'Six young men wish to let themselves all a hire for the purpose of cleaning out pockets...'

Charlotte Brontë's soon-to-go-under-the-hammer unpublished manuscript is all over the news today. Sites echoing the news include The Washington Post, CBS News, The Huffington Post, etc. What they're mostly doing is republishing this Associated Press release:

Sotheby's says an unpublished work by the teenage Charlotte Brontë could sell for 300,000 pounds ($482,000) at an auction next month
The auction house says "The Young Men's Magazine, Number 2" is dated August 1830, when the writer was 14.
The mini-magazine, measuring 1.4 inches by 2.4 inches (35mm by 61mm), contains a tale of murder and madness set in the imaginary world of Glass Town.
Sotheby's book specialist Gabriel Heaton said it "provides a rare and intimate insight into one of history's great literary minds."
He said it includes a foretaste of a famous scene in Brontë's "Jane Eyre" — "when Bertha, Mr. Rochester's insane wife, seeks revenge by setting fire to the bed curtains in her husband's chamber."
The manuscript will be sold Dec. 15 in London. (Picture credits: Sotheby's)

There are a couple of sites that take it further, though, such as The Daily Mail:

Gabriel Heaton, books specialist at the firm, which will auction the book on December 15, said: 'This minute manuscript provides a rare and intimate insight into one of history's great literary minds.'
Crafted with extraordinary care, this minute manuscript marks Charlotte Brontë's first burst of creativity and, significantly, provides a rare and intimate insight into one of history’s great literary minds.
'It contains a colourful tale of murder and madness which includes a precursor to one of the most famous scenes in Jane Eyre – the moment when Bertha, Mr Rochester's insane wife seeks revenge by setting fire to the bed curtains in her husband’s chamber.'
The colourful tale of murder and madness is part of a 4,000-word magazine with 19 pages, written by the young Brontë.
With astonishingly meticulous care, the teenager condensed her immaculate hand-writing into a miniscule script to cram it all in.
The young Brontë writes about her male character: 'He constantly raged about the spirits of Caroline Krista & Charles Wellesley dancing before him.
'He said that every now & then they glided through his eyes to his brain where an immense fire was continually burning & that he felt them adding fuel to the flames that caused it to catch the curtains of the bed that would soon be reduced to ashes.'
In another passage, she gives a vivid description of the attic similar to the one which becomes the home of the mentally-ill Mrs Rochester in Jane Eyre.
She writes: 'The floor was of wet rotten wood blacker than the back of a chimney. The sides were of the same but... partially concealed by elegant draperies of spiders web.’
Andrew McCarthy, director of the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, once the family's Yorkshire home, said: 'The fact that it's unpublished and unknown makes it extraordinary.'
Brontë's 1847 masterpiece tells of an orphan who becomes governess to a ward of the mysterious Mr Rochester, falls in love with him – only to discover that he is already married.
Rochester's mad wife, imprisoned in a country-house attic, seeks revenge, setting fire to the bed curtains.
The manuscript she penned when she was 14 tells of the adventures of a man after he witnesses a murder.
With hand-cut pages, she replicated the format of printed periodicals of the day, complete with table of contents, articles, poetry and classified advertisements, one of which reads: 'Six young men wish to let themselves all a hire for the purpose of cleaning out pockets they are in reduced CIRCUMSTANCES [sic].'
Inspired by Blackwood's Magazine, to which her father subscribed, she called hers The Young Men's Magazine, Number 2, and dated it August 1830. It is the missing second volume of a series of six. (Dalya Alberge)

Art Daily also writes about it at length:

Containing more than 4,000 words painstakingly crammed on to 19 pages, each measuring approximately 35 x 61mm, the size of the manuscript reflects the miniature nature of its subject. Charlotte Brontë’s friend and fellow writer Mrs Gaskell recalls “[A]n immense amount of manuscript, in an inconceivably small space.”
Its size also reflects the intimacy of the subject; this imaginary world was intensely private and the minuteness of these works ensured that they were easily hidden and could only be read without the aid of a magnifying glass by the sharp eyes of a child. The manuscript’s table of contents lists “A letter from Lord Charles Wellesley,” a vivid adventure tale; “The Midnight Song by Marquis Duoro,” a poem; “Frenchman’s Journal,” a continuation of a fictional diary series; and a mocked-up classifieds section, “Advertisements.”
‘A letter from Lord Charles Wellesley’, the first and most substantial piece in this issue of the Young Men's Magazine , is supposedly written by the son of the Duke of Wellington who was a frequent hero of the ‘Glass Town’ stories. It follows the developments of a "rather mysterious incident" that begins when he was awoken in the night and, whilst admiring the stars from his palace garden, hears a sudden shriek from a boat - but before he can intervene the girl who has been captured by the four men aboard is stabbed to death. When he leaps into the canal to avenge her, he himself is captured by the murderer. Lord Charles is taken to the capturer’s country house where he is imprisoned in a vividly-described attic: "the floor was of wet rotten wood blacker than the back of a chimney. the sides were of the same but ...partially concealed by elegant draperies of spiders web. & no vestige of furniture was to be seen not even a straw bed".
Following his dramatic escape, Lord Charles is able to wreak his revenge, but his fright of conscience in so doing sends his victim into a delirium which is described in a passage of remarkable power. It is this passage that represents a precursor to one of the most famous scenes in Charlotte Brontë's later fiction – the moment in Jane Eyre (written in 1847) when Bertha, Mr Rochester's insane wife (who was, like Lord Charles, kept in the attic) seeks revenge by setting fire to the bed-curtains in her husband's chamber. In the case of Lord Charles’s victim,"...he constantly raged about the spirits of Caroline Krista & Charles Wellesley dancing before him. he said that every now & then they glided through his eyes to his brain where an immense fire was continually burning & that he felt them adding fuel to the flames that caused it to catch the curtains of the bed that would soon be reduced to ashes. at other times he said he felt them pulling his heart-strings till a sound like a death knell came from them..."
The manuscript is encased in the original, specially made protective red folder, in addition to an equally minute brown morocco slip-off case with gilt lettering on the spine. Charlotte Brontë's manuscripts were dispersed in the nineteenth century but the vast majority are now in institutional collections in the UK and USA.

