The new Brocklehursts

It seems that the Yorkshire stone thefts in Thornton are still happening, as The Telegraph & Argus reports:

Thieves have struck again in Thornton pinching yet more Yorkshire Stone just metres away from the house where the Brontë sisters were born.
The theft of seven flagstones from the pathway outside 78 Market Street was discovered by Steven Stanworth, the chairman of the Brontë Birthplace Trust 2012, as he gave an interview in Market Street on Wednesday.
Mr Stanworth blasted the vandals, claiming they must be part of an organised gang after three gravestones were taken from the Old Bell Chapel, which also has Brontë links, last week. Mr Stanworth, also the church warden at the Chapel, said yet another part of the district’s history had been taken away.
“The community need to take notice and be vigilant and not just in quiet areas. Market Street is the main thoroughfare through Thornton and anything suspicious needs reporting,” he said. (Dolores Cowburne)

The Yorkshire Post talks about the general heritage problem:

However, at some point in the last week, most likely in the middle of the night, the 400-year-old Yorkshire chapel where the Brontë sisters were baptised became a scene of crime.
The evidence suggest this was no mindless act of vandalism. With centuries-old gravestones ripped up from the cemetery, along with stones from the chapel walls and a nearby footpath, it appeared a carefully planned operation. (...)
The Alliance to Reduce Crime Against Heritage (Arch) was set up to assess the impact of crime on some of the country’s valuable assets and its early findings suggest the problem is worse than anyone first thought.
According to ARCH’s most recent figures, more than 70,000 listed buildings were targeted by criminals last year, with the number of incidents estimated at around 200 a day.
And Yorkshire, where more than a fifth of properties have been damaged, is worryingly near the top of the league. Following the theft of stone from St James’ Church in Thornton, Ann Dinsdale, acting director of the Brontë Society, said: “I just don’t know how you go about educating people that this is a part of their heritage they are destroying.” It’s a problem Chief Inspector Mark Harrison hopes ARCH will help to address. (Sarah Freeman)

A few months ago we echoed the words of Patrick Brontë fighting against the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act commenting on some events in the most recent Irish elections. Tanya Gold writes in The Guardian about the new coalition plans to reform the welfare system and we feel as if have heard this story before. Will we ever learn?

This week Iain Duncan Smith, who deports himself with the grave charity of Jane Eyre's Mr Brocklehurst doing harm to do good, suggested limiting child benefit to the first two children if the parents are unemployed. If you work, his idea goes, you are helped; if you don't, you are punished, even as hundreds chase every job. To support this dull demonisation of poverty, he conjured the usual monsters, so voters might forget he is actually attacking them. Out came the nightmare visions of millions of feckless parents having children out of spite, which entirely ignores the truth that the poor, when in work, work harder than anyone, for fewer rewards.

Publishers Weekly presents the new edition of Rotten Reviews Redux, edited by Bill Henderson which includes the infamous North British Review of Wuthering Heights in 1847:

"Here all the faults of Jane Eyre (by Charlotte Brontë) are magnified a thousand fold, and the only consolation which we have in reflecting upon it is that it will never be generally read." -James Lorimer, North British Review, 1847, on Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë.

Triangle publishes a negative review of Wuthering Heights 2001:

But in this case, curiously enough, the effect is the opposite. The grunts and howls seem every bit as mannered as the florid diction of Olivier and Oberon, perhaps even more so. Their artifice, like Bronte’s own, was overt, whereas Arnold strives to disguise hers in the trappings of authenticity. And as a result, the impact – the grandeur, the art – of “Wuthering Heights” is diminished. (A.O.Scott)

The Brisbane Times mentions the Victorian concerns about childless women:

About the same time, Edward Gibbon talked about single English women as "growing thin, pale, listless and cross", and William Thackeray, in a private letter, described the author Charlotte Brontë as wanting a ''Tomkins'' to rescue her from terminal spinsterhood. ''But you see she is a little bit of a creature without a penny worth of good looks, thirty years old I should think, buried in the country and eating up her own heart there, and no Tomkins will come,'' he wrote. (Jacqueline Maley)

The Independent interviews the novelist Kate Mosse:

Choose a favourite author and say why you admire her/him
They change from week to week... But stalwarts include Emily Brontë, Willa Cather, MR James and TS Eliot.

Dave Astor discusses rich men in literature in The Huffington Post:

Then there are the upper-class characters a reader has mixed or negative feelings about. For instance, Rochester in Charlotte Brontë's masterpiece Jane Eyre is basically a good man who had become embittered, but he does possess some arrogant "I want what I want" tendencies.

