Elegantly Simple

Peter Wilby from the New Statesman visited Haworth a few days ago:

The Brexit vote and the subsequent fall in sterling’s value has led, it is reported, to a sharp increase in tourism. I thought of this as we struggled through people crammed into the excellent Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, West Yorkshire, the other day. Haworth is a tiny village (population 6,379) that was so poor two centuries ago that raw sewage ran down the main street. Now, it has created a flourishing industry from being the place where the Brontës’ novels were written.

BBC4's Woman's Hour has a discussion of Wide Sargasso Sea, celebrating its 50th anniversary:

Love and betrayal and madness: it's 50 years since Jean Rhys' masterpiece Wide Sargasso Sea was published. It tells the story of the first Mrs Rochester, the madwoman in the attic of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. Dr Laura Fish, senior lecturer in creative writing at Northumbria University and author Julia Rochester talk about the novel and its impact.

The List reviews the Dyad Production's Jane Eyre. An Autobiography as seen at the Edinburgh Fringe:

Sole performer Rebecca Vaughan pours her soul into making Jane an emotionally sympathetic hero for the audience to follow, and while her rendering of the supporting cast is sometimes less nuanced (Rochester only ever seems to growl or bellow; the peasantry is caricatured as a set of ee-by-gum yokels), they're at least distinct and easily recognised. Writer / director Elton Townend-Jones has done a good job of condensing the novel into 90 gripping minutes, and the staging – an off-white backdrop and couch, transformed by lighting cues – is elegantly simple. (Niki Boyle)

RTÉ informs that Happy Valley will have a third season and mentions something about Sally Wainwright's To Walk Invisible:

The cast of Happy Valley also includes Rebellion's Charlie Murphy as police officer Ann Gallagher. The Love/Hate star recently reunited with Wainwright for an upcoming one-off drama about the Brontë sisters for BBC One, To Walk Invisible. Murphy plays the youngest sister, Anne, with the biopic telling the story of how Anne - author of the acclaimed novels Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall - and sisters Emily and Charlotte came from obscurity to become literary icons.

The Irish Times has advice for book clubs:

Another theme which emerges, perhaps unsurprisingly, is wine.
“Book club without wine would be Heathcliff without Cathy, Oscar minus Lucinda, Holden without his ducks in Central Park,” says Helen McClements. (Freya McClements)

Sparknotes's SparkLife has a couple of questions for your English class:

14. Why was Heathcliff such a tool? (...)
17. Could Emily Brontë have possibly come up with a LESS euphonic name than Thrushcross Grange? (Elodie)

MyRepública reviews the Classical Comics' Wuthering Heights version:

A favorite book of many readers, this classic tale of wild, passionate and intense love between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff is presented as a full-color graphic novel, featuring beautiful hand-painted watercolor art work. The traditional approach taken to the art in this book creates a wonderful sensory experience that is certain to engage any reader. Another positive here is the fact that the graphic novel stays true to the original novel. It utilizes all the authentic text and dialogue. This graphic novel was specifically designed to encourage readers to enjoy classical literature. They also offer alternative text versions to cater for different readership levels.

Bustle on books to share with the ones you love:

And I just recently gave my boyfriend a copy of Jane Eyre, just in case he turns out to have a secret wife hidden in the attic. (Charlotte Ahlin)

The Guardian reviews the pilot episode of I Love Dick, based on the Chris Kraus novel, created by Jill Soloway:

Soloway has called Kraus’s book “the invention of the female gaze”. It’s a puzzling sort of compliment. I Love Dick was published in 1997. If it “invented” the female gaze, what were the Brontës and Virginia Woolf up to? I Love Dick’s real innovation was to make the intellectual thrills of feminist criticism the engine of a novel – and to heighten that novel’s reality through Chris’s pursuit of pleasure. (Judy Berman)

Vogue on the new season of BBC's Poldark:

The latter gave the directors ample opportunity to focus on their hero’s more desirable attributes – there was, for instance, the moment Ross set his scythe to his crops in the hot sun, his bare muscled chest oiled and flexed, Heathcliff-style locks framing his lion-like features. Not forgetting, too – and how could we? – the sun-drenched naked sea swimming scene. (Emily Sheffield)

South Coast Register talks about a local school program for encouraging students to read:

He said the students get to choose from thousands of titles, many of which are included on the Premier’s Reading Challenge list.
“The children choose what they want,” he said.
“We could give them all a Jane Eyre and make them read it but they probably won’t enjoy it and won’t want to read again.
“We need to make reading and literacy fun and enjoyable. (Robert Crawford)

Well, we hope that some of them will choose Jane after all.
iNews's subject is rom-coms:

It made me think about Wuthering Heights. OK, not a rom-com, but bear with me. Heathcliff is the wild outsider who liberates Cathy and shows her she has a dark side. But in the end she marries boring, solid, wealthy Edgar. She refuses to leave her comfort zone. That’s why they end up miserable. In the screwballs, the heroines are Heathcliff. (But without all the tiresome bashing of heads into trees and gnashing of teeth. And definitely without hanging puppies.) They drag the men into chaos, and the chaos is the relationship. Because love has to be a bit chaotic, it has to be a bit messy. (Samantha Ellis)

Wuthering Heights features on a list of maternal childbirth death featured in novels on Project-Syndicate; Fernweh's Call posts about Villette.