Glimpse into her mind

The Guardian begins the 'best-of-the-year' season with a look back at 2016 in dance:

The best work has come not from youthful next big things, but from seasoned creators. Akram Khan gave us Until the Lions and his reimagining of Giselle (for English National Ballet), both darkly resonant pieces. Cathy Marston’s Jane Eyre for Northern Ballet, Richard Alston’s An Italian in Madrid and Michael Clark’s to a simple, rock’n’roll… song represented very different genres of dance, but were all the result of rigorous and fine-tuned process. (Luke Jennings)

Fiona MacDonald selects love letters for BBC Culture:

Charlotte Brontë to Professor Constantin Héger, 18 November 1844

It’s not the words alone that speak to us. “Some of the physical items have a story to tell on their own,” Clarke tells BBC Culture. “There’s an item that was torn up and then sewn together, or just the addition of a doodle, or you can see that some documents have been through the wars.” One of the most fragile letters in the collection was ripped up and thrown away by its recipient. While studying languages at a boarding school in Brussels run by Professor Constantin Héger and his wife, Charlotte Brontë became infatuated with her teacher. After returning to England, she wrote several letters to him – but he discarded them all. “Incredibly four of her letters have survived,” writes Clarke. “Curiously, it is thanks to his wife – who retrieved them from the waste paper basket and sewed them back together – that we are privy to their content today.”
As Clarke points out, Brontë’s stitched-together missives offer us a glimpse into the mind of the novelist. “The letters are deeply poignant and reveal the extent of Charlotte’s passionate feelings for the professor, her desire to see him, her despair at his silence and ultimately her resigned desolation and sense of rejection – emotions that she would later pour into Jane Eyre and Villette.”

The Sunday Times on creating your personal library:

Starting a collection is easy, says Simona Lyons, the bibliotherapist at the School of Life, in central London. In fact, the odds are that you already have. “Select books to mark significant moments in your life — a childhood favourite in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, or Jane Eyre for a coming-of-age story,” Lyons suggests. (Rebecca Myers)

In The Sunday Times, Richard Myers explores the story behind any scent with old fashioned clichés. If you use old romantic perfumes...

Currently reading Wuthering Heights (again). Dream dinner guest Ernest Hemingway or Dame Barbara Cartland.

TV Wise reminds us of the UK premiere date for To Walk Invisible:

BBC One’s one-off Brontë drama To Walk Invisible will premiere on Thursday December 29th at 9pm, it has been announced.
To Walk Invisible revolves around Charlotte, Anne and Emily’s increasingly difficult relationship with their brother Branwell, who in the last three years of his life – following a tragically misguided love affair – sank into alcoholism, drug addiction and appalling behaviour. (Patrick Munn)

A Younger Theatre reviews Her Aching Heart as performed in The Hope Theatre in London:

The set-up is a fun twist on gothic novels ranging from Wuthering Heights to Rebecca: the love story at its heart is between an aristocratic lady (Colette Eaton) and a local peasant girl (Naomi Todd). (Fred Maynard)

A Brontë reference in this recipe found in The Kankakee Daily Journal:

I might have gleaned the idea for this dish from watching Jamie Oliver's old series, "Jamie At Home." I loved watching Oliver working in his potager (garden), pulling fresh veggies and firing up his outdoor ovens and grills, to turn them into something delectable only minutes after they were plucked from the soil.
Oliver's garden was so rural, rustic and complete, with chickens, veggie patches, fruit trees and a kitchen right out of a Brontë novel. (Deb Terrill)

News Corp Australia Network on weather:

Weather is not just a metaphor for life — stormy spells, long periods of sunshine — it is life. How many of your best memories involve an eccentricity of the weather? How many treasured movies and novels lodge forever in your mind because the wind or the rain or the sunshine not just sets the story but inhabits it? Think of the tornado in The Wizard of Oz, the rain scene when Andy Dufresne finally finds freedom in The Shawshank Redemption, the wind in Wuthering Heights, the snow in Dr Zhivago. (Angela Mollard)

António Sousa remembers in Correio da Manhã (Portugal) how

Ao contrário de quase todo o País, Dona Ester, minha mãe, não via vantagens no sentimentalismo dos poetas românticos. Também contra o que era hábito nas senhoras daquele tempo, que liam romances mais ou menos morais, consagrados à família, ao casamento e aos dramas da educação dos filhos, Dona Ester, minha mãe, era leitora de Cesário Verde – que ela considerava poder ter sido um antídoto para várias gerações, caso fosse estudado nas escolas – e conservava o discreto mau hábito de folhear Jane Austen (por snobismo, gostava de ‘Mansfield Park’) e preferia Charlotte (a de ‘Jane Eyre’) a Emily Brontë (a de ‘O Monde dos Vendavais’). (Translation)

Bongdanet (Vietnam) alerts of the broadcast today of Jane Eyre 2011 on K+NS. If Mermaids Wore Suspenders explores time in Jane Eyre;