Little Worlds for Small Bodies

Keighley News recommends the Museums At Night event at the Parsonage:

Brontë fans can explore the Parsonage Museum by candlelight next week.
The Haworth museum is taking part in the national Museums At Night event on May 14 and 15.
Next Thursday visitors can have a glass of wine then view some of the museum’s treasures by candlelight.
Collections manager Ann Dinsdale will invite the visitors into the library, where she will talk about some that interesting items and artefacts belonging to the Brontë family.
The event runs from 9pm to 10pm, and tickets cost £15 by e-mailing rebecca.yorke@bronte.org.uk or visiting bronte.org.uk/whats-on. (David Knights)

The Wall Street Journal reviews the upcoming The Brontë Cabinet by Deborah Lutz:

Ms. Lutz assumes that readers of “The Brontë Cabinet” will already be familiar with the Brontës and their books; yet it can be hard to keep track of just who wrote what. Further complicating matters, the sisters published under the pen names Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. (...)
In her opening chapter, Ms. Lutz uses the Brontës’ juvenile manuscripts to explore the way they shared ideas, even as youngsters. Their early writings often took the form of miniature homemade booklets that imitated popular magazines of the day. “While all of the books we have left were made by Charlotte and Branwell, some were surely crafted by Emily and Anne and are now missing, probably destroyed,” Ms. Lutz notes. The booklets could be as small as Cracker Jack trinkets, rendered in print so tiny “it is difficult to make out without a magnifying glass,” Ms. Lutz explains. “Their minuscule books initially fit well with their child bodies, as if the books were emanations of those undersized fingertips and palms,” she notes. “Or little worlds for small bodies to climb into, open sesame.” (Read more) (Danny Heitman)

The New York Times reviews The Lost Child by Caryl Phillips:

The book opens and closes by imagining young Heathcliff’s life before Mr. Earnshaw brings the orphan to his estate in the moors of northern England. The early pages give us a horrifying depiction of poverty, prostitution, and mental and physical deterioration through the eyes of Heathcliff’s mother, while the final pages depict Heathcliff’s life as an orphan. At the heart of Phillips’s book is the widespread (and continuing) abuse of women and children, and he writes sympathetically and powerfully about both.
Two additional stories are sandwiched inside the Heathcliff narrative. One is told through the consciousness of Emily Brontë as she suffers through her last days. Here the delirious Brontë confuses the details of her novel “Wuthering Heights” with her life at home with her father and two sisters. Phillips suggests that Emily’s mental decline has as much to do with her father as it does with tuberculosis, for we see a father who values his only son, Branwell, more than he does his three daughters, so much so that at one point he tries to turn Emily into Branwell’s substitute by teaching her how to shoot a pistol. (...) (Jeffery Renard Allen)

The author himself talks about his novel on Work in Progress:

City Lights, with its opening chapter of loneliness and the wretchedness of incarceration, led me back to Wuthering Heights, which in turn led me back to the moors, which inevitably evoked uncomfortable memories of Brady and Hindley, and a pattern began to emerge of landscape and lost children, and broken parental ties, and familial pain and discomfort. Suddenly life was feeding literature, and literature feeding life, and once I put aside researching and returned to writing I found myself better able to focus on the characters, and the language and narrative texture of the book. Soon there were four Post-its on my desk, each containing a single word. Yorkshire. Moor. Lost. Child. And as I continued to write, another Post-it eventually fell gingerly into place with a fifth word upon it, Literature, a word which spoke to the presence of Emily Brontë as one entryway into my book, and surprisingly enough Keith Waterhouse as another gateway. Both his memoir and her novel, in their different ways, seemed to be calling to the small boy who had arrived in his parents’ arms in the Britain of the late fifties and travelled north to a city that is situated in the long shadowy penumbra of the moors. All that was left was for me to write my own book and tell an altogether different story.

