Avoid Heathcliff

Keighley News tells about one of the Branwell Brontë exhibition displays:

Oakbank School students worked with leading poet Simon Armitage on a special Brontë exhibition.
The students from the Keighley school were invited to help create a display to mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Branwell Brontë.
Their efforts went on show last week at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, where the exhibition will run throughout 2017.
Simon is the 2017 creative partner of the Brontë Society, which runs the museum, and he will has curated this year’s flagship exhibition Mansions In The Sky, which explores the mind and work of Branwell.
The Oakbank students were selected to become part of an audio recording of one of Branwell’s poems and they spent the morning reciting and recording with Simon Armitage and his producer.
The recording can be heard by museum visitors in a life-size replica of Branwell’s studio. (David Knights)

On the Brontë Parsonage Blog we can read Simon Armitage's statement on the leaflet produced for the event.

Keighley News also reminds us of the return of the Brontë Treasures experience at the Parsonage:

Brontë Treasures are to go on display once a month in Haworth at the place where the famous family lived.
The Brontë Parsonage Museum is running Brontë Treasures events on the last Friday of every month at 2pm.
Visitors will get a special chance to see items from the world’s largest collection of Brontë artefacts, manuscript and personal belongings.
People will be allowed beyond the security cord into the Parsonage Library for a close-up viewing of items not normally on display.
A museum spokesman said: “During these hour-long sessions, a member of the curatorial team will share facts and stories about a number of carefully-selected objects, offering a specialist insight into the lives of work of this inspirational family."
The cost of each event is £85, and places are limited to 12 people. Visit bronte.org.uk/whats-on or call 01535 640192 for further information and to book tickets. (David Knights)

Incidentally, in The Telegraph & Argus you can see the first visitors to the new Brontë Parsonage season:

 First through the doors were a Mr and Mrs Hemingway, who had travelled from Manchester after seeing Brontë movie To Walk Invisible over Christmas.
The couple wanted to see the real rooms where the Brontë sisters had lived and wrote their novels, after seeing the painstakingly-recreated replicas in the BBC film.
The Hemingways received a signed copy of the book At Home With the Brontës, written by the museum’s principal curator Ann Dinsdale. (David Knights)

Tidningen Kulturen (in Swedish) has an article praising Charlotte Brontë and particularly Villette and The Professor:

 Under några månader har jag vistats i Charlotte Brontës universum. Det räckte med några sidor, ja egentligen med bara inledningsmeningen i Villette för att jag skulle fastna: ”Min gudmor bodde i ett elegant hus i den prydliga och ålderdomliga staden Bretton.” Den starka, sugande rytmen. Därefter ville jag inte sluta lyssna till denna annorlunda och betvingande röst, som likt en musa började sjunga i mina sena kvällar vid sänglampan. Hela min tonårstid var Emily Brontë min favorit bland Brontësystrarna och det är först nu jag insett hur många modulationer och vilken känslomässig spännvidd som finns i Charlotte Brontës romaner. (Read more) (Marie Tonkin) (Translation)

The Telegraph has a TV alert for this afternoon:

Great Canal Journeys (Channel Four, 8.00pm)
Timothy West and Prunella Scales embark on a journey into their pasts via the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, which celebrates its 200th anniversary this year. Along the way, they visit the country's last surviving steam-powered textile mill, meander through the `curlies', and meet acclaimed poet Simon Armitage. They also take a trip by steam train to the home of the Brontë sisters in Haworth, and are confronted by the Salts Mill after tackling the steepest lock staircase in Britain. Repeat. (Simon Horsford)

Slate talks about Dartmoor National Park:

When you think of the English moors, you probably think of vast expanses of grass, wind, and rain, the land of Brontë sisters characters and perpetual fog. But in this video from Max Smith, "The Wet Desert," an old southwestern England landscape comes into focus—when, before humans arrived, it was a temperate rainforest with coniferous or broadleaf foilage and heavy rainfall. (Madeline Raynor)

Caitlin Moran is visiting Japan and she writes about it in The Times:

You see, once a child passes the age of 12, they want only two things from a holiday – either fast cities, such as New York or Tokyo, or banana boats, from which they can instagram themselves achieving “Holiday goals”. That’s it. Forget your caravans, villas with pools or minibreaks to see the disused limestone quarries of Brecon. You’re wasting your time, money and constant, earnest exhortations to enjoy the ruins/sandcastles/Brontë exhibition.

The Guardian reviews Kathryn Hughes's Victorians Undone:

What of the dark skin of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, a lingering trace of their Jamaican ancestry; or the surprise that Charlotte Brontë (right) spoke with a sharp Northern Irish accent, rather than a broad Yorkshire one; or the missing left forefinger of William Gladstone, lost in a shooting accident as a young man? (Robert Douglas-Fairhurst)

Emma Cox quotes in TES one of her students reviewing Emily Barr's The One Memory of Flora Banks:

Conventionally, the story starts with a heroine, (or hero, but the girls go first in my book). The problem I found with Flora Banks is that her confusion is confusing. She doesn’t really know who she is. Neither do we. If a heroine is not self-assured then how is she inspiring? That’s like Jane Eyre without her parting speech (“equal — as we are!”) or Elizabeth Bennet saying “Maybe” when Darcy proposes. (Eleanor Clark) 

East Anglia Daily Times reviews the Bury Theatre adaptation of Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey in Suffolk:

