Preserving likenesses

The Ilkley Gazette talks about two Brontë events scheduled for today as part of the Ilkley Literary Festival:

Executive director of The Brontë Society, Professor Ann Sumner, will welcome top television journalist Kirsty Wark to the Ilkley Literary Festival on Saturday, October 19.
The day includes two events on the subject of ‘Brontë’. The first event is for The Brontë Society Literary Lunch, where Kirsty Wark will discuss with Ruth Pitt the books that influenced her. On the same day at 4.45pm at King’s Hall, Kirsty Wark will also discuss with Ann Sumner her admiration of the Brontë novels and the significance of landscape in her debut novel to be published next year.

Yorkshire Post talks with Charlotte Cory concerning her exhibition at the Brontë Parsonage Museum:

Artist and novelist Charlotte Cory’s latest exhibition creates a surreal world where Victorian men and women become anthropomorphic animals.
But rather than being drawn or painted from the artist’s imagination, the images are made by using computer technology to seamlessly merge early photographs with images of taxidermied animals.
“There’s a parallel between taxidermy and photography – they’re both about preserving a likeness – so there seems to be something very natural about merging the two together,” says Cory. (...)
Cory read Jane Eyre as a 10-year-old and has been fascinated by the Brontës since. “It took me 18 months of bullying my parents to take me to the Brontë Parsonage,” says Charlotte.
“We went on the way to the Lake District from London, and I’ve never forgotten it .
“It’s lodged in my mind. I went back years later and realised it had informed so many of my tastes and interests. I’d never quite got over the experience.” (Jon Cronshaw)

Keighley News celebrates the fact that Haworth has been taken off the English Heritage 'at risk' list:

And last week, as revealed in the Keighley News, Haworth was finally taken off the ‘at risk’ list.
One of the Main Street shops that took part in the restoration was Mrs Beighton’s Sweet Shop, which had its frontage returned to how it would have looked more than a century ago. The work was funded by the shop’s owners, Bradford Council and English Heritage.
Business owner, Alan Breeze, said: “I’m over the moon with how the shop looks.
“It could be one of the most photographed shops in Haworth – so many people want their pictures taken outside it, so we must have done something right!”
Brontë Society chairman, Sally McDonald, said: “That Haworth has been taken off the ‘at risk’ register is a credit to what has been achieved by English Heritage, everyone in the village and Bradford Council in recent years.”
English Heritage’s regional director for planning, Trevor Mitchell, visited Haworth in August, when he urged businesses and local organisations to keep up the good work and maintain Haworth as the “window to Yorkshire”.
After last week’s announcement, he said: “The turnaround was very quick, and I think that was because of the very active local community.
“Putting Haworth on the register was a necessary thing to do – at the time, it looked like it was getting worse. Now it looks like it’s getting better, and we’re optimistic it will keep getting better.
“It is good news the council has announced it will carry out a new conservation area appraisal. That will help decide what still needs to be done. We certainly think advertising signs is a big issue that needs dealing with.” (Miran Rahman)

The Telegraph lists the ten most dramatic deaths in fiction:

5. Catherine Earnshaw in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847)
Self-imposed incarceration and starvation is a particularly slow and excruciating way to expire, even if you do find yourself in the throes of delirium. Love hurts, Catherine, but is haunting your beloved Heathcliff until his death really the best way to appease your suffering? (Rachel Thompson)

IndieWire's The Playlist talks with Michael Fassbender about 12 Years a Slave. The actor who was considered to be Heathcliff in the Wuthering Heights project that finally became Andrea Arnold's film knows his Brontës:

"Look at Heathcliff and Cathy in 'Wuthering Heights,' " Fassbender continued. "Would you consider them to be in love? Do you think she's in love with him? Don't you think there can be two people in love where one person is either more in love, or has a higher position of power than the other person? It doesn't always mean it's going to be pretty. It doesn't mean that the feeling isn't one of love. But it's just how it manifests itself physically. For me, it's love, but what you do with it is something else." Still, he conceded, "She's not in love with him." (Jen Vineyard)

The Independent talks about the improbable Walter Bagehot Country:

Organisers insist they are not seeking to claim Bagehot for Langport in the manner that Stratford Upon Avon allies itself with Shakespeare or the West Yorkshire village of Howarth (sic) embraces the Brontës. Instead, they want to gently remind the world of their most famous son’s achievements. (Cahal Milmo)

