This simmering quality is one that modern readers have grown used to, now that ambitious literary novels so reliably hopscotch among points of view. Our novelists, like our chefs, deliver long sequences of small plates.
That thing that novels do so well, and that caused us to love them in the first place — envelop us, induce us to submit to the spell being cast — is repudiated. Can we pause for a moment to thank Charlotte Brontë for not hitting the shuffle button on “Jane Eyre,” splintering her novel into bite-size arias by Jane, Helen Burns, Mr. Rochester, Adèle Varens and Grace Poole? (Dwight Garner)
Yorkshire Post is a bit sceptical about the Keighley and Haworth Grand Heritage Bus Tour:
The story was reported with barely concealed sniggers by media outlets across Yorkshire. Keighley? An open top tour bus? Really? You could almost smell the incredulity.
The media professionals failing to hide their contempt for the town that 70,000 souls call home might well have been emboldened by the memory of the aspersions cast by [Bill] Bryson on the town. (...)
Bryson made no mention of the Brontës (despite the fact that they are from a few miles up the road in Haworth, Keighlians have long claimed Emily, Charlotte and Anne as their own). Or of the town’s long history with the wool trade.
What he actually said about Keighley was: “I know the army needs some place for gunnery practice, but surely they could find some new and less visually sensitive location to blow up – Keighley, say.” (...)
None of which bodes particularly well for Graham Mitchell. The town councillor and bus enthusiast will be running the Keighley and Haworth Grand Heritage Tour every weekend in August. Not only will he hope to show strangers from out of town around the parks, public squares and shopping centres that make up Keighley – he’s optimistic that local people will take the opportunity to become “a tourist in their own town”. (Nick Ahad)
Female First makes a list of female fiction characters:
4. Jane Eyre from Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
A timid and reserved character, Jane Eyre battles through a difficult childhood where she is unwanted and orphaned.
When she finally meets Mr Rochester, she still remains true to her own values and finds power in her financial independence. (Julia Molloy)
Another list on
SheKnows - best romance novels to date:
9. Jane Eyre is the story of Jane, an orphan raised by her cruel aunt. Then Jane is later sent away to school, but the headmaster also turns out to be an abusive man. Jane stays at the school and eventually becomes a teacher. After two years of working as a teacher, she yearns for new experiences, so she accepts a job as a governess and it is there she meets Mr. Rochester, who she falls in love with and marries. Only after, does Jane discover Mr. Rochester was already married to a woman in Jamaica. Jane immediately flees and finds herself penniless and hungry but is eventually taken in by three siblings. Jane soon learns that these three are her cousins. One of them, St. John, wants to marry Jane, but she refuses and she returns to her true love, Mr. Rochester, from whom she realizes she cannot stay apart. (Lisa Steinke)
Dave Astor on putting artists in literature. In
The Huffington Post:
There are also many novels featuring characters who aren't artists per se, but draw and paint on the side. Those books include Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, whose title character has some artistic talent; and Pete Hamill's Forever, whose very long-lived protagonist Cormac O'Connor spots a sketch in 2001 that he himself drew during New York City's Great Fire of 1835!
Condé Nast Traveler celebrates Yorkshire Day and
Time Out London suggest things you can do in London to celebrate it:
If you’re feeling cultural, drop by the National Portrait Gallery to check out literary legends the Brontë Sisters, (as painted by their brother Patrick).
LiveMint (India) publishes a eulogy of the actress Meena Kumari:
I was privileged to spend a few minutes in her bedroom. It was an unnerving and eerie experience. I saw her large bed made up, I saw her books (Alistair MacLean, Gulshan Nanda, Emily Brontë), I saw her sea stones, I saw her gods in the little mandir she had built in her bedroom, and all the time I kept telling myself, remember India’s greatest actress lived here. (Vinod Mehta)
Sara Lodge remembers in
The Weekly Standard an anecdote from her Holland days:
Another joy is the carillons that mark the hours with a laughing waterfall of musical notes. While most European church bells go “dong” or “ding-dong-ding,” the ingenious mechanisms of the Dutch system allow bells to be tuned to notes and played as instruments, creating chimes with the magical tinkling resonance of a music box.
The downside of this, as I discovered while teaching in a room very close to the university bell tower, is that on certain days students are permitted to “play” the bells for an hour at a time. If you have ever tried to explain the finer points of Jane Eyre while competing with a bell tower that is pealing out the theme from The Godfather, you will pity my predicament.
The Age reviews the performances of
The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter at the Malthouse Theatre (Melbourne):
It's a dazzling restatement and critique of the gothic vision, The Bloody Chamber. Carter somehow packs in all the velvety seductiveness and dream of the thing she wants to stab to death. This is Mr Rochester as potential sex murderer. This is Jane Eyre in a pornographic universe, full of a dark melancholy where a girl can be plucked like a fruit, where she risks having her head cut off. (Peter Craven)
La Gaceta (Spain) is still in the pseudonym frenzy mode:
Las hermanas Brontë son uno de los ejemplos más claros: Charlotte, Emily y Anne comenzaron sus creaciones bajo el seudónimo de los hermanos Bell (que compartían iniciales de nombre con ellas) en 1845, cuando decidieron publicar un libro de poesías con el título de Poemas por Currer, Ellis y Acton Bell. Tras esta primera publicación cada hermana se dedicó a escribir por su propia cuenta, aunque siguen utilizando estos seudónimos hasta la visita de Charlotte y Anne a Londres donde se presentaron a sus editores. (Begoña Marín) (Translation)
and
The Times:
Some pen names have been utilitarian. Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë began their careers as Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, women determined to be published as equals in a male-dominated publishing world. (Ben Macintyre)
Les Chroniques de Linadriel reviews
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall on
The Star!; Stereo Sanctity reviews the blu-ray release of
Les Soeurs Brontë; Incendio de nieve posts in French about
Jane Eyre; The
Brontë Society reports Emily's Birthday Excursion and related tweets.
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