The threat of the benches

Keighley News shares more details about the concerns about the spreading of foreign plants (and benches!) in Penistone Hill:

Concerns family tributes may be spoiling a Brontë Country beauty spot will lead to a ban on benches there – and the creation of a new memorial garden in Haworth.
Penistone Hill, a council-run park above Haworth, has become a popular spot for people to place benches and plants in memory of departed loved ones.
But with the number of memorials steadily increasing, there are fears the beauty spot could become cluttered with furniture, and that alien plant species could harm the delicate moorland.
To counter the problem, Bradford Council is teaming up with the Friends of Haworth Park to create an alternative memorial garden.
Work is due to begin this year, and the council will ban any new benches at the country park, directing families instead to the memorial garden.
Penistone Hill is on the walk between Haworth and Top Withens, the landscape that inspired Wuthering Heights and that is seen by thousands of tourists each year.
Local ward councillors have donated £2,000 to the scheme, which will be created at the park entrance in Bridgehouse Lane. It will include benches, memorial plaques, flowerbeds and trees.

The Thorne and District Gazette is excited to see a local company staging the play The Brontë Boy in Leeds:

A Doncaster theatrical duo will be united on stage for a dramatic and hard-hitting play focusing on the troubled brother of the Brontë sisters.
Actress Keeley Lane and director Marian Mantovani will be working together on the production of The Brontë Boy which will be staged at Leeds’ Carriageworks theatre on June 28-29.
Keeley, who plays Emily Brontë, said: “I studied the Brontës both at school and university and Wuthering Heights is my favourite novel, so it is a great privilege to be playing one of my favourite authors. Playing someone who really existed certainly brings its challenges as you want to play the person with integrity and honesty, whilst bringing them to life for an audience who may know little about them.”

The Independent reviews Havisham by Ronald Frame:

Ronald Frame has done a clever job; Catherine Havisham is believable, and the period is convincingly evoked. But I couldn't help wondering what the point of it all was. Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea is not only a brilliant novel in its own right, but makes it impossible ever to read Jane Eyre in the same way again. The same cannot be said of Havisham; it is consistent with its parent text, but adds nothing to it. (Brandon Robshaw)

Another novel, Constance by Patrick McGrath, in The Guardian:

Sidney is struggling with an intended masterwork called The Conservative Heart, which will combine his deep reading in Romantic literature with some thoughts on the progress of society. Perhaps influenced by his literary discipline, he is one of those stately, slightly slow-on-the-uptake narrators, somewhat reminiscent of Nelly Dean in Wuthering Heights. He is telling the story apparently long after the event, with many phrases such as "In the account she later gave me of those days" and "I learned later". (Mark Lawson)

The Independent reviews the Sweet Bird of Youth production at the Old Vic in London:

The disappointment is Campbell's script which is too obviously indebted to certain gothic and ghostly classics, including Wuthering Heights and The Weir, and feels like a rehash. (Kate Bassett)

Libreriamo (Italy) interviews the writer Marcela Serrano:

Chi sono, se esistono, i suoi mentori, e quali sono gli autori ai quali si ispira?
Devo tutta la mia formazione letteraria alla letteratura inglese e alle sue “donne”: Jane Austen, le sorelle Brontë, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing. (Translation)

Mystery Playground interviews Joanna Campbell Slan, author of The Jane Eyre Chronicles saga:

1) Why did you decide to write The Jane Eyre Chronicles?
While I was on a panel at Malice Domestic, the mystery conference, someone asked what my favorite mystery of all time was, and without thinking I said, “Jane Eyre.” That started me thinking, why not revisit the classic?
2) What did you love most about Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë?
Edward loves Jane for her spirit, and I find that enchanting. I also empathized with a character who was poor, unassuming and overlooked. That described me perfectly as a young woman. (Read more) 

A Cliff Richards fan that has seen the Heathcliff musical seventy times (!) in The Argus; Doing Dewey briefly posts about Jane Eyre.