Kinkiest of the Victorians

Wetherby News talks about Charlotte Cory's exhibitions at the Brontë Parsonage Museum and in Harrogate:

Fans of the Brontës and art lovers, in general, are enjoying a new exhibition at Harrogate’s Mercer Art Gallery by one of the country’s leading surrealist photographers.
In an inventive piece of installation art, Charlotte Cory has created an intricately detailed museum within a museum telling an alternative history of the times.
The exhibition is the result of her investigation of the history of photography, her admiration for Victorian paintings and her affection for the writings of the Brontës and their Haworth Parsonage home.
Cory first visited the Brontë Parsonage when she was just 10-years-old and the experience has haunted her ever since.
She said: “I walked round mesmerised committing every room and item in it to memory. Here in Harrogate all these years later, I ask about all the things I did not see at the Parsonage - and then I recreate many of them.” (...)
Cory’s Visitoriana at Harrogate has been organized in partnership with the Brontë Parsonage Museum, Haworth and the Long and Ryle Gallery in London.
Among the realistic memorabilia Cory has created in her museum within a museum are a shipwrecked trunk, the lost treasures, the unpainted pictures.
Cory said: “The Brontë sisters themselves never went into a photographic studio - so I take them, retrospectively. And since they all clearly preferred animals to humans, I think they would be delighted with the results.” (Graham Chalmers)

Chicago Tribune interviews Elizabeth Gilbert:

Q: Did you have other touchstone writers from that period — Jane Austen, maybe, or George Eliot? A: I did, but I came to Eliot later in life than I'd like to admit, though she's become exceedingly important to me. It was only seven or eight years ago that I read "Middlemarch." And I revisited it again when I started writing this new book. She's probably my second-biggest influence now after Dickens, and after her, I'd say (Anthony) Trollope. I'm not a big Austen reader. I wouldn't say I dislike her, but if I had to choose between her and Eliot to bring to a desert island, it would definitely be Eliot.
Q: What about the Brontë sisters?
A: The Brontë sisters, of course — who are the kinkiest of the Victorians, I believe. If there's a writer from that period who I wish could have written about sexuality in a more direct way, it would be Charlotte. She was the most carnal of all of them.
Q: I would have said "Wuthering Heights" had the most potential for carnality.
A: Well, the initial scenes between Rochester and Jane Eyre are just so charged. There's this weird vibe between them that's really sexual. (Kevin Nance)

The Telegraph discusses the continuous appeal of Henri-Alban Fournier's 1913 novel Le Grand Meaulnes on the occasion of a new English translation (The Lost Estate):

It is thoroughly and engagingly French, but it also belongs to its period, and the atmosphere is that of our Edwardian afternoon before the guns sounded. Alain-Fournier was an Anglophile – he actually spent a few months in the London suburbs working for the wallpaper firm Sanderson’s – and he loved English art (the Pre-Raphaelites) and literature, especially Dickens, Emily Brontë, Stevenson and Kipling. Kim, published just six years before his own novel, was a favourite, and Kim, like Meaulnes himself, is uncertain of his identity. (Allan Massie)

And also in The Telegraph, a visit to the Lake District:

In case you think it’s all Wordsworth and Beatrix Potter, there are shades of the Brontës, Ruskin, Conan Doyle. Dickens and Wilkie Collins once walked all the way from Carlisle to get here. (Terry Wogan)

The Vancouver Sun and Alice Munro's literature:

I met Jane Eyre and David Copperfield, and was intrigued. I met Del Jordan, and was in awe.
Del lived in Jubilee, a small, southern Ontario town, and was the creation of Alice Munro. Her coming-of-age experiences were chronicled in Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women, published in 1971, just three years after her first collection of short stories made its appearance in book stores. (Barbara Gunn)

Yorkshire Post has an interesting question for its readers:

The celebration, at Sheffield Hallam University, is part of the city’s Off the Shelf Festival of Words and is likely to spark debate about whether, from the Brontës through to John Braine and Stan Barstow, there’s such a thing as a “Yorkshire novel”. Does the county has a definable fictional voice?

The New Jersey Star-Ledger talks about the director William Wyler:

"Right from his very first sound movie, 'Hell's Heroes,' Wyler is playing with deep focus," [author Gabriel] Miller says. "And he's utilizing it in 'Wuthering Heights,' in 'Dodsworth,' in many movies before (Orson Welles used it in) 'Citizen Kane.'

Daphne Lee argues in The Star (Malaysia) that children should be allowed to read any kind of literature:

When I was a child I read whatever there was in the family bookcase. There were children’s books – Enid Blytons, The Wizard Of Oz, Little Women; there were novels by Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare and Mark Twain, Tolstoy and the Brontës (just Emily and Charlotte – I didn’t know of poor Anne til much, much later), Thomas Hardy and Edgar Allen Poe, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Evelyn Waugh; there were poetry collections and short story anthologies; and, on the bottom shelf, there was a set of Encyclopaedia Britannica – large, heavy books with gilt-trimmed, chocolate-brown covers.

The latest addition to politicians compared to Heathcliff is John Dease (Ireland, Fine Gael) in The Independent (Ireland):

The brooding Heathcliff that is John Deasy reared his head last week to have a savage go at Enda [Kenny]  at a Fine Gael meeting, and it sounds like the best Enda could give him back was a personal attack that many present found a bit distasteful. (Brendan O'Connor)

The Herst Advertiser presents the new Lydia Baylis album like this:

Scheduled for release in early 2014, Lydia’s forthcoming album, A Darker Trace, is a meditation on the darker side of human nature, inspired by the literature of Virginia Woolf and the Brontë sisters, as well as music by artists such as Beth Orton, Joni Mitchell and Florence Welch.

Daily Kos discusses bad gothics:

Those bastard offspring of early 19th century potboilers by “Monk” Lewis and E.T.A. Hoffman and the Brontë sisters that feature a lovely, naïve young woman comes to a remote house/castle/abbey/ranch/mansion to tutor the children/catalogue the library/restore the tapestries/train the horses in Devon/Wales/Maine/the Loire Valley, meets a brooding, devilishly handsome dark-haired man, falls in love despite warnings from every other person in spitting distance, and faces unimaginable torments before she defeats a ghost/previous wife who’s gone mad/family curse/lack of Internet access before she finally marries her beloved and gets the deed to the house/castle/abbey/ranch/mansion as a wedding present. It’s a formula that’s been around ever since a clever publisher figured out that stripping Jane Eyre of the feminism and political commentary was a dandy idea. (Ellid)

El Norte (México) talks about heroes and villains in literature:

Una historia de amor en la época victoriana protagoniza Heathcliff en Cumbres Borrascosas, de Emily Brontë (1847). Con una identidad y origen misteriosos, este personaje es adoptado de niño por el señor Earnshaw, dueño del rancho Cumbres Borrascosas, donde vive con sus hijos Hindley, quien lo humillaba constantemente, y Catherine, de quien Heathcliff se enamora. (Teresa Martínez) (Translation)

Teen Ink publishes a Jane Eyre college essay; Felice's Log reviews Wuthering Heights 1939; Mariana Noemi P. Vallejo reviews Emily Brontë's book on YouTube.