A Brontë Letter Live

BBC News celebrates the London Letters Live season with a Charlotte Brontë letter:

In celebration of London's Letters Live season, BBC Newsnight invited actress Louise Brealey to read a letter written by Charlotte Brontë following the loss of her sister Emily.
It was composed on Christmas day 1848, six days after the Wuthering Heights author's death, in response to a letter from publisher W S Williams.

The Daily Mail briefly reviews The Lost Child by Caryl Phillips:

It's the late 1950s when Monica Johnson abandons her undergraduate career at Oxford to marry Julius Wilson. He’s from the Caribbean, so her father is horrified and cuts her off.
Julius, for his part evidently eager to confirm Mr Johnson’s worst fears and prejudices, leaves Monica and their two young sons for a life back home.
Monica also returns home, to Leeds, where she struggles to bring up her boys. Cut to a terrific recreation of a bedridden Emily Brontë dying in the parsonage at Haworth, then back to the main narrative, picked up by Monica’s son, Ben, whose account includes some masterfully crafted updates in passing.
Moving between England and the Caribbean, from one storyline to another, including a cameo appearance by Wuthering Heights’ Mr Earnshaw, this novel weaves together a series of stories featuring a cast of outsiders and orphans preoccupied by the idea of home.
Expertly written and artfully crafted. (Harry Ritchie)

The Craven Herald & Pioneer describes a walk through Brontë country:

Straddling the Pennines, this invigorating walk sweeps through the wild moorland and heather which was an inspiration for the Brontë sisters Charlotte, Emily and Anne.
THIS week's walk takes us into Brontë country.
It starts at Penistone Hill Country Park, just a stone's throw away from the village of Haworth, where the Brontë sisters made their home after their father, Patrick, was appointed curate.
The paths and tracks on this route provide views up to Top Withens ruins, connected locally to Emily's famous novel Wuthering Heights and the surrounding moors. Sections can be quite wet and muddy and suitable footwear is advisable. The walk has been provided by Yorkshire Water and other walks in the area can be found at yorkshirewater.com/walks-and-leisure. (Lindsey Moore)

Fusion talks about the history of the Leeds United football club:

It could be that Leeds’ penchant for getting into trouble comes from the club’s hometown, the biggest in the rugged county of Yorkshire. From the Celts to the Vikings to the Norman Conquest, The Black Death to the War of the Roses, Yorkshire’s history is bloodier than the average episode of Game of Thrones. To dip into cliché, this is a county where men — standing atop the Brontë Sisters’ wind-blasted moors, cocking a snook at southern softies down in London or even (philosophically rather than geographically speaking) Manchester — are real men. (James Young)

NPR Books reviews Voyage of the Basilisk by Marie Brennan:

In particular, Isabella's love affair with dragon naturalism and her distance from the years she relates can make any romantic sentiment feel rather perfunctory, and scenes of imminent danger and portents of doom often interrupt themselves with narrative asides. But her account of her childhood in A Natural History of Dragons has the comforting echo of a slightly more bloodthirsty Jane Eyre, and her hard-won friendship with the prickly working-class naturalist Tom Wilker in The Tropic of Serpents is somehow heartwarming even in the midst of danger. (Genevieve Valentine)

The Huffington Post has an article about the origins and evolution of the Southern Gothic genre:

"Southern Gothic" spread from the Gothic literary movement of the 19th century, when romance novels were dressed up in dreary ambience and set in spooky castles and decrepit manors, shot through with excess, fear, and madness. The best of the lot -- classics like Frankenstein, Dracula, Wuthering Heights, and the stories of Edgar Allen Poe -- used fantastical devices and aberrant behavior to get at the ugly truth all trussed up in pomp and formality. (Jamie Kornegay)

The New York Daily News reviews the film Effie Gray:

[Greg] Wise embodies that, with his pungent portrait of a severe jerk. His aristocratic sideburns bookend a perpetually long, judgmental face. Wise’s Ruskin is like a man in a Brontë novel, only without a core decency. Next to him, Fanning feels wafer-thin and out of her element. She’s appropriately wan, but as we never know Effie’s potential, her loss of identity has minimal punch. (Joe Neumaier)

Kate Beaton's comics have been translated into German. n-tv talks about it:

Haben die schreibenden Brontë-Schwestern eigentlich über Männer gelästert? Was, wenn es Charlies Schokoladenfabrik gar nicht gäbe, wohl aber eine fabelhafte Rübenfabrik? Was haben die Suffragetten mit "Sex and the City" am Hut? Und waren die Tudors wirklich so sexy, wie uns das Fernsehen suggeriert? (Markus Lippold) (Translation)

Romance Reader interviews the writer Kate Walker:

I grew up in a house full of books so I read anything and everything I could get my hands on. One of the major discoveries I found on my mother’s bookshelves were the novels of the Brontë sisters. specially Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. I’ve read that book over and over again and wrote my MA thesis on it . I’ve even written a Mills & Boon Modern/Harlequin Presents version of the story in The Return of The Stranger which came out in 2011.

Keighley News recommends Haworth History Tour by Steven Wood & Ian Palmer.  According to The Seattle Times, Charlotte Gainsbourg was 'the perfect Jane Eyre' in Jane Eyre 1996; Clothes in Books reviews Daphne du Maurier's The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë.