Political and social truths

Caryl Phillips, author of The Lost Child, writes about his past and the moors in The Guardian.

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.
Extract.  
She watches attentively as Charlotte sets down the tray on the chair next to the narrow bed. Her clothes make a tremendous noise. Silk on cotton. Cotton on silk. Once again her sister is occupying too much space in the room. Dear, dear Charlotte Please, no more of this. But she must be considerate to her sister, for she understands that it was her own guilty preoccupation with the worlds of the Grange and the Heights that occasioned a distance to grow between them. Please, Charlotte, Forgive my selfishness. An arm begins gently to burrow beneath one shoulder and tunnel its way across her back. A free hand cradles her head, and in one unhurried motion her bones are levered up and forward. She can feel Charlotte calmly stuffing a dry pillow behind her, and then her sister releases her and – lo and behold – she is balanced upright.

The New York Times goes on a European Goth trail which passes through the Brontë Parsonage:

In Haworth, West Yorkshire — about a hundred miles southwest of Whitby — the Brontë Parsonage, now a museum, was the home of the Brontë family, including Anne, Charlotte and Emily. Also a National Trust property, the sisters wrote their most popular novels here — including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre” and Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” — surrounded by desolate moorland; bronte.org.uk. (Ann Mah)

As far as we can tell, though, the Brontë parsonage is not a National Trust property.

More houses as there are full-scale historical Dutch houses on display at the Brooklyn Museum now. The Brooklyn Rail writes about them.

Before arriving at the full-scale theater of the Dutch houses, one passes through the parts of other houses, each with a tiny model of the entire house embedded in a dioramic vitrine. One model’s setting is at dusk, another’s at night, its downstairs window glowing; a third model confronts a stark, dead tree in a kind of Wuthering Heights pre-storm haze, later revealed to be a thin layer of dust on the diorama window. (Amie Siegel)

Bustle lists '14 Books To Read If You're In Love & Think You've Met "The One"':

13. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
While you might not have to endure the insane hardships of Jane Eyre, it's certainly easy to relate to the long road of figuring it out with the one you love. It was no easy feat for Jane Eyre to find true peace and happiness with the man she loved, but the road to her happy ending is worth the read. It’s a good reminder that love is not necessarily a linear path to happiness. (Crissy Van Meter)

And The Windsor Star asks several couples about the inspiration behind their upcoming weddings.

Kristi Maltese & Lucas Strople
Our wedding is an outdoor fantasy-flavoured affair replete with whimsical touches off the fairy-book page.
A horse-drawn carriage whisks my blue-eyed bride up the meandering path towards the hillside amphitheatre, to the accompaniment of keys and melodious cello. The ring is borne by Kristi’s son, along with an edition of Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. And our flower girl, the woodland fairy princess, wears a wreathe of woven brambles for her crown.

Interesting choice of book.

CounterCurrents quotes Karl Marx's opinion of several Victorian writers:

After attaining a Reader’s Ticket to the British Library Reading Room in 1849, Karl Marx voraciously consumed the volumes of Dickens, Brontë sisters, and Thackeray. The Victorian Novel perfectly ‘estranges’ or ‘defamiliarizes’ the thematics of Marxian oeuvre. Marx himself confessed that Dickens, Thackeray, and the Brontë sisters, “have issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together”. Literature, therefore, is not something merely imaginative, figurative, aesthetic, and rhythmic or something that only imbricates a world of abstractions or unfounded philosophical meditations. In fact where a historian, due to some political pressures, fails to record the events judiciously, literature can still come up with a more reliable narrative. Literary discourse, as Terry Eagleton believes estranges or alienates ordinary speech, but in doing so, paradoxically, brings us into a fuller, more intimate possession of experience. (Ghulam Mohammad Khan)

While Penn State News wonders about how 'women's literature' is defined and mentions the Brontës using pseudonyms.

And Abola (Portugal) finds a Brontëite in Rita Sousa Nunes, a biochemist whose research has led to better treatments of brain tumors:

“Sonets, de Shakespeare. Também Poems, de John Keats e Tess of d`ubervilles de Thomas Hardy e Think Like an Artist, de Will Gompertz e The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, de Oliver Sacks. Tenho muitos autores preferidos: Hardy, Ian Mcewan, Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, Herman Hess, Milan Kundera, Albert Camus, Fernando Pessoa” (Manuel Sérgio) (Translation)

Pioneer Press is excited about the movie Crimson Peak:

I've stopped reading online snippets about the Gothic horror movie from writer/director Guillermo Del Toro ("Pan's Labyrinth") because spoilers are starting to spill out, and it's pretty clear it's going to get worse as we get closer to the release date. All I really need to know is that it's set in a haunted English manor in the 19th century and, somehow, Mia Wasikowska, Jessica Chastain and a "Jane Eyre"-ish vibe are involved. Oct. 16 (Chris Hewitt)

You can see lots of pictures from the recent Brontë Festival of Women's Writing on the Brontë Parsonage Facebook page. The Brontë Parsonage Blog has a request from a reader concerning Luis Buñuel's take on Wuthering Heights, Abismos de pasión. Baltimore County Public Library recommends Patricia Park's Re Jane. Obooki's Obloquy has read but not enjoyed Jane Eyre. The Times compares the era of imperialism and the Elizabethans, highlighting that tuberculosis was a common cause of death as in the case of the Brontës.