Portraits of the authors as young women

We Love This Book recommends Charlotte Brontë's Secret Love by Jolien Janzing.

Yet it is Charlotte Brontë and Janzing’s characterisation and portrayal of her internal struggle that captivates the reader. Admittedly the romance between her and Constantin remains quite veiled and although Charlotte’s feelings are evident, Constantin’s, while alluded to, are somewhat undefined, yet in a way this merely adds to the bittersweet nature of the whole situation.
What Janzing does so beautifully is give a real sense of the experiences, emotions and motivations of Charlotte in Brussels that later feed into her own work. Similarly, Emily, who we are given telling glimpses of, comes across vividly as the woman who would go on to create Wuthering Heights. What we have are really portraits of the authors as young women; we see the personalities, character traits and life experiences that will define their literature, and in the case of Charlotte, some of the pivotal moments and relationships in her life that will shape and develop her very consciousness. (Jade Craddock)

The Daily Star (Bangladesh) has a Senior Lecturer from the Department of English at Metropolitan University, Sylhet write a review of Wuthering Heights.

Wuthering Heights is also regarded as an evidential book for tracing the plight of women in Victorian England from a literary point of view. The portrayal of the deprivations suffered by Catherine and the social injustice that Heathcliff had to undergo during his boyhood at the hands of Edgar illustrate sad instances of gender discrimination and class inequity in England during the 19th century. Wuthering Heights is one of the most popular books in the world on remorseful romance and it has been translated into most of the major languages of the world.

Rebelión (Spain) interviews writer Santiago Alba Rico about his book Leer con niños and recalls that

Santiago montó con Lucía y Juan, sus hijos, un rito de lectura a la hora de la cena, durante el desayuno y también delante del colegio o dentro del coche: quince minutos antes de las ocho. Les leía, les lee y les leerá. Sin propósito pedagógico alguno, los tres se bebieron todo Stevenson, todo Kipling, Moonflet, Mark Twain, Carroll, Oscar Wilde, Verne, Tolkien, London, El gran Meaulnes, Matar a un ruiseñor, Swift, las Brontë, La escapada de Faulkner, Truman Capote, Carson McCullers, La conjura de los necios, Jane Austen, algunos cuentos de Kafka… (Peio H. Riaño) (Translation)

The Guardian brings back a 1970 article in which columnist Jill Tweedie wrote about her teenage diary entries.

But the Moroccan leather binding, the milky expanse within, instantly transformed me into Baroness Munchausen. My very handwriting spiked into the serious trembly copperplate I deemed more suitable for the consumptive heroine I wished to be than the thick round letters of the large schoolgirl I was (if experts today are right and handwriting shapes the fortunes of the writer, I should have died elegantly at the end of the diary). Even the contents were bastard - I found it beneath my dignity to write of anything but the most searing Brontë-esque passions and now, far from being a record of day-to-day events, each entry requires a simultaneous translation: “Today I think I shall go mad, I shiver, I groan, I sob “ (Myron Fickelburger didn’t sit next to me in Chemistry); “Wild gales sweep across the moors, I run and howl, my eyes stream tears” (it’s windy in the playground and I’ve got this bit of asphalt in my eye). Discovered long hence, that diary would provide historians with a vivid and haunting picture of youthful stress in the fifties - vivid and haunting and deeply untrue.

This is how The Australian describes Wide Sargasso Sea in an article about Melbourne Festival:

Postcolonial, Marxist and feminist literatures have given us some of the most scintillating retcons in the past 50 years: think Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, a prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre in which the unseen mad woman in the attic not only gains a voice, she becomes the star. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is not so much a retcon as a feminist reimagining of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Retconning is a significant sub-theme of this year’s Melbourne Festival. Desdemona, reviewed by Eamonn Kelly, is a Rhys-eque retelling of Othello. (Chris Boyd)

And now for some Crimson Peak.

Desde Roger Corman a Tim Burton pasando por Mario Bava y Terence Fisher, desde los prerrafaelitas a los pintores académicos victorianos de paisajes ruinosos y desolados pasando por las ilustraciones de las novelas sensacionales, desde Matthew G. Lewis hasta Henry James pasando por el Poe de La caída de la casa Usher o el W. H. Hodgson de La casa en el confín de la tierra, desde la Charlotte Brontë de Jane Eyre hasta sus reescrituras por Daphne Du Maurier en Rebeca o por Standish en La senda de los elefantes pasando por la Emily Brontë de Cumbres borrascosas, todo el universo gótico-romántico parece estar citado, haber servido de inspiración o ser homenajeado. (Carlos Colón in Diario de Sevilla) (Translation)

More "Jane Eyre" than "Hellboy," the always inventive Del Toro came up with a Gothic romance with horror overtones, and the result seems to have confused potential ticket buyers. (Tom Brueggemann on indieWire's Thompson on Hollywood)

Un grande romantico, e “Crimson Peak” ne è la gotica manifestazione tra paesaggi notturni che sembrano usciti dalle tele di John Atkinson Grimshaw e Caspar David Friedrich, o dalle pagine de “Lo zio Silas” di Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu: «Il romanzo gotico è legato alle favole e alla passione. Un film come “Ho camminato con uno zombi” di Jacques Tourneur ha la stessa struttura di “Jane Eyre”: una ragazza pura guidata in un viaggio oscuro da un gentiluomo scuro, entrambi viaggi d’iniziazione all’età adulta». (Arianna Finos on Reppublica's TrovaCinema) (Translation)

Purple Sneakers (Australia) describes Vitamin's video for the song To Believe:

Grim close ups of Hyde Park skate park on a misty dewy morning are intercut with the clubbing antics of the night before, the redbrick ginnels are lined with bins put out for collection (though they’ll never get collected) whilst the leather jacket-clad band drag an early morning fag on their front steps; high end Victoria Arcade markets lead into a day trip out to Ilkley Moor where the fresh open air (the very same that the Brontë sisters supped, don’t you know) offers respite from the neon lit basement rooms and grungy garage beats of the previous evening. Oh and we also get a section which shows every Leeds student’s dream first date – a trip to Tropical World in Roundhay Park. (Katie Rowley)

El periódico de Aragón (Spain) has an alert for today concerning Ángeles Caso and her novel Todo ese fuego:

La escritora y periodista Ángeles Caso presenta hoy en Zaragoza su novela, Todo ese fuego, en una entrevista con Mari Cruz Soriano en el hotel Reino de Aragón, que tendrá lugar a las 18.30 horas y está enmarcada en el ciclo Charlas con Valor. (Translation)

Thanks to alert reader Michael K, here's a link to a podcast featuring Deborah Lutz, author of The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects. Beaux Cooper Bookshelf reviews Jane Eyre.