The letter came home

The Charlotte Brontë letter to Ellen Nussey auctioned at Sotheby's last July has finally reached its final destination: the Brontë Parsonage Museum. The Telegraph & Argus carries the story:
Picture Source: Ann Dinsdale holds the letter written by Charlotte Brontë.

Ann Dinsdale, collections manager at the museum in Church Street, said the fact Charlotte wrote so many letters to Ellen, and that Ellen kept them, was the reason historians knew so much about the domestic life of the famous literary sisters.
The letter, dated June 19, 1834, was written at the beginning of the two women’s friendship. In it, Charlotte talks about Ellen’s recent trip to London.
Miss Dinsdale said: “Ellen was from a more affluent background than the Brontës and she had been on a visit to London. Charlotte had never been to London and all her ideas about it were from literature. She considered it to be a wicked place and she was amazed that Ellen had returned the same person.
“The letter shows the contrast between their lives. Charlotte would have loved to travel but because the Brontës were relatively poor it wasn’t really an option.” (Kathryn Bradley)

The appaling results of the the analysis of an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development about the reading standards of English teens is discussed in the Daily Mail. The schools minister, Nick Gibb is quoted as saying:

He added: ‘Our writers – Charles Dickens and Charlotte Brontë, George Orwell and Ian McEwan – are the finest in the world. It is time we are also among the best readers in the world.’ (Kate Loveys)

Happy (or not) endings and classical novels are the subject of this article in The Huffington Post:

A number of great novels allow the surviving characters some happiness at the end, but there's still a measure of lingering melancholy for what transpired in the rest of the book. Examples of this on that top-100 list include J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White, and many more.  (Dave Astor)

Curiously, the previous article discussed particularly Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth and the novel is the favourite one of the author Mindy Kaling who is interviewed on the Entertainment Weekly:

That’s such a great book. I feel like it preceded so many modern-day books, movies, and TV shows. Isn’t that book freaking amazing? I love that book. It’s so current. I think that’s what makes it so timeless. Listen, I freaking love Jane Austen, love Charlotte Brontë, I love stories about frivolous families, and you know, sisterly rivalries — I love that. But House of Mirth so describes the feeling of being trapped in a time of not wanting to get married but sort of having to, and having one chance out of it and the tragic side of that. (Stephan Lee)

The Savage Pacer asks its readers to send autumn pictures and begins the article with a quote by Emily Brontë:

“Every leaf speaks bliss to me, fluttering from the autumn tree,” wrote English novelist and poet Emily Jane Brontë.

The Washington Post talks about the new Siri personal assistant for the iPhone 4S:

Siri is one of the more novel applications Apple has produced. Utilizing a combination of voice recognition, logic and text-to-speech, the software can interpret casual requests and follow conversations. With Siri, you can ask to get directions, send text messages, schedule reminders or appointments, get suggestions on where to eat, and lots more. Siri can even answer not-so-basic questions such as,“Who wrote ‘Jane Eyre’?” (Joshua Topolsky)

Rope of Silicon makes some 2012 Oscar Predictions in the Best Cinematography category:

Two films I'm very curious in seeing how they end up are Cary Fukunaga's Jane Eyre with cinematography by Adriano Goldman and Martin Scorsese's Hugo with cinematography by Robert Richardson. (Brad Bevet)

And HitFix talks about the films present at the London Film Festival:

Thrillingly terse deconstruction, Robbie Ryan's lensing is witchcraft. I only question its depth of feeling. (Guy Lodge)

Cafemom thinks that no matter how big your library is if you don't read what's in it, it is no good:

And hey, eventually someone's going to use that bookshelf as a conversation starter ("So, do you consider Jane Eyre a proto-feminist novel?"), and when it's clear you haven't even read the CliffsNotes, you'll probably come off as even more foolish than you would have if you had just 'fessed up to being more of a Confessions of a Shopaholic fan in the first place. (Maressa Brown)

The Age talks about being a mother or not:

It is an attitude that negates the achievements of women without children such as great writers including Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters and our own Henry Handel Richardson and actors such as Katharine Hepburn. (Alison Cassar)

The Jamaica Observer describes an exhibition by artist Keith Morrison in the Mechanical Hall Gallery of the University of Delaware which includes a 1994 painting named Wide Sargasso Sea (the painting can be seen here); The Deerfield Scroll reviews Jane Eyre 2011.