Also in the news is Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights, which opens in the UK on Friday. Entertainment gives it 4 1/2 stars out of 5:

With its longs scenes of silence and glances, this version of Wuthering Heights can drag. The first half of the film works far better than the second as one can get wrapped up in watching Arnold's bold choices and odd approach to this masterpiece of literature; once the novelty of that is over, however, there's little here to get in a dizzy about.
Interesting stuff. Don't go thinking Olivier. Or Kate Bush. (Gavin Burke)

The BBC has an audio interview with Andrea Arnold while Digital Spy has talked to Kaya Scodelario.

In the meantime, the Yorkshire Post discusses some of the history of Wuthering Heights adaptations.

Legend has it that Laurence Olivier was uncertain about accepting Sam Goldwyn’s offer to play Heathcliff opposite Merle Oberon in a blockbuster adaptation of Wuthering Heights.
It was 1938 and Olivier, still only 31, was the darling of the English stage. Unsure of how to respond to Hollywood – he had previously been fired from Garbo’s Queen Christina – he asked Ralph Richardson, a contemporary and close friend, for advice. “Yes. Bit of fame. Good,” was Richardson’s terse response. Olivier did the picture and became, overnight, an international sensation.
It was not an easy film. Olivier had wanted lover Vivien Leigh to play Cathy and resented Oberon. And, mired in theatre technique, he struggled to deliver a plausible film performance, prompting Goldwyn to damn him as “stagey, hammy, awful”. One critic later attacked Olivier for acting rather than living the part.
Yet the film, directed by William Wyler from an erudite script by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, was a winner. Did it matter that the movie was entirely fake, shot not on location in Yorkshire but in sunny Conejo Hills, California, complete with faux heather, on cowboy star Joel McCrea’s 450-acre range? No, of course not. But it was a version for the 1930s with Olivier as the satanic gipsy whose obsessive love for his childhood sweetheart turns his heart to ice, robbing him of humanity and compassion. If, as one writer observed, Olivier didn’t make Heathcliff demonic, he came close. And that was enough. Audiences weren’t ready for demonic in 1939.
Wuthering Heights is at the top of the list when it comes to timeless books. Dark, brooding, eerie and beyond romantic, its theme of complete oneness has haunted millions of readers across seven generations. The argument, oft opined, is that no film or television adaptation can hope to match readers’ collective imagination, and that any interpretation, no matter how reverential, will always be found lacking.
The Brontë sisters and the landscape from which they drew their inspiration have been picked over relentlessly. Yet while Emily, Charlotte and Anne have inspired several biographies, has anyone ever really brought their books definitively to the screen?
The earliest film version of Wuthering Heights, now lost, was made in 1920. It starred Milton Rosmer as a glowering, brutish Heathcliff in “Emily Brontë’s tremendous story of hate” and could have possibly been the most accurate, covering the entirety of the novel. Three actresses including Annie Trevor and child star Twinkles Hunter portrayed Cathy in what was, for the time, an epic five-reeler running 90 silent minutes and shot on location near Haworth.
In its review the Bioscope focused on Rosmer’s Heathcliff: “In the cold hatred which obsesses the soul of this amazing character, you feel the fierce passion of the devastating storms which sweep the bleak and lonely wastes of the Haworth district in the dreary winter months – an environment that, we know, made an indelible impression upon the sensitive spirit of the girl-genius pent, far from the warmth and colour of normal life, in her cheerless home.”
Thus the earliest attempt at putting the story on-screen establishes the dynamic between Cathy and Heathcliff. She is an elemental being, selfish, wilful, capricious and mentally-ill. He, grown from gipsy foundling to saturnine adulthood, is sinister, cruel, strong and desolate – deformed by the malevolence of man.
Thirty years after the Olivier/Oberon version came an attempt with Timothy Dalton as Heathcliff and Anna Calder-Marshall as Cathy. Seen today, it struggles to compete with its illustrious forebear: Dalton is far too handsome and well-spoken to manifest Heathcliff’s innate animalism; Calder-Marshall is insipid and lacks fire.
Crucially, it ends with Cathy’s death; unlike the 1920 version it cuts out a significant portion of the book for a ham-fisted finale that sees the wayward lovers dancing off through the heather as Heathcliff’s corpse lies still in the bitter wind. In 1992, casting director turned producer Mary Selway hired documentary filmmaker Peter Kosminsky to do a most audacious thing: make a new version and capture the whole story.
Telling two stories over a generation was the most daunting aspect of the project – that and casting the leads. In a still contentious decision, Selway and Kosminsky chose newcomer Ralph Fiennes for Heathcliff and – horror! – French actress Juliette Binoche as Cathy.
