Eliot and Lewes over Jane

More news outlets publish obituaries of Robert Barnard: Keighley News and The Telegraph:

Barnard’s hero Perry Trethowan returned in The Missing Brontë (1983), a reflection of Barnard’s fascination with Emily Brontë, a biography of whom he published in 2000. (...)
Barnard was chairman of the Brontë Society between 1996 and 1999, and again from 2002.

The Halifax Reader (Canada) also posts an obituary.

Margaret Watson gives a detailed synopsis of her talk at the first North Kirklees Literary Festival in The Dewsbury Reporter, The Reporter and Editor Mr WW Yates:

On Saturday I was speaking at a literary festival in Red House Gomersal, where a great deal of history surrounding the Brontë family is stored.
Visitors were eager to know what this area was like in the early 1800s when Patrick Brontë first came here to become curate of Dewsbury Parish Church.
I was pleased to tell them that much of what had been written about Patrick’s stay here had come from the pen of a local journalist, William W Yates.
Willliam was editor of the Reporter for 36 years and in 1897 published a book about Patrick’s life entitled The Father of the Brontës.
The book had been painstakingly researched by William over a period of 20 years and he had interviewed people who had known the Brontës while living in this district.
The book contains not only details of Patrick’s stay in Dewsbury but also details of what Dewsbury was like when he arrived here in 1809. (Read More) 

Robert Crampton tries hard to be funny and unprejudiced on his column in The Times, but we are afraid it feels only just a bit stupid:

Jane Eyre I have read. All of it. I can't remember a word.

The New Jersey Star-Ledger reviews the theatre production A Most Dangerous Woman by Cathy Tempelsman and reveals a crucial scene of the play which features Jane Eyre:

Crucial to the performance is [Geroge] Eliot’s chemistry with [G. H.] Lewes, whose failed open marriage and reputation as a womanizer made him an outcast. Ames Adamson portrays him engagingly, so that he comes across as sensitive and with a lust for life, but far from flawlessly heroic.
Particularly charming is the couple’s first onstage meeting, in which they go tête-à-tête over "Jane Eyre" and end up enacting a fake "women’s novel" in which, as Eliot describes it, ladies weep their sorrows into embroidered handkerchiefs and faint on the finest upholstery. (Ronni Reich)

Flavorwire lists some of the most bizarre literary myths and conspiracty theories. Number one is:

Branwell Brontë, not Emily Brontë, wrote Wuthering Heights
So Branwell goes out drinking with his friends one evening, has a few pints (or whatever they drank in Victorian England), and read parts of his novel in progress to them. Later on, when his sister Emily’s book became well known, those drinking buddies swore they recognized parts of it as the novel their pal had read to them. (Jason Diamond)

The New Zealand Herald discusses the new Bond novel by William Boyd and, of course, if you want to give credibility to literary spinoffs you should mention Wide Sargasso Sea:

And literary continuation is nothing new either. Perhaps the finest example - a novel arguably as good as, if not in some ways better than, the original - is Jean Rhys' 1966 Wide Sargasso Sea.
Inspired by Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, this was the story of the first Mrs Rochester, set in the Caribbean; an extraordinarily powerful work of alienation, delirium and insanity. (Sinclair McKay)

The Yorkshire Post publishes a list of Yorkshire's Hot 100 and remembers how

Anyone who has studied the Bronte sisters’ novels will know that Yorkshire has deep-rooted links with the arts.

Delia Ephron writes on MacLean's about her biographical book Sister Mother Husband Dog (etc):

Nora wasn’t the only Ephron in Delia’s life who demanded secrecy. Her mother, Phoebe, a Hollywood screenwriter, told Delia, “I hope you never write about what happens here.” Her mother was referring to the late-night drunken brawls with her husband. Delia shared a bedroom wall with her mother, whose demented ramblings sounded like the lunatic wife in Jane Eyre except she wasn’t in the attic.

