Branwell, the hipster avant la lettre

The Yorkshire Post is quite excited with the upcoming To Walk Invisible BBC production:

Filming took place during May and June this year, when the weather turned wet, and unpleasantly cold. And the filming wasn’t in a warm studio space, it was on location, high up on Penistone Hill, just outside Haworth itself, where no attention to detail was spared – to the point where a precise full-scale set of the parsonage was built over-looking an old quarry.
As Susan Newby, learning officer for the Brontë Parsonage Museum explains: “Sally Wainwright wanted it all to look exactly as it had done in the time that the Brontës lived here. And the building itself had extensions to it in later decades, and trees grew in the gardens that we still see today. They simply weren’t here in the 1840s. What viewers will see is as close to what it would have been like as it humanly possible.”
No-one has given a precise costing on the building of the Parsonage and all its contents, but it must run to the millions. Lucky for the BBC then that this is a co-production with other companies and investors, all of whom confidently expect huge viewing figures when it is sold around the world. (Phil Penfold)

The Irish Post also recommends Sally Wainwright's drama:

Starring Enniscorthy’s Charlie Murphy, this lavish new costume drama was filmed on location in York.
It follows the lives of the three siblings who overcame countless obstacles to rise from obscurity to become the Brontë sisters.
This is the remarkable story of three of incredible women – daughters of Co. Down man Patrick Brontë – who between them produced some of the greatest English novels of all time.
A must-watch for book lovers.

And The Sunday Times:

From an opening scene in which three girls and one boy play together, their heads wreathed in halos of imaginary flame, to the almost immediate use of an expletive (a proper one, not one of your mimsy period-drama subsitutes), Sally Wainwright strikes stark contrast between the rich interior lives of the Brontë sisters and their isolated lives with a raging, spitting, alcoholic brother.
The dramatist’s great skill lies in capturing the lovingly bitchy chit-chat and outright violence that comes of adults living at close quarters, and Finn Atkins, Chloe Pirrie and Charlie Murphy (as Charlotte, Emily and Anne respectively) are credible as both literary geniuses and women livid at the limitations placed on their sex. Their father is played by Jonathan Pryce, while Branwell (Adam Nagaitis) is every bit the self-absorbed hipster who believes the world owes him a living.

Radio Times praises Christmas TV:

My heart goes out to Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë in Sally Wainwright’s sombre biographical drama To Walk Invisible (Thu 29 Dec, BBC1), a particularly thoughtful cornerstone of this year’s Christmas schedules.
Life in the Parsonage in the little town of Haworth, high up on the Yorkshire moors, is bleak and hard. The women must look after their ailing dad Patrick and wayward, alcoholic, indulged brother Branwell while writing furiously as they fulfil their brilliantly luminous destinies. Everyone cooped up, cocooned in their own little blankets of misery and, oh, this hardly bears thinking about... no telly! Life surely would be so much better if they could only cuddle up on the sofa to watch Ed Balls throwing a grown woman around a dance floor in Strictly.
In one scene Emily (Chloe Pirrie) stands on a rock in a big cape, looking sad as she contemplates her awful life. Ah, Emily, I’d do the same if I knew I’d never be able to watch Poldark. A world without Aidan Turner in a tin bath, it cannot be borne! (Alison Graham)

Los Angeles Times reports a heartbreaking love story:

Finally, I sent him an old pocketbook I had kept, which he would have remembered from our time together in 1974, along with my favorite high school literature novel, "Wuthering Heights." It is a story, of course, of a deep love that is carried to the grave. (Alicia Castro)

MLB's Cut4 has a baseball-fans-only question:

 - Cheslor Cuthbert or Whit Merrifield: Which [Kansas City] Royals player sounds most like a character from a Charlotte Brontë novel?  (Michael Clair)

La Gazzetta di Mantova (Italy) reviews the book The Cook by Henry Kessing:

E anche se del suo autore si sa poco - Harry Kressing infatti è lo pseudonimo di Harry Adam Ruber (New York, 1928 - Minnesota, 1990) - quello che colpisce de Il cuoco è che sembra di leggere un romanzo ottocentesco e di essere subito avvolti, sin dalle prime pagine, in un'atmosfera gotica, alle Jane Eyre. (Simonetta Bitasi) (Translation)

Numéro 23 TV (France) will broadcast Wuthering Heights 2009 on January 3 (20.55 h). She who scrivens got a swamper posts about the new year's booklist with many Brontë-related books on it; Vesna Armstrong Photography has a few lovely pictures of Haworth's Main Street during Christmas.