The wrongs of literature

The Telegraph writes 'Everything you need to know about the Grand Depart' of this year's Tour de France.

Stage 2 - Sunday July 6
York to Sheffield 200km
Entitled 'Past, Present and Future', stage two is likely to keep the general classification contenders honest as the riders start to hit some serious hills. Beginning at Knavesmire racecourse in York, the riders pass the city's historic Minster before crossing Clifton Bridge and heading out towards the moors.
After passing Knaresborough and Harrogate the riders head west along Skipton Road to join the undulating A59 that passes Bolton Abbey. Claiming up from Keighley, the riders pass through Haworth - Brontë country and the setting for Wuthering Heights - before sweeping down the Pennines to Hebden Bridge, Mytholmroyd (once home to the poet Ted Hughes, whose wife Sylvia Plath, is buried in Heptonstall churchyard) and then up Cragg Vale, reputedly the longest continuous ascent in England at 5.5miles.
Ripponden, Huddersfield and Holmfirth - location of Last of the Summer Wine - lead the riders to the toughest and most spectacular section of the 200km stage, in the heart of the Peak District, with Holme Pass, one of the toughest ascents in the UK, of particular note. The stage ends in the Steel City of Sheffield. (Tom Cary)

It does sound like it will be a lovely stage.

In the meantime, the Keighley News sees

the need for a direct, northbound early morning service from London to Keighley to attract more visitors from the capital to Keighley and Brontë Country.

The New York Times interviews writer Emma Donoghue.

And what were your favorite childhood books? All the fantasists — C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, E. Nesbit, Mary Norton, Diana Wynne Jones, Alan Garner — with a side order of boarding-school fiction (the little-known Antonia Forest is the best I know); some speculative fiction (John Wyndham); and some classics, broadly defined (the Brontës, “Gone With the Wind”).

Speaking of Gone with the Wind, The Indian Express features Ruth’s Journey by Donald McCaig, which tells the story of Mammy. The influence behind it seems inescapable:

Neither is Mammy the first literary character to be rescued from unjust fiction. Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, for instance, takes up the story of Bertha Mason, the Creole mad woman in the attic of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Perhaps literature can make amends for the wrongs of literature, if not for the wrongs of history.

The New Yorker considers P.G. Wodehouse's Bertie and Jeeves 'touchstones and reference points'.

Most often, this sort of bonding springs from romantic love, and in the English novel I suppose the most beloved pairings are Elizabeth and Darcy, in “Pride and Prejudice,” and Catherine and Heathcliff, in “Wuthering Heights.” (The marriage of Jane and Rochester, in “Jane Eyre,” seems less a triumph of romantic love than one of Gothic, erotic-psychological jousting.) But in many ways the most memorable English couples are non-romantic: Holmes and Watson, Peter and Wendy, Scrooge and Cratchit on a peculiar, particular Christmas morning that is in fact every Christmas morning. Add to these Bertie and Jeeves. (Brad Leithauser)

The White Barn seems to be loving Jane Eyre. You can find lots of 'behind the scenes' images of the Brontë Parsonage Museum on its Twitter account. On BBC Radio 4's Character Invasion you can listen to the actress Felicity Finch talking about 'her enduring love for Jane Eyre'.