Animalistic, Abuser, Asexual... Labeling Obsession

The Toast devotes an article to Emily Brontë and her relation with animals, particularly Keeper (an article that links nicely with the current exhibition at the Brontë Parsonage Museum). The article makes interesting insights as well into Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë:

(...) If Charlotte is all culture, all humanity, then Emily is all passion, all animality. Charlotte is compelled by animals’ helplessness; Emily is lured by their “fierce, wild, intractability.” Gaskell’s Emily is otherworldly, more animal than human, a woman who embraces the unfettered passions of nature’s inhabitants. If Emily, like Keeper, is an animal, then their relationship is one of animalistic kinship, formed in canine hierarchy, not human empathy. Emily’s animal justice might seem unfathomable to cultured urbanites, but Keeper understood. She alone spoke his language.
What if we took Charlotte’s hints and Gaskell’s animal metaphor and ran with it? What if we thought of Emily as animalistic? What if we situated her intellectual life outside the drab walls of Haworth and let her loose inside the animal kingdom? In that space, a very different Emily Brontë emerges, a writer who is deeply uncomfortable with the cultural order, reveling instead in her deep affinity for the animals of the wilds. (Read more) (Stassa Edwards)

You can also read the Gawker discussion about the article.

The Bristol Post recommends a visit to Brontë country:

Your holiday will begin with a private coach trip that takes you to the quaint Yorkshire village of Haworth where the cobbled streets and alleyways helped inspire the Brontë sisters to write Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.

 The Yorkshire Post highlights the release of a 'quirky' tourist guide to Yorkshire with the Tour in mind:

First-time visitors to Yorkshire are being pointed in the direction of Keighley and to Chapeltown in Leeds in a slightly quirky guide to the county’s heritage tourism sites.
Managers at the Heritage Lottery Fund have drawn up a ‘top 20’ guide to Yorkshire for those visiting for the Tour de France on July 5 and 6. (...)
Meanwhile, a Banksy-style street artist has been creating a stir with life-size stencils depicting famous folk on buildings across West and South Yorkshire. Bristol-based ‘Stewy’ depict David Hockney, Jarvis Cocker, Sylvia Plath and the Brontë sisters.
The work appeared on the Tour de France route with the blessing of building owners. (Andrew Robinson)

Wharfedale & Aireborough Observer insists on the Tour's visit:

"While the Grand Départ has attracted attention, it is the world-class attractions and hospitality that make visitors stay longer and keep coming back - places like the National Media Museum, City Park, the Alhambra, Brontë Country, Keighley and Worth Valley Railway and many more really play a part in this.
“The Tour is estimated to inject £100 million into Yorkshire’s economy. Its value for business is immense."

Ham & High recommends tomorrow's literary talk in London:

Mr Darcy and Mr Rochester – two heart-throb characters penned by Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë – have long represented the epitome of the romantic hero. But what would they really have been like to live with?
A panel of writers, novelists and broadcasters debates the desirability – and horrors – of these two characters and whether they will always be better left on the page.
The panel includes author Lilian Pizzichini, Guardian journalist Tanya Gold, professor of English at University College London John Mullan, and novelist Fay Weldon. Chaired by broadcaster Melvyn Bragg. (Paul Wright)

Country Life summarises recent sales and auctions:

On May 19, a book and manuscript auction at Bloomsbury featured a complete set of first editions of the Brontë sisters' novels, sent for sale from America. Estimated to £80,000, the set reached £111,600. (Huon Mallalieu)

The New Yorker's Page-Turner interviews the author Rebecca Curtis:

Are there ghost stories that you’re particularly fond of, either by other writers or ones you’ve heard by the campfire?
I love ghost stories. As a kid, I read collections of ghost stories. I loved “Wait Till Martin Comes,” for example, which is about a man taking refuge in an old hut and getting his head bitten off by the largest of a series of three black cats that appear. I loved the Headless Horseman—stuff like that—and Grimm’s Fairy Tales, which are ghosty, in that many feature “spirits” who appear and harm or help out. I love classic ghost novels like “Wuthering Heights,” “Dracula,” “The Turn of the Screw,” and of course Shakespeare’s ghosty plays. (Willing Davidson)

The Independent talks about the exhibition The Wonder of Birds at the Norwich Castle Museum:

More taxidermied birds peer down from high ledges throughout the exhibition, seemingly accusing us humans from beyond the grave. There is a plump-breasted white cockatoo, a blue and gold macaw, a domestic turkey, a chicken, and a magnificent Berwick’s Swan, named after the Enlightenment natural history author Thomas Bewick, whose History of British Birds (1804) became a classic. It is read by a young Jane Eyre in the first chapter of Charlotte Bronte’s 1847 novel. A 19th-century edition of Bewick’s book is displayed here. (Zoe Pilger)

The Boston Herald celebrates the release of the Acorn Classic Drama Collection on DVD which includes Jane Eyre 1997:

Samantha Morton tops almost any list of the world’s greatest English-speaking actors and she is wonderful as Jane Eyre, as is the better known Kate Beckinsale as Austen’s meddlesome Emma. (Stephen Schaefer)

She has been called a mystic, Asperger-like, lesbian, incestous, anorexic (and in this same post animal-lover and animal-abuser)... asexual is not the most far-edged we have read:

What do T.E. Lawrence, Isaac Newton, Janeane Garofalo, and Emily Brontë have in common? They identify and identified as asexuals. Like these people, I am also asexual. (Katrina Trask on The Peak)

Kaite Welsh in The Huffington Post doesn't like the 'reading-is-sexy' type of literary advertisement:

Men aren't the target of this misplaced, cross-brand advertising campaign because it's assumed that they read, they don't need to wear it on their sleeve or across their tits. For every Scrabble tile cufflink, there are hundreds of bracelets quoting Jane Eyre and earrings with quotes from Pride and Prejudice and the real kicker  --  the A Room of Her Own tea-towel. Somehow, I don't think the kitchen was the room Virginia was talking about.

The Telegraph interviews Cheryl Hickman, artistic director of the Opera on the Avalon:

Newfoundland has unique characteristics that attract established composers and directors, she believes, including weather that we might consider lousy, but to some, offers a mysterious, “Wuthering Heights” feel. (Tara Bradbury)

Le Vif (Belgium) begins an article about summer festivals like this

Manon, 23 ans, évoque davantage une héroïne d'Emily Brontë (Les Hauts de Hurlevent) que la festivalière tout-terrain standard. (Philippe Cornet) (Translation)

Ziarul de iaşi (Romania) announces that next July 26, they will give a Romanian translation of Jane Eyre with the newspaper; The News & Observer traces an exclusive book club between a father and a daughter which began with a reading of Wide Sargasso Sea; Homo Literatus (in Portuguese) posts about Anne Brontë; Thany's Thoughts reviews Jane by April Lindner and Jane Eyre 2011; Pa(i)ge Turners has not enjoyed fully a re-reading of Jane Eyre; Prickiga Paula Och Böckerna (in Swedish) posts about Fanny Britt and Isabelle Arsenault's Jane, the Fox and Me; the Brontë Parsonage tweets this 1836 drawing by Charlotte Brontë, The Cross of Rivaulx.