A freakish literary talent

The Telegraph runs a story on Anne Brontë's grave and the nearby car park.

David Selby, a member of English Heritage, has begun a Facebook campaign to restore the site. “I don’t think gravestones should be used as parking markers,” he said.
“St Mary’s has seen fit to change this land into a car park for the public, with cars being allowed to park between the gravestones.
“Whilst I appreciate that churches need to diversify, I am dismayed that the church would use consecrated ground for this facility and am even more astounded that the council allowed planning permission for this to go ahead.”
Reverend Martin Dunning, of St Mary’s, said that allowing cars to park in the churchyard was a necessity in an area with scant parking facilities.
“The car park is for people coming to church services and for visitors and has been used that way for many years. People value it enormously and we would struggle hugely without it,” he told the Scarborough Evening News.
The Brontë Society has invited debate on the subject. Writing on the organisation’s website, Richard Wilcocks (sic) said: “Car parking in church grounds and on reclaimed churchyards will always be controversial, and I would not wish to comment on the rights and wrongs of the church allowing their land to be used in this way, but would certainly respect that personal opinions will be varied.” (Anita Singh)

The Brontë Parsonage Blog does indeed share IMS's views on the matter.

More on Brontë locations. The Yorkshire Post prints a letter from a reader on the subject of Haworth's nomation for World Heritage Site.

How Haworth can move up in the world
From: John Collinson, Oldfield Lane, Oldfield, Keighley.
I REFER to the various articles about Haworth including bidding for world heritage site status (Yorkshire Post, July 8). Investment in Haworth is crucial for its future and I was very pleased with the recent announcement by Bradford Council that it will be investing £600,000 for the repair of the stone setts in Haworth.
I wish to highlight two other areas in the Haworth conservation area that desperately require investment, to bring them up to an appropriate standard.
The Old School Room, Church Street. This building was originally constructed by Patrick Brontë in 1832 as the National Church Sunday School, and is of great historical importance to Haworth. The building, while being wind and watertight, requires major restoration and conservation works totalling £1m. This would create a building for public access that provides a stage and auditorium for shows and lectures, an area for exhibitions, meeting rooms for local groups and societies, an archive room, a Victorian school room together with associated facilities.
The provision of a wheelchair ramp from the Bradford Council car park to Church Street.This is desperately required, as I regularly speak to visitors who are dismayed at the lack of this provision which means that instead of travelling a few yards to Church Street they have to take a 300-yard detour. The estimated cost of this work is £30,000.
Surely these works are essential for the bid for world heritage status to be successful?
Taking the above two items into account, along with all the other issues, it is of no surprise that Haworth now finds itself on the English Heritage "at risk" register.

The Washington Post has opted for a Brontë digest and Romancing Miss Brontë, Charlotte and Emily (aka The Taste of Sorrow), and Jane Slayre are all reviewed together.

From the moment the last of the preposterously gifted and cursed Brontë sisters was laid in the ground in 1855, others have been intent upon rewriting their lives. It's not hard to see why. First, there's the freakish literary talent of Charlotte, Emily and Anne, the daughters of a curate in a remote parish in Yorkshire, England, who spent their childhoods spinning elaborate tales set in make-believe kingdoms and then focused their imaginations on the corporeal world.
Then there are the family tragedies that beggar belief. Two older sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, died from illnesses contracted at a cut-rate boarding school where all the sisters were sent after their mother breathed her last. The only boy in the family, Branwell, a charming but dissolute fellow, died at age 31 from what appears to have been chronic bronchitis, complicated by alcoholism and an acute case of self-pity. Within a few months, Charlotte's two younger sisters were dead, too, Emily of consumption at age 30, and Anne after developing the same racking cough. Charlotte lived on alone for several years, caring for her aging father, until she finally found love, or something like it, with her father's curate. They married, she got pregnant and less than a year after her wedding day, she and her unborn child were dead.
At once, the writer Elizabeth Gaskell took up her pen and wrote a biography of her friend Charlotte, the first of many books about the lives and work of the Brontës. Three of the latest are novels that demonstrate the remarkable variety of approaches to re-imagining this family.
1 Juliet Gael, a Midwesterner who has spent many years abroad, has written a dutiful tale that centers on Charlotte and culminates in her courtship and marriage. It's written with the species of careful love that produces long analyses of the heroine's books, including lesser-known titles, such as Charlotte's final complete novel, "Villette." But Romancing Miss Brontë (Ballantine, $25) is more dreary than inspiring, in part because it picks up the tale too late, after the Brontës are grown, when the imaginative games that sparked their fiction had largely ended and their adult troubles began.
2 Jude Morgan wisely begins Charlotte and Emily (St. Martin's; paperback, $14.99) with the death of their mother, and he artfully evokes the wonder that animated the lives of the young Brontës even in a world pocked with grief. Adulthood forced them to take work as teachers and governesses, though they always returned home. "Here they were around the table again, we three; and again that peculiar rightness in it," he writes, describing one of the interludes when the young women were together, having left or been fired from their genteel gigs. The tension and affection between Charlotte, who is eager to please and hungry for a little literary fame, and Emily, who refuses to play by the world's rules, are wrought with particular sensitivity. Morgan, the author of several historical novels, is a fine writer in his own right, and "Charlotte and Emily," foregone as its sad conclusion is, often surprises and delights.
3 The publication last year of Seth Grahame-Smith's "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" changed the literary scene in a small, weird way: Now the ultimate confirmation of a dead author's place in popular culture is granted by a zombie, a sea serpent or some other supernatural being. And Charlotte Brontë gets her due with Jane Slayre (Gallery; paperback, $15), a mash-up of "Jane Eyre" and the bloodthirsty imagination of Sherri Browning Erwin. In this version, the mousy governess is a vampire slayer, the dreadful charity school she attends as an orphan is populated by zombies, and Mr. Rochester's crazy wife in the attic is a werewolf. It's a clever conceit, with more than a few humorous moments, but ultimately the vampires suck the narrative dry of the blood that animated the original novel. Devotees of "Jane Eyre" thrill to the rich interior life of its heroine, whose thoughts and dreams buffer her against her straitened circumstances. Jane Slayre, on the other hand, is a woman of action, with a tongue as sharp as her wooden stake, chained to the story line of a meeker maid. What some hell-bent rewriter needs to do instead is get hold of "Wuthering Heights." The misanthropic Heathcliff: Now there's a monster to work with. (Sarah L. Courteau)

Yeah, Wuthering Bites is coming out at the end of August.

Daily Express on unrequited love:

There is definitely a darker side to unrequited love as evidenced in practically any Victorian novel worth its salt. It’s the stuff of authors such as Hardy, Austen and Brontë. (Pam Spurr)

And The Huffington Post on book clubs:

One of the great pleasures of being an author today is speaking with book clubs. This is something that Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë totally missed out on, and I, for one, feel sorry for them. There is nothing better than discussing your book with a room full of passionate readers. I learn something new about my own novel from every single one. (Melanie Benjamin)

Well, perhaps she did not attend something clearly labelled 'book club' but discuss her books with some of her readers she certainly did, both by letter and face to face.

On the blogosphere, Book Reviews by Jones features Jane Eyre; the 16th part of which novel is now available for download from Classic Literature Podcast. Libby Sternberg shares on Author Expressions a fragment from her forthcoming novel, Sloane Hall. And finally, Brady Bliss posts about Juliet Gael's Romancing Miss Brontë.

Categories: Anne Brontë, Books, Brontëana, Fiction, Haworth, Jane Eyre