An Outsider's Masterpiece

Charlotte Mendelson joins the ranks of the Villette worshippers in The Telegraph:

It wouldn’t surprise Charlotte Brontë’s Lucy Snowe that the brilliant Villette (1853) is seldom read. Snowe is lonely, clever, pessimistic; others have charms she lacks. It is an outsider’s masterpiece, which should be left on the bed of every new female undergraduate.

Bridget Christie is the winner of this year's Edinburgh Comedy Award for her show A Bic for Her. In The Independent:

 The show’s title comes from a ballpoint pen – “in pastel shades and with an easy grip” – which is marketed just at women. There is an inspired section about how the Brontë sisters may not have been able to write their masterpieces without it, and she links Sir Stirling Moss’s recent fall down a lift shaft with his disobliging comments about female racing drivers. (Veronica Lee)

Financial Times reviews the exhibition Unseen Lowry in Salford:

 Yet alongside are portrait heads that could illustrate D.H. Lawrence or Jane Eyre: the leathery, resilient “Head of an Old Man with a Neck Tie”, the passive, unemployed “Seated Man in Flat Cap with Knees Raised”: it is a panorama of changing British society, filtered through Lowry’s private sensibility, that complements Tate’s show of grand public works. (Jackie Wullschlager)

The Berkshire Eagle reviews a concert by the Boston Pops in Tanglewood, conducted by John Williams and, exceptionally, David Newman:

 Appropriately, Newman led his father’s "Fox Fanfare" (originally composed for and rejected by film mogul Samuel Goldwyn), selections from "Captain from Castile," "How the West Was Won," and "Cathy’s Theme" from "Wuthering Heights" with a shimmering solo turn by Elita Kang, a BSO assistant concertmaster, needlessly amplified. (Clarence Fanto)

New York Magazine has an advance of the literary autumn season:

 ‘Longbourn,’ by Jo Baker
The servants take center stage in this retelling of Pride and Prejudice—a sort of Wide Sargasso Sea meets Upstairs, Downstairs. Knopf, Oct. 8.

tvblog (Italy) remembers the good old days of Italian public TV, the fifties:

Vennero una lunga serie di “sceneggiati”. Dickens, Stevenson, Gautier, le sorette Brontë, Dostoevskij, Fielding, Flaubert, Hugo, Tolstoj, Alcott e tanti altri, uscirono dagli scaffali scrollandosi di dosso la polvere dei secoli per tessere meravigliose storie, spettacolarizzare nei pochi metr degli studi, senza o con pochi esterni, costumi di epoche lontane, baffi, molti baffi, cascate di sontuose parrucche, moderate scollature. (Itali Moscati) (Translation)

the Brontë Sisters posts about Ann Dinsdale's At Home with the Brontës; Teach Mentor Texts reviews Wuthering Heights.