The Brontë sisters at the club

The news of the letter written by Charlotte Brontë and auctioned yesterday in Edinburgh has well and truly reached newspapers from all over the world: BBC News, AOL, The Herald Scotland, El Mundo (Spain), Informador (Mexico), AGI (Italy), El Universal (Mexico), Art Daily, etc. For the story, The Telegraph uses the painting that Ellis Chadwick, author of the 1914 biography In the Footsteps of the Brontës, proved not to be a portrait of Charlotte. It also has a comment from a book specialist at the auction house:

Cathy Marsden, book specialist at Lyon & Turnbull, said: "We had huge interest in the letter, particularly from all the press coverage we have had, and it seems to have caught the public's imagination."

Meanwhile, the Brontë Parsonage Facebook page shares the news that they got Lot 83.

The Mirror comments on the news that Yorkshire has been named Europe's leading destination in 2013.

And a few miles up the Aire Valley (where I live) is the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway, a heritage line that takes you up by steam train to Haworth, home of the Brontë family and the brilliant museum dedicated to their life and work.
T’other day I came across a 1963 guide that recalled the origins of this cultural attraction.
Presiding over a public meeting to establish a Brontë Society in 1893, the Rev WH Keeling, ­headmaster of Bradford Grammar School, said the project was simple, direct and free from any intimidating suggestion of a literary cult. Heaven forfend, that’s what it is now.
The Brontës, he said, thoroughly represented the spirit of the county in their deep and tender feelings, in their trenchant manner of speech, and in their detestation of all that was weak and undesirable.
There you have it. Charlotte, Emily and Anne were admirable because they wrote like proper Tykes. No higher praise could be bestowed. (Paul Routledge)

The Brooklyn Rail reviews Terry Eagleton's How to Read Literature but the reviewer doesn't seem to like Terry Eagleton much:

The opening chapter of the new book deals with some famous first words: the lead sentence of Pride and Prejudice, the first lines of Keats’s “To Autumn” and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, the witches’ brew at the beginning of Macbeth. Subsequent chapters deal with “Character,” “Narrative,” “Value,” and “Interpretation,” with examples culled from works by an all-star roster of writers (Dickens, Hardy, Conrad, the Brönte [sic] sisters, Evelyn Waugh) with a ringer or two thrown in (nursery rhymes, Harry Potter). [...]
Eagleton’s readings are neither original nor profound, but then, we do not expect originality and profundity from primers of this kind—we just like spending time with old friends like Great Expectations or Gulliver’s Travels. I am happy to take a refresher course in unreliable narrators (Nelly Dean in Wuthering Heights, Marlow in Heart of Darkness) even from an unreliable if academically sound critic. (David Lehman)

The Telegraph looks at sequels, prequels, etc. now that Sophie Hannah has been allowed to write a new novel featuring Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot. And which is the go-to mention in that subject?

That, indeed, is the final rule: to play as fast and loose with your source material as possible. My girlfriend is currently devouring Jo Baker’s Longbourn, a novel set among the servants of the Bennet household. It works largely because the familiar characters are essentially peripheral: you get the same frisson when they briefly appear as when Flashman bumps into Bismarck or Lincoln. Sticking with Austen, you didn’t have to have read Pride and Prejudice or Emma to enjoy their knowing reworkings in Bridget Jones’s Diary or Clueless. Or Charlotte Brontë, to be gripped by Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea. (Robert Colvile)

The Daily Herald features the musical Deseret:

With a theme similar to the classic Emily Brontë novel “Wuthering Heights,” [Carl] Bell said “Deseret” is a musical all about commitment, love and choosing our paths in this life. Set in the late 1800s, the show features life in the Utah Territory for early pioneers and the decisions they were forced to make as drought threatened their livelihood and the driving in of the Golden Spike revolutionized opportunity for travel and expansion. (Kari Kenner)

SheWired imagines casting 50 Shades of Grey as a lesbian film in different genres such as

50 Ways to Discuss 'Englishness' - The Victorian Novel Version Break out the petticoats and corsets and head for the Brontë sisters' moors.  Kate Winslet and Emma Watson are are shoo-ins for the Victorian novel version of 50! 

FlavorWire features the Arts Club, 'The Members-Only Clubs That Charles Dickens Built' and clarifies the following just in case:

The words “Victorian club scene” might lead you to picture the Brontë sisters gyrating wildly against some dandy in a top hat blasting music from behind a steampunk-looking DJ booth, but it was quite the opposite. (Jason Diamond)

The Telegraph visits the garden at Gesgarth Hall:

[T]he house was set in the bottom of a valley surrounded by heavy woodland. Mark’s father referred to it as Wuthering Heights. (Bunny Guinness)

So So Gay shares a recap of the latest installment of The Great British Bake Off:

Elsewhere, Kimberley’s amaretti biscuits were nearly enough to have Sue profess her undying love (certainly enough to have her quoting Jane Eyre at us) and a debate erupted over whether jam or jelly was the ‘proper’ filling for a trifle. (Oli Dowdeswell)

The Brontë Parsonage Facebook page section From the Treasure Trove features the knife and fork said to have been used by Charlotte at Roe Head. And a tidbit about Branwell's childhood is also shared:

Did you know? As a child, as well as the famous wooden soldiers, Branwell also played with toys of Turkish musicians and a set of Indians.

The Brontë Sisters begins a series of posts on William M. Thackeray. HA Reads Books shares a few thoughts on Jane Eyre while Bobby Rivers TV posts about the 1944 screen adaptation of the novel.