Tabby's family

According to the Daily Mail Dan Aykroyd is both a Brontëite and a man with a Brontë past:

Researching his family tree, he has learned that he is related to the Brontë sisters’ surrogate mother Tabitha Aykroyd — the woman who gave the young girls their love of books.
The Brontës — Charlotte, Emily and Anne — were cared for throughout their childhood by Tabitha, a forbear of the Canadian-born comedian, whose string of hit films include Ghostbusters and The Blues Brothers.
She read aloud to all three when they were young and growing up motherless at their vicarage home in Haworth, Yorkshire.
Aykroyd, who became a U.S. citizen in the Seventies, tells me at a reception for his Crystal Head vodka: ‘I’m staying with my wife Donna with friends in London and I’ve been looking into my English heritage.
‘Tabitha worked for the Brontës for 30 years and she was buried by the parsonage wall.
‘She was very loyal. I absolutely love Wuthering Heights and all the Brontë books so it was fantastic news when I discovered the connection.’ (Richard Kay)

Surrogate mother is taking it a bit too far though. After all, they had their aunt too.

A couple of festivals featuring Brontë stuff. This media centre says that

Other highlights of the [York Literature Festival] programme include a guided stroll through literary York on Thursday March 29th, which will give visitors a chance to visit the birthplace of WH Auden and learn about the city's connections with the Brontë sisters and Charles Dickens.

And Hollywood Chicago reports that

This year’s edition [of the Annual EU Film Festival at Chicago’s Siskel Center], running from March 2nd through the 29th, includes high profile films from world renowned filmmakers like Andrea Arnold (“Wuthering Heights”). . .

A reader of the Guardian suggests the last lines of Wuthering Heights as the best last line of a novel and this Huffington Post columnist may just agree with that:

In particular, I idolize the Brits for their fictional characters. If shipwrecked on a deserted island and in need of reading materials to last a lifetime, I'd much rather have aristocratic and feisty Emma Woodhouse and her charming Mr. Knightly with me than puritanical Hester Prynne and her pastor, Arthur (yawn) Dimmesdale. Give me Heathcliff and Catherine! (Julie Gerstenblatt)

And an announcement from the Derby Telegraph:

LOCKO Amateur Dramatics Society (LADS) are looking for a young male actor.
"Due to personal circumstances a member of the cast of Wuthering Heights has had to give up the role," explained the group's publicity officer Corinne Eyre.
"We are looking for a young man 18-25 to take a small, but pivotal, role in the play and we are hoping someone might come forward."
The play will be performed in Spondon Village Hall from April 25-28 and anyone interested can contact Corinne by email at corinneeyre@hotmail.com or by telephone on 01332 669138.

Of course Charlotte Brontë sourced the name from the area, but it's still funny that the person is charge's last name is Eyre.

The Yorkshire Post has a short piece on Thornton and The Occidental Weekly reviews Jeffrey Eugenides's The Marriage Plot mentioning its Brontë reference.

Não gosto de plágio has a brilliant post on the Brazillian translations of the works of Charlotte Brontë. Facebook user SJMPhoto has uploaded pictures from the Brontë homeland. Jane Eyre 2011 is reviewed by  Great Old Movies, The Far Side of the World, CineCríticas (in Portuguese) and Docta Ignorantia (in Spanish). Darling Duckie and Bubblan i bibblan (in Swedish) post about the novel.

Finally, an alert for today, as seen on the Buffalo News Gusto Blog:

Santa Clara University based Victorian literature scholar Melissa Donegan will deliver a talk entitled "Room to Write: British Women's Survival Narratives" at 12:15 p.m. Thursday in the Social Hall of Campbell Student Union at Buffalo State College, 1300 Elmwood Ave.
Donegan's talk will touch upon many of the themes of her 2008 Ph.D dissertation at the University of Iowa, including representations of domestic violence in George Eliot’s "Janet’s Repentance," Anne Brontë’s "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall," Sarah Grand’s "The Beth Book," and Elizabeth Dobb’s "The Autobiography of a Charwoman, As Chronicled by Annie Wakeman."  These texts are employed to "explore the ways in which the women writers and their writing heroines employ storytelling to describe and survive abuse and to make meaning out of loss."
Using Virginia Woolf’s "A Room of One’s Own" as an inflection point, Donegan reconfigures "the creation of domestic space in terms of negotiating safety, planning escape, and making room to write." She concludes that "nineteenth-century British women of all classes learned to use narrative construction to survive domestic abuse, find meaning in their pain, and begin to establish a sense of community with their sister sufferers." (R.D. Pohl)