Emily Brontë: foundation myth in our literary culture

The Guardian reviews Lyndall Gordon's book Outsiders: Five Women Writers Who Changed The World.

Gordon’s new book opens with Mary Shelley, takes in Emily Brontë, George Eliot and Schreiner, and ends with Virginia Woolf. There are separate sections on each writer, condensed biographical and critical sketches. The five are also linked explicitly through Gordon’s theme: they are all “outsiders” (it’s Woolf’s word from Three Guineas), or “outsider insurgents”, unconstrained by convention, writing against the grain of their time, prophetically imagining a different future, exploring “oddity in ways that speak to us about our unseen selves”. Gordon is a natural storyteller, and the lives stir us and fascinate us no matter how well we already know them. Some of them – Brontë’s and Woolf’s, certainly – have become foundation myths in our literary culture. Gordon has the storyteller’s feel for the details that make each episode vivid: Brontë sitting at lunch with the British chaplain in Brussels and not saying a word; Schreiner writing to her sister about her stillborn baby, “that beautiful, holy little life of mine”; Woolf putting on her mother’s taffeta dress to be photographed for Vogue. Gordon’s sympathetic imagination works so strongly that she almost slips inside the language of the writer and her era, ventriloquising it: Shelley’s “fine, gauzy hair, loose on her shoulders, spun as she moved her head”; Charlotte Brontë inscribes “a hidden nature graven in secret script”. [...]
The five writers are woven together in a narration across time, through their reading and sometimes as role models for one another. [...] Eliot marvelled at Brontë’s “power, splendour and wildness”, and Woolf thought Brontë was an English Electra. (Tessa Hadley)

Los Angeles Review of Books features another woman writer, Sofia Khvoshchinskaya.

In her informative introduction to Sofia Khvoshchinskaya’s City Folk and Country Folk, Hilde Hoogenboom writes, “In the 1860s […] Russia had its own trio of writing sisters. Like the Brontës, the Khvoshchinskaya sisters wrote under male pseudonyms, endured hardships, and lived in the provinces.” The analogy is fitting, but, as Hoogenboom notes, only to a point: “The Brontë sisters became well known not long after their deaths, [but t]he story of the Khvoshchinskaya sisters remains to be told.” While the sisters’ eventual obscurity is a “familiar situation for women writers,” they themselves contributed to this erasure from literature by publishing under pseudonyms and generally attempting to stay out of the spotlight. Writing was not considered a suitable profession for women, particularly not for those from the upper classes. (Yelena Furman)

Daily Collegian doesn't want any more sequels to classics:

Allow me to just come out and say what we’re all thinking here: no more sequels!
Part of the reason that we’re able to enjoy literary classics like Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre” or J.D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye” or Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” is for the exact reason that we don’t have an extra 700 page addition of Jane’s life as a mother, or Holden Caulfield getting a grip on his life, or Frankenstein’s monster making another murderous appearance. [...]
Sometimes, adding on to a story can be fun.
“Wide Sargasso Sea” was inspired by Jean Rhys’ reimagining of Bertha Rochester in “Jane Eyre.” Susanne Collins’ “The Hunger Games” trilogy was inspired by a mix of “Theseus and the Minotaur” myth and reality game shows.
It can be interesting to see another author’s take on a favorite story.
But the reason that some books are novels – not series – are because they simply don’t need more content.

The New York Times reviews the film God's Own Country:

Filmed with a naturalism that recalls Andrea Arnold’s 2012 dive into “Wuthering Heights,” “God’s Own Country” weaves a rough magic from Joshua James Richards’s biting cinematography and the story’s slow, unsteady arc from bitter to hopeful. (Jeannette Catsoulis)

The Brontë Society taking over Haworth's Visitor Information Centre has reached The Telegraph and its 'ode to the tourist information centre, a British institution trundling towards extinction'.

A similar story is emerging at Haworth, the Pennine village where the three Brontë sisters grew up and where the survival of the visitor centre depends on an agreement being reached between the council and the Brontë Parsonage Museum. (Mark Rowe)

Life with Books & Movies posts about Jane Eyre 1944.