Wispy Brontë Women

Cinemablend thinks that Kaya Scodelario in  Wuthering Heights 2011:

She's most heartbreaking, however, in the recent adaptation of Wuthering Heights, a must-see for any Brontë enthusiast.  (Gabe Toro)

Pitchfork reviews the video Heart is a Drum by Beck:

Over the course of the video, Beck encounters lost astronauts, a wispy woman straight out of a Brontë novel, the grim reaper, and a man wearing white trousers and a jacket/scarf combo that looks strikingly similar to the white outfit he wore in his 1993 video for "Loser". (Zoe Camp)

More news outlets carry the results of Baileys Women’s Prize For Fiction poll about the most influential books written by women: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Scotsman, The Guardian (highlighting that Mary Beard chose Jane Eyre), The Guardian's Books Blog, Entertainment Weekly...

Another usual suspect in recent news was the bad entry examinations at Cowan Bridge of Charlotte and Emily. We find articles on Librópatas (in Spanish) and The Guardian:

It's been a long time since I faced the terror of a school report myself, but it all came back after I landed upon this Slate article, pointing towards Charlotte Brontë's. Made available online by the British Library as part of its fabulous new digital English literature resource, the write up is hardly glowing. Apparently, the girl who would go on to pen Jane Eyre "writes indifferently" and "knows nothing of grammar, geography, history, or accomplishments". The eight-year-old is, however, "altogether clever of her age", but "knows nothing systematically".
The report is taken from the school register of the Clergy Daughters' School, at Cowan Bridge, and published in the Journal of Education. It also mentions Emily Brontë, then aged 5 ¾, who "reads very prettily, and works a little", and, poignantly, Elizabeth and Marie Brontë, then aged nine and 10, both of whom left "in ill-health", and died later in 1825. (Alison Flood)

Lesen (Germany) talks about pseudonyms in literature:

Das Benutzen eines Pseudonyms ist fast genauso alt wie das literarische Schreiben an sich. Viele berühmte Klassiker-Autoren, zum Beispiel Oscar Wilde, Ray Bradbury oder die Brontë-Schwestern, veröffentlichten sowohl unter ihrem bürgerlichen Namen als auch unter einem Pseudonym. (Stephanie Schäfers)

Today is the International Day of Friendship and Graphomania (Italy) quotes from Charlotte Brontë:

[I]f we would build on a sure foundation in friendship, we must love our friends for their sakes rather than for our own[.] (Charlotte Brontë to W.S. Williams, July 21th, 1851).

New York Post's Pagesix titles its article about the Jersey Shore celebrities dressed 'old-fashioned' as Modern-day Brontë Sisters? MTV insists on the same moron 'joke':

The “Snooki & JWOWW” stars looked like they stepped straight out of the literary classic “Jane Eyre” when they made a special trip to a tea house in New Jersey on Monday. (...) If it weren’t for their designer handbags and Nicole’s shades, we’d think we were looking at the Brontë sisters. (Jordana Ossad)

The Guardian (Trinidad and Tobago) reviews House of Ashes by Monique Raffey:

For a self-proclaimed feminist it’s hardly surprising that Roffey’s strongest characters are women. The figure of Mrs Cynthia Gonzales, the cleaning lady (or obeah woman) who reduces the blustering gunmen to shamefaced boys (“Yuh mash up mih carpet…Where are your manners and where is your respect for civilisation?) and who refuses to leave her wounded Prime Minister, is truly memorable. Herself the one time victim of an abusive husband she, like Christophene in Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, refuses to allow any man to oppress her, standing as symbol of Caribbean matriarchy with a long tradition in our literature. (Simon Lee)

The Telegraph & Argus is warming up for the upcoming Yorkshire Day celebrations:

She said: "It's one of those events where people can celebrate all things Yorkshire.
"People have quite a strong identity to Yorkshire. They are very proud to come from here.
"People who come from overseas who have family connections to Yorkshire look to take something with the Yorkshire rose on it.
"The Tour de France has really raised the profile of Yorkshire. A lot more people know where it is now.
"Lots of people come from all over the country. We have a lot of visitors from Japan and the USA coming for the Brontë connections.
"Yorkshire Day has been going for about 30 or 40 years, it's one of those things that keeps building each year."

The Public Reviews interviews Peter McMaster about his all-male Wuthering Heights play that will be performed again at the Edinburgh Fringe:

Can you tell us more about the show?
The show is an all-male production of Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. It looks at the central character of Heathcliff as a male figure wrought with issue and complexity and in a rather subtle way, we as a group of men place ourselves alongside him comparing and contrasting with him; inhabiting his angers, exploring his passions and establishing a relationship with him. There is something about the work that questions, after almost 200 years since it was first published, if men are different nowadays. I am not sure if we are, in which case I wonder what should or could change about us. Lots of people believe that masculinity is in crisis, and I think the complicated version that is on display in this work, as in Brontë’s original, would testify that it is in crisis. If anything, perhaps, it is a performance that shines a light on our experiences of being men now, and our presentation of certain aspects of our masculinity. It is very raw at times, but also adopts good humour at other moments.

A couple of websites cover the recent Romantic Writers of America conference in San Antonio, TX and the presence of a Jane Eyre (more or less) panel:

It is, in fact, a more interesting and better written business than tired stereotypes and “Fifty Shades of Grey” might suggest. Linda Francis Lee and Eloisa James led my Alpha Hero workshop; the real Eloisa James (that's a pen name) is a tenured Shakespeare scholar at Fordham University. The next day, in an adjoining room, the standing-room-only “How to Write Hot Sex” panel was immediately followed by the more literary and historically-based, “Angst and Affability: Using Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice to Craft New Adult and Contemporary Romance.” (Adam Minter on Bloomberg News / Charlotte  Observer)

The Sheffield Star reports the local performances of the ChapterHouse Theatre production of Wuthering Heights in Wentworth Castle Gardens. Trome (Perú) talks about Wuthering Heights. The Brontë Parsonage tweets the earliest surviving sketch by Branwell Brontë when he was 11 years old. Over Crohn en andere ongemakken (in Dutch) reviews Jane Eyre.