Plain But Handsome of Spirit

More details about the recent auction of several Charlotte Brontë letters in New York. Forbes tells about the auction itself:

It is frequently debated why some important people are ubiquitous on the market and others have left us so little. To wit: Have you ever seen a letter of Charlotte Brontë? We've seen only five in more than 30 years, but Copley managed to put three in one collection. And they're rich. One from 1848 reads, "Thought and conscience are or ought to be free." This one sold for $68,500. Sadly, another Brontë letter was pulled from auction (the audience is typically not told why) and the third passed (that means it failed to meet the reserve set by the seller). This last one had an old dealer notation on it, giving away a previous purchase price of $17.50 in 1921. The current estimate was $30,000-$50,000. (Nathan Raab)

The Telegraph & Argus talks about the letter sold to the Brontë Society, although the figures differ a little:

A letter written by Charlotte Brontë as she grieved over the death of her brother Branwell and fretted about the health of her younger sister Emily is on its way back to Haworth.
The Brontë Parsonage Museum outbid other collectors to get the letter for $55,000 (£39,000) at an auction in New York.
It will join a treasure trove of artifacts acquired by the museum in Haworth over the past six months.
This latest item was written by the author of Jane Eyre, on October 18, 1848, shortly after Branwell died. It was sent to William Smith William, the reader at her publisher Smith Elder and Co.
Ann Dinsdale, the museum’s collections manager, said: “This was a very sad period of her life. Branwell had just died and Emily was showing symptoms of the TB which would kill her three months later.
“The letter doesn’t refer to these things, but it talks about her being ill. I think her deep unhappiness was manifested in this ill health.”
Mr William became a friend to Charlotte having spotted her potential as a writer when she sent her first novel The Professor to the publishing house. It was not accepted but he encouraged her to write Jane Eyre, which the company published.
Mrs Dinsdale said staff followed the auction online and were very excited when they realised the hammer had gone down on their bid.
Once the letter arrives back in Haworth, it will join the other recently bought artifacts including a poetry manuscript written by Charlotte as a 13-year-old and Emily’s artist’s box.

John Mullan has done it again. He never fails to slip a Brontë into one of his top ten book lists for The Guardian:

Best Good Doctors
Dr John Lucy Snowe, narrator of Charlotte Brontë's Villette, gets treated by the handsome English doctor to a girls' school in a renamed version of Brussels, after her collapse in the street. He is a childhood friend and Lucy entertains the idea of a romance. Except that, while a brilliant doctor, he falls for Ginevra, the school flirt.

Haaretz interviews writer and Brontëite Jamaica Kincaid:

"I came from a background where to be a writer was unheard of. But I always wanted to write. I loved Charlotte Brontë when I was little, and I wanted to be Charlotte Brontë the way people want to be a princess. I had no idea what it meant, that it would be something to be responsible for, something that would have a meaning." (...)
Kincaid says her relationship to the English language is likewise complicated, since it was the language of the British colonizer in Antigua until 1981, when the island won independence.
"My relationship to it is not an easy one, but it's what I got. What I got was English. My consciousness is influenced by Shakespeare, Milton, the Brontës - you name it. (Maya Sela)

Variety mentions Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights project though nothing new about its current status is said:

Ecosse is also working on Andrea Arnold's adaptation of Emily Brontë's tome "Wuthering Heights," scheduled to shoot in Yorkshire with "Skins" star Kaya Scodelario. (Diane Lodderhose)

Sue Arnold reviews in the Guardian the audioobok of American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld, read by Katherine Kellgren with a curious Jane Eyre reference:

As for the reader, Katherine Kellgren, imagine Jackie Collins reading Jane Eyre and you're close.

KHON2 discusses how Hawaii will be one of ten states to support a nationwide effort to use Common Core State Standards in schools. One of the conditions is

By senior year in high school, students need to complete more complex math equations with "Jane Eyre" and "The Great Gatsby" as required reading. (Brianne Randle)

EDIT:
Here it can me found the document of the CCSS (for Student Rading 6-12) is recommended Jane Eyre. The same novel is also used as example of Grades 11–CCR Reading Text.

The Daily Beast has a curious description of Tilda Swinton:

Perhaps to Swinton, whose life is somewhere between an Emily Brontë novel and an Andrei Tarkovsky film (she devoured the latter’s work as a student at Cambridge), but to most of the rest of us, Swinton’s domestic arrangement is anything but ordinary. (Nicole LaPorte)

Hermione Eyre describes in the London Evening Standard the current building of the British Library with a very approppriate metaphor, considering that the manuscript of Jane Eyre is on display there:

I don't pretend it's beautiful. From outside, it looks like an out-of-town Tesco, or the red sand castle that Noddy built. It sounds one flat note while next door, Gothic St Pancras plays a whole symphony. It was the life's work of Sir Colin St John Alexander Wilson (known as Sandy') and when it opened in 1997, infamously ten years late and £184 million overspent, Prince Charles described it as looking like an academy for secret police'. But in my view it is more of a Charlotte Brontë heroine – plain but handsome of spirit.

Aceprensa (Spain) reviews Stella Gibbon's Cold Comfort Farm in Spanish:

Es una atinada mezcla de todo: crítica al pesimismo de Hardy, homenaje a Jane Austen y las hermanas Brontë, sátira de Walpole, remake de La Cenicienta… (Rafael Gómez Pérez) (Google translation)

The writer Susanna Tamaro publishes in Il Corriere della Sera (Italy) a controversial article with a Brontë mention:

Nella letteratura - che in questo si dimostra specchio della società - non va certo meglio. Non c’è romanzo che non contenga tediosissime pagine di descrizione di rapporti, di umori corporei, di dettagli anatomici, inframmezzati magari da penose osservazioni messe lì per cercare di far lievitare la pornografia in arte. Anna Karenina, Catherine Earnshaw, Jane Eyre, Giulietta, dove siete? (Google translation)

Yozone reviews the French comic Aspic, Détectives de l’étrange (T1) La Naine aux ectoplasmes by T. Gloris & J. Lamontagne:

On retrouve d’ailleurs de nombreuses allusions à la littérature préférée de Gloris, comme, par exemple, celle du Javert de Zola ou celle d’Emily Brontë, l’auteur du roman “Les Hauts de Hurlevent”. (Julien L.) (Google translation)

The New Yorker talks about one of the current hot topics in Twitter: books that changed my world:

Yesterday on Twitter, Susan Orlean created the hashtag #booksthatchangedmyworld as a way to catalog some of her all-time favorite reads, only to see it become a trending topic. (...)
As a child: “Jane Eyre” (Ian Crouch)

You can check people choosing Wuthering Heights here, or Jane Eyre, Villette or Wide Sargasso Sea

BSC describes the cast of Jane Eyre 2011 as 'a damn nice cast', summer readings including Brontës in the Grand Rapids Public Library Examiner, Jane Eyre appears in the Know It All of the San Mateo County Daily Journal, a retired librarian and Brontëite in the Westborough News, I am OK reviews Jane Eyre and Adventure. Laura Travel's Blog visits Haworth.

Categories:Brontëites, Brontëana, Haworth, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, References, Wuthering Heights