"I'd love to be in it"

The Express remembers that Thornton Hall (one of many Thornfield Hall possible originals) is in the market:

The house Charlotte Brontë is said to have used as the model for Thornfield Hall in Jane Eyre has come on the market for the first time in 30 years. Grade II listed Thornton Hall in the village of Thornton near Bradford is a stone’s throw from the church where the Reverend Patrick Brontë was a curate between 1815 and 1820, and where his daughter Charlotte was baptised, before he moved his family to the parsonage at Haworth. Seven-bedroomed Thornton Hall was once owned by a textile baron in whose 400-acre garden the Brontë siblings used to play. It also has a concealed loft which is said to have inspired Charlotte’s storyline in Jane Eyre of the mad woman in the attic. (...)
Thornton Hall, which was rebuilt in the 16th century, was where Barry entertained business guests from Japan, Mongolia, China and America who all loved the connection with the Brontës. It is also a favourite haunt for members of the Brontë Society.
“I let them wander around every couple of years so they can see where the Brontë children grew up and match the architecture to Thornfield Hall in the book Jane Eyre,” says Barry, 73, whose children now live abroad. The house is surrounded by stunning scenery. “We are halfway down a hillside in the Thornton valley, hidden in the trees and with an unbroken panorama of countryside all around us,” says Barry. “Yet we are also just three-and-a- half miles from the centre of Bradford.”  (Jane Slade)

A couple of reviews of Carmela Ciuraru's Nom de Plume:

Charlotte Brontë and her sisters hid their female names to overcome a rigidly gendered society. (Kate Tuttle in the Boston Globe)

The authors she profiles, Ciuraru writes, found that “hiding behind a nom de plume was essential. However varied their literary styles and their reasons for going undercover, all of them longed to escape the burdens of selfhood. … To publish their work, many risked their reputations, their means of subsistence, and even the relationships they held most dear.” Case in point: the Brontë sisters. During an age in which women were expected to keep their thoughts to themselves, Charlotte Brontë found it necessary to publish “Jane Eyre” under the pseudonym Currer Bell. And when Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” was brought out a few months later, it was attributed to Currer’s “brother,” Ellis Bell.
Ciuraru notes that while wrestling with the authorship questions surrounding “Jane Eyre,” “One writer argued that the novel’s ‘mistakes’ about ‘preparing game and dessert dishes’ proved beyond a doubt that the author was a man, because no female author would have been so clueless.”  (Kevin Canfield in the Kansas City Star)

The National (United Arab Emirates) insists on the pseudonyms topic:

The Brontë sisters published poetry pseudonymously because they feared it would not be taken seriously otherwise - "authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice". (John O'Connell)

 The Sunday Monitor (Uganda) interviews the author Princess Ikatekit:

Which books are you glad to have read? Why?
I would have to say: Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, George Orwell’s 1984, Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler.

Another author, Melissa Pritchard is interviewed in The Southeast Review:

For me, writing and humanitarian work co-exist in an uneasy but essential balance. I also believe one can write with profound universality and humanity from the confines of one’s room, or one’s hometown. There are hundreds of examples of this kind of genius. Emily Dickinson, Eudora Welty, the Brontë sisters, Jane Austen…. One finds the path, the way that best suits one. Ultimately, they are the same. (Marian Crotty)

The Morton Report describes singer Rosanne Cash as follows:

Not classically stunning in the Vogue magazine sense, she has an arresting eccentric beauty like a lost Brontë sister or a heroine in a gothic novel that believes she has more good sense than good looks, but always ends up capturing the titled-but-tortured aristocrat in the end. (Jaan Uhelszki)

The Independent interviews Hayden Phillips, chairman of the National Theatre and occasional actor:

Pupils at Kate Middleton's alma mater Marlborough College were encouraged to live outside their comfort zone at yesterday's prizegiving. Sir Hayden Phillips, chairman of the National Theatre, used his speech to explain how taking a risk had led him to land a part in a new film adaptation of Jane Eyre. When his daughter asked if she could bring home a young man who was stranded on his way back to New York, he agreed. Then he learnt the man was Cary Fukunaga, director of the new film starring Judi Dench and Jamie Bell. "I said I'd love to be in it, and got the part of Colonel Dent, and was given nine lines. My wife was given a non-speaking part, which is a recipe for domestic bliss," he quipped. (Matthew Bell)

The Independent (Ireland) reviews Fame by Tilly Bagshawe:

Fame by Tilly Bagshawe (Harper, paperback, €10.55) covers much the same ground as [Jackie] Collins with the plot centring on a remake of the Hollywood classic Wuthering Heights. Sabrina, a former homeless runaway, is a young actress going off the rails and in rehab, Viorel is the leading man of the day, a former Romanian orphan adopted by a leading British MP, Dorian is the producer and director whose future depends on the success of his movie, and Tish Crewe is a nice, posh English girl with an adopted Romanian son and a ne'er-do-well brother running the family pile into ruin. The action takes place in Hollywood, Romania and the aforementioned stately home in England. (Anne Marie Scanlon)

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reviews a book of interest to Austenites: A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship and the Things that Matter by William Deresiewicz which curiously ends with:

Mr. Deresiewicz ends his personal narrative with the happy ending required in Victorian novels. "Reader, I married her," he writes, mimicking the famous line from "Jane Eyre." (Michael Helfland)

The Green Bay Press Gazette reviews the YA novel Okay for Now by Gary D. Schmidt:

With spot-on details straight out of life in the ‘60s, Schmidt’s book is a pitch-perfect story of the times complete with anguish over the Vietnam War, trips to the library and the grocery store, favorite baseball players, first jobs and first crushes, and even mention of the moon landing. Jane Eyre and Aaron Copland’s music are thrown in for good measure. The result is a masterful work, sure to become a classic in children’s literature. (Shirley VerBruggen)

The Penguin Doll posts Wuthering Heights; The Porter's Lodge has visited Haworth; Eres Mi Vida & Mi Mundo (in Spanish) and ebokhylla mi (in Norwegian) post about Jane Eyre; Leituras Brontëanas comments several covers for Jane Eyre editions (in Portuguese).

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