' Reader, we all need Jane in our lives'

MPR News features both in writing and on audio Deborah Lutz's The Brontë Cabinet.

Lutz's new book, "The Bronte Cabinet," explores the sisters' lives using nine objects they once owned. She pulls stories from the walking stick they used to ramble through the moors, and from a bracelet made out of Emily and Anne's hair.
These objects reveal details of the sisters' everyday lives and of their path to publication. Charlotte started hand-stitching her own books at age 13 — they were no bigger than a matchbook and she wrote in such small handwriting, they're nearly impossible to read.
A little snooping between sisters is what kicked off their literary careers. When Charlotte was rifling through Emily's writing desk, she discovered her poetry and got the idea that the three should collaborate on a collection. It eventually went to print under the male pseudonyms of Curer, Ellis and Acton Bell — it sold only three copies, but they continued to use those pseudonyms as their careers took off.
Lutz unpacks their lives with these everyday items, even spending time on their pet dog's collar, which has survived the ages. She also digs into the mystery behind one of Charlotte's letters that was torn up, and later stitched back together. With these pieces, she roots the Brontës' legacy in physical objects, to fascinating effect. (Tracy Mumford)

In The Huffington Post, writer Margo Rabb recommends '7 Classic Feminist YA Books Everyone Should Read' such as

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, 1847 I first read Jane Eyre when I was 16, huddled under the covers, and I fell in love with Jane's indomitable will and her ability to survive the cruelty of Lowood, and any hardship (or madwoman in the attic) that came her way. When Jane tells Rochester, "I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh: it is my spirit that addresses your spirit...equal--as we are!", I decided, then and there, to be like Jane and to defy ever being classified as "poor, obscure, plain, and little," and to throw out all inequalities, whether of class, gender, age, or experience. Reader, we all need Jane in our lives. 

On Cambio, a young girl writes letters to several literary heroines, including Jane Eyre.

Dear Ms. Eyre,
I have a bone to pick with you. You'll notice that I address you in this letter by your maiden surname. I had faith in you, Jane. You were ahead of your time. You possessed a sense of self worth and dignity that went beyond just being someone's wife. You left your aunt's emotionally abusive home and gained financial independence. You are the star of my favorite piece of 19th-century British, romantic literature, and that means that yes, I do like your story more than Pride and Prejudice. You were not afraid of being plain. You weren't always witty and courageous. Sometimes you were awkward and would overreact and say the wrong things. But you had a fierce sense of integrity, one that I was sure you would hold onto as you drifted from the dreariness of the Lowood School to Thornfield Hall.
But you also become victim to the social norms of your writer's time. Because you married him, Jane! I'm aware that I'm speaking ill of debatably one of the most desirable men in literature, but that still does not change the fact that he locked up his mentally ill wife in the attic and wasn't going to tell you until you two were well and married. You left him, Jane, because you could not bear the shame of being his mistress, but then you went back to him and I felt the helplessness of being a reader as you returned to the smoldering cinders of Thornfield Hall. You are smart and driven and flawed and, in my eyes, you made a mistake that I, as a reader, will have to live with. Because I can't make your choices for you.
I read your story in the summer before my junior year, and now I'm about to go to college. You've always been so sure of the choices that you've made and I'm not sure I will be able to say the same. I'm not sure I would be able to be as self assured as you are. I'm not sure what I would do if someone thought of my choices the way I think of yours. But you were happy in the end. You ended your story with three paragraphs of exposition about how everyone lived happily ever after. I suppose I can only hope for something close, and thank you for all that you've taught me.) (Rachel Zhao)

Arts Hub (Australia) has advice for women writers:

Even though we often work in isolation and sometimes we can feel more like a secluded Brontë sister, you are part of a community of writers and some of the best mentors you can find are books. So hit the stacks and read everything the author you admire has written. (Brooke Boland)

Patheos features the book Jane Eyre’s Sisters: How Women Live and Write the Heroine’s Story by Jody Gentian Bower and shares an extract too.

What compelled you to write Jane Eyre’s Sisters?And what inspired the title? (Deborah Arca)
After I started noticing this same plot & cast of characters in novels by women, I got curious and went looking for books on the topic. I didn’t find any—that is, I found books about “The Heroine’s Journey” but they were almost all based on Joseph Campbell’s Hero Quest story, and that was not the story I was seeing in the novels. The story I saw was very different! Finally I decided that if I wanted to read a book about this, I would have to write it myself.
My first title was She’s Leaving Home, referencing the Beatles song, but while I was attending a writer’s conference the phrase “Jane Eyre’s Sisters” came to me, because it seems to me that so many famous heroines of women’s literature are in fact “sisters” to Jane Eyre, they want the same things, they have similar experiences. I spent the weekend running the two titles by people at the conference. I found that whenever I said “Jane Eyre” people perked up and got interested. So I went with that (my book editor also liked it better).

While Entorno Inteligente features Eduardo Galeano's posthumous book Mujeres:

Varios textos exploran las dificultades de narradoras y poetas, como "Ellos son ellas" sobre las hermanas Brontë –Emily, Anne y Charlotte–, "intrusas en el masculino reino de la literatura" que "se han puesto máscaras de hombres para que los críticos les disculpen el atrevimiento, pero los críticos maltratan sus obras rudas, crudas, groseras, salvajes, brutales, libertinas…". (Hernán Porras Molina) (Translation)

Country Life has selected '6 of the best portraits of British writers'. One of which is

The Brontës
The British public didn’t have to wait quite so long to see the Brontës siblings as they did Shakespeare, but the discovery of this portrait was dramatic nonetheless. Its importance lies in the fact that it’s the only surviving group portrait of the three novelist sisters, Anne, Charlotte and Emily, who look typically (and satisfyingly) gloomy. Thought to have been lost for 80 years, it was discovered folded up on top of a cupboard by the second wife of Charlotte’s husband, the Rev A. B. Nicholls, in 1914. What’s more, in spooky Brontë fashion, the artist and brother to the three, Patrick Branwell Brontë, emerges, ghost-like, from the centre of the painting, obscured behind a painted pillar (www.npg.org.uk). (Annunciata Walton)

Talking New Media has invited Jacob Cockcroft, founder of The Pigeonhole, a unique, new serialized book service, to write about it.

We have started reaching out to schools interested in experimenting with the technology for English classes. In order to showcase this possibility, we have been running free serializations of classics such as Great Expectations, Wuthering Heights and The Picture of Dorian Gray, alongside our new fiction and non-fiction offerings.

New Republic discusses 'How to Rid the Science Lab of Sexism':

The solution is not, as Dr. Hunt (who has since resigned his honorary professorship at the University College London) suggests, to force female scientists to carry out their research in segregated labs. Such a suggestion, even in jest, could arise only from a point of view in which women are a distraction because men were here first. In the world in which Dr. Hunt grew up, women were a source of recreation during the rare hours when a man needed to get out of the lab and clear his head, or the source of the meals that appeared on his table when he rushed home to gobble down a steak before kissing the kids goodnight and rushing back to the lab. In that world, in which I also grew up, girls were conditioned to fall in love with any smart, successful man, no matter how flawed or homely (see Jane Eyre, Beauty and the Beast, or “The Mary Tyler Moore Show”). (Eileen Pollack)

Writer Rita Gardellini mentions reading all of the Brontës' novels as a young girl in an interview by La Prensa (Peru). The Brussels Brontë Blog has a post on historian Joseph Joshua Green.