The New York Times reviews San Miguel by T. Coraghessan Boyle:

Fanciful, novel-reading, artistic Edith, who misses her piano and dance lessons and pines for her friends back in San Francisco, compares the island to “Wuthering Heights.” “Only where’s my Heathcliff?” (Tatjana Soli)

The Scotsman reviews Inconvenient People by Sarah Wise

Charlotte Brontë’s first Mrs Rochester; Wilkie Collins’ Woman in White … Victorian society was stalked by the spectre of the “madwoman in the attic”. And, still more alarmingly, by that of the sane woman branded mad for no other reason than her nervous anxiety, her feisty independence, or her wealth. In fact, this fascinating book makes clear, it was at least as likely to be a man who was “put away”, given that inherited property invariably followed the male line.  (Michael Kerrigan)

Financial Times reports that goth is back in fashion:

Black lace looked more demure on covered-up gowns at Valentino (think Jane Eyre) while a cobweb-lace knit at Helmut Lang suggested spiders had taken over the atelier. (Carola Long)

The Times talks about the visit of the Queen Elizabeth II to the BFI:

Yesterday, the Queen was still marching on, in a purple velvet hat and coat, with gold buttons, taking a tour of the BFI Reuben Library and the Mediatheque before settling into the cinema with the crowd.
She watched a clip reel from great British films, featuring the occasional bare bottom. The cuts included Psycho, The Life of Brian, Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights and Riachard Ayoade's Submanrine. The final clip was, appropriately, from The King's Speech. (Kate Muir)

The National Post reviews Camille Paglia’s Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars:

In Glittering Images, she ends her survey with George Lucas. It is true, as Paglia maintains, that the bridging of art and technology is an important aspect of much late-20-century art and Lucas is a master of this. Despite all the gadgetry in Star Wars, however, there’s a hollowness to the series — despite, or perhaps because of — Lucas’s immersing himself in studies of mythology by writers such as Joseph Campbell and James Frazer. These authorities were meant to help him design his own myth. “He constructed a vast, original, self-referential mythology like that of James Macpherson’s pseudo-Celtic Ossian poems, which swept Europe in the late eighteenth century, or the Angria and Gondal story cycle spun by the Bronte children,” Paglia writes. (Philip Marchand)

Rzeczpospolita (Poland) presents a new Wuthering Heigths theatre adaptation (by Julia Holewińska) that will open in Warsow next November 17:

Na pewno wcześniej swoją wersję „Wichrowych Wzgórz" pokażą tam Julia Holewińska i Kuba Kowalski. Hollywood zobaczył w powieści Emily Brontë materiał na wielki melodramat, opowieść o tragicznej miłości w efektownej scenerii ponurych wrzosowisk. – My próbujemy spojrzeć na „Wichrowe Wzgórza" jak na swoistą encyklopedię miłości. Brontë zawarła w swojej powieści niezliczoną ilość wzorców miłosnych relacji, od tych bratersko-siostrzanych, poprzez miłość rodzicielską i synowską, koncentrując się wreszcie na związkach kochanków – mówi Kowalski. Czytanie na nowo klasyki to specjalność nowej dyrektor teatru Agnieszki Glińskiej. Jak wyjdzie to teatralnej młodzieży? (Jacek Tomczuk) (Translation)

Indian Ruminations interviews the poet Aiswarya T. Anish:

Who is your favorite author/poet and work? Can you tell us whyyou consider it so?
I love classics, and the work of Thomas Hardy, Charlotte Brontë and Charles Dickens. They have beautiful imagery and they feel so real. Looking at modern writing and the old ones, we can learn a lot. (Christina Anna Alex)

The Spenborough Guardian celebrates the 40th anniversary of the foundation of the Spen Valley Historical Society which, as readers of this blog know, is very much involved with the Red House Museum and the restoration of the preservation of Rydings at Birstall which was the old home of Ellen Nussey.

SiOL TV announces that Wuthering Heights 2011 is available on the Slovenian PPV; the film is reviewed on and Still there are Songs; The Big Book Cull, A Rapariga dos Livros (in Portuguese), Женский Путь или Как Полюбить Себя? (in Russian) and  Books and Tea post abouteviews Jane Eyre; Tartaruga Máxica (in Spanish) talks about the 2011 version; the Best of British blog posts about Charlotte Brontë; nickb676 posts a nice picture of the Brontë moors in autumn.