Take Britain by Storm (and some peas)

The North Jersey Record talks about the Brontë200 celebrations in Haworth, NJ:

Charlotte Brontë got a 200th birthday celebration at the Haworth Library, which included readings, historical discussions and movies dedicated to the author of "Jane Eyre."
Haworth draws its name from the English hometown of the literary Brontë sisters. According to the borough's web site, Haworth, which incorporated in 1904, dates its name to 1872. John S. Sauzade, a New York author and railroad man named the borough "Haworth" in honor of one of his favorite author's hometowns.
Haworth's tribute, "Brontë Week," includes a reading of the entire book aloud in the library by volunteers and via Skype from Haworth, England. Events, which kicked off Nov. 27, will run through Sunday. The book reading, which began Friday, is expected to take 22 to 24 hours, with overnight breaks. In addition to the readings, the library also is showing several Brontë-themed movies, including versions of "Jane Eyre."
"It's a great way to share with our sister city across the pond the passion that we have for books as a wholesome form of entertainment," Mayor John Smart said Friday, pointing out the use of 21st century technology to share a 19th century story. (Marc Lightdale)

Check the Friends of the Haworth Library Facebook Wall for updates on the readathon. By the way the readers of chapter one were no others than the Brontë Parsonage staff at the Parsonage Library.

The manuscript edition of Jane Eyre published by Éditions des Saint Pères is the subject of this article in Newsweek:

Now ready to take Britain by storm is Brontë’s manuscript of Jane Eyre , which offers rare insight into the author’s world. Brontë’s prose is clear, with only occasional modifications. She sometimes strikes out words, proposes others, circles a sentence she doesn’t like and replaces it with another carefully crafted option. Nelson explains that at the time Brontë wrote Jane Eyre, her earlier work, The Professor , had been turned down by several publishers. “One can imagine that’s why she took extra care in her choice of words and style. It is probably the last draft before publication; you can see how much of a perfectionist she was.”
The book itself has the quality of a work of art. “The ink, the paper, the cover, the fact that they are all crafted by hand in limited editions makes the experience all the more intimate,” says Nelson. It takes a certain set of skills to produce Éditions des Saints-Pères books and so the publisher works with a company who specializes in restoring old films—such as Jean Cocteau’s 1946 movie La Belle et la Bête (Beauty and the Beast)—who have experience handling delicate materials. (Claire Toureille)

The Telegraph & Argus on the last time the Red House Museum will celebrate Christmas:

Dressing the house for Christmas will be a poignant occasion for the Friends of Red House.
Since the museum in Oxford Road, Gomersal, opened to the public in 1980 staff have literally trimmed the halls with boughs of holly and other foliage they find in the gardens to give visitors an insight into Christmas past.
This year though the celebrations will be tinged with sadness as it will be the final time the house will be decked up for Christmas since its closure to the public, on December 21, was announced as part of the budget cuts.
However, despite the disappointment the museum is closing, the Friends of Red House are determined their forthcoming Christmas event, on Sunday December 11, will be a happy occasion.
On Thursday, (December 8), the dressing of the house will begin to help re-create the Christmas past as it would have been enjoyed when the Taylor family lived there.

The Southern Daily Echo is excited about the fact that the National Theatre's production of Jane Eyre (which is qualified as 'superlative' in The Stage) will tour the UK next year, including Southampton:

The National Theatre will be touring Sally Cookson’s energetic and imaginative new adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s masterpiece Jane Eyre and is coming to Mayflower Theatre from Monday 8- Saturday 13 May 2017.
This is a very significant time to be announcing the tour, as 2016 marks the 200th anniversary of Charlotte Brontë’s birth and 2017 is the 170th anniversary of when Jane Eyre was first published.
This exciting new stage version of Jane Eyre was originally presented in two parts at Bristol Old Vic, and then transferred to the National Theatre, re-imagined as a single performance, playing to sold out houses at the NT’s Lyttelton Theatre. Casting for the production is yet to be announced. (Hilary Porter)

Kate Bush, a tory? So? Financial Times and Caitlin Moran in The Times comment on it:

The whole point about Bush is that she has never played by the rules. She doesn’t care about fashion or what other people think (otherwise she could never have made that first, ineffably weird “Wuthering Heights” video, let alone released that godawful album The Dreaming). (James Delingpole)

Geoff Norcott in The Independent says:

Kate Bush fans could take heart from the possibility she might have been left-wing when she wrote some of the soundtrack of their lives. Maybe she should come out and give a discography in which she underlines her political state of mind at each point.
Wuthering Heights – Marxist Feminist

The New Yorker has an article about Stevie Nicks:

By 1983, Nicks was ready to make another record. Her relationship with Iovine was strained, but Nicks asked him to produce the record anyway. “The Wild Heart” is inspired in part by the unravelling of that relationship, and in part by her mourning for Anderson. Nicks frequently cites as a guiding influence for the recording sessions the 1939 film adaptation of Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights,” which depicts an undying, almost fiendish love. Mostly, the songs are about bucking against the circumstances that separate us from the people we need. (Amanda Petrusich)

Which brings us again to Kate Bush, via The Prosen People:

