A guide and a walk

Keighley News reports the release of a new tourist guide produced by Pennine Yorkshire. It can be downloaded from their website:

The life and times of the Brontës has inspired a new guide which takes fans on a tour of the region that influenced their lives and novels.
It reveals how their lives unfolded not just in Haworth but across the region.
The new 28-page guide, produced by Pennine Yorkshire, brings together for the first time the places and buildings where Charlotte, Emily and Anne spent time and found inspiration.
Visitors following the Brontës in Pennine Yorkshire Experience can visit well known destinations in Haworth — from the Parsonage Museum to the Black Bull pub, brother Branwell’s watering hole.
Then it’s across Bradford and Kirklees to their parents’ home in Thornton, their birthplace and the churches where their father worked.
The guide also encompasses some of the many grand houses that the Brontës spent time in These include Oakwell Hall, at Birstall, which inspired Charlotte’s description of Fieldhead in Shirley; Red House, the home of Charlotte’s lifelong friend Mary Taylor, and Ponden Hall, at Stanbury, generally thought to be the house Emily Brontë called Thrushcross Grange, home of the Linton family in Wuthering Heights.
The Brontës in Pennine Yorkshire Experience brochure can be obtained by visiting pennineyorkshire.com or hard copies are available from all tourist information centres throughout the region.

The Times lists twenty possible winter walks including the Jane Eyre walk:

Stanage Edge, Derbyshire
The Jane Eyre walk

How difficult is it? There are testing climbs
Do we take the kids? For lively over 6s
A path leads south through the trees to North Lees Hall, a grimly beautiful Tudor house. In Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë used the battlemented stone tower of the hall as the setting for one of the most dramatic scenes in literature, as poor mad Mrs Rochester, having set the house ablaze, leaps from the roof to her death. Return to cross the road and continue up the ancient packhorse road to the summit of Stanage Edge.
This rocky rim, all that’s left of a gigantic dome of millstone grit, is a climber’s and boulderer’s heaven, and a superb jumping-off point for hang-gliders. Children will love the drama of the spread-eagled figures on the cliffs and in mid-air. You can walk the Edge for a couple of miles in either direction, a high and mighty path that gives the feeling of mountaineering without any of the sweat and effort. (Christopher Somerville)

The Telegraph announces the upcoming broadcast of the two-part Cranford Christmas special and quotes Judi Dench as saying:

Dench, who was thrilled to reprise her role of Miss Matty Jenkyns, points to the appeal of Elizabeth Gaskell’s original novel. “This is an English classic that’s not been read much. People don’t know the ending. It’s not like watching Jane Austen or Emily Bronte. I was made to read it at school and didn’t care for it much. But it has been fantastically adapted.” (As well as Gaskell’s writings, screenwriter Heidi Thomas immersed herself in old newspapers, Victorian housekeeping manuals and even the King James bible to recreate the authentic cadences of Victorian dialogue.) (Ajesh Patalay)

The Yorkshire Post interviews The Right Rev John Packer:

Name your favourite Yorkshire book/author/artist/CD/performer.
There's everything from the Brontës to Barry Hines and Kes, isn't there? But I'm going to name two people who have associations with our present home, Hollin House.

Peter Stothard visits the Clay Printers' presses in Bungay, Suffolk where

On the Spartacus Road was proud to share the conveyor belts of Compac1 (I hope I have its name right) with the latest Adrian Mole, The Prostrate Years, and the latest reprint of Wuthering Heights. (Times Literary Supplement)

and also the TLS (just for subscribers) includes an article by Martin Wainwright where he asks to

[j]ust open your eyes - to the glowing limestone village churches, to Haworth, which is not as bleak as the Brontë industry would have you believe, to the Lake District - to see what you miss when you accentuate the grimness.

The Express Buzz (India) imagines the Brontës in jeans (!):

MAGINE this — Victorian women, the likes of Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Mary Ann Evans, clad in denim jeans. (Diana Ningthoujam)

A Quebec blogger has followed in the steps of several women writers who used men pseudonyms. On CBC News:

Chartrand, who plans to continue working under that name, has made no apologies, saying she has followed a well-carved path of women who have commanded more respect by writing under a male nom-de-plume.
Think George Eliot, George Sand, Isak Dinesen and the Brontë sisters.

