The Brontës' steadiness

The Telegraph features a study that looks into the classics' popularity:

They are the books that have stood the test of time – not to mention the ones we are all supposed to have read.
But an analysis of reading habits has revealed that some of the most celebrated classics of English literature have fallen out of fashion in recent years.
Works by Thomas Hardy, George Eliot and EM Forster have seen their popularity plummet over the last two decades, while those by Charles Dickens, Jane Austen and George Orwell have fared much better.
The study involves a comparison of lending data from Britain's libraries for 50 classics by British and Irish authors from the literary canon from the early 1990s, a decade ago, and last year.
It shows some clear winners and losers, with all featured works by the first three named authors rising in the list over the period and all of those by other three falling. [...]
The top 20
1 (7 in 1993-94) – Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen, 32,812 loans in 2010-11
2 (2) – Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë, 29,278
3 (1) – The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien, 28,414
4 (11) – Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell, 24,839
5 (4) – Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë, 23,985
6 (9) – Animal Farm, George Orwell, 22,396
7 (22) – Great Expectations, Charles Dickens, 21,308
8 (10) – Emma, Jane Austen, 21,066
9 (5) – Dracula, Bram Stoker, 19,046
10 (12) – Lord of the Flies, William Golding, 18,404
11 (16) – Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen, 18,360
12 (6) – Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier, 18,310
13 (34) – Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens, 17,876
14 (18) – Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stephenson, 17,463
15 (35) – Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Robert Louis Stephenson, 15,591
16 (49) – Cranford, Elizabeth Gaskell, 15,337
17 (20) – Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen, 14,716
18 (31) – The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins, 14,596
19 (8) – Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy, 13,593
20 (28) – Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh, 12,969 (Jasper Copping)

We are glad to see the Brontës' steadiness.

Today we have a couple of photographers who seem to be Brontëites as well. The Yorkshire Post talks to Nicola Taylor, who acknowledges her influences and inspiration:

Having completed her course and moved back to Great Ayton, Nicola began to work on her idea, developing themes that interested her in a landscape that she is inspired by. “I feel that there are some places in the world that are very evocative and I am lucky enough to live in one of them,” she says. “As a child I had lots of trips out to the Moors and my grandmother always had plenty of Yorkshire stories to tell and those have influenced my work. There is a lot of folklore from this area that has grown out of the people having to survive in their harsh surroundings – all the stories are really related to the landscape. I love the Brontës and Thomas Hardy, and the landscape is really a character in their stories. I try to bring that sense into my images – the landscape is always part of the story.”
Using herself as a model, Nicola captures her images with a remote control and in a collection called Tales from the Moors Country she explores the relationship between people and place. The tales feature witches and ghosts, spirits and fairies, lost loves and obscure protagonists. [...]
The purpose of the photographs, she says, is to fuel the viewer’s imagination, so they are deliberately left open to interpretation. “Many of the images don’t have an obvious face – often it is obscured by hair – and I think that makes them more ambiguous. The picture is the beginning of a story, a prompt so that the viewer can take their own meaning from it. There are various stories and themes that I draw on. I tend to like dramatic, angst-ridden stories – that’s what appeals to me. So, for example, Wuthering Heights is a more appealing story to me than Jane Eyre.”

And MyBoox (France) on Juliette Tang:

Diplômée de l’université de Dartmouth, aux Etats-Unis, Juliette Tang a consacré ses études à la littérature. Avec les lectures de Virginia Woolf, d’Emily Brontë ou encore de Françoise Sagan, Juliette Tang nourrit très vite une passion pour les femmes écrivaines. Et comme ces dernières, elle entreprend l’écriture, sauf que… elle découvre que le moyen par lequel elle invite le lecteur à entrer dans un livre n’est pas un stylo mais un appareil photo ! (O.P.) (Translation)

She is indeed the photographer behind a still life with Wuthering Heights we linked  not so long ago.

This columnist from La República (Peru) seems to be quite the Brontëite too.

Madame Bovary y El Quijote son nuestros modelos. ¿Por qué leen ellos, por qué leemos nosotros? Porque somos tímidos pero ilusos leemos a Emily Brontë; (Alonso Cueto Caballero) (Translation)

The Oxford Student admits that

Literature is teeming with the stories of buildings, the Wuthering Heights, Bleak Houses and Manderleys. . . (Elizabeth Culliford)

The Brontë Sisters has a very interesting post on Charlotte and Anne's brief stay in York in 1849 on their way to Scarborough. MittimEllan posts in Swedish about Jane Eyre. Mete D'Inchiostro writes in Italian about Agnes Grey. And Vagabond Language has recently been to Haworth and writes about it (lots of pictures too).