Hope of Happiness

The Telegraph & Argus announces of the events that will take place next weekend (Haworth 1940s weekend) at the Brontë Parsonage Museum:

Treasures by candlelight are on offer to Bronte fans during an after-hours museum visit.
The Brontë Parsonage Museum is taking part in the national Museums At Night event on Friday.
Education officer Sue Newby will give people a guided tour of the parsonage’s rooms by candlelight, before collections manager Ann Dinsdale lets visitors have a rare close-up view of valuable Brontë items in the library – including manuscripts, pictures, and objects owned by the family during the 19th century. Sue said: “It’s the Haworth 1940s weekend so we will be speaking about things that happened during that time of the parsonage.
“We know a lot about the Mitchells who were living here during the 1940s.”
The event begins at 9pm and costs £15. E-mail louisa.briggs@bronte.org.uk or call (01535) 640188 to book a place.

Good news from Braunchsweig (Germany), the local opera theater will stage a new production of Bernard Herrmann's Wuthering Heights next year, in April (via Braunchsweig Heute).

Tessa Hadley vindicates Lucy Snowe from Villette in The Guardian:

It isn't easy to like Lucy Snowe – she doesn't even want us to like her. She certainly doesn't want us to think she's attractive, describing herself as "thin, haggard, and hollow-eyed; like a sitter-up at night, like an overwrought servant, or a placeless person in debt". The young heroine of Charlotte Brontë's last novel, Villette, set mostly at a girls' school in Brussels, is more or less invisible to others: they don't notice her any more than if she were a serviceable piece of furniture in a room. Lucy only hints at whatever sad family history has left her destitute and friendless and somewhere on the social margins, neither a working-class servant nor a lady. Behind her invisibility, though, passion rages; she's a fascinating mixture of abjection with appetite. All by herself she travels to the continent, and finds work as a teacher. The novel's love stories and dramas happen mostly to the pretty, lucky people; Lucy's interest in them verges on voyeurism. Yet her sheer intensity intrudes all the time into the foreground, insisting we attend to the life of her extraordinary mind, to her visions and longings. The sensibility is so English, so self-righteously Protestant - and yet it is almost Dostoevskian, too, in its tormented obsession.
Would this clumsy, extravagant, eccentric and magnificent novel ever have been published, I wonder, if it hadn't been for the success of Jane Eyre? Jane Eyre had seemed to hold out a hope of happiness to the thousands of invisible women ground small in mid-Victorian England by gentility, poverty and exclusion; if there is one spark of hope in Villette, then it is snuffed out on the last page. Brontë was writing after the early deaths of all her siblings. Lucy is brutally realistic about her own prospects – the worst will probably happen. She's my heroine because she won't resign herself to it, or be at peace.

John Mullan chooses Lizzie Bennet from Jane Austen's Mansfield Park in the same article:

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.

New Straits Times makes a list of mothers from hell in literature:

Sarah Reed
ALTHOUGH the mother figure in Jane Eyre is actually her aunt, for all intents and purposes she fills the role of mother for the orphaned Jane. And boy, does she fill it with a whole lot of cruelty and disinterest. Favouring her own children and treating Jane like a hanger-on, Mrs Reed reinforces Jane’s feelings of unhappiness. When her son John bullies Jane, Mrs Reed takes his side, punishing Jane in such an extreme fashion and then lying about it to the attending doctor that it eventually leads to Jane’s removal to a boarding school — and the start of her new life.
Mrs Reed eventually gets her sad comeuppance when her good-for-nothing son breaks her heart. (Samantha Jones)

The Guardian reviews The Year of Reading Dangerously by Andy Miller:

Miller's list – which started with a dozen titles but swelled to 50 – included a number of great Unreads such as Don Quixote, The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Communist Manifesto and Beowulf – all bursting with potential for Betterment – and a lot of what one might call unread Greats: Jane Eyre, War and Peace, Middlemarch, Frankenstein, books that fit Alan Bennett's definition of a classic, "a book that everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have". (Claire Harman)

Nikki Gemmell discusses in The Australian the so-called 'new female gaze' and how men could feel about it:

Perhaps a clue was provided by Jean Rhys in her book Wide Sargasso Sea. The protagonist — the first Mrs Rochester, bold and wild — gazes at that mythical example of clotted masculinity, Rochester, and places a garland upon him. As poet Nalini Paul explains, “Rochester does not feel comfortable with having this role enforced upon him; thus, he rejects it by removing the garland, and crushing the flowers.” And we all know what fate befell Mrs Rochester: the attic, and madness. Where she belonged, some men would argue, for such an impertinent gaze.

