Cultish Meeting

A new review of the Helen Tennison Wuthering Heights adaptation now performed at the Rosemary Branch Theatre, London::

This is not the romanticised story that Hollywood devised for Olivier and Merle Oberon but the harsh reality of Emily Brontë’s novel, though its staging is often impressionistic.
Helen Tennison’s adaptation keeps Brontë’s device of the servant Nelly Dean telling much of the story to southerner Mr Lockwood. She begins in the ill-lit kitchen at Wuthering Heights where Heathcliff is polishing his boots while Hindley Earnshaw is asleep at a table across the room. It is a room which seems to have been invaded by the moors outside: ivy clings to the fireplace and furniture, mist swirls below the ceiling.
As Benedict Davies’s music, used extensively to great effect in this production, merges into the wind and storm of Matt Eaton’s sound score we hear a cry above the gale and Heathcliff is alerted. His eyes search the empty air until the shadow of Cathy appears at a fitfully lit window. (...)
Although the script of Helen Tennison’s compact adaptation provides only a filleted version of the novel and its characters' journey, her imaginative production follows its spirit in its evocative and imaginative theatricality that captures some of the wildness of the moors and of Brontë’s novel. (Howard Loxton in British Theatre Guide)

Lincolnshire Echo interviews Jasper Fforde about his literary career. This is what the writer says about The Eyre Affair:

“The trouble is, all my series started as standalones. What happens is someone will say ‘I love this, can we have a sequel’. The Eyre Affair was a standalone and Shades of Grey was originally meant to be as well. The Nursery Crimes was another but when I discover this interesting and exciting world I automatically think ‘what else can you do with it?’. (...)
"I chopped cross genres with The Eyre Affair – Jane Eyre, time travel, fantasy, crime and sci fi all mixed together. For the most part people say don’t write cross genre but I didn’t know this at that time.
“The important thing about writing The Eyre Affair was I felt the classic had been perhaps adopted by teachers and academics and Jane Eyre was no longer a novel but more a study text. (...)
“I wrote The Eyre Affair for fun and was writing for nearly 11 years before I got published. The only piece of advice I got in the early days was ‘look at the bestseller list and see what is selling’. I always thought that was bad advice to an author. I just wrote what was fun, enjoyable and amusing to me. (...)
“I have no plans when I am writing. I think plans can be very stifling – as soon as you have a plan you feel you have to stick to it. I tend to just start with a ‘narrative dare’ ... what would happen if someone kidnapped Jane Eyre out of the novel?

Yorkshire Post talks about female literary friendships and the website Something Rhymed:

Intrigued, they set up a website to explore their findings. The name Something Rhymed comes from the title of a poem by Jackie Kay, in which she celebrates her friendship with the novelist Ali Smith, and each month the website profiles different pairs of female writing friendships from down the years.
Readers are encouraged to submit their own suggestions and since launching in January the site has attracted thousands of readers from across the world, along with guest posts from well-known authors like Jill Dawson and Kathryn Heyman.
Profiles so far have included Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield – often remembered as fierce rivals, but in fact close friends – and in May the focus will switch to Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell.

The Telegraph publishes a (quite bizarre) list with the 20 best British and Irish novels of all time. No Brontës on the list but Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea is included.

On Tallahassee.com we read this story about the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at FSU's class Passion Through the Ages and Pages: Feminist Theory and the Romance Novel:

I read four sticky-sweet romance novels this spring. And I’m not a bit ashamed of myself.
I temporarily dropped my lifelong literary values and preferences to learn about a much-maligned but highly popular genre. And along the way, I read Jane Eyre—twice. (...)
Why does an extraordinarily well-read literary scholar love bodice rippers? And how do those novels compare to one of the earliest and most lauded romance novels, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre? (Fran Conaway)

The Herald reviews the new album by the singer Liz Green:

I think I first heard her singing Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights as part of a Glasgow art project, and the comparisons with the revivified Ms Bush are still there.

Bustle and StyleBlazer talk about the latest collection by fashion designer Vera Wang:

For this Spring 2015 collection, she insists that the dresses “just happened to be white,” and emphasizes that they could be worn for anything, not just a wedding ceremony. Perhaps a cultish meeting between sisters (Wang compared the models to the Brontës) in the woods?  (Tori Telfer) 

The mood and mystery of the film owe some inspiration to the closeness of the Brontë Sisters. (Giselle Childs)

The Bath Chronicle talks about a local production of The Three Sisters by Chekhov:

Chekhov’s masterpiece about three sisters marooned in provincial Russia whilst yearning for the promised land of Moscow was apparently inspired by the situation of the Brontë sisters living in the middle of the Yorkshire moors.

Amica (Italy) describes the recent winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, Donna Tartt, like this:

Ma Donna Tartt ricorda anche certe miniature di Charlotte Brontë (la riga in mezzo, la fronte spaziosa). (Antonella Catena) (Translation)

Horror Magazine (Italy) interviews the author Cristina Astori:

Queste sono infatti le premesse di “Acqua e sangue”, forse la mia prima storia d'amore romantico, ma che del sentimento narra anche i lati oscuri e agghiaccianti, una sorta di Cime tempestose in chiave vampirica. (Translation)

KemzMovies reviews Jane Eyre 2011 and Expasts Post does the same with Wuthering Heights 1939;  Samantha Ellis suggests Miss Temple could have been an excellent womentor; Closed the Cover posts a negative review of the novel Solsbury Hill.