Female Rebel

More news outlets echo the British Library's press release (via Associated Press) announcing the availability online of many of their literary treasures. The Japan News or B92 (Serbia) illustrate the news with an image from a manuscript by Charlotte Brontë:

This undated image made available by The British Library in London, Friday, shows Charlotte Brontë’s earliest known effort at writing, a short story written for Anne, the baby of the family.

The Independent discusses the new BBC film A poet in New York (about Dylan Thomas) and the latest Mike Leigh film, Mr. Turner (about J M W Turner):

There is no point in complaining about this mythologising process, if only because it stems from a very natural wish to dramatise what is nearly always highly prosaic – most artistic lives, seen in the round, are horribly mundane – and give it sparkle. After all, when Charlotte Brontë made the mistake of dedicating the second edition of Jane Eyre to Thackeray, a rumour instantly swept round literary London identifying the author of Vanity Fair as Mr Rochester and Brontë as the governess. (DJ Taylor)

We read in the The Sunday Times:

Is there a book that changed your life? The answer to that question tells you more about a person than their response to “What do you do?” or “Where did you grew up?” ever could. For this year’s Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, formerly the Orange prize, a collection of extraordinary women have named the book, written by a woman, that changed them.
Mary Beard named Jane Eyre because the book “is about what it is to be a female rebel”. (Jessica Brinton)

The Telegraph talks about the rise of the short story format:

Brevity, fleetness of foot, unflinching attention to detail. All these and more lie at the heart of almost every good short story. “I think the world is divided into Jane Austen lovers and Brontë lovers,” says [Alexandra] Pringle [the editor-in-chief of Bloomsbury, and Saunders’ UK editor]. “I’m an Austen girl, and all these writers [she reels off a list that includes Alice Munro, Eudora Welty, Polly Samson, Helen Simpson and Jhumpa Lahiri] do that Austen thing: perfect, nuanced, subtle, luminous understanding and expression of people’s lives, of the human heart. (Sam Baker)

On the same Austen vein, this article on Hot Topix vindicates Fanny Price:

Austen’s own relations and friends perhaps grasped this better than later readers, for they did not seem disappointed to turn from Elizabeth to Fanny. “Fanny is a delightful Character!” thought her brother Francis. “Fond of Fanny,” said her sister Cassandra. For all her reticence and awkwardness (she blushes more often than any other Austen heroine), Fanny has to be as stubborn and resourceful as any Brontë heroine.

The Guardian interviews the writer Eimear McBride:

Though she read the Brontës as a teenager and found consolation in George Eliot, McBride places herself in a European rather than Anglo-American tradition: Thomas Mann, Bohumil Hrabal and Mikhail Bulgakovare the writers she likes. (Susanna Rustin)

Bee Rowlatt in The Telegraph describes a curious side effect to be immersed on volcanic sand.

This much sand is surprisingly heavy – it sits on your stomach and pins down your limbs. I feel entombed. A couple of minutes in I start rambling and misquoting Emily Brontë. (A light flow of nonsense was not listed among sand-bathing's effects.)

An article about the Coupérie-Eifel sisters in Paris Match:

De la maxime de leur mère, « Notre seul devoir est d’être gaies », Virginie et Coco, les soeurs Coupérie-Eiffel, ont fait le credo de leur vie. Elles sont douées pour le bonheur comme les Brontë l’étaient pour l’écriture. (Marie-France Chatrier) (Translation)

El Heraldo de Aragón describes Luz Gabás's novel Regreso a tu Piel:

Luz Gabás, que ha leído a Ángel Gari y a María Tausiet, enlaza esa trama con otra contemporánea, donde asoma el amor, en un libro que querría ser reivindicativo, pero también neorromántico, casi el 'Cumbres borrascosas' oscense. (Antón Castro) (Translation)

Il Corriere di Bologna (Italy) informs of the local 1010 ways to buy a book without money event. The current Wuthering Heights value: 10 hugs.

Alfie Dog Fiction interviews the author Sharon Hammad:

What did you like reading as a child?
(...)Around the age of twelve or thirteen, I discovered Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë which I still love and occasionally reread.

The Ledger-Enquirer opens an article with the 'Conventionality is not morality' Charlotte Brontë quote; El Observador (Uruguay) reviews The Moor by William Atkins; a Jane Eyre re-reader in Rutland Herald; a reference to the Brontës in the latest column of Caitlin Moran in The Times; the Parsonage's Facebook has a couple of interesting entries: the visit of Eric Mitchell (the last baby born at the Parsonage whe his father was its custodian) and a candlelit tour of the Parsonage; Bride of the Book God reviews The House of Dead Maids.