BBT plan to buy Brontë Birthplace and the Red House is now a Grade II* building

The Telegraph & Argus informs of the initiative of the Brontë Birthplace Trust to raise money to make a bid for the Brontë birthplace in Thornton:

The Brontë Birthplace Trust is looking to get a Community Right to Bid in place on the house in Market Street, Thornton, after it was put on sale for £129,950.
If the bid goes through, the house would be reserved for the group to buy if it raises sufficient funds or receives a grant.
The group, which aims to turn the house into a museum as part of a plan to help boost tourism in the village, has said it hopes to have the bid in place within the next week.
BBT chairman Steve Stanworth said: “Obviously if someone comes and puts a bid in before we buy it then it has gone again, so we are really going to have to be on our toes and get the thing together and make sure we can get in before it gets sold.
“I don’t think it will be sold in a hurry, but obviously other people could just come along and put a bid in and buy it, so until we get this in place we are in limbo really.”
Under the Localism Act, the Community Right to Bid was introduced this autumn, requiring local authorities to maintain a register of assets of community value which have been nominated by residents.
The Community Right to Bid is now in force and gives people the chance to bid to buy and take over the running of assets that are of value to the local community.
The new rules mean the owners of land and property on the list are unable to sell them without first notifying the Council.
This triggers a six-week moratorium, giving community groups and parish councils the opportunity to express an interest in bidding for the property.
If an expression of interest is received, groups then have six months to prepare their bid. At the end of this period the property is removed from the list and the owner can sell it to whoever they want.
Mr Stanworth said the group had applied for the Council to list the property, which it hoped to go through in the next week.
He said: “It could regenerate Market Street and put a bit of new life into it.
“Once we have established the Community Right To Bid we have to find someone to give us a grant to buy it or raise funds. The Brontë Birthplace Trust will then own it.
“We would like to run it as a museum, a working museum, where people can come along and be taken around it, and then the whole community could benefit. The Brontë Birthplace would link up with the Old Bell Chapel and the South Square project, so it’s a three-pronged tourist attraction.
“The objective is education, to get school children coming round and things like that.” (James Rush)

The news of the monstrous windfarm plan in Ovenden Moor has reached Sky News:

At Ovenden Moor in West Yorkshire, Yorkshire Wind Power wants to replace 23 wind turbines generating 9.2MW of power with nine turbines generating up to 23MW.
But the size of the new turbines has led to campaigners in nearby Haworth, home to the Brontë Museum, complaining that the environment will be blighted - while denying charges of nimbyism.
"This is everyone's back yard, this is heritage landscape," said Chris Gwent, the heritage and conservation officer for the Brontë Society. (Gerard Tubb)

Fortunately there's also good news in preserving the Brontë-related heritage. The Spenborough Guardian announces that:

Gomersal’s Red House Museum has been upgraded to Grade II* because of its architectural and historical interest.
The news has been welcomed by campaigners who, earlier this year, fought to stop Kirklees closing the museum because of budget cuts.
The upgrade from Grade II was made on the recommendation of English Heritage and was agreed by the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport.
It follows representations made by local historian and author Dr Gillian Cookson, Imelda Marsden of the Kirklees Brontë Group and the Brontë Society’s heritage and conservation group.
English Heritage sent an advisor to Red House earlier this year to meet Dr Cookson and Kirklees Museums and Galleries staff and hear their views about the significance of Red House.
Dr Cookson has welcomed the upgrade and said while the new listing would not prevent Kirklees from selling Red House in the future, the restrictions now placed on the building would make it less appealing to potential buyers.
The reasons for the upgrade are its Georgian architecture; literary interest as Charlotte Brontë featured Red House in her novel Shirley; historic interest as it was the home of radical feminist Mary Taylor, and industrial interest because of its connections with the woollen cloth industry.
Mrs Marsden, who is also a member of Friends of Red House, was delighted but also urged caution. “It gives us more power to apply for grants, but its future is still very vulnerable,” she said..

The Advocate is thrilled that Drew Lamonica Arms is one of the contributors of the new Cambridge University Press book The Brontës in Context, edited by Marianne Thormählen:

Drew Lamonica Arms, LSU director of fellowship advising and professional-in-residence in the LSU Honors College, was selected as one of 36 top Brontë scholars who wrote about the literary work of the Brontë family for The Brontës in Context, available in January 2013 from Cambridge University Press [already available in the UK].
“My chapter considers the influence of the Brontës’ sibling relationships on their writing,” Arms said. “They wrote as a family, commenting on each other’s work throughout their lives. I explore how this essential writing relationship is reflected in their publication history and their literary constructions of family. I’m honored to be included among the scholars in The Brontës in Context.”
Very few families produce one outstanding writer; the Brontë family produced three. The works of Charlotte, Emily and Anne remain immensely popular and are increasingly being studied in relation to the surroundings and wider context that formed them. The 42 new essays in this book tell “the Brontë story” as it has never been told before, drawing on the latest research and the best available scholarship while offering new perspectives on the writings of the sisters.
A section on Brontë criticism traces their reception to the present day. The works of the sisters are explored in the context of social, political and cultural developments in early 19th-century Britain, with attention given to religion, education, art, print culture, agriculture, law and medicine. Crammed with information, The Brontës in Context shows how the Brontës’ fiction interacts with the spirit of the time, suggesting reasons for its enduring fascination.

Missy Writes interviews the writer Jessie B Tyson:

MF: . If you could jump into a book, and live in that world … which would it be?
JBT: I’m undecided. Fantasy fiction, with elves and earth spirits or Wuthering Heights.

Jottings from Jan posts about Agnes Grey; Les Lectures de Cachou (in French) reviews Sheila Kohler's Being Jane Eyre; bloginglesestefania posts about Wuthering Heights; Kiss the Book reviews briefly Wish You Were Eyre; JennifersLevin reviews Wuthering Heights 2011.