The Old School Room's work has begun

Good news for the Old School Room in Haworth, according to The Telegraph & Argus:

Work has begun on a near £100,000 project to restore one of Haworth’s most important historic buildings following a major fundraising effort.
The renovation of the 184-year-old Old School Room, in Church Street, started on Monday.
The work is expected to last for about two and a half months.
The total cost of renovation of the historic building, which is used for community events and functions, and recently featured on Celebrity Masterchef, is £96,000.
The work comes after eight years of fundraising by Brontë Spirit, the charity dedicated to repairing and refurbishing the property.
Around £70,000 came from grant money and nearly £30,000 from community fundraising.
A spokesman for the scheme said: “On Monday Averil Kenyon, chairman of Brontë Spirit, was on hand to greet the contractors Hopleys as they arrived on site to start the project that is expected to take in the region of ten weeks to complete.
“The work has been made possible by a grant of £44,973 from landfill community fund WREN, £10,000 from The Garfield Weston Foundation and £15,000 from The Pilgrim Trust.”
The grade II listed Old School Room was built by Patrick Brontë in 1832 and was extended in 1850 and 1871. (...)
Reverend Peter Mayo-Smith, the rector of Haworth Parish Church, said he was delighted that the main part of the renovation is now under way.
“I congratulate the trustees of Brontë Spirit for the extremely hard work they’ve put in to making this possible,” he added.
“This is excellent news.
“The Old School Room is a very valuable building not just for Haworth but also for the nation.
“It is one of two properties Patrick Brontë was responsible for building, the other being St Gabriel’s Church in Stanbury.
“He was a great believer in education being a way out of poverty – something still very relevant today – and he wanted the children of local mill workers to have an education so they could escape the deprivation of the surrounding area.” (Miran Rahman)

PopMatters reviews Lyndsay Faye's Jane Steele:

Lyndsay Faye’s Jane Steele is a recreation of Jane Eyre and an homage, with a decidedly entertaining Gothic atmosphere and a main character whose feminism is in keeping with modern liberal sensibilities of a “kickass” female character. In Faye’s version, Jane also endures the numerous indignities and injustices that befell Jane Eyre—and most Victorian women in general who lived without the support of a family wealth and connections—but reacts to matters differently. This is the one key difference between Steele and Eyre: this Jane kills her oppressors. (...)
Metatextual ironies abound in this novel, which Jane telling us from the start: “I have been reading over and over again the most riveting book titled Jane Eyre, and the work inspires me to imitative acts.” (...)
In that sense, too, Jane Steele spices things up and sacrifices the depth and the oddness of Jane Eyre. What made Jane and Rochester’s relationship so disturbing yet poignant and affecting was Jane’s position outside of the realm of standard bourgeois white womanhood of the times. Rochester’s ability to see some internal value in her was the draw of the relationship, and the heart of the philosophical conundrum of Jane’s desire for marriage and passion within a libidinal economy that ensured plain women were made to understand that not being pretty objects of desire made them deviant and unnatural, and most of all, undesirable. (...)
Beyond the spiced-up Gothic atmosphere, however, and the gloss of the easily-digestible liberal feminism of present-day pop culture, there’s an absence of the rage and sadness of Jane Eyre’s flawed and complex feminism. (Subashini Navaratnam)

Bustle lists things every feminist did in middle school:

Not all feminists loved to read when they were in middle school, and there's nothing wrong with that. Even so, I feel like most of us can remember the first book we read that featured a strong, inspiring, badass female character. For me, that book was Jane Eyre, and it kind of changed my life. Before I finished Charlotte Brontë's Gothic classic, the only books I wanted to read were either fantasy-themed or all about that lovable klutz, Amelia Bedelia. After getting to know Jane Eyre, though, I couldn't get enough of literature's strong women — like Jo March and Hermione Granger. (Elizabeth Enochs)

Adam Kivel from Consequence of Sound has an interesting theory:

Over years of shelf-scanning, I’ve come across some lessons, some dotted lines between favorite artists and personality traits.(...) The apartments with dozens of presidential biographies, for example, are usually inhabited by clever people, if on the sarcastic side — maybe from having seen all those good intentions gone to crap over the years. My friends with Austen and Brontë on their shelves are polite, or at least infuriated at the lack of politeness in the world today.

Abus de Ciné (France) compiles some film scenes featuring Olympic sports. Including a deleted scene from Jane Eyre 2011 showing Jane playing badminton.

Market Rasen Mail is eager to see the ChapterHouse Theatre open-air performances of Wuthering Heights in Elsham Hall Gardens and Country Park.

The Brontës will be the writers of the month of the Biblioteca Municipal d'Eivissa (Can Ventosa) according to Diario de Ibiza (Spain). Ellora Reads Books reviews Wuthering Heights.