Jane Eyre crashes after seeing Mr Rochester's enormous. . .

BBC News reports that at long last the most important part of the Haworth Main Street cobbles replacement is going to take place:

Thousands of stone setts, or cobbles, are to be re-laid in a West Yorkshire village.

The work begins on Monday on Haworth Main Street and is the last piece of a £600,000 refurbishment in the home of the Brontë family.
The famous literary family moved to Haworth in 1820 where the Reverend Patrick Brontë was appointed Curate of Haworth.
Thousands of tourists walk the steep hill running through the village.
Bradford Council said the renovations will maintain the historical character of the village
The road will be closed in short sections as the work is carried out, although pedestrian access will be possible at all times.
The work is expected to last until the summer but the road will be re-opened over weekends and there will be no work on bank holidays.

Also on BBC News we read the results of the latest "Emily Brontë portrait" auction. Unsurprisingly, the auctioneers announce yet another Brontë portrait to be auctioned in April:

A portrait believed to be of the author Emily Brontë was sold for £4,600 at a Northamptonshire auctioneers.

The 33cm by 24cm (13in x 9.5in) oil painting went under the hammer in Towcester on Thursday.
Auctioneer JP Humbert said it had attracted a moderate amount of interest after a previous sale of another painting.
The auction house sold that portrait of the reclusive writer for £23,836 in December.
This latest painting, which is annotated 'Emily Jane Brontë', was estimated to fetch between £5,000 and £8,000.
Auctioneer Jonathan Humbert said: "We have another Brontë painting which we will put up for auction in April and we are hoping to make it three out of three."

AutoStraddle interviews the members of the art collective All the Cunning Stunts. One of them, Marnie Slater makes the following rather enigmatic statement:

Marnie:  Hehe. I think Rachel [O'Neill]  for sure hand-washes her laundry more often than all the Brontë sisters combined.  (Effing Dykes)

Sarah Pyles remembers in The Huffington Post her love of reading:

As I grew older, my love of reading continued. I think I must have read Little Women over 15 times as a teenager. Other favourites included Jane Eyre, Emma and The Outsiders.

 And more Oscar predictions:

Best Costume Design. Another very tricky category. The traditional pick would be Anonymous, because it's a lavish period piece. My friend Howard calls this the Most Costumes award. But that movie truly was anonymous in every sense and has been so thoroughly forgotten it seems unlikely. And when you think of Hugo, the costumes do not come to mind. That means it's down to the glamour of The Artist versus the realism of Jane Eyre. Glamour wins every time. Mind you, the Costume guild gave it to Madonna's movie W./E., which is also period and very glamorous. And this category has been willfully offbeat for the past 10 years. Still, that's not how voters think when they're voting; that's just how we think when we're trying to predict how voters think. Michael O'Connor of Jane Eyre won before and that never hurts. But I'm sticking with the "obvious" choice of The Artist.  (Michael Giltz in The Huffington Post)

In a relatively quiet year for British cinema at the Oscars, the nation can still turn to that reliable standby, the best costume design award, for a little welling-up of patriotic pride. Four out of the last five winners have been British, and two of them – Sandy Powell and Michael O'Connor – are in the running this time. O'Connor is up for Jane Eyre, but the smart money is on Powell, for her work on Martin Scorsese's early-cinema fantasy Hugo.  (Andrew Pulver in The Guardian)

And the winner is: Hugo. This is an especially tricky category, and it's not impossible for an impressive period piece with no other nominations like Jane Eyre to swoop in here. But Hugo's Sandy Powell has won this award three times and seems well poised to do it again. This is one of the tightest races in the technical categories, though, so many other things are possible.  (Katie Rich on CinemaBlend)

The world’s largest costume supplier, Angels has provided a selection of clothing and accessories for all four films nominated for best costume design at this year’s Oscars — “W.E.,” “Hugo,” “Jane Eyre” and “Anonymous.” (WWD)

The lush set designs that characterized both critical darling Jane Eyre and less-well-received Anonymous provided appropriately rich backdrops for the examination of such weighty subjects as love and art. In Eyre, the opulence that Jane encounters at Rochester’s estate serves as a deliberate contrast to her forlorn upbringing.   (The Globe and Mail)

Em Jane Eyre, a indumentária tem o estilo da era vitoriana e ajuda a compor o clima sombrio do filme, além de ser um marcador da evolução da personagem Jane Eyre. Os vestidos escuros e de tecidos rústicos vão dando lugar a peças mais claras à medida em que a própria personagem se transforma ao longo da trama, abandona a aura de tristeza e solidão, se apaixona e ainda se torna uma rica herdeira. Tudo muito eficiente, mas não faz brilhar os olhos. (Pollyana Teixeira in  Mundo Ela) (Translation)

