The full Brontë experience

ESPNcricinfo's Sri Lanka correspondent has visited Haworth and the Brontë Parsonage Museum and he writes about it.

I am in Haworth, about 30 kilometres west of Leeds. Ahead of me a cobbled street climbs past a windswept old village, beyond a stone pub that serves beef nihari, and an apothecary that sells soy candles. Atop the hill, the tower of St Michael and All Angels rises from the church where Patrick Brontë, father of three beloved authors, was reverend for 41 years. [...]
It was death, in a sense, that made the Brontë sisters. Their mother Maria died of ovarian cancer less than two years after Anne was born. Their two oldest siblings then fatally contracted typhoid and tuberculosis at school. Desperate not to see his brood dwindle further, Patrick began to teach Charlotte, Emily, Anne and Branwell at home. It was in the front study with the dark fireplace and the upright piano that the sisters dreamt up the stories that would one day bleed into their novels. In daytime rambles on the sloping moors, formed the worlds of their books: the spindly tussock, the forbidding bogs, the wind howling through thorns.
Upstairs there are more intimate glimpses into the Brontës' lives. On one side of what was Charlotte's room are the cloth boots she wore as a baby. On the other, the veil she wore at her wedding, less than a year before her death. There are letters written in stylish hands to friends, and that kept their quills in working order.
Towards the back of the museum a display explains the Brontë's influence on literature, and outside on the parking lot, there are even modern-day Brontë villains in operation. Wardens from a private company gleefully clamp cars and issue fines to any visitors even 30 seconds over their allowance, like modern-day Josephs from Wuthering Heights, clutching parking codes like King James Bibles.
It was cloudy when I arrived at Haworth but, while I was in the parsonage, the wind had whipped up around the hills. That icy rain that lovesick 18th century characters loved to take long, sobbing walks in, was coming down on the moors. I thought about taking a stroll in the damp countryside myself, just to get the full Bronte experience. But as I was unlikely to be rescued by a handsome, moneyed gentleman, then nursed slowly to health at his mansion while he wormed his way into my tender heart, I just walked down the hill and took the bus back to Keighley, then the train back to Leeds. (Andrew Fidel Fernando)

Townsville Bulletin (Australia) interviews the actor who plays Heathcliff in Shake & Stir Theatre's production of Wuthering Heights.

Wuthering Heights is a story that's been told many times especilly on screen. Why did you decide to bring it to the stage?
It has been done a lot in film but on stage it hasn’t been done a great deal. I guess that has a lot to do with its theatrical challenges, which shake & stir theatre company never shies away from. The company is renowned for bringing classics to the stage. It’s the same company that’s brought George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula to the stage and reinvigorated those amazing fictitious stories to a new theatrical audience. So I guess Wuthering Heights was in that canon of classics that the company was just dying to produce on stage.
What was it about the story that appealed to you?
A few things. Those really juicy themes that we all deal with at various stages in our lives: love, hate, revenge, and that burning uncontrollable desire to get what you want at all costs. It’s the stuff that Shakespeare’s made of, and it’s the stuff the Emily Brontë’s written so eloquently and so disturbingly. We relished the opportunity to bring those words alive on stage. Also the climate in which the whole story takes place within the moors and the tumultuous weather and unrelenting wetness and dampness – that was also a theatrical challenge that we were really excited by. I can say that thanks to our brilliant director and our beautiful design team, they’ve managed to really capture that essence of the book as well and brought that to the stage. (Read more)

Fraser Coast Online recommends the production too.

Los Angeles Times' Jacket Copy features 'one of Kickstarter's most successful books', Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls.

The concept behind "Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls" is a relatively simple one — the book will contain 100 stories about real women, written in fairy-tale style, with illustrated portraits of each. Subjects include Queen Elizabeth I, Serena Williams, Frida Kahlo, Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters. (Michael Schaub)

Blog Critics has some advice of writing a debut novel.

I needed to make some decisions and answer some basic questions: Will the novel to be a supernatural story? Is it a romance, with this meeting setting up a Charlotte Brontë-esque scenario a la Jane Eyre? Or will the plot unfold something darker? The elevator pitch needs to tell potential readers (and agents and editors) what’s happening between these two characters. (Barbara Barnett)

Curbed discusses the suburbs and why 'midcentury Americans believed they were making them sick'.

The health problems of the suburban man, according to these books, are caused by his incessant motion across the landscape. He is always in a hurry, commuting to the city and back every day, going on business trips. Women’s disturbances have the opposite etiology: They are the result of spatial confinement. Because suburban women spent so much more time at home and in the neighborhood, writers of the era tied women’s problems more closely to their environment, especially the house. This was nothing new: the archetype of the trapped woman goes back from Charlotte Gilman’s "The Yellow Wallpaper" and Charlotte Brontë’s madwoman in the attic to Danaë in Greek myth. But for the woman stuck in the new suburbia, the monotony of her surroundings—with only new gadgets for diversion—was thought to deepen her despair. (Amanda Kolson Hurley)

Listverse shares '10 Fascinating Facts About Gypsies'.

We encounter many of these stereotypical suppositions of Romani magic in our daily lives. Literature is rife with references to the Romani and their magical arts. For example, in Jane Eyre, the Romani visit Thornfield as fortune-tellers. (Angela Hamm)

Not really, though.

Tampa Bay Times has some recommendations for those missing Downton Abbey.

Jane Eyre
Plain Jane Eyre was falling in love with her employer Mr. Rochester long before Tom Branson was falling for Lady Sybil. You've seen one Jane Eyre you've seen them all, right? Wrong. But I probably have seen them all or close to it, including a 1983 version with Timothy Dalton (♥) and the weird 2011 version starring Mia Wasikowska, Michael Fassbender (double ♥, except in this) and Judi Dench. The 2006 miniseries is one I'll watch over and over, starring Ruth Wilson (The Affair) as Jane. Netflix has the 2011 movie and the 1996 miniseries; Amazon Prime has the 1970 TV movie with George Scott and Susannah York. Find all the rest at the library. (Caitlin E. O'Conner)

For the Love of Words reviews the Texts from Jane Eyre audiobook by Mallory Ortberg.  Serendipia (in Spanish) posts about Jane Eyre. La Huella de los Libros (in Spanish) reviews Herbarium. Las flores de Gideon by Anna Casanovas.