A blue plaque for Jean Rhys

Starting today, Jean Rhys, rightly called by The Independent 'literature's great outsider', will have her very own blue plaque in London:

Jean Rhys is best known as the author of Wide Sargasso Sea, the "prequel" to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. She is less well known as a perennial outsider who was ostracised for her West Indian upbringing, and then shunned by the literary establishment after a descent into alcoholism and prostitution.
Today, the author will receive some recognition for her contribution to post-colonial literature when English Heritage unveils a blue plaque at the London home she shared with the second of her three husbands. Rhys's champions, who remain few nearly 33 years after her death, believe the small honour is long overdue, and will go some way to restore the reputation of one of English literature's more complex writers. [...]
At Paultons Square, Rhys's plaque will be one of only a dozen or so English Heritage unveils each year. But residents offered mainly blank looks when asked about their former neighbour. "Isn't she a scientist?" asked one woman yesterday. "I didn't know she lived here."
After Tilden Smith's death in 1945, Rhys married for a third time, and in 1960 moved to Devon, where she wrote Wide Sargasso Sea, published in 1966, and died in 1979. It was this novel, which portrays the first Mrs Rochester's Caribbean childhood, that brought her fame, earning greater recognition than herself. (Simon Usborne)

Coincidentally, The Telegraph discusses John Sutherland's latest book The Lives of the Novelists and claims that,

In his entertaining new book, The Lives of the Novelists, John Sutherland observes that these lives are getting longer. Nothing remarkable in that of course; we all know that life expectancy is stretching out, and that it is now quite usual for children to be acquainted with at least a couple of their eight great-grandparents. Politicians and policemen may be getting younger, but novelists are getting older. So they are faced with problems that most of their illustrious predecessors didn’t have to deal with. Fielding died at 47, Scott at 61, Austen at 42, Thackeray at 52, Dickens at 58, and none of the Brontë sisters lived to be 40. [...]
Occasionally they pick up a novel they wrote long ago, and read it with surprise, admiration, and then pain. And then they think: “Fielding and Jane Austen and all the Brontës were already dead at the age I was when I wrote that – and so they didn’t have to find matter for a new novel in their sixties, seventies, eighties…” (Allan Massie)

Food for thought, isn't it?

Bury Focus has an article on Simon Warner's current project concerning Top Withens:

The wild moors of the South Pennines have offered artists inspiration for centuries and this year a landscape filmmaker will bridge the gap between the Brontës and the twenty-first century.
Taking Top Withens, the ruined farmhouse thought by many to be the inspiration behind Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, as his focal point Simon Warner, artist in residence for the Pennine Prospects Watershed Landscape Project, hopes to explore the literary landscape of the South Pennines and people’s connections to it.
Through a three-part exhibition Simon will bring together his own landscape video films shown on miniature screens, the work produced through his collaboration with community groups and a photographic history of the progressive ruination of Top Withens by showcasing the iconic images taken over the decades by landscape photographers, including Bill Brandt, Fay Godwin and Alexander Keighley. The exhibition will be shown at the Brontë Parsonage Museum from Friday, September 28, to Monday, December 3, and will coincide with a symposium at West Lane Baptist Church, Haworth, on October 6.
“The symposium will be an exploration of how we understand landscape,” explained Simon. “I have invited a diverse range of presenters to the event including a local historian, geography professor, writer, landscape artist and performer. A symposium is like a pack of cards; it’s my job to bring it all together and engage a wide audience. There will be some people there for the intellectual ideas, some there for the art and some for the landscape. I’m aiming by bringing them all together and then hopefully they will make connections and share their inspirations.”
Simon is the fifth artist in residence for the Watershed Landscape Project, which is funded through the Heritage Lottery Fund and managed by Pennine Prospects. His work continues on from that of Char March, Angie Rogers, Andrew McMillan and Sally Barker. All the artists have taken their inspiration from the South Pennines as a whole, examining different aspects of the area; Simon’s work will concentrate on the watershed moorland between Haworth and Wycoller, with a particular focus on Top Withens. [...]
Despite the fact Simon has lived only an hour’s hike from the ruin since 1983 and walked there many times it has never become familiar. Maybe it’s the change in altitude, vegetation, or the remoteness of Top Withens that prohibits familiarity? Maybe this is its appeal and what continues to draw people there? Simon hopes to find out.

FlavorWire has compiled a Jane Eyre mixtape - well worth a look and a listen! Meanwhile, The Inquirer (Philippines) recommends 'catching' a man who reads:

Date a man who reads. You’ll find him in a park, beneath a tree, with a newly acquired book whose pages could be white or yellow; or sitting by the bus window, relishing the yellow light, his perfect aphrodisiac for reading. He always welcomes a conversation with a stranger who likes to read Austen, Brontë, Woolf, Dickinson, and Niffenegger. (Carlo Hernandez Andrion)

The Epoch Times discusses Emily Brontë's poem The Harp. And Sue Lonoff posts about Charlotte Brontë's French in her first known devoir on the Brussels Brontë Blog.

Las mejores críticas de cine discusses Jane Eyre on film in Spanish and BooksUnbound reviews on YouTube April Lindner's Jane and eventually Jane Eyre.