Chocolate biscuits and questions in the margins: the Jane Eyre experience

This is sweet: the Hebden Bridge Times focuses on what is going on at Calder High School and we get this:

Olivia Iribarren, Emily Sutcliffe and Nell Hunt of the Year 7 Book Group write: “We have been reading a book called ‘Jane Eyre’ - the author is Charlotte Brontë and the story is partly based on her own life. It was published in 1847.
“We learnt that as children Charlotte and her sisters loved to write and come up with stories. We meet in the LRC and read after school in an informal environment.
“So far the book is quite gruesome and sad but we want to read more so we find out what happens and because we have been promised some chocolate biscuits!”

And this is funny. A columnist from The Cavalier Daily discusses marginalia:

I like to mark up my books as much as the next person. I bracket passages. Sometimes I write little notes for myself in the margins. I’ve even dog-eared a page or two. Importantly, however, I mark up my books: my ragged, Amazon-used paperbacks and thrift-store pulp. Go to Alderman Library and pick out a book: you’ll find the marginalia of a dozen readers before you — odd stars, arrows, checks and scrawls on every other page. At first I found it stirred in me a certain nostalgia for times passed, but now I just find it annoying. Please, stop writing in the library books.
A heinous example: in the margin of page 570, in a certain Alderman copy of “Jane Eyre,” there’s a question written out in red ink. This is the part when Mr. Rochester — the thinking man’s Mr. Darcy — proposes to Jane Eyre for a second time. It’s touching and beautiful stuff. A house fire had, unbeknownst to Jane in her and her lover’s long estrangement, blinded both of Rochester’s eyes and taken his hand. Newly crippled, sightless and loveless, Rochester falls into despondency until, months later, Jane goes back to him. I read that Jane cares nothing for Rochester’s deficiencies, and loves him more when she can “really be useful” to him than when he was in his “state of proud independence.” I glance to the left, and scrawled there, unabashedly, is a question for Jane: “What are you, his mother?”
In retrospect it’s a pretty funny poke at the Victorian ideal of romance and the woman’s marital role. But after nearly 600 pages of a book one gets pretty invested, and by that point all I wanted was to see Jane and Rochester declare their everlasting love — since they’re so perfect for each other. I don’t want to criticize their romance; I want to revel, grossly, like a hog in the mud, in the soppy sentiment. Whoever wrote that in the margin — I can’t say ruined — but definitely detracted from my experience finishing “Jane Eyre.” That reader with the red pen wounded my appreciation of the novel by thrusting his cynicism and discontent into the text. I’ll always think of that when I remember “Jane Eyre.” (Brennan Edel)

(As a side note, describing Rochester as 'the thinking man’s Mr. Darcy' is quite interesting, though we haven't decided yet whether we agree or not.)

More readers' experiences as The Guardian publishes love letters from readers to libraries.

Austen, the Brontës and Dickens in a Hong Kong village. Josephine Wang recalls fondly her experiences in Hong Kong libraries – and shared a picture of her current one:
As Ray Bradbury, I was also raised by the library. A one-room facility in an island village off Hong Kong, there I first read Austen, the Brontës, Dickens, Lawrence, Joyce, Woolf, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Balzac, Kafka, Shakespeare … (in Chinese). I didn’t understand some of them but I read them anyway.

And there's of course what Friends taught us about reading. From Bustle:

IT’S HARD TO BS YOUR WAY THROUGH A DISCUSSION OF JANE EYRE. RELATED: THERE ARE NO ROBOTS IN JANE EYRE
Do your homework. Some people were lucky enough to have gone to high school, while others grew up on the street. That person may really want to learn. (Laura Brennan)

Another TV show which recently featured the Brontës was Sons of Anarchy. Beware of spoilers in this article from US Weekly:

Sons of Anarchy motorcycle club member and confessed “rat” Juan Carlos “Juice” Ortiz (Theo Rossi) was first to bite the dust in a prison cafeteria at the hands of white supremacist Ron Tully (Marilyn Manson). After slipping Tully a scalpel, Juice asked only to finish his cherry pie before Tully slit his throat. (Tully, who had read him Emily Brontë poetry in creepy slammer scenes, obliged.) (Rachel McRady)

Télérama (France) recommends a box set which includes Jacques Touneur's I Walked with a Zombie (released as Vaudou in France). Robert Edric, author of Sanctuary, speaks about his novel and Branwell Brontë on BBC Radio 4 's Frontrow. The Writes of Woman reviews Jane Stubbs's Thornfield Hall. FringeReview ja que probable