Topless Brontë

This is something you probably didn't expected if you read about The Full Bronte:

A trio of scantily-clad lads is taking the charity world by storm after raking in more than £4,000 in less than a year.
The Full Bronte – brothers Chris and Phil Elrick – and Richard Smith took on their first topless waitering assignment at a charity event for the Manorlands Hospice based at Oxenhope in Keighley.  ( The Telegraph & Argus )

Camilla Long in The Times talks about bitchiness and British bitches and so on:

This is why the original bitch was always Charlotte Brontë, a woman who would slag off Jane Austen entirely without warning, calling her 'incomplete' and 'insensible', which is Victorian for 'vaginismus'.  

Jane Merrick in The Independent gives her opinion on the Austen appearance on the British bank notes:

If it had been my choice for a great female novelist on a tenner, I would have gone for one of the Brontë sisters. I've always preferred the gothic psychological thrillers of Charlotte and Emily to Austen's galloping middle-class froth. But I'm heartily in favour of people called Jane being given prominence, so, all in all, it is a good thing.

Gay News remembers the figure of Peggy Ann Garner:

The year before A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Peggy Ann had played the young Jane in Joan Fontaine/Orson Welles' Jane Eyre. The first 20 minutes of the film is not only the best part of the entire movie but shows the brilliance of the young actress. (An unbilled Elizabeth Taylor is also with Peggy Ann during the brutal scenes at the hideous Lowood institution.)
Peggy Ann Garner simply broke your heart as the poor tormented Jane Eyre. Earlier, Peggy Ann had played in a number of other outstanding films. After her Academy Award, it looked liked the young girl would go on to a brilliant adult career as a major actress. What happened was probably as tragic as anything poor Jane Eyre ever experienced. (Mike McCrann)

The Independent talks about Leicester and multiculturalism:

 And the Asian immigrants from East Africa – affluent professionals and businesspeople – were better equipped to prosper than any before or since. "While others came to Britain from villages in Bengal or Kashmir," says Suleman Nagdi, who arrived from what was then called Rhodesia, "we had been immersed in Britishness – Jane Eyre and all that – from our school days, and that immersion helped us integrate more quickly: we were familiar with the education and legal systems and everything else."

Yorkshire Post tells old stories about teachers:

 There was the one who decided to scare the infants by putting a sheet over his head and wandering around outside their classroom window shouting “WOOO”; the one who wore a green corduroy suit and pretended he hadn’t heard when my mate said, “Why is he wearing a corrugated iron shed?”; the one who ran out of the class weeping every time we started to read Wuthering Heights; the one who brought her guitar into class every day for a whole year but never, ever, played it. (Ian McMillan)

SoloLibri (Italy) reviews Miss Charity by Marie-Aude Murail:

 Il suo è un omaggio, tra gli altri, a Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde e alle sorelle Brontë.

Threepanelbookreview publishes a funny three-panel-review (what else?) of Jane Eyre; look a this beautiful painting by keiana using Jane Eyre as canvas; Mommy Adventures with Ravina interviews the writer Colleen Connally:

What books did you grow up loving? One of my favorites was To Kill a Mockingbird. It still is. I also loved all the classics, including Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.

Both this article about Lucy Caldwell and this review of the latest John Boyne's novel mention the Brontës. Finally, tonight' BBC4 broadcasts again the Sylvia Plath episode of A Poet's Guide to Britain (19.00h):

Sylvia Plath is one of the most popular and influential poets of recent history but her poetry is often overshadowed by her life - the story of her marriage to Ted Hughes, her mental health problems and her tragic suicide at the age of 30. A rich and important area of her work that is often overlooked is the wealth of landscape poetry which she wrote throughout her life, some of the best of which was written about the Yorkshire moors.
Sheers explores this rich seam, which culminated in a poem called Wuthering Heights. It takes its title from Emily Brontë but the content and style is entirely Plath's own remarkable vision of the forbidding Pennine landscape.
Sheers visits the dramatic country around Heptonstall where the newly-married Plath came to meet her in-laws, a world of gothic architecture and fog-soaked landscapes, where the locals have a passion for ghost stories that connect directly with the tales that were told in the kitchen of the Brontë parsonage. His journey eventually leads out onto the high moors and the spectacular ruin known as Top Withens. Here amongst the wind and sheep 'where the grass is beating its head distractedly', Plath found the material for some of her most impressive writing.