'Vacuuming Mr Brontë’s nightshirt'

Brontë Parsonage Museum intern Alana Clague writes about her experience in The Telegraph and Argus.

The Parsonage has not been a disappointment!
Every day has been a different challenge, which I have really enjoyed. The beginning of my time here was quite daunting, with much to learn about the museum and the Brontë family history, and I spent a part of my time reading as much as I could about the Brontës.
The next task I faced was helping to catalogue books and other donations into the museum’s collection databases. There was a great range of material to catalogue and I have some personal favourites.
‘Wuthering Bites’ by Sarah Gray, a reimagining of the classic tale with Heathcliff as the orphaned child of a vampire and vampire hunter at war with his inner nature, is a story I think would please Twilight fans everywhere and one I have catalogued into the Parsonage library.
I have catalogued a copy of The Brontës by Flora Masson, discovered abandoned in a World War One dugout in 1918, a book fascinating and poignant for more than story written on its pages.
There have been books about the Brontës, stories inspired by their works, foreign language versions and film adaptations including a samurai Wuthering Heights and a Mexican version with Heathcliff as Alejandro.
Along with this I have been involved with researching objects, answering research enquires, uploading articles to the website and many activities in between.
At the moment, however, it is the museum’s closed period and we are busier than ever. Everyone is helping to prepare the museum for the visitors return in February.
I have been helping to move objects from display and to clean them, from waxing chairs to vacuuming Mr Brontë’s nightshirt. I help with whatever is needed and at the moment that means something different every day.
Yesterday I was researching the German first edition of Wuthering Heights but who knows what challenges today will bring!

The Brontë Parsonage Facebook page tells about a lovely 'tradition':

Today, as in previous years, we've received flowers from an anonymous well-wisher in recognition of Anne Brontë's birthday, which was on Saturday. Thank you anonymous well-wisher! Come inside for a cup of tea and a sit-down next year.

There are a couple of Brontë-related projects in Dewsbury, as seen in the Dewsbury Reporter:

Young south Asian women with a love of literature are being invited to take part in a new project by Creative Scene.
Worlds Apart, inspired by the life and work of Charlotte Brontë, is part of the lead up to the 200th anniversary of the birth of the author.
The collaboration between Chol Theatre and Gomersal’s Red House Museum involves developing a theatre piece for the museum, which was once the home of Brontë’s best friend Mary Taylor.
Creative Scene is holding an open casting call to find a group of South Asian young women aged between 14 and 25 to work with Chol Theatre’s guest director Evie Manning and writer Aisha Zia.
Evie and Aisha recently made the critically acclaimed No Guts, No Heart, No Glory – a performance by young Muslim women.
A drop-in session in Dewsbury Town Hall takes place on Saturday, 10.30am-4pm.

Manchester is not all that far away from those places and, according to SuperBreak, it has been 'named top tourist destination for 2015'. The attractions of course now include

Elizabeth Gaskell’s House
Elizabeth Gaskell's novels including Mary Barton, Cranford, North and South, Ruth and Wives and Daughters have enjoyed an extended life in print form, on the radio and even on the small screen, with many admiring the charm of their period stories and strong female characters. Now, you can see where writer Gaskell crafted her storylines and developed her heroines, at the newly opened Elizabeth Gaskell's House on the edge of Manchester. The Grade II listed property is a rare example of the elegant Regency-style villas once popular in the city and it has just been restored thanks to a National Lottery fund of around £2.5 million. Few other places have such an incredible history - previous visitors include Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, the American abolitionist and novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe and musician Charles Hallé.
The house is currently open on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Sundays, from 11.00am to 4.30pm, although these opening hours are likely to be extended during the summer months. (Vikki Stathers)

The Chicago Tribune brings back from its archive a 1929 review of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own.

"A Room of One's Own" is one of the most stimulating books of the year to any one really interested in creative writing, whether as an eager reader or as a mute and inglorious Milton or Emily Brontë. In it Virginia Woolf bares her mind about why women have and have not written books, and the processes of that mind, quite as much as the conclusions which it draws, are fascinating; for, to most of us, Virginia Woolf has one of the most alluring minds in present day literature. [...]
That women wrote nothing remarkable under such circumstances she finds not at all startling. In a later period, the common sitting room as a retreat and a life devoted to mending and stewing and brewing did not offer women much leisure, or independence, or quiet for creative work. It did, however, offer them unlimited opportunities for the observation of human relationships, and it made inevitable their writing novels when they came to write anything. Once woman had proved — it was Aphra Behn who first in the English speaking world earned money by writing — that she could be economically independent through writing, women of all sorts and kinds began it. They were afraid at first to sign their own names. They signed men's names in tremulous fear of detection. Currer Bell, George Eliot, George Sand are only the well-known names which fame rescued from the thousands. (Fanny Butcher)

This columnist from the Courier-Post comments on the proposed opening of a hardware library:

I'd suggest they consider the emerging field of tool literature, like my favorite adaptation of a Charlotte Brontë classic.
Jane Eyre Compressor. (Jim Walsh)

The Liverpool Echo reports the death of actress Pauline Yates who

made her stage debut, aged 17, playing Grace Poole in Jane Eyre. (Paddy Shennan)