Don Draper: updated Rochester

Former Prime Minister Baroness Thatcher died yesterday and the Keighley News recalled one of her visits to the area.

Lady Thatcher’s involvement with the Keighley area included a visit in July 1972, when she was Education Secretary. She arrived to re-open the newly refurbished Keighley Library, and also went to Cliffe Castle Museum and the Brontë Parsonage Museum.

Still in Yorkshire, The Telegraph and Argus features Kirby Lonsdale:

Nearby Cowan Bridge was where the Brontë sisters went to school in the 1820s – in Jane Eyre it became Lowood, and Kirkby Lonsdale was Lowtown. (Emma Clayton)

In the novel it's actually called Lowton, though.

The Atlantic looks at 'The Handwritten Poems of Famous Authors', including Charlotte Brontë.

A 13-Year-Old Charlotte Brontë's Tiny Poem. 
I've been wandering in the greenwoods
And mid flowery smiling plains
I've been listening to the dark floods
To the thrushes thrilling strains.
The Brontë sisters often wrote their works in a minuscule handwriting on whatever scraps of paper they could find. A magnifying glass is often required to read the texts. This early poem from a 13-year-old Charlotte (dated 1829) was scrawled on a three-inch square paper. Scholars believe the miniature handwriting was a way for the sisters to hide their work from prying eyes and due to the expense of paper at that time. Others suggest it's the scale that the sisters' beloved toy soldiers would have written in, since the playthings were an integral part of their childhood fantasy world that inspired their earliest works. (Emily Temple)

That poem is actually the one that's being auctioned tomorrow at Bonhams.

The Millions discusses Anna Sewell's Black Beauty.

Chief among these is the mare Ginger, a consistent foil to the stoicism of Beauty (who’s a gelding, although the castration is not described.) Like some of her human literary forbears — the reformed prostitute Jemima in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria; or, the Wrongs of Woman (1798) or the abused wife Helen in Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) — Ginger is a sensitive and high-spirited female, literally beaten into apparent obedience by men.  Her resistance becomes the occasion for more punishment, and the novel leaves little doubt that men’s brutality — uncomfortably resembling rape — has formed her into the rebel she remains throughout the book. (Amy Weldon)

A columnist from the Malverne-WestHempstead-Lynbrook Patch admits to loving tragic love stories:

Not sure why, but when Spring rolls around, it makes me think of Cole Porter songs, and rereading the classic love stories I've been obsessed with since I was a teenager.
I'm not talking about the Harold Robbins books I used to sneak from my parent's shelves, though those were interesting in their own right. I'm talking about anything by Jane Austen, or the Brontë sisters. Of course I love happy endings, but my real obsession are the failed ones. The more tragic, the better!
All I want to think about is Heathcliff imploring Cathy to haunt him, while on her deathbed (Wuthering Heights). Or Marianne sobbing Willoughby's name on the hill behind his home, in the rain (Sense and Sensibility). The moment Mr. Rochester told Jane they were connected by an invisible cord that ran from the place his heart was, to the corresponding part of her (Jane Eyre). The day Edna spent with Robert when they took the boat to the mainland before he left for Mexico (The Awakening). The green light at the pier (Great Gatsby). (Stacey Simens)

The Buffalo News discusses Mad Men, after the broadcast of the Season Six premiere.

Don Draper is a kind of updated Rochester from “Jane Eyre” – a mysteriously tormented man with a great profile and all the superficial sophistication in the world awaiting some final twist of fate. (Jeff Simon)

The Los Angeles Loyolan writes about spending time in a monastery.

Thankfully, our actual time at the monastery was less Wuthering Heights and more Disney classic – it was all very loving and affirming, and actually involved a frightening amount of group sing-alongs. (Zaneta Pereira)

A Namibian newspaper, New Era, quotes from Charlotte Brontë in a public letter to the Prime Minister. The Happiest Lamb posts about Heathcliff while Flickr user Danufran has uploaded several illustrations from a copy of Wuthering Heights in Spanish. Lipstick and Love posts about a trip to Haworth.