The Brontë sisters: more important than housework

Beaver County Times has a summer resolution that we can't help but agree with:

I will read to my heart’s content, whenever I have a spare moment. Catching up with the Brontë sisters is more important than housework, or filing, or mowing the moor — er, lawn. (Charlotte Latvala)

In The Telegraph, Howard Jacobson doesn't understand how it is that Charlotte Brontë didn't get Jane Austen.

So no: in the matter of “eye-rolling” and zip-fiddling Jane Austen is not our contemporary. (Some of you might feel that in such matters you are not contemporaries yourselves.) But we needn't go to the other extreme and agree with Charlotte Bronte's breathy judgment that Jane Austen lacked passion, was indifferent to “what throbs fast and full”, and ignorant of “what the blood rushes through”, by which I can only suppose she means the veins. [...]
You would have expected the author of Jane Eyre to recognise – in those fraught, self-castigating rhythms – the fast, full throb of passion; Anne [Elliot]'s efforts to gain some ascendancy over which require a long application, not of cold showers, I grant you, but of solitude and reflection. As for “what the blood rushes through”, only think of Fanny Price in Mansfield Park, waylaid by an insistent Mary Crawford determined to plead her brother's cause – “I must speak to you for a few minutes somewhere” – “words,” and I quote, “that Fanny felt all over her, in all her pulses, all her nerves.”

However, as far as we know, Charlotte Brontë never read Mansfield Park or Persuasion. Her opinions were  apparently based on Pride and Prejudice and Emma.

Sugarscape has a video of writer Giovanna Fletcher offering advice to literary characters, Jane Eyre among them.

11 KTVA's pets of the week includes

The Brontë sisters -- Emily, Charlotte, and Anne -- are a lively bunch of sister hens that enjoy each other’s company and are cute to boot. (Janessa Webb)

The McScribble Salon, Michele Carter's blog, has a post on the review her novel Charlotte Brontë's Thunder, had recently in Brontë Studies. The Budding Librocubicularist reviews briefly Jane Eyre Laid Bare.