Poi viene Jane Eyre, un film i costumi sono perfette macchine di significazione: basta dargli un’occhiata e lo spettatore capisce lo stato sociale del personaggio, il suo percorso emotivo, la sua età. C’è anche una grande attenzione ai dettagli (come si evince da certi cappelli), al peso storico dei materiali e alcuni momenti di lirismo creativo. I costumi di Jane Eyre sono per noi anche migliori di quelli favolosi che Michael O’Connor ha realizzato per The Duchess (per cui ha già vinto un Oscar) eppure l’Academy non si sofferma su certe sottigliezze e pensa piuttosto come un PR, assegnando premi più al film che ai suoi singoli componenti.  (Emanuele Lugli on Vogue.it) (Translation)

The Huffington Post also discusses films with no Oscar endorsement:

Jane Eyre. You've probably heard a lot about German / Irish actor Michael Fassbender lately. Mostly I'm sure about his enormous penis, which is on prominent display in his Golden Globe-nominated performance in Shame. But before that he was very memorable as a young Magneto in X-Men First Class, and before that he turned in an impressive and sexy performance as the cold and distant Rochester to Mia Wasikowska's Jane Eyre. Directed with moody gothic chilliness by Cary Fukunaga, this adaptation never feels boring or austere. This is technically another cheat because it did get an Oscar nomination for best Costume Design, but it is much better than just a well-costumed period drama.  (Bill Augustin)

Why has Jane Eyre no more nominations? The Daily Californian says what we already know:

If “Jane Eyre” had opened in the fall instead of in March, Mia Wasikowska would probably have earned a very deserving nomination.  (Braulio Ramirez)

The Seattle Times joins in the recognition.

IndieWire's The Playlist mentions her partenaire:

Best Actor - Michael Fassbender - "Shame"
It's become something of a tradition for the best performance of the year to get overlooked by the Academy, and that's exactly how we thought of Michael Fassbender as Brandon in "Shame."(...) The actor put in several excellent performances in the last year (he easily could have managed a nomination for "Jane Eyre" too), but this is the one that will be remembered as putting him into the big leagues.  (Oliver Lyttelton)

ContraCosta Times has some alternative nominations:

Most Tragic Ruins

The great smoking hulk that once was Thornfield Hall in "Jane Eyre" again reminds us to deal with that crazy woman in the attic before things get out of hand. (Kathryn Pritchett)

Like The Times:

Best Use of Mud: Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights. Here the mud was brilliantly deployed and liberally splattered on characters, on animals and across locations, both inside and out. The mud not only suggested the hardships of life on the moors in early 19th-century Yorkshire, but it also gave you something to look at when the acting of the older kids started to get a bit rubbish in the second half. (Kevin Maher)

The Phoenix Film Industry Examiner interviews Cary Fukunaga about the origins of the film:

“I would say I found ‘Jane Eyre’, I was thinking about adapting the novel on my own while I was waiting for ‘Sin Nombre’ to get made. I was thinking about other scripts to write, I had just finished another adaptation and was thinking about other stories of my youth and Bob Stevenson’s version of Jane Eyre was one of my favorites and thought it would be a great adaptation. 
But it didn’t happen (with a chuckle); I got busy with ‘Sin Nombre’.  While I was promoting ‘Sin Nombre’, I found out that the BBC had a ‘Jane’ on their slat and I wanted to find out what their take on it was!  So I asked to read it, liked the script, and I asked to meet the producer and the screenwriter Moira Buffini!  They liked me and my approach to the story, and, I liked them so I said ‘Let’s make this movie. That’s how it happened!” (Stan Robinson)

The New York Times reviews By Blood by Ellen Ullman:

And literature would be bereft without the love triangle in all its variations — one party dead (“Rebecca”), oblivious (“Othello”), mad (“Jane Eyre”) or a pile of old letters (“The Aspern Papers”).  (Parul Sehgal)

The Guardian interviews the writer Reggie Nadelson:

Who's your favourite writer?
Philip Roth … but only one? Can I have Graham Greene, Salman Rushdie and Charlotte Brontë, please (Only for Jane Eyre).

Keighley News informs about a local accident with some bizarre Brontë connections:

The driver of the other vehicle, Haworth man Ellison Moore, who works for Haworth-based haulage JVM, escaped injury.
He had been driving his vehicle -- named "Jane Eyre" -- back home towards Keighley after dropping off a load in Manchester. (David Knights)

Outlook India publishes a satirical piece about P.D. James:

There are still queries on why I wrote Death Comes to Pemberley, a sort of sequel to Pride and Prejudice. In media interviews, I said I loved Jane Austen and her Pemberley and why not stage a murder among familiar scenario and characters. I got some weird feedback though. Like why not murder off the arrogant Darcy and let ‘smarty pants’ Elizabeth Bennett solve the crime. Or get the idiot Mr Collins bashed on the head and killed, with the post-mortem revealing a total absence of brains!
But here, I can reveal the real reason. I was getting a bit tired of my longstanding hero, Adam Dalgliesh, who was getting on my nerves. I got him married off in my last book, his faithful assistant Kate Miskin will no longer sigh after him and perhaps his poetic faculties had also dimmed. Mind you, he had been with me since 1962 and had he been in real police service would have retired long back. Will I do murder sequels of more classics? Here too suggestions poured in. ‘Murder at the Orphanage’ (Oliver Twist), ‘The Guillotine Killings’ (A Tale of Two Cities), ‘Descending Heights’ (Wuthering Heights) and so on. Let me think about this. (V. Gangadhar)