Karen [Simpson] says that the secret of the success of female writers like Austen, the Brontë sisters and George Elliot, probably lay in the fact that they were writers who lived outside London and because of their good education could write authoritatively about people and things that they were interested in.
“They write about different types of women in different situations but the one thing that binds them together is that they write about women in a way that is not defined by men. This is a woman’s view of the world and that’s very unusual, particularly for that time.” (Andrew Clarke)

The New York Times interviews writer JP Delaney, aka Tony Strong:

Delaney is actually the British adman Tony Strong, he told me via email. “There are some big advantages to using a pseudonym,” he wrote. “The first is that people can’t tell from the initials if I’m a man or a woman — and I’ve been really gratified that many readers have assumed from the way I’ve written from two female perspectives that I’m actually a woman. (In that respect pen names have come full circle from the days when Emily Brontë had to publish under the name Mr. Ellis Bell.) The second is that you know people are responding to something in the story, not to a name. . . . To write under a completely new name is to free yourself from expectations.” (Gregory Cowles)

Grazia Daily lists romantic heroes in order of 'dating potential':

Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights
Likes: Wiley windy moors, drinking, gambling, cursing
Dislikes: Coventional morality, his family, you
Perfect date: Sitting in a dark room glaring at you, like any well-adjusted human being
Our verdict: 1/5. Avoid at all costs

Mr Rochester in Jane Eyre
Likes: Plain Janes, being serious, telling other people what to do
Dislikes: Bonfire night, Heathcliff (he’s his rival), women who won’t stay in line, illegitimate children
Perfect date: Locking you in the attic. Just kidding. Reading aloud together – but under no circumstances near an open fire (Rebecca Cope, Emma Firth and Katie Rosseinsky)

AbeBooks Reading Blog interviews the bookseller Inga Eubanks:

AbeBooks (Richard Davies): What’s your most memorable moment as a professional bookseller/framer?
Inga Eubanks: “There have been several but the only one I can think of right now is selling an 1898 copy of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre to the assistant of a TV movie director, who was in the process of filming Jane Eyre and who was going to be given this somewhat rare copy as a Christmas present. Ordering it two days before Christmas and needing express delivery in order to get it delivered to New York in time made it rather challenging at my end since there is no FedEx office here and the US Post Office was closed on the day the order came in but I managed. The assistant promised to let me know when the movie would be on TV but I never heard from him again.”

Movie Pilot has a list of Korean drama films (or TV series) for Valentine's Day:

'Secret' (2013) (...) Working as a reverse Wuthering Heights, this drama shows what happens when love starts from revenge. (Roxana Ortiz)

The Holsworthy Post reviews a local panto, Goldilocks and the Three Bears:

Ahead of them Madame Zarina has arrived at the manor and awoken the ancestors by spookily singing a new version of ‘Wuthering Heights’! This is a truly magnificent scene as the portraits come alive like something out of Harry Potter.

Cultora (Italy) reports several of the many (British) literary anniversaries to be celebrated in 2017:

John Milton. Il suo celebre “Paradiso perduto” veniva pubblicato 350 anni fa, ispiratore di scrittori e registi dalle sorelle Brontë a George Lucas, e il Miltons’ Cottage, situato nel piccolo borgo di Chalfont St. Giles, a sud-est del Buckinghamshire, può rappresentare uno dei luoghi più suggestivi in cui approfondire la figura del poeta. (Translation)

Página 12 (Argentina) talks about the upcoming Feria Internacional del Libro de Buenos Aires:

Se presentará Sebastián García Mouret, el booktuber con más seguidores en España. “Los booktubers contarán cómo se vinculan sus lecturas con las lecturas de los clásicos; es muy común que los chicos vayan encontrando referencias a los clásicos en los géneros que prefieren. Supongamos que los que leen novelas románticas terminan enterándose de que está Cumbres borrascosas y los que les gustan la literatura fantástica de pronto descubren que existe La metamorfosis y la buscan. Los caminos lectores en los adolescentes me parecen un tema interesante para debatir”, plantea Oche Califa, el director de la Feria, a Página 12. (Silvina Friera) (Translation)

La Nouvelle République talks about the singer and songwriter Brisa Roché:

Mais dans le clip Each of us, sorte de Hauts de Hurlevent sur les falaises, on croirait voir Björk, qu'on prendrait pour sa grande sœur. Grande sœur qu'on verrait encore davantage en Kate Bush, comme toutes les filles ayant créé leur univers visuel, musical et textuel. (A.V.) (Translation)

Il Libraio (Italy) reviews Luca Bianchini, author of Nessuno Come Noi:

Emily Brontë, Cime tempestose – Di questo libro ricordo che ero obbligato a leggerlo per la scuola, e per finirlo mentii ai miei amici e non uscii una sera d’estate a 17 anni. Una delle storie più belle e romantiche che abbia mai letto… (Translation)

Diario de Córdoba reports a recent local talk on Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre; Book Share India posts about the novel; Riverdale's HamletHub, Fantastika berättelser (in Swedish) and Disha Trivedi publish reviews of Wuthering Heights. Ginger Nifty reviews the webseries The Autobiography of Jane Eyre and Bahnreads talks about Jane Eyre 1996 and Jane Eyre 2011. The Jacke Wilson Blog posts a conversation with Margot Livesey

about her readerly passions and writerly inspirations, including Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, and James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room.

Finally, a poem on Branwell Brontë by Lorna Faye with music by Alessandro Moretti.