Too Good to be True

Sarah Freeman author of the upcoming/already published book Brontë in Love writes about Charlotte Brontë in the Sunday Express (which illustrates the text with a 'portrait' of Charlotte Brontë that we have not traced yet... can any reader enlighten us? (see below)):

SOME stories are just too good to be true. Take Charlotte, the plain, stoic cleric’s daughter, who wrote one of British literature’s greatest love stories before her own heart had even been touched by the tiniest of flutters.
The myth of the quiet genius came from Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte’s friend and fellow novelist, who wrote the first biography of the author shortly after her death.
It was a book written with the very best of intentions but one which had no interest in salacious detail. Charlotte was an extraordinary literary talent and a woman whose vivid imagination and sheer determination allowed her to defy Victorian convention.
However, she was also arguably a wild fantasist who lived a dangerous double life, obsessively intent on destroying the marriage of the man she fell in lust with and a hopeless romantic who was taken to the very edge of a nervous breakdown.
Those seeds of destruction were sown during her childhood in Haworth parsonage. Charlotte desperately wanted to believe that brains were more important than beauty yet whenever she looked in the mirror she couldn’t help but feel disappointed. (...) (Read More)

EDIT: Our thanks to the knowledgeable Susan of TheBrontës.net, who was able to solve the mystery as much as possible. The image which accompanies the article above is not of Charlotte but, according to William Scruton and his book Thornton and the Brontës (1898), it is a portrait of Emily and confirmed by Martha Brown. The matter of the picture is, of course, much more intriguing now. Here's the quote from the book:

»Miss Nannie Preston, of Littlebeck Hall, near Bingley, has already gained so high a reputation for her artistic excellence that any praise from me seems quite superfluous. ...
The portrait of Emily Brontë (see frontispiece) was carefully and accurately copied by Miss Preston from a picture which came to me from Haworth with good credentials as to authenticity. The original was submitted to the inspection of Martha Brown, the Brontë housekeeper, and admitted by her to be a tolerably faithful portrait. The picture formerly belonged to a member of the Brown family, of Haworth, who always regarded it as a good likeness. On the strength of this evidence, and notwithstanding Mr. Shorter's opinion that the quest for an authentic portrait of Emily Bronte now seems hopeless, I have felt justified in giving the portrait a prominent place in my book.
Readers of Miss Robinson's Emily Brontë will doubtless remember that lady's word-picture of the authoress of Wuthering Heights,—" A quantity of dark-brown hair, deep, beautiful hazel eyes that could flash with passion, features somewhat strong and stern, the mouth prominent and resolute." Martha Brown, who was thrown much in contact with Emily, said, "We always thought her to be the best looking, the cleverest, and the bravestspirited of the three sisters."« (xiv)

A.A. Gill in The Sunday Times has also something to say about the Eyre-China love affair:

A great leap backwards.
The Chinese can’t get enough of Brontë’s Jane Eyre. It’s translated as “a record of an orphan girl who drifts about alone”, which I think is a better title. While being deeply conservative about imported culture, the Chinese have agreed to buy a job lot of our ghastly Sunday-night BBC costume dramas, presumably because these stories of petty snobbery, greed, arranged marriages, women as property and the rigid class system are cautionary tales about life in the running dog West.

lee_fragilidad posts some pictures of Jane Eyre 1973, Jane Eyre 1983 and Wuthering Heights 2009; YayFunBooks , From Films to Frocks, Um Mondo de Sonhos (in Portuguese) post about Jane Eyre; ScribbleManiac nicely describes a typical case of Emily Brontë-philia which culminates with a trip to Brontë country; the Brontë sisters posts about Sir Emery Walker, the photographer who took the 1854 alleged photograph of Charlotte Brontë; Blog do Livro reviews Wuthering Heights in Portuguese. Finally, Les Brontë à Paris reviews the 1988 fictionalised biography of Emily Brontë La Hurlevent by Jeanne Champion (in French).

Categories: Books, Charlotte Brontë, Fiction, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, References, Wuthering Heights