Heathcliff's many faces

The Daily Star discusses fictional men such as Heathcliff and Mr Rochester and not in a favourable way.

Tall, dark, and handsome, Heathcliff is the epitome of an obsessive, impulsive, and possessive lover that we all should be wary of. The sense of mystery this man oozes with his dark gypsy past is somewhat attractive, yes, but what is so intoxicating about a man who does not fall in love but is driven by an all-consuming passion, seeking to possess Cathy's mind, body, and soul escapes me. I understand his unwavering love can be enthralling but that man is terrifying. That is no ordinary desire, ladies; troubled characters with dark pasts are not boyfriend material - fictional or otherwise. Nah-uh.
To that catalogue of bad boys, let's now add Mr Rochester. Intriguing brooding anger and passion aside, the man you are dreaming of locks his wife up in an attic and keeps her a secret from everyone, including Jane, the woman he has feelings for. Call me cold and heartless and devoid of imagination but no man dressed up as a gypsy fortune-teller, feeding me news of false engagement just to see my reaction is going to going to sweep me off my feet. He has skeletons named trouble everywhere in his house; closets, I'm sure, would be wise to avoid. Is he really the man you want to spend the rest of your life with? The rest of your imaginary life with? I'm sure the fictional world of men has more to offer. [...]
Imagine Austen and the Brontë sisters finally becoming friends over watching us obsess over their crazy men from heaven… (Imani Khaled)

More on Heathcliff as TLV1 (Israel) shares a podcast on which

Host Marcela Sulak reads from the opening of Orly Castel-Bloom’s short story, “Heathcliff,” in which a young girl’s crush on the literary figure, Heathcliff, follows her about the city of Tel Aviv. 

El correo (Spain) describes Laurence Olivier portrayal of Heathcliff as charming, an adjective we wouldn't have thought to use, to be honest.

The Canberra Times presents the Canberra performances of the shake and stir Wuthering Heights tour:

"I was trying to distil the novel to its essence."
Tackling a well-known and well-loved classic like this one - a frequent inspiration for films, television productions operas and other adaptations - meant he could only take it on from his own perspective, he said.
He wanted to focus on the relationship of the mysterious gypsy Heathcliff (played by Ross Balbuziente) and Catherine (Gemma Willing), which he said had a lot of contemporary resonance. He said Wuthering Heights was not a book that meant a lot to him when he first read it as a teenager: "I wasn't a romantic."
He had also been led to believe it was a soppy love story. But returning to it years later after some life experience he found his feelings towards it had changed.
"There are so many modern elements - hate, love, jealousy, anger, fear. Love can comfort but it can also tear you apart."
And, he said, the destructive aspects of their relationship affected not only them but the people around them, into the next generation.
"We have a cast of six actors who play 13 or 14 characters," he said.
But the environment in which the story unfolded was also crucial and sound, light, projections and other effects were employed to create the settings and atmosphere - including wind, fire and rain. (Ron Cerabona)

The London Review of Books has an article on Jonathan Bate's Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life which includes a couple of Brontë mentions.

This withdrawal didn’t, however, stop Bate from detailing the priapic Hughes’s multiple affairs in the decades after his marriage to Carol in 1970, although he does withhold the name of his final lover, a property developer based in South London – in ‘Brixton, say’, as Bate carefully puts it – with few literary interests, but who apparently got him to play golf, thereby much diminishing his stature as a ‘savage god’ in the eyes of his fishing buddies. Ted Hughes measuring up a putt … it’s like trying to imagine Heathcliff playing tiddlywinks.[...]
Although only on occasion fussy or disapproving, Bate’s book frequently made me feel that anyone intrepid or naive enough to think that they can do justice to all parties caught up in the Hughesian force field is likely to come across like a hapless Lockwood blundering into Wuthering Heights. (Mark Ford)

The Times talks about the female playwrights in Ireland status:

A blaring silence echoed through the theatre. The ethos of the Gate is to stage predominantly classic productions, he explained. And by that, he means Shakespeare, Friel, Beckett, Wilde, Miller. The best it could do was adapt the novels of the likes of the Brontë sisters and Jane Austen into stage productions. (Ellen Coyne)

Star-Telegram describes Jacquelyn Mitchard’s novel Two If By Sea as follows:

The saga follows American Frank Mercy from a tragic and terrifying Christmas Eve tsunami in Australia to his family’s aging Midwestern horse farm and finishes in a quaint, perfect English village straight out of a Brontë novel. (Diana Andro)

And The Irish Times features the novel The Glorious Heresies by Lisa McInerney.

Every great novel seems to have a lost child at its core and the one at the centre of the action here is Ryan, a 15-year-old drug dealer who might have become an accomplished pianist if he had grown up in a different housing estate. His love story is as real and affecting as any the Brontës or Shakespeare can offer. (Liz Nugent)

Daily Toreador has an article on people who don't like to be touched and makes the following point:

Perhaps this is exacerbated by the growing discomfort women feel as social norms for touch continue to be bent, but I do not think our response is inappropriate. Women have had a history of being safe from excessive touch. Look at women of the Victorian era, for example. Jane Eyre did not have to worry about her face being randomly stroked or her sides being playfully, but invasively, poked. (Avery Aiken)

The Brontë Parsonage Facebook page reports that they have

 just had confirmation that the BBC's documentary 'Being the Brontës' will be broadcast on BBC2 at 9pm on Easter Saturday, 26 March. Do not miss!

Unfortunately, the BBC page announcing it doesn't seem to be working anymore but luckily The Brontë Sisters caught the press release before the page went offline. It works again:

Journalist and broadcaster Martha Kearney, novelist Helen Oyeyemi, and columnist and author Lucy Mangan travel to Haworth Parsonage, the home of the Brontë sisters, to discover the stories behind their classic novels Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey.
Just two years before these works were published, prospects for the three unmarried sisters were looking bleak. Their brother was battling an alcohol-fuelled breakdown, Charlotte was hopelessly in love with a married man and their father was going blind. But by 1848 they were a literary sensation. How was it that Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë managed such a sudden and miraculous creative achievement, in the face of adversity? With help from a range of experts, each presenter will explore one of the Brontës in fascinating detail.
By re-living the sisters’ daily routines, visiting the key places in their world, studying their private letters and exploring their interactions with each other, they’ll discover what it was that served as their sources of inspiration. 

Also the page for the programme describes it as follows:

Martha Kearney, novelist Helen Oyeyemi and journalist Lucy Mangan immerse themselves in the Brontes’ lives, to learn how they wrote Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey.

Eric Ruijssenaars has written another interesting article for the Brussels Brontë Blog on whether Villette did or did not cause a stir in Brussels.