From the great Victorian grandeur to the beauty of the moors

The Telegraph and Argus reports that Brontë Country is one of the destinations selected as part of a new national tourism campaign.

Brontë Country is among destinations across the district being promoted as part of a new initiative.
Visit Bradford is taking part in a national campaign showcasing the region’s heritage.
The venture is part of a VisitEngland project, which will include a series of national radio adverts.
Several itineraries in the district will be spotlighted, including a visit to Haworth and the chance to experience life as a Bronte sister.
Councillor Susan Hinchcliffe, Bradford Council’s executive member for employment, skills and culture, said: “We are delighted to be working with VisitEngland on this campaign to promote our heritage to visitors from near and far.
“Bradford has a rich and fascinating history and this is highlighted by the variety of experiences people can enjoy across the district this spring.
"There’s something for everyone, from the great Victorian grandeur to the beauty of the moors.
“People who wouldn’t normally consider visiting the Bradford district are going to find out about all the wonderful experiences we have to offer.”

If you'd like to see how much tourism has changed in the area, do take a walk down memory lane with Keighley News and reminisce about the local Brontë bus firm.

Flavorwire reviews the play You on the Moors Now, currently on stage in New York City.

Last night I saw You on the Moors Now, an experimental play currently running in New York City’s Greenwich Village, which cannily combines characters and plot points from four novels: Little Women, Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. The story, such as it is, consists of the respective heroines banding together after spurning their various suitors. They end up camping out on the moors. Meanwhile, they are pursued by the rejected men, themselves united in an attempt at revenge, or requited love, or some other concession. The cast features a delightfully queered Mr. Darcy, a manic Jane Eyre who longs to travel in space, a Cathy Earnshaw with unexpectedly pronounced leadership qualities, and sundry twists and gimmicks which wouldn’t have worked if much of the audience didn’t have a basic understanding of at least a few of the four novels.
A cast of jeans-clad secondary characters switch in and out of minor roles, giving pleasure to audience members like me who know lots of inside-baseball (or inside-drawing-room) references: four-and-20 families is the number of people Mrs. Bennet brags she dines with. Nelly Dean is the unreliable narrator of much of Wuthering Heights, and so on and so forth. Amusing as well is the way that writer Jaclyn Backhaus enlists these minor players into espionage, spying for either Team Men or Team Women as the tension heats up. [...]
The idea of remixing and reinventing these classics of “women’s literature” is hardly new. Popular romance and mystery novelist Georgette Heyer traded in books that were sophisticated Austen fan-fiction, while Daphne DuMaurier and Jean Rhys were spinning off the Brontës, offering their own retort to these earlier authors. And still, the echoes of these formative books’ plots in literature are everywhere. Wuthering Heights is the godmother of a lot of YA romance, with its privileging of intense, all-consuming emotion and its angst about sex and the end of childhood’s gender freedom. Jane Eyre is the parent of feminist resistance novels and Gothic romance all at once, while Pride and Prejudice gave birth to the romantic comedy structure and the use of satire and wit to critique a male-driven world. [...]
But for those of us who are influenced by this canon, which is quite a large group of readers of all genders and backgrounds, these texts are foundational due to the way they occupy themselves with the sometimes conflicting ideals of self-actualization and romantic love. In You, on the Moors, for instance, the female characters travel away, finding jobs, even studying organic chemistry. Eventually, in the show’s final scenes, some are able to find love, but only after having “found themselves” first. This isn’t really a new innovation. In fact, it underscores the plot points that all the novels (save the more complicated Wuthering Heights) share: a woman’s journey is first to an understanding of both her limitations and her power. Love comes later, a cherry on top. [...]
At its best, You, on the Moors Now uses canonical characters to provide a cutting commentary on the kind of gender norms that bloggers and personal essays writers are tackling every day. “These men, they grieve,/ They go riding/ Or they travel/ Or they ask someone else to marry them/ Or they take it out on the person nearest them/ Or all of the above,” says Lizzy Bennet. To which Jane Eyre chimes in, sounding decidedly modern: “The world gives them the chance to ‘get over it’/And we climb over hills away from them/ We starve ourselves/ And run away.” (Sarah Seltzer)

More moors as three reviews of the film Catch Me Daddy mention Wuthering Heights.