Sara Hyde begins an article in Christian Today about the banning of books in prison with this comment:

During my long summer holidays I used to love roaming through the canyons of New Mexico, getting saturated and bone cold on the Yorkshire Moors and most of all developing an enduring fascination with Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt, without ever leaving my sofa. Courtesy of Judy Blume, Emily Brontë and Agatha Christie respectively, I witnessed, touched and tasted things that expanded my horizons far beyond my home counties cul-de-sac.

Laura Mitchell (Daily Express) is visiting the private spa Boscundle Manor, St Austell, Cornwall, where

Each room at the cosy guesthouse is uniquely decorated and named after a famous female heroine. I am in the Emily (Brontë), a luxurious golden twin room with a stripped chaise longue and a light airy window seat with a beautiful view of the courtyard complete with ornamental stone fountain.

Jane Sullivan in The Age doesn't agree with the recent Huffington Post list of the biggest heartbreakers in literature:

The list has a bet each way with both Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler named as champion heartbreakers in Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind; they deserve each other. The rest range from bounders such as Steerforth in David Copperfield, who ruins Little Em'ly, to Rochester in Jane Eyre, a debatable choice (actually he's a much nastier character in Jean Rhys' prequel, The Wide Sargasso Sea).

Starpulse reviews the film Belle:

The film also smartly acknowledges that the issues Belle experienced weren't necessarily racial but class focused. 'Jane Eyre,' 'Mansfield Park' (which Dido possibly influenced) and the 17th century Grimm version of Cinderella all exemplify what happened to penniless relatives of gentry - they're raised by the wealthier family but typically become that family's upper-level servants in adulthood. However, unlike Jane in 'Jane Eyre,' Belle's family never felt coerced into caring for her and unlike Cinderella, she never served as a direct servant. (An Nicholson)

The Topeka-Capital Journal makes some suggestions to put your house on the market:

 Here are suggestions for staging this area: (...)
A book opened and face down on the chair. Forego the shades of gray genre, and instead use a classic (Jane Eyre) or a popular novel. (Faye Wilson)

El Mundo (Spain) remembers how the Brontës published their works under pseudonym:

Para poder publicar, novelistas como las hermanas Brontë, George Sand, Fernán Caballero y muchas otras tuvieron que recurrir a una argucia muy socorrida, como relata Marta Robles, premio Fernando Lara 2013: "Hubo infinidad de escritoras que tuvieron que valerse de seudónimos masculinos para que sus libros fueran considerados". (Carmen Machado) (Translation)

Página 12 (Argentina) reviews La Parte Inventada by Rodrigo Fresán:

La solución: escribir los objetos de amor como si fueran literatura, es decir: monumentos clásicos, al mismo título que Tierna es la noche o Cumbres borrascosas, los dos grandes objetos literarios que presiden La parte inventada. (Alan Pauls) (Translation)

Lesbicanarias (Spain) reviews Dark Garden by Jennifer Fulton:

[L]a autora expresa en la introducción la influencia que han tenido en esta obra “Cumbres Borrascosas” y “Rebecca”. Debo confesar que en cuanto leí tal cosa, me invadió una curiosidad imposible de resistir. Si algo está inspirado en esas dos grandísimas novelas- por las que tengo debilidad-, pues me lo tengo que leer.(...) Creo que en la novela hay muchas más huellas de esas influencias literarias que lo que declara la autora: por ejemplo, la atracción fatal e irresistible de las protagonistas no puede ser más “Cumbres Borrascosas”. Y no hablemos del escenario, claro, porque ahí las evocaciones pueden dispararse. Yo he disfrutado mucho del libro, la verdad. (Carmen Sánchez) (Translation)

Several Italian websites report the ratings of Thursday night airing of Jane Eyre 1996 in Iris TV:

su Iris il film Jane Eyre, 499 mila telespettatori e il 2,02% di share.

The Wire interviews Mallory Ortberg, creator of The Toast and author of Texts from Jane Eyre that will be published in November. A local actress and Brontëite in the Derry Journal. The San Jose Mercury News includes an easy Brontë-related question in its SuperQuiz. RedBuzz has read Wuthering Heights. The Oddness of Moving Things reviews Susan M. Wyler's Solsbury Hill. Sonder Books reviews Jane, Le Renard et Moi.