A woman of astute psychological insight and gutsy resilience

The Telegraph and Argus has further info on the suggested closure of Haworth's Visitor Information Center.

Campaigners have vowed to fight any attempt to close Haworth Visitor Information Centre (VIC).
The battle-cry was issued this week as Bradford Council launched a public consultation over the future of its tourism service.
A review commissioned by the local authority is recommending that Bradford VIC should be retained, at the expense of the district's three others – Haworth, Ilkley and Saltaire.
Among those vehemently against the move is Haworth trader, Nikki Carroll.
"It makes absolutely no sense to close the Visitor Information Centre," she said.
"It's a ludicrous proposal. I will do all I can to oppose it and would urge other people to make their views known too.
"The council was very eager in its support of the Tour de France when that came through the district and was keen to build on the legacy, plus we've seen a surge in tourists since the BBC screened the To Walk Invisible Brontë drama at Christmas.
"Bradford Council should be doing more to promote tourism and bringing people into smaller villages, rather than focussing on the city centre."
And ward councillor Rebecca Poulsen said the proposal was "nonsensical".
"The Haworth building is leased rather than owned by the council which I suspect is a factor behind this," she added.
"Haworth is where the tourists go and that's where a VIC is needed.
"It's beyond belief that the council would contemplate closing it."
According to the review, carried out by TEAM Tourism Consulting, Haworth VIC is the most expensive of all four to run – at over £101,000 a year.
Its estimated income is £19,000, second only to Ilkley – much of whose revenue is from ticket sales for the King's Hall.
The review team concedes Haworth is "the key VIC".
"It deals with the most visitor enquiries and probably adds the most value to the destination," it states.
But the recommended option is that all should be shut except Bradford VIC, which would be refocussed as a "welcome and interpretation centre".
The move would save about £244,000.
Council chiefs say they need to slash the tourism budget by £172,000 by 2017-18 and are keen to hear public opinions on the proposals. [...]
The consultation runs until March 5. (Alistair Shand)

It is clear to us, though apparently not so to Team Tourism [sic] and Bradford Council, that many people (most people, even) visiting Haworth never even set foot in Bradford city. Visitors to Haworth want to go Thornton, Scarborough, Shirley country (now without the Red House, of course), York, but, unless they go looking for Branwell's brief dwelling place in the city, they have no particular interest in visiting Bradford. So it is in Haworth where they want to inquire how to move around - it is the 'key VIC' for a reason. Close it and they will get incomplete info from the landlord at the pub, the girl at the reception desk, the man behind the counter at the shop, etc. But still they won't go to Bradford to be 'welcome and interpreted' (whatever that means).

Onto better things now. Samantha Ellis's biography of Anne Brontë continues making its way in the national press. The Spectator wonders whether '‘the other Brontë’ [was] the best of them all'.

Fans of the novels and poems written by the sibling inhabitants of Haworth Parsonage always have a Top Brontë. Fame-seeking Charlotte and mysteriously reclusive Emily usually grab the limelight. My father reread Emily’s only novel every five years, annotating his student copy of Wuthering Heights and monitoring his opinions depending on how his own love life was going. He shared his choice with the playwright and journalist Samantha Ellis, until the day she read Anne’s final letter, and was taken aback as its sudden significance ‘catches at my heart’, making her wonder about the less wowed, less known, youngest sister.
This wonderful biography begins at a disadvantage. All but five of Anne’s letters are missing. The surviving biographical facts can fit a single page. But Ellis’s first solution is to tell Anne’s story through the characters at the centre of her life. Chapters are devoted in turn to the children’s heroic mother, Maria; their selfless aunt; their bereft Reverend father; the controlling Charlotte; the uncompromisingly independent Emily; and their brother Branwell, who Charlotte says ‘thought of nothing but stunning (drugs) and drowning (drink) his distress of mind’, jointly provide a prism through which Ellis’s elusive protagonist emerges. [...]
By the time Anne arrives to die in Scarborough her hazy image has been sharp-focused, revealing a woman of astute psychological insight and gutsy resilience. If the experience of reading Anne’s poems feels for Ellis ‘like being let in on secrets’, that feeling is mirrored for the reader of Ellis’s illuminating book. (Juliet Nicolson)

Samantha Ellis herself writes about the Brontës' 'very real and raw Irish roots' in The Irish Times.

