The unstoppable power of desire

We have a few Valentine tidbits that weren't included in yesterday's post:

10 Love Stories we love for Valentine's day:
Wuthering Heights (1847), Emily Brontë
Nothing says romance like the wild and windy Yorkshire moors, the backdrop for Emily Bronte’s novel about the doomed lovers Heathcliff and Cathy.
Jealousies, passion and misjudgements reign in this thrilling story which sees an impenetrable bond develop between the pair from childhood. At the centre of the novel is the headstrong and unruly Cathy, who marries one man as she loves another. (Sarah Gilmartin in The Irish Times)

The Greeks mythologized love, Italian bards invented romance, French lovers added the French kiss, Caravaggio's Cupid remains all-victorious and Raphael's cherubs in Sistine Madonna are possibly the Western mascots of everything romantic. From the time that Shakespeare staged it, Keats wound it in poetry, and the Brontës gave it a female voice. (Marika Azzopardi in The Malta Independent)

Bookstores we love choose books about love:
Stephen Sparks of Green Apple Books has two suggestions for readers:
Emily Brontë, Wuthering HeightsWuthering Heights is not a sweet love story. Perhaps because of this it remains one of the most powerful novels about the subject. It’s an intense, brooding tale of thwarted love and vengeance, full of ghosts, strange weather, and violent passion. Anyone who has loved someone inaccessible understands the unstoppable power of desire. Few books relate these feelings as accurately, and eerily, as Emily Brontë’s only novel. (...)
Althea Kent of Copperfield’s Books calls for the classics, making sure the Bronte sisters are equally represented:
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë – From the very first time my mother read it to me when I was nine years old, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre has been a favorite book of mine. And while there are many aspects of the story that appeal to me, what keeps me returning, time and again, is that it is such a complete and compelling story of love. Jane is a figure constantly striving for love in all of its forms and complexities. She seeks familial affection and kindness, is wary but entranced by the grand and sweeping gestures of a first romance, and eventually discovers the beauty and simplicity of learning how to genuinely care and love oneself.
Through Jane, Brontë illustrates the importance of finding balance and maintaining balance in love- a lesson that is particularly significant during a month when love is all anyone seems to want to talk about. Whether you feel stuck in your own personal Red Room, or are attempting to determine if he is more a St. John or a Rochester, or just scared about the uncertainty of the future, Jane will be there. And so will all of the love. (Rick Kleffel in KQED)

The St James Plaindealer explains how a local Minnesota high school is performing a one-act Jane Eyre:

In Jordan February 7, students from St. James High School brought their one-act production of “Jane Eyre” to the sections competition, and, though Maple River was the school that moved on to state, Saints also won laurels for their performance.
“The competition is fierce, and you worked hard and fast,” said Sandy Sunde, the director and an English teacher at St. James HS. “I was very satisfied.”
St. James won their spot in Jordan by virtue of their high finish January 31 at the sub-section competition in Maple River. St. James did a farcical, comedic, and truncated 30-minute version of Charlotte Brontë’s famed novel “Jane Eyre.”
This play is more funny, enjoyable, and stylized than Brontë’s novel, Sunde said. There are imaginary elements to it, where the audience is asked to suspend their disbelief. (Ryan Anderson)

Suno's Bertha Mason/Antoinette Cosway-inspired new collection is featured both in Vogue:

The show notes by Max Osterweis and Erin Beatty revealed a complex inspiration, reflecting on the madness in Charlotte Brontë's novel, Jane Eyre and the subsequent link to the "mad woman in the attic" in the Wide Sargasso Sea. (Suzy Menkes)

and Fashion Week Daily:

Care for a bit of madness? At Suno, designers Max Osterweis and Erin Beatty used Bertha Mason, the more than slightly insane Charlotte Brontë character, as their starting point. The message was conveyed through busy prints and a range of silhouettes, both of which the label has plenty of experience in executing deftly. (Daniel Chivu)

... and in the Washington Post via this tweet from Robin Givhan:

All hail Jamaica! #Suno inspiration - part of it, there's some Jane Eyre in there too

The News-Gazette talks about 'bibliomemoirs':

The spark for "How to be a Heroine" was a conversation between [Samantha] Ellis and her best friend, in which her friend argues that Ellis would be in a better place in her life if she had idolized Jane Eyre instead of Cathy Earnshaw, the main character in the tortured Gothic romance "Wuthering Heights." Ellis realizes her friend may be on to something and sets out to revisit her literary heroines and takes us along for a frank and very funny look at her life and the ways in which she was inspired by the characters she loved, for better or for worse. (...)
In the end, it all comes back around to Jane Eyre and Cathy Earnshaw, as well as a new inspiration in a heroine closer to her cultural heritage, Scheherazade, the storyteller in "A Thousand and One Nights." (Kasia Hopkins)

CinéChronicle talks about the Crimson Peak trailer:

Des premières images sombres, atmosphériques et vraiment prometteuses qui nous entraînent dans une romance gothique au cœur d’une maison hantée dans l’Angleterre du XIXe siècle de Jane Eyre et de Charlotte Brontë. (Philippe Descottes) (Translation)

The Frome Standard presents the LiveWire and Butterfly Psyche Brontë Season and The Warwick Courier the Blue Orange Theatre Jane Eyre tour;  Broadway World publishes photos from the You On The Moors Now performances in NY.

EDIT: And a reminder, tonight at 22.20 in ITV there is a chance to watch again Perspectives: The Brontë Sisters presented by Sheila Hancock.