Emily Dickinson as the ghost of Currer Bell

Joyce Carol Oates reviews The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson by Jerome Charyn in The New York Review of Books. Several references to the Brontës (and to Sheila Kohler's Becoming Jane Eyre) are made:

[N]o conventional biography of the Brontë sisters is likely to present their highly charged family drama—in which Charlotte emerges, as if by chance, as the triumphant survivor among her gifted siblings—more convincingly than Sheila Kohler's impressionistically rendered group portrait. (...)
In one of her guises as "the ghost of Currer Bell" (Charlotte Brontë), Dickinson is discovered by her older, disapproving brother Austin in a "dark dead-end of Rooming-house Row" on the wrong side of the college town of Amherst, Massachusetts[.] (...)
Nor does Dickinson's father evince much interest in her literary inclinations: "Pa-pa did talk Poetry, but only with his horse. The rest of the world was pure Prose." In a bitter-comic passage that recalls a similar experience of Charlotte Brontë when she'd given her self-centered minister-father a copy of Jane Eyre to read, along with a selection of very good reviews, Dickinson complains:

It tore at me that Father did not know one damn thing about my Treasure. A couple of years ago I gathered up the courage to leave one small booklet of Verses under his door. Lord, I wasn't looking for praise, but the privilege of having a tiny anthill of my own. Months later I found that booklet shoved back under my door like a misused missile. And never a sound from Pa-Pa, never a syllable.... It wouldn't even have pleasured Pa-pa had he known that half my songs were to him.

An article on The Quad about J.D. Salinger mentions Heathcliff:

At least villains like Heathcliff have some passion about them; I’ve always considered Holden to be apathetic, or at best, inactive in response to his discontent. (Stephen Maouyo)

The Spenborough Guardian talks about an International Women's Day event organised by Spen MP Mike Wood. One of the speakers is of interest to us:

Next to speak was Joan Bellamy, the former lecturer and Dean at the Open University and co-ordinator of the Mary Taylor Exhibition at the Red House Museum.
Mary Taylor was a good friend of Charlotte Brontë and was an extraordinary and uniquely independent woman of her era. She was well educated, highly intelligent and ambitious, writing articles and books arguing for women's rights.

The Telegraph talks about b&b and guest houses for sale. The Old Registry in Haworth is one of them:

For sale in West Yorkshire: The Old Registry in Haworth was built in 1902 as the village registry office. Now it's a 10-bedroom guesthouse, big on whimsy (the Cherub room, the Blue Heaven), four posters and the Bronte sisters. £725,000 through Preferred C. (Lesley Gilliam)

The Times has a brief article on Michael Berkeley who is now working on an opera based on the novel by Ian McEwan, Atonement.

Berkeley has an opera based on Jane Eyre under his belt. But Atonement, with its excursions into meta-fiction and leaps across several decades, is a more complex matter. (Richard Morrison)

More music, as The Plymouth Herald talks about the local girl popera group, Milan:

"The pop stuff is given a classical emphasis. We do things like Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights and Bohemian Rhapsody; it's quite a diverse set, but it hangs together really well."

The Scoop reviews the UK comedy duo Frisky and Mannish's show The School of Pop :

Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights gets a Lily Allen style east-end interpretation which also strangely seems to fit all too snugly with the lyric, "Heathcliffe, it’s me Cathy. I've come home." (Alastain Thompson)

EDIT: And The Dominion Post:

There were other great examples of this - Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights became Wuvvering Heights in the hands of Frisky, working as if a character from Little Britain or Harry Enfield's Television Programme. (Simon Sweetman)

In The Argosy a list of books to read after graduation that includes Wuthering Heights, the South Orange Patch remembers a Bontë-related event from March 1901 and the Chicago Post-Tribune interviews 103-year-old Edith Meyers who likes 'the classics, romantic things mostly, like 'Wuthering Heights.' '

Meanwhile on the blogosphere, Passionate Booklover writes about Juliet Gael's Romancing Miss Brontë (watch this space in April for BrontëBlog's review) and Les élucubrations de Fleur posts about The Professor in French. Finally, Flickr user lucy.loomis has uploaded a series of collages inspired by Jane Eyre as part of the Brontë-Along.

Categories: Books, Haworth, Jane Eyre, Music, Victorian Era, Wuthering Heights