Astute Perspective

ABC Radio Sidney's program Self Improvement devotes its time today to Charlotte Brontë:

Are you one of our regular students for Self Improvement Wednesday? Each week, you get to learn something new.
Your lesson this week is English novelist and poet Charlotte Brontë two hundred years after her birth.
Most famous for her novels Jane Eyre and Villette, Charlotte Brontë of course comes from a family of writers. Take a listen to the story of her life.
Your teacher is Susannah Fullerton, literary lecturer.

The Scotsman reviews positively (4 out of 5 stars) the Jane Eyre. An autobiography production at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival:

Brilliantly performed by Rebecca Vaughan, Elton Townend Jones’ adaptation might be stripped back, but it doesn’t lose any of the atmosphere, warmth and sparkling chemistry of Jane’s tumultuous relationship with Mr Rochester. However, it also gives us what some lesser adaptations can miss – Jane’s astute perspective on the constraints of life as a woman two centuries ago. (Sally Stott) 

The other Brontë-related event at the Festival, Madwomen in the Attic is also getting good reviews such as in Edfringe Review. The production has also been nominated for an Eddie award.

Glasgow Daily Times tells about the students of the Gatton Academy study trip to England:

After this study abroad, our students have a newfound appreciation for Shakespeare after seeing The Taming of the Shrew at The Globe Theatre, understand after visiting Newstead Abbey why Lord Byron was considered the world’s first person to have rock-star status, and understand Heathcliff better because they walked across the same moors that influenced Emily Brontë as she wrote Wuthering Heights.

The Guardian on sequels of Pride and Prejudice and derivatives in general:

This won’t, I promise, become a rant about derivative spin-offs. Re-imagining classic novels from the point of view of minor characters can produce fascinating new insights: Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, JM Coetzee’s Foe, Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, Sena Jeter Naslund’s Ahab’s Wife and Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead are just a few that spring to mind. (Charlotte Jones)

Does our current idea of love need revision? New York Times tries to find an answer:

Natasha Lennard: From “Romeo and Juliet,” to “Wuthering Heights” to Hollywood romance tales like “The Notebook,” the mainstream Western view of love has long been that — to borrow from the former Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart’s thoughts on obscenity — we know it when we see it.True love. Real love. Love at first sight. We treat romantic love as some unchanging, metaphysical object waiting to be found and grasped, even though these “traditional” modes of courtship and coupling are actually relatively recent developments. Why does love continue to be upheld as something timeless and transcendental?

Listverse selects important historical figures outshined by their children:

Patrick Brontë
Patrick Brunty was born on March 17, 1777, the eldest of 10 children. Despite coming from a barely literate family of farmers, Patrick showed a real aptitude for learning and eventually managed to graduate from Cambridge. It was also during this time that he changed the spelling of his name to Brontë. This name was later made famous by his daughters, who were known collectively as the Brontë sisters.
Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë became three of the most celebrated authors of their generation. Charlotte was the first one to find success with her classic novel Jane Eyre, published under the male pen name Currer Bell. Her sisters followed suit and published under the names Ellis and Acton Bell.
While the sisters developed their literary careers, Patrick, now a reverend with the Church of England, held various curacies throughout Yorkshire before becoming a perpetual curate at a church in Haworth. He also published several books of poetry, although these never attained the popularity enjoyed by his daughters.
In a similar situation was Branwell Brontë, Patrick’s only son. Like his siblings, Branwell was a writer and even wrote poetry with his sisters when they were young, but history remembers only the Brontë sisters.
Patrick was the only Brontë blessed with a long life. His wife, Maria Brontë, died 40 years before him. His first daughters, Maria and Elizabeth, both died in 1825 after a typhoid outbreak at school. Emily, Anne, and Branwell Brontë all died around 30 years of age. Charlotte Brontë died at age 38, still six years before her father. (Radu Alexander)

Museum Hack has a marketing associate with Brontë aspirations, Moira O'Connell:

MH: If you could work at any museum, which one would you choose?
Moira: It’s always been my dream to work at the British Library or the Brontë Parsonage Museum.

Literary Hub quotes the (in)famous Graham Lady Magzine Wuthering Heights original review in an article about the meanest literary or culinary critics:

Graham Lady Magazine‘s 1848 review of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights
“How a human being could have attempted such a book as the present without committing suicide before he had finished a dozen chapters, is a mystery. It is a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors.”

SBS discusses winter in Australia:

Something profound happens by about the second month of winter. Everyone bins high-quality conversational conventions and begins to complain semi-constantly about the weather. Providing their hot take on the cold truth. Introductory hellos are dumped in lieu of casual remarks about how horrible life is toiling under the charcoal sky. Like our existence is now so bleak it may as well be taking place in the windswept Victorian-hellhole of Wuthering Heights. We suffer as one. But we WILL NOT do it in silence. (Liam Ryan)

El Progreso (Spain) visits the O Courel mountains:

En estos casos siempre recuerdo —como ya recogí en Un ano nos Ancares aquel diálogo de Cumbres borrascosas: "¿Cuánto se tardará en llegar a lo alto de aquellos montes, qué habrá detrás?—Hay otros montes iguales". Ése debe de ser el Montouto, quemarca el límite entre Lugo, Ourense y León. (Jorge de Vivero) (Translation)

Fantasymundo reviews Charlotte Cory's The Unforgiven novel:

“Los que no perdonan” es una novela victoriana al estilo de los clásicos de los que bebe como las hermanas Brontë, Jane Austen o Charles Dickens. (Alejandro Guardiola) (Translation)

Lisa Marbly-Warir is asking for your favorite Mr. Rochester (actor); Pocket Writes posts about Wuthering Heights; The stars wouldn't shine so bright reviews Wuthering Heights 2009; Angry Angel posts about The Madwoman Upstairs by Catherine Lowell; Bücherstöberecke (in German) reviews Agnes Grey.