Mislaid sentimentality?

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The Halifax Courier tells about the new blue plaque at Sowerby Bridge Railway Station.

The Friends of Sowerby Bridge Railway Station have unveiled an English Heritage style plaque to commemorate the connection of Branwell Brontë with the town and its first railway station.
The piece has been commissioned as part of a wider project being undertaken by the Group’s volunteers to promote this Brontë link.
Mr Brontë was appointed as Assistant Clerk-in-Charge, with an annual salary of £75, at the soon to be opened Sowerby Bridge station. in1840.
Chris Wright, convenor of the Friends of Sowerby Bridge Railway Station, said: “We would like to thank Calderdale Council for the contribution from its Small Grant Fund which allowed us to obtain the plaque.”

Remember that oh-so-memorable (NOT!) book Crap Towns? well, Crap Towns Returns is coming out soon and Bradford and Haworth are still doing badly according to it. The Telegraph and Argus covers the story.

And it’s not just Bradford city centre that’s in for a kicking... picturesque Haworth comes in at number 18, with the comment: “With mislaid sentimentality we thank Haworth for giving us the Brontë sisters. Really we should be cursing the place for killing them so young.” [...]
Liz Tattersley, Welcome to Yorkshire’s West Yorkshire Area Director, said: “We find it pretty unbelievable to see Bradford on this list and ranked so highly. We could go on for ages about what makes Bradford brilliant, not least its UNESCO City of Film status, Bradford City’s epic cup run last season, the National Media Museum, Alhambra theatre, numerous curry capital awards, world famous Brontë Country and Saltaire being a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In fact, all these things are compelling reasons to visit the city which will also see the Tour de France pass through the district next summer.” (David Barnett)

Evan Gottlieb discusses the origins of the Gothic novel in The Huffington Post.

But it was not until several decades after Walpole's original efforts that a novelist named Ann Radcliffe tweaked the genre sufficiently to make it widely popular.
How did she do this? For one thing, Radcliffe characters are compellingly complex -- her villains in particular are endowed with strong and often conflicting emotions and motivations. Her greatest creation, the monk Schedoni in The Italian (1797), arguably set the mold for the figure of the conflicted bad guy, from Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights (1847) to Tony Soprano. For another, Radcliffe made her heroines into central protagonists rather than merely supporting characters. Yes, adventures happen to them more frequently than they seek them out, and they tend to faint repeatedly and require rescuing at key moments. But they are still undoubtedly both the focus and the "focalizers" of every major Radcliffean novel. In fact, critics frequently speak of Radcliffe as the creator of "the female Gothic" -- the first popular novelistic genre written by and about women.

City of Book Reviews has interviewed writer Debbie Heaton.

What books did you love growing up? I read anything I could get my hands on as a child.  Reading to me was an “adventure” and I couldn’t get enough.  But Wuthering Heights and Gone with the Wind rank on the very top for me.  Wuthering Heights made such an impression on me that I’ve read it more times than I can count!

A columnist from The Citizen (South Africa) thinks it's an 'affectation' to write 'dear readers' nowadays.

These days it’s usually an affectation to say “Dear reader”.
It’s a literary device much employed by Victorian novelists who were in the habit of addressing their audiences directly, as did Charlotte Brontë in Jane Eyre, “Gentle reader, may you never feel what I then felt!”, and so on. (Martin Williams)

A CityMetro columnist writes that, 'Autumn recalls the fondest memories' such as

reading books by a wood-burning heater…“Jane Eyre”…”Little Women”… Edgar Allen [sic] Poe. (D. Barbara McWhite)

The Chicago Tribune's Theater Loop reviews the play The North China Lover by the Lookingglass Theatre Company where

the environment feels austere, something more in keeping with the Brontës, perhaps. (Chris Jones)

Now Gamer reports that Wii Karaoke U includes Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights:

But most of all, we like that we can sing Wuthering Heights and Symphony Of Destruction in the same evening. (Ryan King)

RMF 24 (Poland) reviews Charlotte Bronte i jej siostry śpiące. Myśli Czytelnika, also in Polish, reviews Wuthering Heights. Lovely thinks that the editorial from the October edition of British Vogue is for everyone who has loved Jane Eyre (although we are not so sure about that). Filey looks at its Charlotte Brontë connection.