New information panel for Brontë buffs

The Telegraph and Argus reports the news about the new information panel installed at Top Withins.

Thousands of literary pilgrims who make the trek to Top Withens above Haworth every year can now learn more about the site.
The derelict moorland farmhouse attracts Brontë buffs from across the world due to its alleged inspiration for the location of Emily’s Wuthering Heights.
Now an information panel has been installed explaining its history and the people who lived there.
The venture is part of the award-winning Watershed Landscape Project, managed by Pennine Prospects and financed by the Heritage Lottery Fund and South Pennine Leader.

The Boar adds to the classics at the classroom debate.

As many of us struggled through the spiels of Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, with its defiantly complex plot which twists and turns dizzily through time, it is safe to say the minority of people actually understood why we were reading it. (Amber Reeve)

The Denisonian discusses Denison English professor Diana Mafe's new book Mixed Race Stereotypes in South African and American Literature: Coloring outside the (Black and White) Lines.

The literature under Mafe’s critical gaze also showcases two sharply different perspectives from two different centuries on what makes the mulatto “mad.” In Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre”, Rochester’s wife Bertha is mentally ill and “racially suspect,” writes Mafe. There’s no context to her madness in the 1847 novel; her mental state, like that of other mulattos in literature, is considered to be a given. However, in Jean Rhys’ prequel to “Jane Eyre,” “Wide Sargasso Sea,” chronicles Bertha’s life before her marriage to Englishman Rochester, and it shows the reader, through a 1966 post-colonial lens, that Bertha is not crazy because she is a mixed-race Creole; she’s crazy because society has marginalized her as a result of her mixed-race heritage. (Curtis Edmonds)

Writer Collette Auclair doesn't seem to be a Brontëite according to this interview on Westword.

No Jane Austen or Brontë influence? I know them, but I haven't delved in lately. I always preferred Dickens as far as Victorians go. (Byron Graham)

Vanity Fair jokes about Taylor Swift 'discovering' Francis Scott Fitzgerald.

Now that Taylor seems to be in touch with her literary side, we have our fingers crossed for a song from Elizabeth Bennet’s perspective, a Wuthering Heights–themed music video, and the album title The Swift Also Rises. (Josh Duboff)

Finally, you can see pictures of the Brontë Parsonage Museum's stall at Haworth's Christmas Market on their Facebook page.