, the story of "Jane Eyre" shows the boundlessness of the imagination and the ability to put pen to paper to effect change, something I strive to do every day in my job as a journalist. Charlotte made many people uncomfortable, which, I hope, I have, on occasion, done. She made them so uncomfortable that they liked to think she must have been a social outcast. They never would have pegged her for a respectable clergyman’s daughter entrenched in the society they were a part of. I think the best way to reflect on the way people think is to do so from within, as Charlotte did. If you are like them, you can see the foibles you all are prone to, you can see the prejudices and the redeeming qualities, and are then able to paint for those people, in stark detail, what they are a part of. Even if someone disagrees, at least they’ve stopped to think for a moment about their philosophies or actions.
The relevance of Charlotte today is untouched. Her social commentary is still reflective of our society. Despite all the musings posted every micro-second on the Internet and the images glaring at us every night from the television, the written word is still what has the power to last, to evoke change so deep that it is still at work centuries later.
Thank you, Charlotte, for being so angry you just had to write something down. (Tara Seel)

On Discover Magazine we read an interview to Twitter's co-founder Jack Dorsey. We are pleasantly surprised when we read:

Do you ever read anything longer than 140 characters?
I just finished Wuthering Heights, an amazing book. (Interview by Boonsri Dickinson)

The South Yorkshire Star publishes an article promoting the virtues of Hathersage and among other things, the article mentions:

Tourists are drawn by the village's literary connections – many of the locations in Charlotte Brontë's novel Jane Eyre match real places in Hathersage and the supposed grave of Robin Hood's sidekick Little John can be found in the graveyard of St Michael and All Angels' church. (Richard Blackledge)

And the wonders of Bradford are explored in The Guardian:

It also scores exceptionally well for Morris dancing troupes, tea rooms and even holiday camps, with a cluster of small centres for children and families in the district's outlying areas around the Bronte village of Haworth and Ilkley Moor. (Martin Wainwright)

and this other article:

They remind the world how much of the Bradford district is countryside, and grade A countryside at that: the landscape of the Brontes, the Railway Children and invigorating walks on Ilkley Moor. (Martin Wainwright)

BoxOfficeProphets talks about Martin Scorsese's new project, an adaptation of the novel Shutter Island (Denis Lehane):

Well then, Mr. or Ms. Film Aficionado, let me ask you this: if I told you that Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio were teaming up for their fourth collaboration, would you have ever guessed that it would be on a movie based on a book that combines Gothic settings and B-movie archetypes with a plot inspired by the works of the Brontë sisters and Invasion of the Body Snatchers? (Jason Lee)

The comparison was originally made by the author himself.

Of Books and Bicycles reviews The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Lost in Dream has written a poem inspired by Jane Eyre in Chinese, Brontës.nl announces the upcoming broadcast of Jane Eyre 2006 in the Netherlands next June (more details here) and miss_callahan has uploaded several icons of this production.

Categories: Brontëites, Haworth, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, References, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Wuthering Heights