The San Francisco Books Examiner contributes today to the Twilight zone:

Meyer, having exhausted the Romeo and Juliet motif in the first two books, now [in Eclipse] brings Wuthering Heights into the arena, giving Bella and Edward a new reference for their overwrought love: so the meaning of tragedy has morphed from two teenagers who kill themselves in the belief that the other is dead, to two teenagers who believe the entire world is as good as dead if the other dies. (LJ Moore)

With the company of Il Messaggero (Italy) talking about the philosophy of Twilight:

Questo, per una che prende spunto dall’amore tra Catherine e Heathcliff in Cime tempestose, è un biglietto da visita perfetto. (Paola Polidoro) (Google translation)

Expresso (Portugal) reviews a recent Portuguese translation of Wuthering Heights:

Numa soturna charneca inglesa, um casal vive uma paixão que faz o furacão Katrina parecer uma lufada de ar fresco.
Na minha modesta opinião de sumidade, "O Monte dos Vendavais" é um dos melhores romances de sempre. Harold Bloom concorda comigo. Não, por acaso não calhou ele subscrever-me de viva voz - mas está lá no seu livro "Genius", onde Emily Brontë divide um capítulo com Nathaniel Hawthorne. Aliás, a definição de Bloom sobre o génio daquele aplica-se como uma luva à essência desta autora: "Obedece à moralidade da narrativa e não da História, da sociedade ou da natureza." Bingo. Eis um fenómeno cultural. Nas primeiras décadas do século XIX, um reverendo inglês teve seis filhos, cinco dos quais mulheres. Eram todos mais ou menos literariamente geniais. Dois morreram demasiado cedo - os outros todos morreram cedo, de tuberculose, como então era a última (literalmente) moda. Diz-se que o mais dotado era o rapaz, Bramwell, que nunca chegou a publicar uma linha (conheço alguns génios assim). Quer Charlotte quer Anne Brontë escreveram livros que continuam admiráveis. Mas Emily é outra loiça. Autora de poemas brilhantes, este foi o seu único romance. Trata-se mais da quintessência romanesca do que do gótico, com a paixão tempestuosa entre Heathcliff e Catherine, num cenário lúgubre onde as pulsões são reprimidas mas fervilham como lava. As relações parentais e amorosas são mais emaranhadas do que numa telenovela venezuelana - porém, aqui, uma árvore genealógica vale por uma floresta amazónica (e é impossível confundir a árvore com a floresta). Há quem invoque o byronianismo do herói - mas se em Heathcliff palpita o egotismo, Catherine é demasiado indómita para o papel de vítima. Como notou Bloom, ambos não são as "pessoas verdadeiras" do romance realista, mas arquétipos psicológicos como a libido, a anima e a sombra junguiana. O génio supremo da autora está em conferir mais vida e individualidade àquelas figuras idealizadas do que a maior parte de nós pode apregoar nas nossas existências de carne e osso. (Paulo Nogueira) (Google translation)

Solidaridad Digital (Spain) interviews Jesús Marchamalo one of the authors of 44 escritores de la literatura universal:

De las hermanas Brönte (sic), ¿con cuál se queda?
Con la pequeña, siempre. Las Brönte (sic, again), ¡qué gente más interesante! Hemos leído sus obras, pero no sabíamos de esa vida suya, de ese piropo que recibieron (“si hubieran sido hombres hubieran sido grandes navegantes”). De todos modos, para la selección de escritores soy poco monógamo. (Esther Peñas) (Google translation)

Which is a bit puzzling. Who's the little one? Anne? Because the navigator anecdote was Heger's description of just Emily.

Terra (Italy) reviews the latest book by Isabel Allende (La isla bajo el mar) and mentions Wide Sargasso Sea:

Per non dire che questa operazione di “revisionismo”, verrebbe da dire filo sessantottina per il modo in cui è stata attuata, è già stata messo in pratica in altre opere, tra le quali, ad esempio, Wide sargasso sea, in cui l’autrice, Jean Rhys, riscatta Bertha Mason, la creola pazza rinchiusa in soffitta dal marito Rochester in Jane Eyre, mettendola al centro del proprio romanzo, dandole parola e libertà d’azione. Ma Rhys l’ha fatto molto meglio, e forse ai suoi tempi aveva anche un senso. (M. Flaminia Attanasio) (Google translation)

The Pittsburgh Morning Sun (Kansas) recommends the Studio One Box Set including Wuthering Heights 1950, the North Adams Transcript mentions the Brontës as example of the words versus the visuals, Châtelaine (France) asks the writer Marie Laberge about her favourite authors and she chooses Emily Brontë among others, Il Friuli and Corriere del Veneto (Italy) recommends an Italian audiobook version of Wuthering Heights, dé Week-Krant (1, 2) (Netherlands) announces performances of the Dutch tour of De Brontë Sisters by the Toneelgroep Dorst and Recensieweb (Netherlands) reviews De Kleine Odessa by Peter Van Olmen.

Categories: Audio-Radio, Books, Brontëites, Haworth, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, References, Theatre, Wide Sargasso Sea, Wuthering Heights