Blame it on the Biros

The Wakefield Express reviews the restaurant at the Healds Hall Hotel in Liversedge:

I’m often a little wary of eating out at hotels: there’s always that nagging suspicion that running a restaurant might merely be a way of keeping the kitchen busy and supplementing the revenue from the residential side of the operation.
However, it soon became clear that there’s no such distinction at Healds Hall, a sensitively-converted late 18th century mansion which has previously served as a boarding school and the home of a wealthy carpet manufacturer, among other roles, as well as inspiring a character in Charlotte Brontë’s novel Shirley.

The character is, of course, the Rev. Helstone, based on Hammond Roberson, owner of Healds Hall between 1795 and 1841.

The Guardian interviews Bridget Christie, winner of the Forster's Comedy Award at the recent Edinburgh Fringe Festival with her show A Bic for Her:

As she discusses the fact that Bic really did make a pen "for her", she holds a regular biro as if struggling with the weight and size of it, and says: "I expect that's why the Brontës were so shit at writing." (Rebecca Nicholson)

First Things seems to have discovered the BabyLit board books:

A baby book publisher has caught on to this concept. Jane Eyre: A BabyLit Counting Primer (by Little Miss Brontë), counts from “one governess” to “ten books”—and quotes Jane here and there, i.e. “It is always dangerous to keep a candle lit at night.” Moby Dick, Wuthering Heights, and Anna Karenina also come in square board books by BabyLit. How Wuthering Heights is made appropriate for babies I don’t know. An alphabet book perhaps? “A is for Anger, B is for Betrayal, C is for Corpse. . . .” (Ashley Thorne)

The Huffington Post complains about TV Dramas where 'men have secrets but women are crazy':

The trope of the insane woman has been prevalent for centuries in literature. Lady Macbeth was one of the earliest examples, but Jane Eyre's crazy woman in the attic is cliché at this point, and Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar is almost painful to read, given Plath's death by suicide. (Tamara Shayne Kagel)

The Mumbai Mirror talks about the need for male pseudonyms for women writers:

Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life, and it ought not to be, said the Poet Laureate Robert Southey to the young Charlotte Brontë. There you have it, in one sentence: one of the million things that a woman's life ought not to be. Not surprisingly, major women writers in the 19th century adopted male pseudonyms: the Brontës, George Eliot and others. Once it was known who they really were, it is said, reviewers became hostile, and charged Charlotte, for instance with "coarseness," and "an unseemly knowledge of passion." (Eunice De Souza)

Metro is presenting the new BFI series of screenings on Gothic Film:

‘There’s a big, fearful thing going on, particularly over sex, and that’s the draw of gothic films. Think of some women’s obsession with Byronic, bad-boy heroes such as Mr Rochester and Heathcliff, or Fifty Shades Of Grey. The British discovered sex in Technicolor through gothic.’ (Larushka Ivan-Zadeh)

Missoula Independent reviews I Await The Devil's Coming 1902 by Mary MacLane:

Less depressing tangents do crop up here and there, as when the author muses on the merits of Charlotte Brontë or Charles Dickens and fires off a brilliant stream-of-consciousness regarding Butte's turn-of-the-century melting-pot dynamics. There's also a four-page tutorial on the art of eating an olive. (Michael Peck)

Judy Jerome in Utica Observer-Dispatch never connected with Salinger's literature:

Holden Caufield never held the same allure for me as did Hardy’s Bathsheba Everdene or Brontë’s Jane Eyre.

The North Devon Gazette tells the story of a retired carpenter who now creates scaled models of noteworthy buildings:

The houses are often built on his kitchen table and the hobby began when his late wife Doreen asked him to build one after he retired.
“She asked if I could make a miniature house as she was going to join a club - she wanted one like the Brontë sisters,” he said. (Tony Gussin)

The Indianapolis Public Library Kids' Blog recommends Catherine Reef's The Brontë Sisters;  The Limited Editions Club & Heritage Press Imagery discusses the famous 1943 Random House editions of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights with the Fritz Eichenberg engravings.