This tremendous debut feature by British brothers Daniel and Matthew Wolfe opens with a deadened rendition of Ted Hughes’ Heptonstall Old Church. Mist rolls over the shabby roofs of nowhere towns. Most of the film’s characters live in mobile homes surrounded by gorse and heather. They subsist on milkshakes and anything that dulls the pain: prescription pills, weed, alcohol, cocaine and cheap crystallised concoctions.
This is recognisably Hughes’ Yorkshire: its pitiless poetry is ever ready to engulf its unfortunate human inhabitants. But it is equally the tramping ground of Emily Brontë, where the darkest nights harbour and hide runaways and doomed romantics not unlike the youngsters at the heart of this riveting thriller. Neither Brontë nor Hughes knew that their moors would someday host a sizable Asian community. (Tara Brady in The Irish Times)

Critics have likened Catch Me Daddy to the classically British social realism of Ken Loach or Andrea Arnold. Daniel Wolfe objects. "It's too easy, isn't it? Because it's up north, it's got street cast people, [they label it as] Ken Loach," he says. "It's not social realism and it doesn't intend to be. None of our influences were that. I love Andrea Arnold; Wuthering Heights is in one of my favorite films of the last five years. But she wasn't an influence on this." (Rachel Segal Hamilton on Vice)

It’s a British film. The plot is much ado about nothing much. On the Yorkshire moors, six nasty thugs in two separate cars pursue a runaway couple at the beck of the Asian girl’s father. But the direction, by first-timer Daniel Wolfe (co-scripting with brother Matthew), and editing (Dominic Leung, Tom Lindsay) are often dazzling. And the cinephile’s brain — this cinephile’s at least — is starting to boggle at the number of films cinematographer Robbie Ryan is turning to gold, whatever their original element. He did it for Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights (same location, almost same plot). He has done it for Ken Loach. In Catch Me Daddy, shooting increasingly at night as the film gathers pace and tension, his work is astonishing. (Nigel Andrews in Financial Times)

Writer Anna Todd picks Wuthering Heights as one of her favourite books for Cosmopolitan.

4. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. It took me two reads of this to understand it, but once I did, I was in love with the angsty, destructive relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff.

The Telegraph shares 10 'surprising facts' about John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.

• It came out on a Friday
The book was published on Friday April 14, 1939, on the same day that the film Wuthering Heights, starring Laurence Olivier, had its premiere in New York. It was also the day that President Roosevelt wrote to Hitler to say: "Are you willing to give assurance that your armed forces will not attack or invade the territory or possessions of the following independent nations?" with a list that included Poland, Belgium, France, Great Britain and Ireland. (Martin Chilton)

Rté's The entertainment network reviews the film The Boy Next Door.

Claire is suitably impressed by the garage door stunt, but spends the next few days trying to figure out what she is really impressed by. She is plunged into a welter of what would be termed ‘hot flushes,’ if we were discussing a Jane Eyre costume drama. (Paddy Kehoe)

That indefatigable fan of Charlotte Brontë's, Santiago Posteguillo, is interviewed by La Razón (Argentina).

Qué hay que leer sí o sí? Todo lo que está sugerido en estas anécdotas. Pero “Jane Eyre”, de Charlotte Brontë, es la más hermosa historia de amor. (Paula Conde) (Translation)

The Lewisville Leader mentions a local student whose favourite books is Jane Eyre while Patheos's Love among the Ruins examines the novel from the 'Theology of the Body' perspective.

The Brontë Society thanks members on Facebook for the wonderful response received when they asked for spare copies of Brontë novels to send to a school in Algeria.