Rhubarb à la Brontë

Katy Guest selects reasons why the North is as good as (or better than) the South (of Britain, of course) in The Independent. Among them:

Regional dialects, rhubarb, liquorice, Cheshire potatoes and the Brontës.

In the North, the Dewsbury Reporter reports that the Dewsbury Museum has reopened and has an exhibition named Brontë 200:

THE finishing touches are being made to Dewsbury Museum as its £700,000 refurbishment nears completion. The museum in Crow Nest Park reopens tomorrow (Monday)when visitors will get a first look at its new exhibitions. (...) Touring exhibitions also on show include Brontë 200, a celebration of Dewsbury's links to the literary family, and Transforming Thornhill Lees, which charts the area's industrial history. (Georgina Morris)

We have known for a while but now there's official confirmation that Gyles Brandreth is no longer president of the Brontë Society. On the Brontë Parsonage Blog:

The Society's recently-departed President, Gyles Brandreth, is soon going to appear in Edinburgh as a stand-up comedian. Let's hope it's a big success! Find it in the Pleasance Courtyard 4 - 30 August. His group is Bound and Gagged Comedy. (Richard Wilcocks)

Maybe some reader can help us trace the mysterious Charlotte Brontë quote alluded to by this journalist of the Trinidad Express criticising its mention by the Minister of the People and Social Development, Dr Glenn Ramadharsingh, of Trinidad and Tobago:

He massacred an irrelevant quotation from Charlotte Brontë (the "blendness" and "spurrence" of youth?). (Judy Raymond)

The Telegraph reviews What to Look For in Winter: A Memoir in Blindness by Candia McWilliam. There is a funny Brontë reference:

This is what makes so many of the walk-on characters in her memoirs – a cousin who incarnates the disciplines of Old Edinburgh, the only femme fatale to be elected FRS, the gentle peer who became a chocolatier and had three dachshunds named after the Brontë sisters, a nose-studded cleaning lady who is a lesbian Mary Poppins – all seem creatures of rare value. (Richard Davenport-Hines)

The Brattleboro Reformer reviews Sheila Kohler's Becoming Jane Eyre:

(...) Her story imagines Charlotte Brontë’s life and its influences as she wrote "Jane Eyre." Her premise is that the classic tale of the governess, the madwoman in the attic and the master, Rochester, was far more autobiographical than we knew. She makes her case admirably as we follow Charlotte’s struggle to write, and to be recognized as a literary force. (...) (Read more) This is a work of historical fiction in which we gain insight into a woman’s life and its influence on her work. It tells us much about the times in which she lived, and a great deal about her and the physical and emotional environment that shaped her. It is the story of a woman who worries that "my life is passing me by," a woman who desperately wanted that life to matter, a woman who never would have guessed that her work endures and is loved by millions. Read it, and then read "Jane Eyre" again. Its gifts will reveal themselves to you with new insight and pleasure, and for that we have both Charlotte Brontë and Sheila Kohler to thank. (Elayne Clift)

The Winston-Salem Journal is not very happy about the Wuthering Heights audiobook read by Michael Kitchen and edited by BBC Audiobooks:

Many of us have loved Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, (BBC Audiobooks, 10 CDs) with that iconic romantic pair, Cathy and Heathcliff, whose love survives even death itself. Yet somehow this multi-generational, intricately woven story of love and hate, of cousins furiously intertwined with each others' lives, degenerates via actor Michael Kitchen's reading into character studies of nasty, vindictive, petulant, morose and thoroughly unlikable people. Kitchen cannot deliver a single one of Brontë's sentences without practically spitting it out, even while speaking as the motherly housekeeper Nelly, and the most inert prose becomes whiny and truculent sounding, especially in the unforgiving Yorkshire accent Kitchen accurately duplicates. These are not the dulcet tones of Laurence Olivier's fervid Heathcliff, or the pseudo-Hollywood British plummy voice of Merle Oberon's Cathy in the classic 1939 film version by William Wyler (there have been at least five other film and TV adaptations). In this audio version, we are left wondering why anyone loved anyone, or even the book itself. This is a sobering example of how an unfortunate choice of reader can absolutely sabotage a classic novel. (Dale Pollock)

We have also an alert from Brattleboro, Vermont, for this month:

BOOK DISCUSSION: The Brattleboro Great Books Discussion Group will be discussing for August will be Charlotte Brontë's "Jane Eyre". For further information, call Michael N. Landis at 802-257-1851 or emagicmtman@gmail.com

Great Books for Horse Lovers explores the Gytrash reference in Jane Eyre; winterlilies posts icons of Jane Eyre 2006; Manglish, please! reviews Wuthering Heights; a book that Adriana, from ~*Loves to Read*~, chooses in the Show and Tell organised by Random Ramblings. Categories: Alert, Art-Exhibitions, Audio-Radio, Brontë Society, Fiction, Jane Eyre, References, Wuthering Heights