The infamous words of David Gilmour (not the Pink Floyd one) are discussed by The Huffington Post which lists other heterosexual writers who were not afraid to love women writers:

Henry Miller not only had a literary friendship with Anais Nin, an erotica writer who he occasionally collaborated with in and outside the bedroom, but he also listed Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights as one of his must read books. (Beulah Maud Devaney)

Another article in the Canadian edition of the Huffington Post also reacts to Gilmour's words with a list of favourite women writers which includes Charlotte Brontë.

The Globe and Mail reviews Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries:

The books of similar length and scope (Brothers Karamazov, Moby-Dick and, among contemporary examples, Roberto Bolaño’s 2666) and works of Victorian literature (the Brontës, in particular) that have most deeply infiltrated my thinking are often flawed and raw, with raggedy edges that excite the imagination. Scenes from these novels reside alongside my own memories, and I recall their characters as I might old friends – or enemies. (Pasha Malla)

The followers of TV series like Homeland will be amused by this comment on Frontpage Magazine:

In the name of charity, perhaps the appalling ignorance about Islam in Washington, DC, is more real than feigned. Yesterday, Fox News Channel's Bill Hemmer interviewed former CIA and FBI analyst Philip Mudd on "America's Newsroom" about Islamic terrorism in relation to the Nairobi attacks. Mudd stated categorically that "public opinion in the Muslim world does not support terrorism and jihad." Really? Perhaps Mr. Mudd should stick to deconstructing Jane Eyre (he has a BA and MA in English literature) and leave the analysis of the Islamic world to those of us with more relevant, and frankly better, training. (Timothy Furnish) 

This columnist of the Leesburg Daily Commercial remembers how

Unlike some of my peers I was delighted in High School when we were introduced to authors like Shakespeare, Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Pearl Buck, Edgar Allen Poe. I did my book reports and my sister’s and my cousin’s book reports as well because I liked to do them. (Nina Gilfert)

Both the Daily Mail and the Daily Beast share their highlight from Isabel Marant's catwalk at the Paris Fashion Week: Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights:

The Isabel Marant show got off to a jumpy start today, when the soundtrack literally jumped -- right at the crescendo of Kate Bush’s "Wuthering Heights" (That song is such a winner with the fashion pack that we all let out a collective sigh when it cut out). (Alice Cavanagh)

Bang Style reviews the new album by Pretty Girls Make Graves, The New Romance:

“Something Bigger, Something Brighter” works as a piece of Gothic fiction, mirroring the darkest images found in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. (Danny De Maio)

24Sata (Croatia) brings up the therapeutic power of novels:

Romani mijenjaju životnu perspektivu, tvrde znanstvenici sa Sveučilišta York. Pogled na svijet očima Jane Eyre britanske spisateljice Charlotte Brontë može vam pomoći da poboljšate obiteljske odnose, dodaju stručnjaci. Čitanje je i svojevrsna psihoterapija jer smanjuje stres učinkovitije od glazbe i videoigara, tvrde britanski istraživači. (Sanja Rapaić) (Translation)

Augmented Reality in a Brontë novel. It's just a question of time. The journalist of Svenska Dagbladet (Sweden) is surprised:

På årets Bokmässa tycks motsättningen mellan det digitala och det analoga, eller om det är ett gemensamt famlande, ställd på sin spets. I en sektion som kallas Molnet finner jag ett seminarium som syftar till ”förhöjd verklighet”: glasögon som kan förvandla papper, video som inkarneras med ögonen. Här vandrar det också unga män, klädda som om de flytt ur en Brontë-roman, och delar ut lappar som visar sig leda till ett ytterst modernt videoverktyg. (Translation)

A new (paranormal/historical romance) author, Harper E. Brooks is a Brontëite according to The Sandpaper;  The Prose of the Powerless shares a Jane Eyre paper by Kaylie Hayter; Picture Me Reading posts a music set list for Jane Eyre; two Celebrate Musicals Week posts devoted to Gordon & Caird's Jane Eyre. The Musical on Regency Delights and Yet Another Period Drama Blog; Covered in Flour has a nice post about Little Miss Brontë's Jane Eyre; grande_caps posts a bunch of new caps from the webseries The Autobiography of Jane Eyre.