The Miami Herald reviews the other recently released Brontë retelling, Re Jane:

In her delightful debut novel, Patricia Park uses the classic novel Jane Eyre as a template to examine very modern concepts: questions of identity and love, culture and conscience, even the hardships of immigration. But you don’t really need familiarity with Charlotte Brontë’s most famous work to appreciate Re Jane; it’s entertaining all on its own, vibrant and witty and a hell of a lot of fun.
Of course, comparing the original Jane’s journey from orphan to governess to grown woman of conviction and means to the contemporary Jane’s story adds another level of enjoyment.  (Connie Ogle)

An excerpt can be read on The Good Men Project.

The Guardian reviews We That Are Left by Clare Clark:

When Jessica hurls a book at Oskar, who’s hiding with an encyclopedia in a window seat of Ellinghurst, she repeats, with a twist, a leitmotif in Jane Eyre, by denying the rights of a forlorn dependant. (Stevie Davis)

The NYT's Women's Fashion Magazine has a curious intro for an article on dewy skin:

Some of life’s greatest pleasures teeter on the near side of wretchedness: Brontë novels, floral scents with fecal base notes, Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata, Monica Vitti’s face in profile. (Alice Gregory)

More NYT mentions:

But in other ways we should be grateful that in each field of endeavor there are certain families that are breeding grounds for achievement. We should be grateful that there are Bachs in music, Griffeys and Molinas in baseball, Brontës and Amises in novel writing and Kennedys, Roosevelts, Clintons and Bushes in politics. These families make life more unfair for the rest of us (because it’s harder for others to compete against them), but they also make society as a whole more accomplished. (David Brooks)

Jasper Fforde is presenting his books in Hanoi. Viêt Nam News reports it:

His debut, The Eyre Affair (2001), which was listed in the best-sellers by the New York Times, was inspired by the classic Jane Eyre. In the Fforde's story, Eyre is kidnapped and detective Thursday Next is given the mission to find her and the kidnapper.
Fforde said proudly that the novel had attracted many readers, especially students who studied Jane Eyre at school.
"My book makes the students curious about the characters and urges them to research the novel at school," said Fforde.
"When I was young, I also studied Charlotte Brontë and William Shakespeare," he said. (VNS)

More Fforde Vietnam news in Nhân Dân.

Dan (Montenegro) talks about the English writer Alexander Potter:

Naj­dra­že knji­žev­no dje­lo su joj „Or­kan­ski vi­so­vi”, ka­ko je ot­kri­la, lju­bav Ke­trin i Hit­kli­fa je iz­no­va i iz­no­va in­spi­ri­še. Ta­ko­đe, i dje­la su­na­rod­ni­ka Džejn Ostin, se­sta­ra Bron­të, To­ma­sa Har­di­ja, te ro­man­tič­ne ko­me­di­je na ko­ji­ma je od­ra­sla. (Translation)

Porgrunn Dagblad (Norway) interviews Tone Serine Hansen, a local participant in a young talent TV show:

Nei, «Battle Royal» har jeg ikke hørt om, svarer hun, når vi forteller henne om den japanske romanen fra 1996, og filmen (med samme navn) som kom ut i 2000. I tillegg til «Hunger Games» er også «Skyggejegerne» og «Fallen engel»-sagaen blant favorittene. Men klassikere som «Jane Eyre» og «Stormfulle høyder» er også unnagjort. (Filip Wennerød) (Translation)

El Heraldo de Aragón (Spain) interviews Soledad Puértolas:

Me contó de las visitas a la librería Gómez, en Pamplona, donde en los cumpleaños, en fin de curso, en su santo –once de octubre–, la llevaban a comprar libros de Celia o de Antoñita la fantástica, sus lecturas entonces favoritas. También, un poco después, ‘Kim’, de Kipling o ‘Cumbres borrascosas’, de Emily Brontë. (Jesús Marchamalo) (Translation)

Le Monde (France) recommends the film Partisan:

Il est de ces décors qui feraient le film à eux seuls. La lande bruissante filmée par Andrea Arnold dans ses Hauts de Hurlevent défend avec plus d’éloquence que ceux qui la parcourent le droit de l’amour à la sauvagerie. (Noémi Luciani) (Translation)

New pictures can be found on the Brontë Bell Chapel Facebook Wall.