Knitting Emily

For once we open our newsround with the fashion-related story. This is not a name-dropping journalist or a designer listing influences, this is about a fashion designer who has actually incorporated texts by Emily Brontë into a couple of her designs. From Women's Wear Daily:

Leave it to Véronique Branquinho to incorporate lines of Emily Brontë into a Fair Isle sweater. That item captured the brooding, yet romantic spirit of her fall collection, where sweet and demure shapes collided with acres of paper-thin black leather and nubby, thrift-shop tweeds. (Miles Socha)

Coincidentally, the Columbia Daily Tribune chose her poem The Old Stoic as yesterday's poem of the day.

Back to actual books, as PopMatters reviews Samantha Ellis's How To Be a Heroine and gives it a 7/10.

Ellis’ ability to be both unquestioningly loyal to what she loves while interrogating its message means her own book sits somewhere between literary criticism and book club reader’s guide. The latter description is by no means pejorative; if anything, it broadens the scope of Ellis’ book that she discusses characters as both literary vehicles and as if they were real people: she gushes that she “loves” Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet, whom she refers to exclusively as “Lizzy”. She admires Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre for being independent and self-respecting, but also wonders, “Can a woman not be equal to her husband unless he’s wounded?” She finds space for her enjoyment of Jane Eyre and Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, along with Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s feminist reading of the former in their seminal work of criticism, The Madwoman in the Attic. Then she turns around and plays “Snog, Marry, Avoid” with Mr. Rochester, Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff, and Daphne DuMaurier’s Jem Merlyn. [...]
It’s in this connection between fiction and reality that How to Be a Heroine becomes truly meaningful. In closing her memoir with a chapter entitled “Scheherezade”, Ellis acknowledges that characters, especially female characters, only truly gain agency when they stop just being characters. They must become storytellers. Whether that means literally taking up the pen to write, as Jane Eyre did, or simply choosing to buck the standard narrative, like Thomas Hardy’s Tess boldly rising up to greet her captors after killing her husband, Ellis rejects the notion that life just happens to women. (Jennifer Vega)

This columnist from Terra (Colombia) mentions reading Jane Eyre as a little girl.

La madre que me regalaba las Barbies con todos sus vestidos rosas y zapatitos a juego, además me compraba libros interesantes sobre mujeres notables. La primera novela que leí fue Jane Eyre, considerada como un texto innovador y feminista adelantado a su época y escrito por una mujer, la inglesa Charlotte Brontë. Mi mamá me dio a leer ese libro cuando tenía 10 años de edad y fue más significativo para mí que la “Barbie pedicurista”, la “Barbie madre de familia” y la “Barbie bailarina”. (Guadalupe Flores) (Translation)

The Guardian discusses 'the tricky job of showing writers on TV'.

The Brontë sisters have rivaled Austen in inviting work-love-life speculation. A 1973 ITV five-parter The Brontës of Haworth – written by the verse dramatist Christopher Fry, although these scripts were in prose – was decorous about making connections. So it will be fascinating to see what Sally Wainwright (Happy Valley, Last Tango in Halifax) does with the material in the ​biopic about Charlotte, Emily and Anne​ she is currently writing for the BBC. (Mark Lawson)

Hello! Magazine recommends the Folio Society's edition of Jane Eyre as a gift for Mother's Day. The Scriptorium Daily talks about adoption in Wuthering Heights in connection to Christ's atonement.