Exclusionary, Cruel, and White Solitary Eccentrics

A Secret Sisterhood: The hidden friendships of Austen, Brontë, Eliot and Woolf is presented in The Irish Times by their authors Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney:

The most famous female authors, on the other hand, are remembered as solitary eccentrics. The Jane Austen of popular imagination is a timid spinster, devoted above all else to kith and kin. Charlotte Brontë knows little of the world beyond the moorland parsonage where she languishes with only the company of her sisters. (...)
Charlotte Brontë also had someone outside her close-knit family to whom she could turn for literary support. Mary Taylor, the future author of the early feminist novel Miss Miles, met Brontë in 1831, when they were both adolescent boarding school students. An outspoken and unconventional personality, Taylor challenged the then socially conservative views of her classmate, particularly concerning the position of women in society. Later, when they’d both reached their twenties, Taylor convinced Brontë to accompany her to Brussels. Here, the pair would further their education, but Brontë ’s stay ended in heartbreak after she fell in love with a married man. Taylor’s influence on Brontë can be felt not just in the books directly influenced by her Brussels years, but also in her most outwardly political novel Shirley, in which Taylor inspired the character of the forward-thinking Rose Yorke.

The Providence Journal reviews A Girl Walks into a Book: What the Brontës Taught Me About Life, Love and Women’s Work by Miranda K. Pennington

Pennington excels at interpreting Charlotte’s ambition, and she is an astute literary critic. She freely admits her preference for “Jane Eyre” over “Wuthering Heights,” so her take on Emily Brontë’s masterpiece might not sit well with fans of Heathcliff and Catherine. But her accounts of all the books, particularly the under-appreciated novels of Anne Brontë, are full of insight.
Less interesting are her attempts to tie her own life and romantic disappointments to the travails of Jane Eyre, Agnes Grey and Catherine Earnshaw. (Betty J. Cotter)

The Independent falls for the dark side of questionable listings and presents 'five literary classics that will only make sense in your twenties':

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
Forbidden love doesn't exist in the age of Tinder
The tale of Heathcliff and Cathy will forever hold a place in any literary buff’s hearts. But in 2017, the whole “but we’re from different worlds” concept doesn’t fly, mostly because since dating moved online, romance is governed by omnipotent Tinderellas and Bumblers, who employ algorithms to ensure that we’re all operating within the same digital world, or your money back. The lovers in Brontë’s novel were kept apart by torturous social constraints and agonising bigotry whereas today all they’d have to do it both swipe right. All’s fair in love and apps. (Olivia Petter)

This article on the 2017 Summer issue of Invisibility is quite controversial:

The title character of Jane Eyre, and by extension the entire novel, was racist.
Many discussions of race in Jane Eyre tend to center on Bertha Mason, Rochester’s insane first wife, and with good reason. Bertha’s ethnicity as a Creole is directly connected to her insanity and the dissipated evil she allegedly possessed before going insane. (...)
White feminists who champion Jane Eyre as a bastion of female self-actualization don’t talk about its racism or colonialism enough. You cannot satisfactorily and honestly champion the story or its author without drawing attention to the ways in which its feminism is exclusionary, cruel, and white. (...)
White feminist readings of the novel have triumphed over a century and a half of literary criticism because Jane Eyre is about gender; Charlotte Brontë, a white woman living in Yorkshire through one of the largest and most brutal expansions of empire in human history, explicitly wrote it to be so. But it can never be just about gender. Readers drawn to Jane Eyre read with the understanding that it has a place in the Anglophone canon, malecentric as that canon has been. (Li Sian Goh)

The Times interviews some book tubers. Including Lucy Powrie, aka Lucythereader:

What she’s reading now:
Shirley by Charlotte Brontë
“It’s one of the underrated Brontë novels, but for no fault of its own. It’s quickly becoming a favourite read.”

