The Ultimate Love Story

The Hindu visits Haworth, the Parsonage and the Brontë country:

It is a bizarre feeling. I am standing in front of the oak cupboard painted with apostles that Charlotte Bronte described in Jane Eyre. I actually am, and a visit to Haworth in Yorkshire, where Emily, Charlotte, Anne and their brother Branwell lived with their father the reverend Patrick Bronte, is filled with such goose bump moments for Bronte fans.
The lines blur between fact and fiction as one recognises this and so many other things one had read of in their novels. A walk up the moors (an absolute must), and, I feel I have wandered into the pages of one of their novels. I wouldn’t be half surprised if Heathcliff came galloping down the windswept landscape, or Rochester.
Till they appear, it is only some sheep and birds for company. Our destination is a skeletal tree and a pile of stones, barely visible in the mist. That is Top Withens, where lie the ruins of a farmhouse, in a setting so truly bleak, desolate and savage that you know this must be Wuthering Heights. Flip to the opening pages of Wuthering Heights — (“Wuthering Heights is the name of Mr. Heathcliff’s dwelling. ‘Wuthering’ being a significant provincial adjective, descriptive of the atmospheric tumult to which its station is exposed in stormy weather. Pure, bracing ventilation they must have up there at all times, indeed; one may guess the power of the north wind blowing over the edge, by the excessive slant of a few stunted firs at the end of the house; and by a range of gaunt thorns all stretching their limbs one way, as if craving alms of the sun.”) — and you know you are standing right where Emily must have got her inspiration.
The Brontes are everywhere. Especially so on the beautiful moors. Ann (sic), Emily and Charlotte regularly walked here. A chair-shaped rock, right by the beck (a small stream) is where the sisters rested and caught up with their muse. Of course, it is now called Bronte’s chair, and there is a Bronte waterfall and a Bronte bridge, too.
Fact and fiction
We are staying in a B&B called Aitches. It was built in the 1840s and one can’t help but think, surely, the sisters strolled past this way, and, who knows, were on nodding terms with those who lived here! A visit to a pub, and we learn that it is the very same one that Branwell frequented. It is a typical English village of cobbled streets, tea rooms, huddled-together-cottages, a cemetery and of course streets named after Haworth’s famous occupants who lived just around the corner in a Georgian stone house. They moved in, in 1820. And, thanks to the Bronte Society, the parsonage remains pretty much the way it must have been in their time.
Mr. Bronte’s book of Psalms with a magnifying glass beside it still lies on his desk by the fireplace. Most of the furniture we see at the parsonage was actually used by the Brontes. So, goose bump moments once more as I gaze at the sofa on which Emily breathed her last, or the piano which she played, or the rough kitchen table where she made bread. On the way upstairs is the clock that Mr. Bronte wound nightly before going to bed. The gowns Emily, Ann and Charlotte wore, the books they read, their needlework and locks of hair from Emily and Charlotte are some of the precious displays in the exhibition room. The stories the three sisters and their brother made up, of adventures in Gondal Land and Angria are there. Imagine being face to face with the handwriting of the Brontes.
We rest a while at the Bronte pew in the nearby church and pay our respects to Emily and Charlotte who are buried here. Ann was buried elsewhere. And, as a mark of respect to her, I buy Tenant of Wildfell Hall at the charming gift shop attached to the parsonage that sells Bronte memorabilia. (Pankaja Srinivasan)

The Independent celebrates George Orwell's 1984 sixty anniversary and asks several writers about their favourite novel. Joanne Harris chooses Wuthering Heights:

I studied 1984 at school, and revisited it a couple of years ago. When I read it recently I was much more struck by the doomed relationship between Winston and Julia. They have no means of having a relationship, and nothing in common except the circumstances that have brought them together. It's a milestone book, but I'm not sure that it influenced me. Wuthering Heights was a book I really loved. I was obsessed by it at 15 or 16. I reread it recently and it stood up so well. There were things I picked up on that I hadn't seen before. At 16, I saw the love story between Cathy and Heathcliff, but the bigger love story is with the environment. Her descriptions of the Yorkshire moors are the ultimate love story. (Andrew Johnson)

Another Brontëite is the author China Miéville who is interviewed on Powell's Books website:

Doug: What are some of your favorite books, some of the books you have read more than once?
Miéville: The Borrible Trilogy by Michael De Larrabeiti, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, Black Sunlight by Dambudzo Marechera, The Course of the Heart by M. John Harrison, At the Mountains of Madness by Lovecraft, Joan Aiken's The Wolves of Willoughby Chase and Nightbirds on Nantucket. Those jump to my mind. There are plenty of others. Philip K. Dick, particularly Martian Time-Slip — and A Maze of Death, actually, which I don't think is one of his best, but for various reasons is the one that really sticks in my head. The short stories as well. The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers. You want more? I got more. [Laughter]

Another (bad) review of Carlos Ruiz Zafón's The Angel's Game is published today in The Telegraph, including Jane Eyre mentions:

Perhaps comedy is what is lost in translation (which, in this case, reads very well). Pseudo-profound statements clog many conversations – 'Emotional truth is not a moral quality, it’s a technique’ – and the endless literary references – 'Don’t pull a Jane Eyre on me, Señor Sempere’ – become irritating. It’s as if Zafón is trying to be Dan Brown for those who have read something other than tabloids. (Mark Sanderson)

The Richmond Times-Dispatch reviews The Pig Comes to Dinner by Donald Caldwell:

As this installment begins, novelist Kitty McCloud has married longtime familial enemy Kieran Sweeney and has bought Castle Kissane with the profits from her reworkings of classic novels. (In her version of "Jane Eyre," for example, it's Rochester, not his crazy wife, who hurls himself from the roof; the crazy wife then befriends Jane). (Jay Strafford)

Circolo della Lettura (in Italian) and Amy Letinksy post a brief comment on Jane Eyre, bookstep posts about several Wuthering Heights adaptations which she has recently seen, Tii lukee reviews Wuthering Heights in Finnish and Swedish. Finally, on YouTube, Jane Learmonth reads He saw my heart's woe by Charlotte Brontë.

Categories: Brontëites, Haworth, Jane Eyre, Poetry, References, Wuthering Heights