Christmas wasn't Christmas at the Parsonage

The Telegraph and Argus has an article on Christmas in Yorkshire where the Brontës are mentioned:

Visiting the Brontë Parsonage at Haworth, Mike [Harding, author of Beautiful North] is surprised to discover that the traditional image of a cosy Victorian Christmas wasn’t quite the reality for the Brontë family. Brontë expert Dr Juliet Barker tells him there’s barely a mention of Christmas in letters documenting the Brontës’ lives. The only documented festive fact is a newly-married Charlotte and her husband distributing Christmas money around the village in 1854. (Emma Clayton)

Even though the Brontës didn't seem to have written much about Christmas specifically, we are very much enjoying the Brontë Christmas-like quotations sent by participants to our Christmas contest. Do send us yours if you haven't sent it yet!

And for those wanting to know a little more about how the Brontës may have celebrated Christmas there's a lovely book out there called The Brontës' Christmas by Maria Hubert which is quite a treat at this time of year.

Speaking of quotes, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser defines what a pilgrim is based on Charlotte Brontë's description of St John Rivers (ch. XVIII).

Charlotte Brontë suggested that a pilgrim must be "firm, faithful and devoted, full of energy, zeal and truth." (Mike Town)

The National (UAE) features author Kate Morton and the Brontë-like atmosphere of her novels is mentioned again:

And her love of not just England, but a certain kind of English literature - think Jane Eyre or I Capture the Castle - is shot through everything Morton writes. (Ben East)

The Sop interviews Elham Madani, who recalls reading Emily Brontë at a very early age:

I discovered literature and movies at an early age. I mean by the time I was 7 or 8 years of age, I had already read big novels by Charles Dickens, Emily Brontë, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and a few others --- That`s what made me aware of the beauty of literature, and to love the drama in movies by so many different personalities. (Chase Von)

The Independent (Ireland) asks several people about what they've read this year:

Nicole Dunphy
[...]
Reading time is scarce for businesswoman and mother Nicole, so she treasures it dearly. "I heard Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights on the radio the other day and I got a real hankering to re-read that classic, curled up in front of the fire." (Jennifer Ryan)

Idle Scrawl - a BBC blog - suggests the following game:

Earlier I relaunched a mental exercise first started by Hollywood scriptwriter and columnist Ben Hecht in the 1930s. You have to make a list of the 50 books you would have bound and put in a library if that was all you could have.
The key is to do it from memory. No internet, no Googling, no peer pressure: in an ideal world you sit down in an empty room with a typewriter and a bottle of something and hammer out the list. Here is mine (actually I have cheated and looked up some titles on the internet, and I wrote on a computer). (Paul Mason)

His last ten include Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights.

Petit Plaisir posts in Portuguese about several Jane Eyre adaptations through time. And Turn of the Page discusses Charlotte Brontë's opinion of Jane Austen.

Categories: Brontëites, Jane Eyre, Victorian Era, Wuthering Heights