A successful and productive Brontë Society AGM

Keighley News tells about the Brontë Society AGM, summing it up as 'successful and productive'.

Kitty Wright, executive director of the museum, said she was delighted to have the chance to spend time with members over the weekend.
She said: “I enjoyed hearing how pleased they were about the success currently being enjoyed by the museum and Brontë Society.
“It made me feel very proud to have members endorsing our work and being appreciative of how staff are making the most of the opportunities presented by the bicentennaries.”
The weekend was built around the Brontë Society’s annual general meeting, where John Thirlwell was elected as chairman for a third term.
Mr Stillwell this week described the meeting as “very successful and productive” – a far cry from previous years which had seen resignations and arguments over the future direction of the society.
A spokesman said members this year voted overwhelmingly in favour of updating the society’s articles of association, which mostly govern intricate administrative matters.
She said: “This will enable us to meet the challenge of running a successful museum in the 21st century. The articles were written more than 100 years ago.”
Trustees will now work on the articles line-by-line with solicitors and charity experts then present recommendations to members in the autumn for comment, followed by a vote at next year’s annual general meeting.
The weekend began on Friday with a talk by dress historian Eleanor Houghton about the blue and white delaine dress that Charlotte Brontë reputedly wore to a dinner at the home of William Makepeace Thackeray in June 1850.
The dress was recently displayed at the Morgan Library in New York.
Yorkshire-born poet and playwright Blake Morrison gave the annual Brontë Society lecture, entitled The Brontë Family and Other Attachments, exploring the complex family dynamic that resulted in some of the greatest novels in the English language.
Amongst his dramas was a reworking of Chekhov’s classic The Three Sisters as a play about the Brontës.
Responses To The Brontës was a Saturday concert featuring poet Andrew McMillan and singer-songwriter Nat Johnson.
The pair were commissioned by three literary festivals to celebrate the Brontë legacy through the production of new work inspired by the creative siblings.
Also during the weekend, Jane Eyre stage director Sally Cookson and playwright Judith Adams discussed the challenges of adapting a novel for the stage. (David Knights)

There's also a picture gallery showing different moments of the weekend.

Keighley News also reports an increase in visitors to the Parsonage, which is fantastic news.

A ‘bicentennial buzz’ is boosting visitor figures at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth.
The already-popular attraction is seeing up to a quarter more visitors as a result of the 200th anniversary celebrations for the Brontë siblings.
The news comes as the parsonage staff celebrate success gaining new customer service qualifications.
The museum is partway through its five-year Brontë200 campaign, which commemorates the 200th anniversaries of the births of Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne, and there father Patrick’s arrival in Haworth as minister.
Alongside a host of festivals, talks and performances was last Christmas’s well-received broadcast of the BBC Brontë biopic To Walk invisible.
Kitty Wright, executive director of the Brontë Parsonage Museum, said there had been a steady rise in visitor numbers over the last year and particularly since the beginning of the new season in February.
She said: ‘We are thrilled that the buzz created by Charlotte’s celebrations last year and our Branwell-focused programme this year, has encouraged so many people to come and visit the museum.
“Easter Saturday was our busiest day in over 10 years, and the Easter weekend as a whole saw a 24 per cent increase in admissions over 2016.
“We’ve also seen an increase in the number of local residents visiting us, something we are really pleased about.”
Many people are travelling considerable distances to the museum to contribute to artist Clare Twomey’s Wuthering Heights manuscript project.
People of all ages have been captivated by the invitation to recreate Emily Brontë’s lost manuscript, and have been queuing up to write their line.
Earlier this year, 16 members of the museum’s front of house team undertook a course entitled Welcome to Excellence: Exceeding Visitors’ Expectations.
The training was endorsed by Visit England and all those who completed it went on to attain a City and Guilds Level 2 Award in Principles of Customer Service in Hospitality, Leisure, Travel and Tourism.
Museum manager Chloe Simm said: “Providing excellent customer service is at the heart of all we do at the museum.
“We welcome around 80,000 visitors each year and all of our staff pride themselves on identifying their needs and going the extra mile to make every visit memorable.
“Comments left on TripAdvisor, via social media and in our visitors books reveal that the service provided by our dedicated team really does exceed expectations and we are very proud of how everyone continues to put all they have learned into practice.” (Richard Parker)

Business Reporter has an article on 'insider threats' called 'To Eyre is human'. The play on words comes from this paragraph:

When you look at most IT employee training, though, the human side of IT rarely gets covered. There’s tons of fault and failure content, procedural instruction and definitions, but little (if any) attention paid in lecture to user behaviour. No wonder, then, that so many organisations find themselves blindsided by insider threat events. Rather than pay attention to (and comprehend the importance of) the early warning signs of peculiar employee behaviour, companies in general (and IT departments in particular) tend to treat rogue users like the classic ‘madwoman in the attic’ literary trope. Think Jane Eyre’s out-of-nowhere villain Bertha Rochester. Everything was fine, until one day when everyone was completely surprised by User X’s sudden and wholly unexpected violation of company regulations. The merciless incident review highlighted a bunch of obvious clues that management and security should have noticed, but it seemed like one had wanted to get involved … (Keil Hubert)

This reviewer from Refinery29 didn't really enjoy the new film adaptation of My Cousin Rachel.

By the time Rachel (Rachel Weisz) arrives to her naive younger cousin Phillip’s (Sam Claflin) mansion on the English coast, the discontented young heir has already sulked enough to fill an Emily Brontë novel. (Elena Nicolaou)

Wuthering Heights is one of 10 books to have moved readers according to Libreriamo (Italy).