Remezcla presents the works of the artist Krystal Quiles. Including:

 Her newfound love of GIFs has led her to create a spectacular J. Lo and Ja Rule graphic from the “I’m Real” music video, as well as a very on-point GIF of Katie Bush – inspired by the “Wuthering Heights” music video – swaying back and forth. (Yara Simón)

(Source)

The Guardian visits northern England from coast to coast:

It’s worth getting up early in Scarborough: this is the east coast and dawn can be spectacular. The town spreads around two broad bays with a promontory in between, topped by the castle – Brontë fans will want to go up there via St Mary’s churchyard, where Anne is buried. South Bay is the earlier settlement: the harbour is a joy to explore and early birds who have an appetite should not miss the Harbour View Café, aka “the tea shack”, which serves superb fish and chipsfrom 6am till lunchtime, largely for the homecoming fishermen. (Kevin Rushby)

The actress Mandy McElhinney is getting married. In The Age, she explains why:

I went to an all-girls boarding school, Stella Maris Presentation College in Geraldton, and didn't really notice boys. But later I attended a co-ed high school in Perth, St Joachim's. I would take long bus and train journeys to get home and that's when I started noticing boys. I spent a lot of time reading romantic novels like Wuthering Heights and had a warped vision of romance. (Jane Roca)

Financial Times mentions that the film director Frances Lee lives near Haworth:

The 48-year-old film director is in his cottage near Haworth, the village that was home to the Brontës. (Tom Seymour)

SparkLife has a curious experiment:

Fall Out Boy is notorious for their song titles that go on forever. Most 19th-century novelists did the same thing with chapter titles. But that's not the only thing these two have in common. Specifically, pretty much every quote from Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights sounds like a line straight out of "My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark." Can you tell them apart?

Multiple Esclerosis News recommends some books:

Books help improve memory and empathy, improve focus and increase critical thinking skills. That’s why “War and Peace,” “Love in the Time of Cholera,” and “Swann’s Way” are all on my “to read” list, and books including “Jane Eyre,” “Heart of Darkness” and “Dubliners” are among my all-time favorites. (Jamie Hughes)

Le Devoir reviews the recent French translation of Brontë letters Lettres choisies de la famille Brontë 1821-1855:

Le génie a parfois dans ses coulisses des pensées bien sombres, un « silence fatal » aussi que vient aujourd’hui faire entendre, avec éloquence, l’imposante correspondance que les soeurs Brontë ont animée entre elles, leur famille et leurs amis au milieu du XIXe siècle. Près de 300 lettres, inédites en français, traduites et annotées par Constance Lacroix, qui racontent un Yorkshire d’antan, mais entre surtout dans l’intimité d’un incroyable phénomène littéraire qui y a émergé d’entre les murs du presbytère de Haworth sous la plume de trois romancières ayant traversé leur époque en coup de vent. (Fabien Deglise) (Translation)

Brecha (Uruguay) reviews Rodrigo Fresán's La Digresión Infinita:

el encuentro con Vladimir Nabokov, genio tutelar de la novela, con las hermanas Brontë y una historia de vampiros, con Bob Dylan, omnipresente en el imaginario de Fresán, con una fundación futurista dedicada a preservar los sueños. (Translation)

Not the first time we read this applied to PJ Harvey. In L'Echo (Belgium):

Et s'il y a un point commun à ses multiples facettes, c'est cette indéniable "englishness" magnifiée sur "White Chalk" (en 2007), interprété entièrement au piano par une sorte d'Emily Brontë du Dorset qui aurait choisi d'écrire au clavier. (Bernard Roisin) (Translation)

Ghigliottina (Italy) talks about the novel An Enchanted April by Elizabeth Von Arnim:

Intitolato Un incantevole aprile, ristampato e imbellettato recentemente da Bollati Boringhieri, è uno dei romanzi di madame Mary Annette Beauchamp, in arte Elizabeth Von Arnim. Donna di suprema intelligenza che si trovava a suo agio nel bel mondo (fu a lungo amante di H. G. Wells), la scrittrice fu una mancata sorella Brontë novecentesca, e regalò alle sue eroine vite avventurose e intrighi in perfetto stile de Staël. (Gloria Frezza) (Translation)

Reel Illustrated reviews Jane Eyre 1944.