Frail and formidable

The Ilkley Gazette reveals some of the (Brontë) names at the upcoming Ilkley Literature Festival (2-18 October, 2015):

Caryl Phillips, author and Professor of English at Yale University, incorporates the Leeds cityscape of his youth into a new novel inspired by ‘Wuthering Heights’. And recounting the inspiring tale of Hull fishwives, who changed UK shipping laws in 1968 after the loss of three trawlers, is journalist and university tutor, Brian Lavery.
Anticipating the wealth of Brontë anniversaries during the next few years, the festival explores the decade into which the sisters were born.
Father and son broadcasters, Peter and Dan Snow, examine the Battle of Waterloo, while Charlotte Brontë is the focus of both Claire Harman, writer of a new biography on Charlotte, and novelist Patricia Duncker, who explores the oldest Brontë’s lesser known novel, ‘Villette’. (Amanda Greaves)

Another literary festival with Brontë talks will be the Budlitfest (Budleigh Salterton, 17-20 September). The Exeter Express & Echo explains:

Hilary Mantel will also be taking part in the festival with her talk entitiled From Jane Eyre to Brideshead Revisited: from Crime and Punishment to The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: She will trace her evolution as reader and writer, discussing the authors who gave her courage, those she holds in awe, and those who make her laugh. 

Frances Hardinge chooses some Victorian heroines in The Guardian:

And finally there was Jane Eyre, frail and formidable amid a stormscape of dark romance and gothic peril.

Also in The Guardian, ItWasLovelyReadingYou complains about YA novels not portraying homeschooling accurately:

My reading habits matured and became more diverse much quicker than those of my school peers because I had the freedom to explore, and as a result I developed a much more diverse vocabulary; by the time I was 10 and a half I had read Jane Eyre and my favourite book was Little Women. Not only had my friends not even heard of these books, which I thought was incredible in itself, they were still reading the likes of books I had stopped reading around three years prior. 

The Washington Post interviews the novelist Alice McDermott:

Is there a book you read as a kid that has stayed with you?
Right away I think of two books — “Wuthering Heights” and “Rebecca” — and of just sinking into them as a young reader. I think they must have appealed not just to my romantic adolescent soul, but I suppose there’s also an appealing darkness in both of them. (Joe Helm)

In the same newspaper we find a review of a recent biography of the film director Brian De Palma: Brian De Palma's Split Screen. A Life in Film by Douglas Keesey:

In any case, that seems to be the way with De Palma: He is one of those artists whose forte is spinning variations on themes pioneered by others. And what’s wrong with that? What contemporary mystery writer hasn’t been strongly influenced, at least indirectly, by Wilkie Collins and James M. Cain? What writer of romances doesn’t owe a big debt to the Brontë sisters and Daphne du Maurier? (Dennis Drabelle) 

Another review again in the Post: Bradstreet Gate by Robin Kirman:

Since at least as far back as “Pride and Prejudice,” or “Jane Eyre,” single people, their love lives and their problems have been among the mainstays of the novel. Numerous ads for dating Web sites try to answer the question: Where can I meet interesting single people? To that question, at least one obvious answer presents itself: They may be met in the pages of novels. (Martin Weil)

The Atlantic quotes from Erica Jong's Fear of Dying:

We looked to our uncertain heroines for help, and lo and behold—Simone de Beauvoir never makes a move without wondering what would Sartre think? And Lillian Hellman wants to be as much of a man as Dashiell Hammett so he’ll love her like he loves himself. And Doris Lessing’s Anna Wulf can’t come unless she’s in love, which is seldom. And the rest—the women writers, the women painters—most of them were shy, shrinking, schizoid. Timid in their lives and brave only in their art. Emily Dickinson, the Brontës, Virginia Woolf, Carson McCullers … Flannery O’Connor raising peacocks and living with her mother. Sylvia Plath sticking her head into an oven of myth. Georgia O’Keeffe alone in the desert, apparently a survivor. What a group! Severe, suicidal, strange. Where was the female Chaucer? One lusty lady who had juice and joy and love and talent too?

Business Insider is delighted with the new Playstation 4 game Everybody's Gone to the Rapture but has no idea of what kind of landscapes Charlotte Brontë portrayed in her novels:

Having spent nearly 10 hours in Shropshire, the English town where the new game “Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture” takes place, I’ve got nothing but positive things to say about its beauty. Shropshire is the idyllic English countryside of Geoffrey Chaucer and Charlotte Brontë. (Ben Gilbert)

Dazeba News (Italy) lists several beach archetypes:

Il chiacchierone e la sua degenerazione, il gossipparo: in agguato dietro l’angolo, nascosto a pelo di sabbia nella trincea dell’architetto si trova la categoria più temuta di tutte. Armati di riviste di gossip e di un desiderio irrefrenabile di condivisione vi tortureranno di chiacchiere, prendendovi sulla stanchezza; ma se sarete pronti, prima di lasciarvi travolgere dal loro fiume di parole, potrete proporgli la lettura di “Cime Tempestose” (Emily Brontë). Il romanzo più sentimentalmente complicato di sempre, un labirinto complesso di intrighi e relazioni familiari che renderà i vostri drammi noiosi al limite dell’inverosimile. (Alessia Cornali) (Translation)

The Estonian radio station Vikerraadio has asked its listeners about their favourite love story and Jane Eyre came in the first place (via Elutark); One Blog Now posts about Jane Eyre.