The importance of Top Withens

Grough features photographer Simon Warner's current project:

A professional photographer will chart the decay of a ruined farmhouse high on the Yorkshire hills, which is passed by thousands of walkers on the Pennine Way.
Top Withens is also visited by countless tourists who make the walk to the ruins, almost 1,400ft (423m) up on the moors above Stanbury in West Yorkshire.
Local photographer and videographer Simon Warner will showcase the progressive ruination of the building, said to be the location in which Emily Brontë set Wuthering Heights in her novel.
Using images taken by some of the best known photographers over the decades, including Bill Brandt, Fay Godwin and Alex Keighley, Mr Warner who is 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.
He said: “The more people know I’m interested in Top Withens the more they want to tell me their stories.
“It’s a special place to so many people: ashes have been scattered there and I know of at least one person who has proposed to his girlfriend at Top Withens.
“But why is it so important? Obviously it has the Brontës link; Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath both wrote poems about the site and many photographers have captured the scene over the years. But is there more to it than that?
“From Top Withens and the Alcomden Stones not far away you can see for miles. [...]
People travel half way around the world to visit the ruin, with many Japanese tourists among them; others pass it while hiking on the Pennine Way, but many may just be out for a Sunday afternoon walk with their dog.
Working with a group of tourism students to conduct a survey Simon hopes to find out why people hike to the remote spot above Haworth.
A three-part exhibition will be staged later this year, with Mr Warner’s video films shown on miniature screens; the photographic exhibition featuring the famed photographers; and work produced by collaboration with community groups.
The exhibition will open in September in the village of Haworth, which was home to the Brontë family, with a symposium on the subject the following month. (Liz Roberts)

The Times posts about Charlotte Brontë's newly-discovered devoir 'L'ingratitude' and her letters to Constantin Heger:

The bicentenary of Charlotte Brontë’s birth is four years off, but already interest in the author’s life is increasing. The growing focus of attention is the relationship she had with Professor Constantin Héger [sic], a schoolmaster with whom she became infatuated at the age of 25, while studying languages at his boarding school in Brussels. Last week the London Review of Books published a long-lost short story, L’Ingratitude, the first known piece of homework she was set by her married tutor. A book is also in the works by Claire Harman concerning Brontë’s unrequited love for him, while a new anthology, Love Letters: 2,000 Years of Romance, makes public the surviving correspondence between Brontë and Héger. Like her mistake-strewn story, three of the four letters were written in French. In one misssive, Brontë reflected, “I have never heard French spoken but once since I left Brussels — and then it sounded like music in my ears — every word was most precious to me because it reminded me of you.” Professor Héger’s response to the love letters was to tear them up, perhaps thinking them nothing more than the infatuations of an admiring student. But his wife found and stitched the pieces together with thread. They are preserved between thin panes of glass in the British Library’s archives. Brontë’s feelings soon developed from desire to despair. In her final letter to Héger she decried: “I have tried to forget you. But I have not been able to overcome either my regrets or my impatience — and that is truly humiliating — not to know how to get the mastery over one’s own thoughts, to be the slave of a regret, a memory, the slave of a dominant and fixed idea which has become a tyrant over one’s mind.” Brontë might not have mastered her thoughts, but she almost certainly channelled them into her work: Héger is understood to be the model for M. Paul Emanuel in Villette, and in her letters she calls him “the master” — the original title of her first novel, The Professor. It’s possible that Héger remained ignorant of his fictional fame, and it seems he learnt that the letters had survived only when he was shown them again on his death bed in 1896. The “lost letters” were not publicised until Héger’s son gave them to the British Museum in 1913. They were published by The Times for an audience eager to learn more of the writer whose books “read as if they were autobiography”. In part, perhaps they were. (Fiona Wilson)

Writer Ellen Ullman is quite a Brontëite, as per her answer to one of the questions asked by PopMatters:

2. The fictional character most like you?As you’ll see as we go along, I can’t seem to pick the “one” in each question. In this case, the moment I decided on a single character, others knocked upon my door and demanded entry. The two heroines who most recently walked in: [...]
Lucy Snowe, in Villette, by Charlotte Brontë. She constantly faces adversity. Her way is to persevere, batting down “Hope” and “Desire” with “Reason” and “Reality”.
In the end, it seems that, after all, she has gotten her heart’s desire. But maybe not? Bronte coyly leaves the question open.
As per my gloomy side, Lucy and I dare not count on being happy.
Twelve years ago, I had the great fortune of finding a wonderful life partner. Then again “Reader, I married him” assures nothing. It simply begins the great and perilous challenge of marriage. (Karen Zarker)

This columnist from the Independent (Ireland) remembers reading Jane Eyre as a sick child:

I had asthma as a child, so I was off school often. I read a lot, my mother's childhood books with hard, red covers. What Katy Did and Jane Eyre offered with a casual challenge, "You're probably too young to enjoy this ... " Too young, pffff, I'll give her too young. There were my own paperbacks, Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys, Milly Molly Mandy and The Borrowers, appropriately enough from the library. (Aine O'Connor)

And this columnist from The Frisky has also read it ad wonders,

I’ve never read a romance novel of any sort (unless Jane Eyre counts?), so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from the genre. (Chiara Atik)

No, we'd say it doesn't really count.

The Timaru Herald discusses ukeleles and praises the Ukelele Orchestra of Great Britain:

Watching and listening to the British version perform The Good, The Bad and the Ugly is highly recommended, to say nothing of their rendition of Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights. 

The Province looks back on what Charlotte Brontë was doing on March 5th, 1839:

1839: Charlotte Brontë writes to the Reverend Henry Nussey, declining marriage. The 23-year-old Bronëe tells him that he would find her "romantic and eccentric" and not practical enough to be a clergyman's wife. Rather than marry, Brontë struggles as a teacher and governess to help support her brother Branwell's literary aspirations. In the end, Branwell's excesses will destroy him; his sisters, though, all become literary figures.

Meredith Kendall posts about being unable to put Jane Eyre down and Knightleyemma writes about the 2011 adaptation. Erdeaka's book review posts about Wuthering Heights and Tonårsboken writes in Swedish about the 2011 adaptation. David Maine discusses both novels.