Going Insane

Patrick McGrath, the author of Spider, talks about madness in literature in The New York Times:

And then comes an extraordinary variation on the theme. In her last novel, “Wide Sargasso Sea,” Jean Rhys takes Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre” and tells the story of Rochester’s wife, Bertha, locked in an attic in his great country house. Rhys creates an early life for Bertha, as Antoinette Cosway, a Creole heiress in Jamaica. Torn from that life and taken to a cold and distant land, she goes insane and destroys her husband’s house. “Jane Eyre” is thus turned on its head, as our attention shifts from the heroine’s trials, and later relationship with Rochester, to the madwoman in his attic and what she suffered to become so, and why she burns down his great house, destroying herself in the process.

No connection to the Brontës but the Manchester Evening News contextualises a news item which is related to 1847:

Terry Whitworth, of Littleborough, has enlarged and coloured in an illustrated map of the town in 1847 - a time when the Brontë sisters were penning some of their best-loved works and Ireland was suffering the Great Famine. (Lisa Gray)

Crave interviews the film director Neil Jordan who talking about his 1999 film Interview with the Vampire says:

Maybe Interview was the start of seeing vampires as romantic characters.
Maybe, maybe. They were kind of doomed, ironic creatures. They were really Heathcliff, weren’t they? They were really interesting, but I suppose maybe every generation invents its own vampire, doesn’t it? Maybe Interview with the Vampire was at the time, maybe Twilight was at the time. I don’t know. I never thought I’d make another vampire movie but here I did. (Fred Topel)

Bath Chronicle presents the Laura Ashley exhibition at the Bath & North East Somerset Council's Fashion Museum:

The Fashion Museum will showcase more than 70 Laura Ashley dresses in a special summer exhibition on display from July 13 to August 26. The display will capture the Laura Ashley look that in the 1960s and 1970s inspired a generation of women to dress as though they were the milkmaid Tess of the d'Urbervilles from Thomas Hardy's novel, or perhaps Cathy from Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights.

StarkInsider reviews the San José performance of the play A Minister's Wife (based on G.B. Shaw's Candida):

Written as much to inform an audience about Christian socialism (as opposed to other flavors of socialism which remain religiously unaligned) and to highlight the wisdom of the minister’s wife, who’s caught between her somewhat prissy, but hopelessly sincere husband, and Eugene Marchbanks, a spoiled and histrionic upper class lad, the story has the tediousness of a period piece, with few of the redeeming virtues of the same. Jane Eyre (or Downton Abbey, for that matter) it’s not. (Cy Ashley Webb)

Libération (France) describes the actress Rinko Kikuchi like this:

Un même décalage s’applique, humainement, à l’héroïne féminine de Pacific Rim, Rinko Kikuchi, 32 ans, samourai dans l’âme mais aussi fragile d’apparence qu’une Brontë japonaise, et star à éclosion lente depuis son apparition en collégienne sourde et très sexuée dans Babel – il y a six ans. (Françoise-Marie Santucci) (Translation)

Estadão (Brazil) reviews the film Augustine:

Há um lado, digamos, gótico nessa história. A forma como Augustine, privada de sua liberdade, conhece o horror. "Acho que, no limite, essa é uma história sombria de sexo e poder."O repórter evoca o universo das irmãs Brontë. "Não digo que tenham sido inspirações conmscientes, mas elas com certeza fazem parte do meu imaginário." (Luiz Carlos Merten) (Translation)

Hell on Frisco Bay announces a local screening of I Walked With a Zombie 1943 and reviews the film;  Requiem for More Books and caryarit ferrer (in Spanish) review Jane Eyre; Près de la plume ... au coin du feu posts a Emily Brontë poem translated into French.