The scope of the story meant that the screenplay, by Irish writer Anne Devlin, encompassed 27 turbulent years – from spring 1775 when the 12-year-old Heathcliff enters the Earnshaw household, until his death in 1802. Devlin also introduced an eerie prologue and epilogue in which the figure of Emily Brontë, played in an uncredited cameo by Irish singer Sinéad O’Connor, opens and closes the film.
“Cathy just isn’t a modern part,” said Kosminsky. “She’s capricious and sexually manipulative. She flaunts her sexuality and she uses it. She’s precocious and she’s elemental. And she shines like a kind of beacon in this tiny, isolated moorland community of 200-odd years ago. She’s the kind of character who comes along maybe once in ten generations in a place like that.”
Much maligned, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (as the film was advertised) is actually the closest in style, mood and atmosphere to the novel. It is underpinned by Ryuichi Sakamoto’s ghostly score. Fiennes’s magnificent performance is soaked in dread and vengeance; Binoche, wavering accent aside, is more than acceptable as the wild child of the heather. Kosminsky succeeded in his quest: to make the movie a visual metaphor for the choice between head and heart.
Now Wuthering Heights has spawned yet another bastard child. Andrea Arnold’s 2011 attempt at the book boasts non-actors who give non-performances in a film utterly without heart or soul.
It’s resemblance to the novel is merely accidental, such is Arnold’s deliberate attempt to pare down dialogue and plot to the barest minimum, giving her cast only landscape and weather to inform their performances.
Rumours from the set whispered of a filmmaker struggling to make sense of the parallel storylines, and lacking direction. Peppered with profanity and racial epithets, it demands from audiences an in-depth knowledge of the novel, its sub-plots and diversions, and delivers only a skeletal representation of a mighty tale.
Arnold’s insubstantial vision is bolstered by the camerawork of Robbie Ryan. The film has been described as a bold experiment – a new vision for a new generation. Yet whilst the peasant hill farm locale of the Earnshaws’ home is suitably bleak and meagre, the scorching heat of the love between the principals is never present. Only Kaya Scodelario, as the older Cathy, offers hints of what might have been. It is, at its simplest, of an awfulness that bends the mind.
Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is an exemplar of gothic romance. It is a story of naked emotion, madness, obsession, death, revenge, the supernatural and, at its end, redemption.
Few films have managed to authentically recreate such ingredients. Kosminsky, Fiennes and Binoche came closest. Said Mary Selway in 1992: “You have to honour the book and honour the writer’s intention of what she wanted to achieve in the book but make that in film terms. The story absolutely lends itself to a miniseries – the size of it is so vast – but it needs the largeness of the screen filled with the Yorkshire moors.”
Wuthering Heights is indeed a big story, maybe even the biggest in fiction. It is pure. Filmmakers should consider that when next they attempt to scale this Everest of novels. (Tony Earnshaw)

The News-Sentinel shares the literary recommendations of columnist Nicholas Kristof:

I was surprised that he included “Wuthering Heights,” by Emily Brontë, because I had thought of it as a “woman’s read.” He says no. He thinks it “may be literature’s greatest love story.” He finds the characters “achingly luminous,” and they reflect the way things were in the 19th century. Did you see the film with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon? It’s still on TV occasionally – not as often as “Jane Eyre,” which I liked even more. (Betty Stein)

IndieWire reports that Cary Fukunaga's Jane Eyre has been 'completely shut out' from the 21st Gotham Independent Film Award nominations.

The Keighley News has an article on the revamped History to Herstory website:

Brontë sisters’ letters feature in a newly expanded archive devoted to historical women of the county.
History to Herstory has been launched by the West Yorkshire Archive Service and the University of Huddersfield.
It features more than 80,000 documents and images concerning 900 women from the year 1100 AD to the present day.
There is a large collection of personal letters either written or received by the Bronte sisters.
They include an 1847 letter from Charlotte Brontë to her publishers Smith, Elder & Co on the eve of publication.
She writes: “I am glad you think pretty well of the first part of Jane Eyre and I trust, both for your sakes and my own, that the public may think pretty well of it too.”
The History to Herstory archive was originally created in 2002 but has now been redeveloped and expanded.
The archive service and university had drawn on records of other organisations, including the Brontë Society. (David Knights)

Seven Sassy Sisters interviews Kate Walker, author of The Return of the Stranger:

inspired by Wuthering Heights but it’s a stand-alone romance for the Presents line that works whether you have read the original or not.