Middlebrow and chick-lit

The Atlantic reviews Jeffrey Eugenides's The Marriage Plot:

Eugenides's third and latest novel, The Marriage Plot, arguably represents his most ambitious approach to gender yet: Rather than describing young women from the point of view of a collective male narrator, as he did in The Virgin Suicides, or creating an intersex protagonist, as he did in Middlesex, he writes from the point of view of a woman, Madeleine. And, as suggested by the title, he's not writing just any female character. He's attempting to create a woman who wrestles with and possibly defies the traditional Jane Austen or Charlotte Brontë novel's expectations for her gender: that is, the expectation that her story will end with a wedding. (Eleanor Barkhorn)

The Portland Mercury does the same:

The Marriage Plot announces its obsession in the very first sentence:
"To start with, look at all the books."
The books are by Henry James, Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, George Eliot—and they're arranged by publication date on the bookshelves of Madeleine Hanna, a Brown University senior who's about to graduate with a degree in English. It's a collection of texts, author Jeffrey Eugenides tells us, "seemingly chosen at random, whose focus slowly narrowed, like a personality test, a sophisticated one you couldn't trick by anticipating the implications of its questions and finally got so lost in that your only recourse was to answer the simple truth. And then you waited for the result, hoping for 'Artistic,' or 'Passionate'... but finally being presented with an outcome that cut both ways: 'Incurably romantic.'" (Alison Hallett)

The visit of Jacqueline Wilson to the Brontë Parsonage Museum (one of the Contemporary Arts Programme activities) is announced by The Telegraph & Argus:

Children’s author Dame Jacqueline Wilson will be reading from her new book as part of an arts programme organised by the Brontë Parsonage Museum. (...)
A great admirer of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, she has written the introduction to the Whites Pocket Classic edition of the novel.
he Parsonage’s autumn/winter contemporary arts programme, which runs until March 2012, includes an appearance by the screenwriter for the upcoming new film adaptation of Wuthering Heights, Olivia Hetreed.
Artist-in-residence Rebecca Chesney will be setting up a weather station at the Parsonage to record weather readings over the next year. She will then cross-reference the data with weather descriptions in the Brontës’ letters and novels to compare how the weather in Haworth has changed since the Brontës’ day.
Working with local people to collect the information, Rebecca will use her research to create an exhibition of new work for the museum next summer. (Emma Clayton)

Slate discusses the current meaning of middlebrow (if it has any meaning any more):

The novel as a form has a particularly strong middlebrow tradition, as Richard Brody noted a few months back; indeed, many of the writers [Virginia] Woolf claims as fellow highbrows—Dickens, Scott, and Brontë, for instance—seem obviously middlebrow.  (David Haglund)

Nouse insists on an idea which we find deeply wrong:

It is also important for scholars to remember that authors like Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot would most certainly come under the umbrella of “chick-lit” – after all, their storylines and ideas are akin to many recent fictional works of this genre. 200 years of hindsight and scholarly criticism may have granted them access into the literary canon, but at the time, one can only imagine how they were scorned by the men as pieces of unintellectual fluff. (Andrew Ryan)

Austen, Brontë and Eliot are as much under the umbrella of chick-lit as Mickey Spillane, Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler are pulp fiction.

PopMatters reviews The Mangan Inheritance by Brian Moore:

The plot rolls forward, gaining density like an Irish gothic version of Jane Eyre, until finally Jim meets a man able and willing to give him the entire sordid story of the family Mangan. (Diane Leach)

Thinkerviews has posts on Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey; Iris Watts Hirideyo and The Idle Woman talk about Jane Eyre 2011; Secluded Charm attended Juliet Barker's talk at the Morley Literature Festival; Elle Cloughie has uploaded Brontë country pictures on Flickr.