The people who call Emily Brontë boring

Keighley News features Helen MacEwan and her forthcoming biography of Winifred Gérin, biographer of the Brontës.

The life of Winifred has been explored by Helen MacEwan, a long-time Brontë scholar and founder of the Belgian branch of the Brontë Society.
A Brussels resident for the past 11 years, she decided to write about Winifred after discovering their shared links with the Belgian city.
Helen said Winifred was “bowled over” by Haworth during her 1954 visit and felt people could not understand the Brontë family without becoming immersed in a their environment.
Helen said: “Very romantically, on that first visit Winifred met her second husband, John Lock, also a Brontë enthusiast.
“They both decided to move from London to Haworth and devote themselves to writing biographies of the Brontës.
“Lock wrote the first biography of Patrick Brontë, called A Man Of Sorrow. The couple lived in Haworth for ten years from 1955 to 1965."
Helen, a lifelong fan of the Brontës’ work, is a translator and former teacher who has lived in Brussels since 2004.
After moving to Brussels, she explored Charlotte and Emily’s time in the city during the early 1840s, including Charlotte’s love for her married tutor Constantin Heger, which inspired a character in her novel Villette.
Helen began the Brussels Brontë Group, which organises guided walks and talks in Brussels, and wrote an illustrated guide entitled The Brontës In Brussels.
During her research, Helen became interested in Winifred, whose first husband was a Belgian cellist called Eugène Gérin.
The Gérins were living in Brussels when the Germans invaded in 1940 and had an adventurous war.
Helen was able to trace Gérin’s unpublished autobiography, which was held privately in Yorkshire, and draw on it for her life of Gérin.
Winifred Gérin: Biographer Of The Brontës has been described by fellow Brontë authors as an original, revealing and lovingly-researched biography. (David Knights)

Another new book for your Brontë bookshelf is Claire Harman's biography of Charlotte Brontë, which is being read on BBC Radio 4.

Uclu's Arts and Cultures Journal reviews the National Theatre's production of Jane Eyre:

With a main cast of six actors, the majority of whom play a range of different roles within the play, ‘Jane Eyre’ can only be described as a team effort throughout. The cast take on a unified role during the performance, acting together as the collective voices of Jane’s tormented inner monologues and creating the onomatopoeic sounds of slaps and knocking. The effectiveness of the cast’s efforts as a company is obvious, yet also leaves room for each actor to convey their own capabilities to the audience. (Riah Osborne)

This columnist from The Island Packet has a bit of a trauma concerning Wuthering Heights:

Twenty-two years later, I'm still completing my high school assignments. In fact, if the day ever comes when I finish "Wuthering Heights," I might throw a par-... actually, no.
I'm never going to finish that book.
I made it to page 90 in 1992 -- I know this because the bookmark is still in the book -- but I pretended to have read the whole thing by nodding along to others' insights.
I'm ashamed of this, but I'm taking it off my Past Failures To-Undo List.
No one should live with this guilt.
My classmates who went to Harvard probably read "Wuthering Heights," though, which brings me to another thing I remember about high school: My classmates got into Harvard ... and Yale and Dartmouth and schools that were "the Harvard" and "the Yale" and "the Dartmouth" of whatever state they went to after graduation.
For instance, I went to the Harvard of Adams County, Penn.
This is where they send the people who call Emily Brontë boring. (Liz Farrell)

The main characters of the film Miss You Already didn't have that problem. Several sites review the film today and mentions its Brontë references.

The deliberate rough-around-the-edges quality of Miss You Already is liability and asset: Whisking Milly and Jess off to the Moors for a double-homage to Wuthering Heights and "Losing My Religion" is just one of several odd detours the film takes, but Hardwicke's willingness to get into the vomit, tears, and viscera of Milly's cancer treatments has a boldness and integrity to it. For better or worse, we're on this rollercoaster ride, too. (Scott Tobias on NPR)

Milly, always demanding, now feels she has an unassailable right to be. “You’re a cancer bully,” Jess shouts at Milly during a big argument that takes place on the Yorkshire moors, a Brontë-esque setting that feels both arbitrary and strangely appropriate. (A. O. Scott in The New York Times)

Barrymore's Jess, an American who grew up in London, and Collette's Milly have been best friends since school days, bonding over boys and music and Wuthering Heights. [...]
In the aftermath of a dismal surprise birthday party, Milly persuades Jess to go with her to the Yorkshire moors - to the rocky hills where Heathcliff once trod. And where a randy barman she met in London now works at an inn. Just like C.C. and Hillary in Beaches, Jess and Milly have a huge falling out. (Steven Rea in The Inquirer)

Ces bagarres pour la vie se déroulent dans des environnements d’un chic fou, anesthésiant les petites tragédies du quotidien, Catherine Hardwicke se baladant en touriste dans une ville expurgée de toute forme de laideur et de chaos, se concentrant sur ses deux héroïnes sophistiquées. Même leur escapade improvisée dans le Yorkshire — leur dévotion pour Les hauts de Hurlevent, d’Emily Brontë, relève quasiment du fétichisme —, faite en taxi (!), illustre par l’absurde ce climat d’insouciance, celui d’une vie payée à crédit, mais où l’on ne reçoit jamais les factures. (André Lavoie in Le devoir) (Translation)

And let's not forget that other film bringing Brontë references of late: Crimson Peak, reviewed by Tech Central (South Africa).

It’s the sort of movie that doesn’t get made often these days, harking back to 1940s psychological thrillers like Gaslight and Hitchcock’s Rebecca, though with some lurid lashings of the Hammer House of Horror flicks and a dash of the surreal, sensational elements of Italian Giallo. Even more than that, it harks back to Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, arguably the smarter precursors of the much-maligned Twilight books and movies. (Lance Harris)

The Elm tells about the summer programme Kiplin Hall thanks to which

Some of the places students get to travel to include Beatrice Potter’s house in the Lake District, Haworth Moors, featured in “Wuthering Heights” by Emily Brontë, Castle Howard, Dove Cottage, otherwise known as William Wordsworth’s home, the Cliffs of the North Sea, and Robin Hood’s Bay. (Molly Igoe)

The Telegraph and Argus has pictures of the sand sculpture of Emily Brontë at a Waterstones in Bradford. Patheos' Eidos discusses Mr Brocklehurst. More on on the recent talk by Tessa Hadley to the Brussels Brontë Group on their blog. AnneBrontë.org writes about theatre and the Brontës. Creative Review has an article on the beautiful new editions of the Brontë novels by Vintage Classics. Peak District & Derbyshire has an article on Hathersage: a walk on Jane Eyre country; Unbound's The House of Fiction project has  a post on Houses associated with Charlotte Brontë.