Lyrics by Anne Brontë

The Yorkshire Post features the new book A Secret Sisterhood: The Hidden Friendships of Austen, Brontë, Eliot and Woolf by Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney.

Charlotte Brontë is perhaps the most famous of all of Yorkshire’s daughters. But how well do we really know her? The recent BBC drama, To Walk Invisible, presented her as a prim, rather joyless young woman, cooped up in her father’s Haworth parsonage with fellow author sisters, Anne and Emily, and their unstable brother Branwell.
Growing up in York – with a mother who loved the Brontës so much that she named me after one – I had been raised on just this kind of image of Charlotte: the eldest of a trio of isolated sisters, so dependent on each other artistically that they had little need to seek the friendship of other writers beyond the confines of their home.
My own journey to authorship led me into a close collaboration with fellow writer Emma Claire Sweeney. We were fortunate to meet back when we were each just beginning to put pen to paper, and have helped each other ever since. Our friendship led us to question stories of the Brontë sisters’ literary isolation. Researching the friendships between female authors for our new book, A Secret Sisterhood, we were intrigued to find that, for most of her life, Charlotte shared a close bond with fellow Yorkshire woman Mary Taylor, the late-life author of the protofeminist novel Miss Miles. The two met in 1831, as adolescent boarders at Roe Head School in Mirfield. The pair’s relationship got off to a rocky start when Mary, a strikingly pretty girl, bluntly told Charlotte she was ‘very ugly’. Charlotte was mortified. But in time they bonded over a shared love of literature and their fondness for a good political argument. [...]
After Charlotte’s death in 1855 at the age of just 38, a bereft Mary received a request by post from another of the novelist’s literary friends. Elizabeth Gaskell, the author of Cranford, had met Charlotte in the later years of her life. She was now writing the first biography of Charlotte, and was looking for contributions from those who had known her best. Mary sent Elizabeth pages of recollections, hoping that The Life of Charlotte Brontë would vent her anger at the social restrictions she felt had held Charlotte back. But Elizabeth, mindful of Victorian notions of propriety, instead portrayed Charlotte as a compliant woman who suffered her many hardships with acceptance. Many readers came to regard Charlotte as a saintly figure, never troubling themselves to question whether – as Mary put it – a woman of such talents should have been forced to live her life in a ‘walking nightmare of “poverty and self-suppression”’. Stung by the experience, Mary often refused to cooperate with the requests of future biographers. This reticence allowed a less fully-rounded image of Charlotte to emerge and the importance of Mary’s influence on Charlotte’s writing slipped away. Our research shows this is not unusual. Unlike the famous partnerships of Coleridge and Wordsworth, Byron and Shelley, or Fitzgerald and Hemingway, the important literary friendships of England’s most famous female authors tend to have been overlooked, distorted or even actively suppressed.

iDiva (India) lists several Indian TV shows with Western origins.

Meri Aashiqui Tumse Hi 2014 from Wuthering Heights
We kid you not! The basic plotline for this Ekta Kapoor production is indeed inspired by Emily Brontë's classic literary work, Wuthering Heights. We can assure you that amidst all the time jumps, they lost the plot. (Debiparna C)

Froggy's Delight (France) features Inüit's EP Always Kévin, which includes

l'éclatant "Anne" qui reprend les paroles d'Anne Brontë, on est touché directement au cœur par la puissance de ce groupe. (Jean-Louis Zuccolini) (Translation)

   

Nick Holland has written a post on The Death and Funeral of Anne Brontë on AnneBrontë.org.