"They were just too busy producing great literary works to be great gardeners"

In view of the forthcoming Brontë Yorkshire Garden at the Chelsea Flower Show (May 22-26), The Independent digs deeper on the subject of the Brontës and gardening:

Their books and poems – even their paintings – evoke the wild beauty that surrounded them at their remote parsonage home.
Yet although the Brontë sisters could conjure the elemental splendour of the Yorkshire moors with their pens and brushes, it seems they were sadly lacking when it came to cultivating nature on the small plot outside their home.
Research carried out while creating a special Brontë-themed garden for this summer's Chelsea Flower Show has unearthed evidence of the sisters' surprising lack of green-fingered talent.
Researchers at the Brontë Parsonage Museum at Haworth, West Yorkshire, discovered repeated references to the women's horticultural failings.
Among them was one from Charlotte's close friend Emily Nussey who described Haworth in 1871. "The garden, which was nearly all grass, and possessed only a few stunted thorns and shrubs, and a few currant bushes which Emily and Anne treasured as their own bit of fruit garden," she wrote.
Two decades earlier James M Hoppin, an early visitor after the cult of the Brontës began to spread after the publication of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, observed "a small flower garden (though rather run to waste now)".
Meanwhile, Charlotte's celebrated chronicler Elizabeth Gaskell, describes the "great change" endured by the author when she moved to Haworth – "a place where neither flowers nor vegetables would flourish and where a tree of even moderate dimensions might be hunted far and wide".
Tracy Foster, who is designing The Brontës' Yorkshire Garden on behalf of the regional tourism agency Welcome to Yorkshire, conceded that the windswept Pennine conditions were very challenging for both people and plants although the garden flourishes today in the hands of a skilled horticulturalist. "They were obviously very observant and made many comments about individual plants and flowers in their poems and novels and also painted them in exquisite detail so they were obviously very aware," she said.
"But the conditions they had were very difficult and exposed. Maybe they were just too busy producing great literary works to be great gardeners." [...]
The Chelsea garden will have as its centrepiece The Meeting of the Waters – a favourite moorland spot which the sisters would visit as children. Andrew McCarthy, director of the Brontë Parsonage Museum, said: "They were highly attached to the wilderness landscape of the moors rather than the much more cultivated idea of the domesticated garden." (Jonathan Brown)

The Guardian hosted a live webchat with writer Kim Newman. Here is one of the questions asked as Kim Newman's answer:

BigbadD asks:
Are there any gothic tropes which you feel are ripe for the picking or, perhaps more importantly, are glad haven't been touched or wish hadn't?
KimNewman replies:
[...]The Twilight films aren't to my taste - and the books even less so - but I think there are interesting things to be said about them. And teenage horror has been a vital area since I Was a Teenage Werewolf - one of the best titles of anything ever - in 1958. Though there's a version of The Monk out in the cinemas this week, the vast bulk of British and continental gothic literature outside a few famous examples remains surprisingly untapped by the movies. David Pirie pointed this out in 1973 and the situation remains unchanged - last year, we had the umpeenth versions of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, but where are the films of Melmoth the Wanderer, The Mysteries off Udolpho, The Castle of Otranto, 'The Vampyre', Uncle Silas, The Midnight Bell, Confessions of a Justified Sinner or The Beetle? And that's just the pre-20th century canon - modern masters like Robert Aickman, Ramsey Campbell, Algernon Blackwood, Peter Straub, etc., are similarly neglected by the cinema. (Sam Jordison)

Publishers' Weekly's Shelf Talker looks at some covers whose book are certainly better off not being judged by them. Look at this Wuthering Heights cover:

This is a bold design which succeeds admirably at failing in both categories. Its ability to horrify Wuthering Heights fans proved to be very pronounced in our test group. One tester, after her eyes lit on the cover, literally shrieked in pain saying. “Are you telling me this is real? This isn’t even period. Didn’t someone tell them that it wasn’t a regency romance? Why is this happening? AAAH I can’t look at it anymore.” Others noted that Catherine’s dress would have been quite something to try and walk along the wild moors in. Another tester remarked that “Heathcliff looks more like the quiet guy who sits behind you in chem class, the one your parents wish you would date instead of that long-haired ne’er-do-well you’ve taken up with.” In short, the cover’s ability to completely misrepresent the characters it portrays caused universal feelings of revulsion in our test group. Mission accomplished vis-à-vis appalling familiar readers. In terms of the second element—alluring only new readers who will then dislike the book—Wuthering Heights has a strong appeal to young readers and there is thus an almost unavoidable amount of inadvertent success which is sure to occur with any version. Nonetheless, the vapidly romantic nature of the cover does strongly insure that those teenagers who are too shallow to enjoy Wuthering Heights will be the likeliest ones to open the book. (Kenny Brechner)

The Spectator Book Blog discusses classics, ebooks and books:

Classics were predicted to be one of the first things to fall at the feet of eBooks. Traditional booksellers — like me — have been in a perpetual cold sweat, wondering how to make up the lost revenue for around a third of our sales. Classics publishers must have been positively feverish with worry.
The reason for the panic is thus: the great majority of classic works of literature are old — think Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, the Brontës — and, therefore, out of copyright. That means that anyone who has the time and inclination can publish Dickens online and nobody can come after them screaming copyright theft. So an eBook of Great Expectations, for instance, can be found, easily, for free. So why, with everyone bragging about their Kindles, would anyone bother going into a bookshop and buying a paperback edition for £7.99? Why spend money for something you can get for free? (Emily Rhodes)

The Chronicle's ProfHacker broaches on a similar topic:

The Classroom Context
First, I should make clear that I’m simply describing my own experience in two upper-level literature courses this semester. I teach nineteenth-century British literature, so all of the texts I teach are in the public domain and hence available for e-readers. These are specialized courses that do not use a survey textbook . I do order specific paperback editions of the novels and poetry for the course, and recommend them to students, but I do not require that my students use those editions. If someone already owns a copy of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, I’m not going to require her to buy another copy of the book. In fact, the differences among available paperback editions of some of the novels have often sparked useful discussion in my courses about textual editing, book marketing, and canon formation. (Natalie Houston)

San Francisco Book Review posts about Harper Design's Wuthering Heights edition, illustrated by Tracy Dockray:

In the gothic novel, there is a tradition of doubling the characters and author; Emily Brontë does this through two households, two generations, and two pairs of children. Struggles of class, arrogance, contempt and selfishness are all main characters in this classic novel, but the theme of the book must be that of revenge corrupting its vessel and rendering the power of love into a most destructive force.

Chris's Film Blog posts about Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights (the film is screened tomorrow April 28 at the 2012 Minneapolis St Paul International Film Festival); Smutstiteln writes in Swedish about April Lindner's Jane.