Gardens and Bluebells

The Royal Horticultural Society remember how

The Brontës’ Yorkshire garden is the 2012 RHS People's Choice for small gardens - chosen from the Fresh, Artisan and Generation garden categories.

Horticultural Week also mentions the Brontës' garden, designed  by Tracy Foster and Rebecca Chesney from the Brontë Weather Project has visited it. Welcome to Yorkshire has pictures of the garden and the winners.

The Times talks about female writers to coincide with the Orange Prize:

Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell sometimes stayed in each other’s homes, but they were more acquaintances than friends (Emily Midorikawa and Emma Sweeney)

Let's not abandon flowers, The Telegraph has an article about the most English of wild flowers, the bluebell:

For its fleeting appearance is part of the bluebell’s magic. Like spring itself, it never lasts long. There is a sad joy about it which is, no doubt, why it so appealed to the Brontë sisters.
Anne — on her way to York to become a governess — was characteristically gloomy until she “looked upon a bank” and her “wandering glances fell upon a little trembling flower, a single sweet bluebell”. The sight cheered her up no end, which — bearing in mind Anne Brontë’s character — was a wonderful achievement in itself.

Financial Times reviews The Colour of Milk by Nell Leyshon:

The Colour of Milk has occasional Brontë-esque undertones, from nods to Charlotte’s sexual politics to Emily’s rural imagery. It is above all a disturbing statement on the social constraints faced by 19th-century women. (Maria Crawford)

The Austin Chronicle lists Now Now Oh Now in its theatre section:

They used to call it CL1000P, but now the Rude Mechs have transformed those earlier workshops into their newest multivalenced spectacle. This full production – inspired by evolutionary biology, the Brontës, and Live Action Role Playing communities – weaves together "a locked room puzzle, a lecture on sexual selection in evolutionary biology, and the world's weirdest night of Dungeons and Dragons."

The Guardian talks about the Stanza Stones project in West Yorkshire:

The contrast always seems so severe. You start down in the valley: it's steep-sided and dark, choked with lines of sooty stone houses that press up against the canal, the road and the river. Then you blast up through some woods and emerge in outer space, a place filled with light, cloud and long views. No wonder West Yorkshire has been jangling the literary nerve for generations, squeezing prose and poetry from residents pent up in the valley but with a yearning for the hills. Now I'd come out with friend and part-time poet Peter Finch, who lives locally, to find a few verses that had escaped up on to the moors, words written by Simon Armitage that have been inscribed on six rocks across a 47-mile route that snakes through the territories of Ted Hughes and the Brontës.

Counterpunch reviews The Last Warner Woman by Kei Miller:

The narration skips back and forth in time (beginning in the 1940s and ending, roughly, forty years later) and introduces the narrator known as The Writer Man.  He collects the stories of Adamine, her mother, and numerous other characters, including several in Britain after Adamine has agreed to become the wife of a Jamaican who has recently lost his wife.  But well before we hear of that marriage we learn that Adamine has been placed in a mental institution in Britain, a horrifying mirroring of her mother’s own situation in the leprosarium, a generation earlier.  Milton Dehaney, the husband, has had her incarcerated because she talks back to him.  Shades of Jane Eyre, which has already been glossed earlier in the story.  Miss Lilly, one of the lepers, read and re-read Charlotte Brontë’s novel obsessively.  The book couldn’t be taken away from her. (Charles R. Larson)

Salon wonders whether the Harry Potter or Twilight sagas are serious enough to enter scholar studies:

“Twilight,” which I suspect will have an even greater impact on America’s book culture because of the fan networks it has inspired, is doubly damned as unserious because it’s not only “for children” (that is, teenagers), but it’s also a romance, surely the most reflexively disdained of all literary genres. Throughout the early 19th century, all novels were seen in more or less this light: as fanciful stories read by silly women seeking escape from sterner truths, women all too prone to absorbing dangerously misguided notions of life and love. (For the record, I tend to agree with the later opinion, but that doesn’t mean I think “Wuthering Heights” beneath scholar interest.) As recently as the 1930s, it was controversial for any novel at all to be assigned to students at Oxford. Novels were regarded as recreational reading, not matter for significant study.  (Laura Miller)

The Huffington Post has an article about the decline and failure of male role models for young boys:

Schools too, are increasingly becoming a place where men aren't present either as mentors or role models. According to the National Education Association the number of male teachers is approaching a 40-year low. With reading assignments with heroines, like Wuthering Heights, and the removal of recess and hands-on learning, it's becoming difficult for boys to find any subject in school that's interesting to them or that stimulates their imaginations.  (Dr. Philip Zimbardo & Nikita Duncan)

We rather think that Wuthering Heights is not exactly a good example of a heroine-like book.

The National Business Review (New Zealand) publishes an article about E L James Fifty Shades of Grey:

Mr Grey descends from a long line of damaged heroes with lots of money who have set feminine hearts aflutter since the 1800s.
Remember Heathcliff (who wasn't very fanciable until he went off and made a fortune), Mr Rochester, from Jane Eyre , Max de Winter at Mandalay and, of course, the incomparable Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind.
In these books sex was alluded to, but not explicated. In these less imaginative times there is a need out there for well written literature that includes lots of great sex. (Lorraine Craighead)

The Wichita Falls Times Record reviews the film The Woman in Black:

The British moors are scary.
Case in point: "An American Werewolf in London," in which a werewolf attacks two American college students who fail to heed the warnings of the pub locals to not hike through the moors at night.
Second case in point: "Wuthering Heights" and multiple sightings of Cathy's ghost — yes, again on the British moors.
And then there's "The Hound of the Baskervilles." (Lana Sweeten-Shults)

Psychology Today begins an article with an Emily Brontë quote:

If I could I would always work in silence and obscurity, and let my efforts be known by their results - Emily Brontë. (Christopher Peterson)

Nonfiction (France) comments on a new edition of Virginia Woolf's works in French and begins the article like this:

“Laissés dans le train, oubliés dans un meuble, feuilletés, déchirés et finissant en lambeaux, les anciens volumes ont fait leur temps, et pour les nouveaux arrivants dans leurs nouvelles demeures se préparent de nouvelles éditions, prélude à de nouvelles lectures et à de nouveaux amis” . C’est par ces mots que Virginia Woolf accueillait les rééditions de Jane Austen, des sœurs Brontë et de George Meredith en 1922.

L'étrange bibliothèque de Calenwen (in French) and Integrated Skills post about Wuthering Heights; Victorian 9322 uploads two video tutorials of a Charlotte Brontë-inspired make-up and hair; the Bydgoszcz Gazeta (in Polish) talks about Wuthering Heights 2011.