In January 1978—half a decade before Stevie Nicks reunited with her ex-lover and Bella Donna producer Jimmy Iovine to put The Wild Heart together—a doe-eyed adolescent crooned her eerie debut through a thick brunette mop of bangs, instantly taking the British music scene by storm. No one knew what to make of Kate Bush, a soft-spoken young woman who blushed shyly through interviews and then walloped the airwaves with her hyper-stylized siren’s call, wailing to Heathcliff at the window in her first released single.
Perhaps it is not surprising that the difficult story of Wuthering Heights speaks so directly to songwriters: the saga of Cathy and Heathcliff is, of course, about the the potency of love and its potential to simultaneously drive and incapacitate those who plunge headlong into its deepest, darkest depths. It’s a story of self-destruction and despair—is there any romance that hasn’t been to some degree beleaguered by both? If music is supposed to express the core experiences and emotions of the human condition, “shouting ‘Cathy’ and banging your head against a tree,” as Helen Fielding would put it, is probably a good starting point for translating the inner turmoil of thwarted or unrequited devotion.
“It was perfect material for a song,” Bush shared in one of her earliest interviews. “It was so passionate and full of impact. And I read the book,” she is quick to add. “Yeah, I read the book before I wrote the song, because I needed to get the mood properly.”
The original inspiration for the song had come many years earlier, when Bush caught the last couple minutes of television miniseries adaptation of Brontë’s masterpiece. She couldn’t have been older than ten years old at the time, but the image of Cathy haunting the windows of Thrushcross Grange captivated Bush, swirling around her imagination for the next decade of her life until she released “Wuthering Heights” in that uncanny voice over the keys of a Grand piano.

Or The Irish Times:

A sense of being apart from the era has always been crucial to the appeal for Bush’s fans. Nobody much expected Wuthering Heights in the post-punk era. She’s never been part of any zeitgeist. (Donald Clarke)

The Upcoming reviews the Off-West End production Her Aching Heart:

This tongue-in-cheek, bodice-ripping musical is superbly fun. In a pastiche of the Mills and Boon genre it follows the lesbian love affair of an aristocrat and a simple country girl. It’s a gothic romance more comparable with Blackadder than Brontë. There is no subtly; at times the script feels like a succession of increasingly more elaborate innuendos. (Georgie Cowan-Turner)

The San Francisco Chronicle reviews the novel The Lesser Bohemians by Eimear McBride:

The damaged older man and the lonely, hurt, intelligent girl who loves and saves him has been a trope since at least “Jane Eyre.” Unlike McBride’s first book, in which familiar subject matter was interpreted anew through the stuttering, circular form of the language, here McBride can’t quite escape the cliche. Her lyricism still scatters light across the page, and her fragmented style hammers you with immediacy, but the story falls prey to nostalgia and wishful thinking. (Marthine Satris)

Read It Forward lists 25 authors on the best books they've ever received:

Olivia Sudjic: Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
I began with a beautiful blue Virago edition of Jean Reese (sic)’s Wide Sargasso Sea, and was electrified. As Reese (sic)’s Antoinette and Jane Eyre’s Bertha began to fuse in my mind, connecting an old favorite novel with a new one, the initial electrical jolt turned into a mixture of rage, wonder, and self-reproach for having put the experience off for so long.

Bustle speculates on Westworld (warning, some spoilers ahead):

Charlotte's about the right age, would likely be invested in the park as a member of his family. Now, the Man in Black did tell Teddy that his daughter's name is Emily. He also told Teddy that the "Big Bad" Wyatt had kidnapped Dolores, which just isn't true. He's manipulating Teddy and only letting the host know exactly what he wants him to. If he knew that Charlotte was on the premises and could interrupt his mission at any time, it's possible that he could have lied about her name to keep people in the park from knowing their relationship. Maybe the Man in Black is a Brontë sister fan. (Leah Thomas)

Bleeding Cool and Den of Geek! discuss the origins of fandom:

Fandom has been around for a lot longer than people realize, even in that way that goes beyond mild interest and towards those deeper fascinations that tend to spawn related activities. Charlotte and Emily Brontë wrote stories as children in the 1830s that we’d think of as fan fiction today. (Mark Seifert)

Fanfiction has always been a thing. From The Great Game to Wide Sargasso Sea to Spockanalia, fans have long been inspired to become creators in the fictional worlds they love. Fandom as we now know it, however, is a more modern development. (Kaytl Burt)

A curious initiative in Donostia (Spain). El Kolmado has a way of vindicating a reduced VAT for culture products like other basic products: Jane Eyre as a peas and carrots jar (via EFE).

Letralia (in Spanish) lists several Paris literary associations:

Jean Rhys vagaba por París en los años treinta. En Ancho mar de los Sargazos nos contó quien era la mujer metida en el desván por su marido en Jane Eyre. Por qué esa mujer que representaba la vibración y la sensualidad del Caribe acabó loca en un desván de Londres a causa de la frialdad de su marido. Y ella misma unía la vibración del Caribe con esa vibración interminable de París a través de los siglos. (Antonio Costa Gómez) (Translation)

Vijesti (Montenegro) discusses the films of William Wyler:

Kao što je i ponudio hrabru l'amour fou interpretaciju u Wuthering Heights (Orkanski visovi, 1939), gdje impresivno korištenje pejzaža ima metonimijski potencijal, naročito kada se Heathcliff (Laurence Olivier) povezuje sa prirodom. (Aleksandar Bečanović) (Translation)

Babbling Books and Delicious Reads reviews Wuthering Heights. Vull Escriure (in Catalan) selects Jane Eyre for its call for writing. Broadside Blog posts about Charlotte Brontë's dress as shown at the Morgan Library in New York.