Jane Eyre's inspiring independence

The recent White Rose Awards are featured in Keighley News.

Haworth's Brontë Parsonage Museum has won recognition in coveted tourism awards.
It was highly commended in the 'large attraction' category of the White Rose Awards. (Alistair Shand)

The Telegraph and Argus also highlights the achievement.

More recent events as Times & Star reports on the literary festival in Maryport last weekend:

From wild mountains to the wild, windswept moors of Yorkshire, Juliet Barker gave a perceptive insight into the life of the Brontës gather from research and some of their personal correspondence.

The New York Times discusses whether 'domestic responsibilities at odds with becoming a great artist' and film critic Dana Stevens recalls how

When I was younger, with fewer dependents and more literary ambition, I recall angstily counting on my fingers how many of my favorite writers had never had children. Emily Dickinson. Charlotte Brontë. Franz Kafka. Fernando Pessoa. Samuel Beckett. James Baldwin. 

A columnist at BookRiot thanks books for their influences.

Books also have inspired me. Jane Eyre’s declaration that she’s a free human being with an independent will has given me strength more times than I can count. And Anne Lamott’s sassy version of Christianity helped me keep my faith when I was having a hard time seeing a Christianity that was right for me. Meeting such strong and defiant women in books has helped me find my own strength. (Teresa Preston)

Similarly, blogTO announces

the launch of You Care Too Much, a collection of art writing on the question of self care.[...]
We learn that self care looks differently to each of us. It is a balancing act; It is conscious self-preservation; Its a non-linear journey to healing. Responsibility to yourself means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts, and being able to say, like Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre: I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.

Technically, Jane Eyre ever actually says that. It is Rochester who, disguised as a gypsy, utters what he thinks Jane Eyre's attitude reveals.

In The Sundial a student builds on Jane's said attitude.

Jane Eyre sat shotgun as I drove home from school the other day. Her right hand clung to the edge of the bucket seat and her left hand gripped mine, in an attempt to soothe her fear of this fast moving vehicle, but occasionally I’d let it go to make a turn or change lanes. I was going under fifty on the freeway, on the fastest route with usual traffic. She eventually eased up and began to ask me a lot of questions about how cars work. Not knowing much about cars myself, I tried to explain how there’s some kind of process of combustion that occurs within the engine. She gripped my hand a little harder when I mentioned the combustion bit, but she was very curious and inquisitive about the nature and mechanics of our modern means of transportation.
“You see,” I said to her “I’m young, and I’m female. Two things that make me somewhat vulnerable in the city. But I can drive and I own this car, and that gives me a kind of power that compensates for those vulnerabilities. Now, I do also use public transportation, but this is a much more egalitarian society overall, and my traveling alone is generally respected by the people around me. Yeah, there’s the occasional jerk, but independence is highly revered in America. Even for young women.”
“And your education is quite liberal” Jane said. (Marja Ziemer) (Read more)

According to Financial Times,

One of the most rewarding things about teaching is that teenagers really do make original and thought-provoking observations. Mind you, this might be more of a phenomenon when you are teaching Charlotte Brontë rather than Lucy’s beloved trigonometry. (Lorna Dolan)

Anne Rice, though not a teenager, also makes a thought-provoking observation in an interview for Smashing Interviews Magazine.

If you look at all the novels you love and enjoy, a lot of those novels do involve a death. It’s very hard for the story to come to a conclusion without somebody perishing, even with Jane Eyre, that book I love so much. Essentially, the woman in the attic perishes dramatically and horribly, and that’s the only way Jane and Rochester can go on. (Melissa Parker)

On Facebook, BBC Radio Leeds shared a live video of Rebecca Yorke from the Brontë Parsonage Museum explaining why 'Yorkshire is the top British tourist attraction'.