It Can't Be Proved is Ok

The Sunday Times reviews the upcoming book by Lyndall Gordon, Outsiders: Five Women Writers Who Changed the World:

The heroines of Outsiders are Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Olive Schreiner and Virginia Woolf. What links them is their outsider status. “In a period when a woman’s reputation was her treasured security, each of these five lost it. Each endured the darkness of social exclusion,” says Gordon. (...)
Gordon describes how Jan Smuts, an admirer, likened Schreiner to Emily Brontë. “Both were clergy daughters, both loners, both interfused with their terrain.” Much of the chapter on Schreiner is devoted to her activism, contributing to the feeling that she belongs in a slightly different category from the other four women. (...)
Mostly, though, Gordon is a scrupulously restrained biographer — sometimes almost too cautious. In the chapter on Emily Brontë, she says: “It can’t be proved, but I think she was marked ever after, as Charlotte was, by what happened at Cowan Bridge.” The Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge was the puritanical, physically abusive institution that reduced Emily’s elder sisters Maria and Elizabeth to terminal ill health in just eight months. Emily was seven when her sisters died; years later, she wrote “the heart is dead since infancy”. Having marshalled these damning facts, Gordon’s “it can’t be proved” feels like admirable but unnecessary compunction. (...)
Explaining the reputation for awkwardness that Brontë acquired during her stay in Brussels, Gordon writes: “Her refusal to conform suggests that…she resolved…not to contort herself to fit the artifice of femininity.” What is really awkward in this otherwise absorbing study is seeing Brontë et al forced into the ill-fitting clothes of our contemporary concerns, the living writers lost in the oversized argument. (Claire Lowdon)

We rather think that to say 'it can't be proved' when it can't be proved is quite honest.

Unfortunately it seems that Emily Brontë's claim to fame, Wuthering Heights, was not at all written by her, not even by any Brontë. The Hans India clarifies who the real author of the novel actually is:

Jane Austen wrote some of the finest literary pieces. ‘Emma’, ‘Wuthering Heights’, and ‘Pride and Prejudice’, are amongst her recommendable works.

A reader of The Christian Science Monitor writes

I was enchanted by Robert Klose’s Sept. 4 Home Forum essay, “How I became a reader of books." It brought back memories of my more than threescore years of reading, even as a small child. Having experienced the pleasure of book ownership at a much younger age than Mr. Klose, my introduction to reading was on a far less sophisticated plane than “The Cask of Amontillado.” My first love was Robert Louis Stevenson’s “A Child’s Garden of Verses,” followed by the Beatrix Potter animal stories, Nancy Drew mysteries, and eventually the English classics of Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, and the Brontë sisters. (Anne Carr Bingham)

Stuff (New Zealand) has a Brontë (hater style) mention in an article about 'old school' houses:

Another bundle, dated 1949, revealed a big old clean-up. I yelped. There'd been a fire in this house!
It was all a bit Charlotte Brontë for my liking. (I never liked the Brontës. Give me a Pump Room in Bath any day, tinkling with snarky gossip as the ladies promenade. I never understood the romance of Jane Eyre's madwoman in the attic, or the masochism between Cathy and Heathcliff, who should have just booked a nice room with a view of the moors and saved us all a novel. Cathy winds up a screaming ghost, doesn't she, tapping on the window? And after a hundred years of Emily Brontë's sublimated sexuality we get Kate Bush, of all people, wailing in a nightdress about it all.) (Leah McFall)

The Advertiser on how kids played years ago:

A simple pointing of a finger and the shout of “bang” or “pow” was enough for a cowboy victory, while simply miming the releasing of an arrow and yelling “whoosh” was good enough for an indian to claim a scalp from an arrow.
It was like hide and seek and World Series Wrestling if the boys arranged the game, and Wuthering Heights and a tea party if the girls were in charge.
There was plenty of scope for overacting and dramatic death scenes, with arms flying and writhing. (Bob Perry)

El País (in Spanish) mentions the next project of the illustrator and writer Isabel Greenberg:

La dibujante fue una buena lectora infantil, reforzada por las narraciones que ella y su hermana escuchaban de su madre. Las relaciones fraternales inspiran varias de los cuentos de Hero. Sobre ellas Greenberg vuelve con frecuencia. Su próximo proyecto es una inmersión en una extraordinaria fraternidad, que dio a la literatura un racimo de clásicos: las hermanas Brönte (sic).
Una semana antes de visitar Madrid, había visitado la rectoría donde vivieron las autoras de Cumbres borrascosas (Emily), Jane Eyre (Charlotte) o Agnes Grey(Anne). Escribirá sobre el imaginario de su infancia. Y después de las Brönte (sic) , Isabel Greenberg retornará a la Tierra Temprana, el mundo fantástico entre medieval, futurista y legendario, que se inventó con 25 años con los mimbres de un clásico de la novela gráfica. (Tereixa Constenla) (Translation)

Página 12 (in Spanish) reviews the film The Beguiled  by Sofia Coppola:

The Beguiled es gótico sureño, el subgénero de la literatura norteamericana con más gusto por lo monstruoso, lo mórbido y lo melancólico. Un género en el que, además, sobresalen las mujeres –el gótico, sin especificaciones geográficas, es casi exclusivamente de dominio femenino–. Las mujeres y sus casas: Merricat, la aniñada bruja doméstica, quizá una asesina, encerrada en Siempre hemos vivido en el castillo de Shirley Jackson; Bertha Mason, esposa loca, mordedora e incendiaria de Jane Eyre y todas las locas encerradas en el ático que Sandra Gilbert y Susan Gubar definieron y rastrearon al tiempo que pedían salir del estereotipo en The Madwoman in the Attic, el clásico de la crítica literaria que analiza la literatura victoriana desde un punto de vista feminista. (Mariana Enriquez) (Translation)

Steven Rubio's Online Life reviews I Walked with a Zombie 1944;  StreamLine reviews Wuthering Heights 1939; Taking Up Room celebrates Joan Fontaine's anniversary with an article about Jane Eyre 1944; Victorian Musings reviews The Last Brontë: The Intimate Memoir of Arthur Bell Nicholls by S.R. Whitehead. The Brontë Society of Japan shares some pictures of their recent annual conference.