Vernon Morning Star reviews a local concert of the electronic duo Chairlift:

The rain and mist of the dark English moors have drifted across the Atlantic to Brooklyn, once home to Sweathogs like Barbarino and Horseshack. (...) Illusion is made concrete as the Brontës are dropped off in front of the pizzeria.  (Dean Gordon-Smith)

Financial Times reviews the novel The Prisoner of Paradise by Romesh Gunesekera:

The Prisoner of Paradise is a delightful study in method writing, an affectionate, playful tribute to Lalla-Rookh, Jane Austen, the Brontës and the historical romance itself. (Susan Elderkin)

Simon Schama shares personal memories also on Financial Times:

So the fit between being British and being Jewish seemed to my parents, and to their two children to whom they had given the very British names of Simon and Tessa, utterly natural, beshert even – historically fated. As well as Dickens and Shakespeare on the bookshelf at home, there was Fielding, George Eliot, Austen, the Brontës, Hardy, Wells and (a special passion of Arthur’s who spoke as if he had known him personally) anything written by GB Shaw.

An alert from the Concord Journal:

Margot Livesey will be at the Concord Bookshop on Sunday to read from, answer questions and sign copies of her new novel, “The Flight of Gemma Hardy.” At once an homage to and a variation on the beloved classic “Jane Eyre,” Livesey’s take on an iron-willed orphan girl, determined to find her place in the world despite the odds stacked against her, is set in Scotland in the early 1960s.
Like many readers, Livesey says she first fell in love with “Jane Eyre” as a child, relating to Jane’s plight because of her own childhood unhappiness — details of which she has incorporated into Gemma’s story.
“I have reread Jane Eyre a number of times since my first passionate reading and my understanding of the novel has shifted with each experience,” Livesey writes. “Like most readers I was initially riveted by the discovery of Bertha in the attic, but on rereading I saw that Jane had a larger part in her own fate than I had first understood….The Flight of Gemma Hardy is, in my mind, neither my autobiography nor a retelling of Jane Eyre. Rather I am writing back to Charlotte Brontë, recasting Jane’s journey to fit my own courageous heroine and the possibilities of her time and place. And like Brontë I am, of course, stealing from my own life.”

Publishers Weekly talks about Jeannette Winterson:

Winterson’s mined the circumstances of her young life for her fiction, notably her first, hugely successful novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (U.K.’s Pandora Press 1985). But while she’s written novels, nonfiction, children’s books, and screenplays since then, she never expected she would write a memoir. It was discovering her adoption papers that “compelled her to start the journey” to find her mother. “I believed that my mother was dead,” Winterson says unapologetically. “Where do you think I got my information? The arch fiction writer, Mrs. Winterson. I thought, ‘if she can make up the ending of Jane Eyre, she can sure invent a dead mother.’ ”  (Louisa Ermelino)

Carlos Colón writes a moving obituary of his own mother in el Diario de Sevilla (Spain):

Por eso lloro Rebeca en el Llorens una noche de marzo de 1943; una jovencita de 16 años leyendo Cumbres borrascosas en la edición Crisol de Aguilar, sentada en el cierro de una casa de la plaza de Argüelles[.] (Translation)

Il Corriere della Sera (Italy) talks about Orhan Pamuk's views on literature:

Gli sembra di sognare: vede il mondo cogli occhi dei personaggi di Cime tempestose o di Anna Karenina ; passeggia nei paesaggi che essi frequentano. (Citati Pietro) (Translation)

Coopération (Switzerland) interviews the journalist Nathalie Ducommun:

Et j’aime me replonger dans des livres qui m’ont marquée, comme «Voyage au bout de la nuit» de Céline ou «Jane Eyre» de Charlotte Brontë.»  (Didier Neto) (Translation)

The Berliner Morgenpost (Germany) lists several famous sisters, including the Brontës. Maria Ripenberg at the Upsala Nya Tidning (Sweden) is a truly Brontëite:

Till den riktiga hyllan skulle jag t ex köpa Charlotte Brontës reade bladvändarklassiker Jane Eyre. Om jag inte redan ägde den alltså, och dessutom hade läst den två gånger. Likaså skulle jag satsa på Hjalmar Söderbergs Den allvarsamma leken – en roman som sannerligen förtjänar omläsning. (Translation)

The Times reviews Hark! A Vagrant by Kate Beaton;  Nekultura (Czech Republic), Review Every Day and Los calcetines no tienen glamour (in Spanish) review Jane Eyre 2011; hourglassphilosophies, La Petite Charmande de Prose (in French) and Books Anna Recommends post about the original novel; Parenthetical Views and elledoubleyouu do the same with Wuthering Heights; the Brontë Parsonage Blog gives information on yesterday's Gothic from the Brontës to Twilight conference; fearless... posts a poem inspired by Wuthering Heights; Abigails reviews Jane Slayre; Without an Art? doesn't like at all Villette.