One of the oddest reactions to Sally Wainwright’s recent (brilliant) TV drama about the Brontës, To Walk Invisible, was an objection to the Yorkshire accents. Some fans had imagined the literary sisters speaking RP. I wonder what they’d have said if Wainwright had focused more on the Brontës’ childhood, when Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne still had Irish accents, inherited from their father. They lost them when they went to school. Yet they never lost a sense of being outsiders, of never quite fitting in. (Read more)

The Stanford Daily has a Brontë blunder:

 Among many famous female writers who wrote under male pseudonyms, Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë adopted the names of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell when publishing their works, with Emily Brontë commenting that, “we did not like to declare ourselves women, because — without at that time suspecting that our mode of writing and thinking was not what is called ‘feminine’ — we had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice.” (Jasmine Liu)

That link there in the original article would indeed show that it wasn't Emily, but Charlotte who said that.

This columnist from She the People picks Jane Eyre as her favourite 'Feminist Read Of All Time'.

I remember the time when I picked up ‘Jane Eyre’ during my school days. A friend had gifted me the book on my birthday.
The book is an easy read which will keep you hooked throughout. It is often described as a romance novel or a gothic novel. But for me, that novel is one of the earliest feminist reads I remember.  The protagonist, Jane Eyre, unlike girls her age never had marriage on her mind. Instead, she looked to claim her identity in a male-dominated society. She never saw herself any lesser than others around her in terms of her soul and character. She demands that she be looked at as a human being with ‘as much soul as you–and full as much heart’.
Though not in a modern sense of feminism, Jane Eyre for me stood as a feminist novel for many reasons. Jane Eyre led me to read other feminist books like Color Purple, Palace of Illusions, The Handmaid’s tale, Room of One’s Own and others, but Jane Eyre will always hold a dear place in my bookshelf. (Vidhya Bharathi)

Coincidentally, Jane Eyre is also selected by inUth as one of '8 wonderful books you should instantly read to understand feminism'. However, it might be another Jane Eyre as the ending is slightly different to the one we are familiar with.

Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
Although every male character who comes into contact with the protagonist of Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 novel tries to dominate her, Jane never fully succumbs to them. In a move virtually unheard of in that era, she continues to work after getting married, wanting to be financially independent from Rochester. (Aakash Chhabra)

Jane Eyre herself has also made it onto the 20 favourite fictional characters of all time according to Raconteur.

Florida Weekly reviews The Magdalen Girls by V.S. Alexander, who is a Brontëite.

Mr. Alexander is an ardent student of history with a strong interest in music and the visual arts. Some of his writing influences include Shirley Jackson, Oscar Wilde, Daphne du Maurier and any work by the exquisite Brontë sisters. (Phil Jason)

Mashable has a podcast on which

 inspired by The Goldfinch we talk about our favorite non-YA coming of age stories including Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, The Magicians by Lev Grossman and The First Bad Man by Miranda July. (MJ Franklin)

Human Events shares some 'Tips For Hate Crime Hoaxers', the first of which is

Hate Crime Hoaxer Tip No. 1: Don’t invent hate crimes that could form the opening of a Harlequin Romance.
Liberal girls always seem to be imagining strong, rough, Heathcliff-type white men demanding that they disrobe or become “sex slaves.” (Oddly, Heathcliff keeps doing this in well-trafficked areas in the middle of the day with no witnesses.) (Ann Coulter)

The Davidson County Dispatch sees the Brontë Parsonage Museum as a good example of what a writer's museum should be.