The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review has a most practical approach to Emily Brontë's overquoted fall poems:

“Every leaf speaks bliss to me, fluttering from the autumn tree,” wrote English novelist and poet Emily Brontë. Obviously in the aftermath of fall's grandeur, she never spent hours on end raking leaves. (Bob Pellegrino)

 The Citizen presents a local production (in Newnan, GA) of The Mystery of Irma Vep:

In “The Mystery of Irma Vep,” author Charles Ludlam satirizes Gothic romance novels, pulp fiction, and horror movies. But he doesn’t stop there. With two actors playing eight different roles and changing costumes 35 times, Ludlam is also laughing at the entire craft of theatrical production. The plot is borrowed from Gothic romances such as Daphne de Maurier’s “Rebecca”and Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights,” with fantastic characters from “penny dreadful” fiction and “C” rated movies tossed in. (...)
“The Mystery of Irma Vep” opens at Newnan Theatre Company on October 24 and runs through November 3. Ticket prices are $8 for children, $12 for seniors and students, and $14 for adults.

Sky Tyne and Wear has a curious story with a tiny Brontë link:

Martineau Guest House in Tynemouth is one of four hospitality businesses to have been shortlisted for best Bed and Breakfast/Guest House Accommodation of the Year in the prestigious North East England Tourism Awards 2013. (...)
The Grade II listed guest house on Tynemouth’s picturesque Front Street is so named because famed Victorian social theorist, novelist and journalist Harriet Martineau – whose fourth great grandniece is Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge – lived there for five years from 1840 whilst convalescing from a serious illness.
Credited with being England’s first female journalist she wrote many of her most important novels at the Georgian house and was visited by among others Charlotte Brontë and Charles Dickens. 

Xinhua News talks about the economical results of the Shanghai Ballet experience adapting and exporting a Jane Eyre ballet:

As one of China's leading troupes, the Shanghai Ballet has tasted the sweetness of overseas success. "Our adaptation of 'Jane Eyre' has been staged five times in England since its debut in November 2012, with a revenue of about 50,000 yuan (8,205 U.S. dollars) for each performance," said He Dong, production manager with the troupe.
This points to the value of investment in this field. "We spent more than 4 million yuan on the adaptation of 'Jane Eyre,' but the cost was recovered within a year," according to He.

Still in China. Jane Eyre as a role model for communist disidents?

Members [of the party] are mostly passive at meetings, she says. When officials read statements by party leaders, “We comment how wise they are. Always very wise. But they are very dull. No real business is conducted.” After Ms. Liu graduated, her father helped her to obtain her first job. “I knew he could do that,” she says. But she didn’t like it: “I read and reread the novel ‘Jane Eyre.’ Like her, I wanted to be myself.” (Rowan Callick in the Wall Street Journal)

The Chattanooga Times Free Press describes a local trivial night:

As trivia jockey Marc Michael announces that the Brontë sisters were Emily, Charlotte and Anne, an exuberant “Yeah, baby!” bursts out of Savannah Mazda and her right arm swings into the air for a fist pump. (Susan Pierce)

ABC Ramp Up describes disability in S/F and fantasy:

But the big difference I see is in the way men and women handle their altered mental states: the men go for power, whether that's taking over the colony or taking over the universe Voldemort style, and the women retreat from it, almost literally swapping Jane Eyre's attic hideaway for a spaceship hold or space prison. Men also tend to go mad in 'logical' ways: they succumb to the idea that science or machinery will solve their problems (Cybermen, Frankenstein's monster) while women are overwhelmed by emotional concerns or a lack of power. (Leah Hobson)

Die Welt (Germany) reviews the German translation of Gail Parent's Sheila Levine is Dead and Living in New York:

Man denke an Jane Austens Miss Benning oder Charlotte Brontës Jane Eyre: Immer sind es sich von vorherrschenden gesellschaftlichen Verhältnissen emanzipierende Frauen. (Nadine Hemgesberg) (Translation)

An Italian X Factor participant and Brontëite on blogosfere. The Brontë Parsonage Facebook page reminds its followers that North Lees Hall may have been the model for Thornfield Hall.