Charlotte's hair

Atlas Obscura discusses writers' hair.

Once it has been trimmed and saved, hair might take any of several paths to the stacks. Some acquisitions are deliberate. A scrapbook of tresses compiled by the poet and critic Leigh Hunt now belongs to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. The “Hair Book,” which features samples from Wordsworth and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, has become “one of the [library’s] most popular ‘show and tell’ items.”
Other paths are more roundabout. Oftentimes, a library will acquire an entire collection of papers or correspondence, only to find some spare hair squirreled away within it. When the New York Public Library received Charlotte Brontë’s traveling desk, a lock of her hair came along. (Cara Giaimo)

In The New York Review of Books, Elaine Showalter writes about Sylvia Plath, the current Sylvia Plath exhibition at the  Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C (One Life: Sylvia Plath) and centers specifically on a sample of the the poet's hair cut and preserved by her mother when she was 12.

Locks of hair, of course, are a traditional memento of distinction and fame. The Ransom Center of the Humanities at the University of Texas in Austin owns a popular collection of the tresses of famous writers, assembled by the nineteenth-century English poet Leigh Hunt. Milton, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, and Poe are there, along with Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Charlotte Brontë. But literary locks are usually meager strands. Plath’s thick glossy ponytail is unique, and, indeed, hair is a theme of both her literary legend and the exhibition, which emphasizes her visual imagination and her self-portraits in painting and photography.

Daily Gazette tells the story of children's writers Jane, Ann and dad Isaac Taylor:

Local historian Andrew Phillips asks: Name two sisters, daughters of a clergyman, who transformed literary England in the early 19th century. Is your answer Brontë? If so, read on. [...]
Earlier still, a young girl sat at her bedroom window, still there today in West Stockwell Street, where, she wrote, ‘I used to roam and revel ‘mid the stars, when in my attic with untold delight, I watched the changing splendours of the night.’
She was, of course, Jane Taylor, who, with her elder sister Ann, became, for a while, the best known children’s writers in Britain, celebrated by literary figures both here and in America. How come?
Theirs was a family of literary achievers.
Their father, Isaac Taylor, did copper engravings for book illustration, a task in which his five children joined him from eight in the morning till eight at night, stopping only for meals when books were read out aloud, so that the time could be used for learning. [...]
The Romantic Age was dawning: she caught the bug. So it was that the girls’ second volume in 1806 included a poem called ‘The Star’. You all know the first verse, now set to music with an old French tune. Largely unknown are the other 4 verses, but ‘Twinkle, twinkle little star’ is known the world over. [...]
There are obvious parallels between the Taylor and Brontë daughters.
Both were Romantics, anonymous authors with a clergyman father, amazed by their success. What Colchester has never realised is that they were nearly neighbours too.
The Rev Patrick Brontë, a remarkable man, was born Patrick Brunty, son of an Irish farm labourer. Yet he actually won a scholarship to St John’s College Cambridge. It was here he changed his name to Brontë to hide his humble origins. He studied for the church, going initially as a curate to Wethersfield near Braintree.
But in the summer of 1807, shortly before his full ordination, he moved to Colchester to visit St Peter’s, the civic church on North Hill, which was reserved from Cambridge for an Evangelical minister like Brontë.
Nothing came of this visit, Brontë fell in love with a farmer’s daughter, and his life moved on.
We shall never know if, in his brief stay, he crossed the path of the famous Taylor authors. What we do know however is that two streets away in George Street was another bedroom window facing west, where a young Grammar School pupil also studied the stars, scratching his name with a diamond on the window pane.

In The New York Times, author Jeffrey Eugenides reviews the book Mrs Osmond by John Banville, a sequel to Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady and

As with Jean Rhys’s Brontë prequel, “Wide Sargasso Sea,” this shift of perspective lets the reader view the original story anew. 

While The Guardian reviews Jackie Kay's new poetry collection, Bantam:

There are so many delightful poems here. I loved Perfume, about trying in vain to make scent out of rose petals (I recognise the futile enterprise from childhood), and who could resist a poem with the title Would Jane Eyre Come to the Information Desk? (Kate Kellaway)

The poem was first published in 2015. It can be read in its entirety here.

Times of San Diego reviews the play The Moors:

You can practically hear Heathcliff and Cathy calling to each other across the desolate, windswept landscape.
What with the ominous music, the funereal wood and wine-colored furnishings, and the fog wafting in, you get the creepy feeling that things will not end well. And of course, they don’t.
“The Moors,” by Jen Silverman, is a macabre satire, conjuring (and Americanizing) those Victorian literary oddballs, the Brontës: Charlotte, who wrote “Jane Eyre;” Emily, who created Heathcliff and Cathy in “Wuthering Heights;” and their dissolute brother, Branwell, who lived together in a gloomy, isolated mansion in the midst of the Yorkshire Moors. [...]
The eccentric family has always been ripe for exploitation and exaggeration, and New York-based playwright Silverman has stepped into the fray with subversive, diabolical glee.
She introduces us to the spinster sisters’ bizarre existence, with austere, severe Agatha in charge of everything and everybody, particularly her unhappy, unacknowledged sister, Huldey, her (unseen) profligate brother, Branwell and the maid, whose name and hat change depending on whether she’s perceived to be in the kitchen or the parlor. It’s either Marjory or Mallory; one’s pregnant and the other has typhus.
Somewhat peripheral to the main events, but no less entertaining, are a philosophical Mastiff, mired in existential dread, and an air-brained but independent-minded Moor-Hen. And, as is common in these Gothic tales, a governess, Emilie, is added to the mix. Mayhem, murder and lesbian love ensue.
The perfect shepherd for this black-sheep of a sendup is Lisa Berger, one of the best directors in town, who relishes diving into deep, dark comedies. She and her marvelous cast are having a longing, lusty field-day with this West coast premiere at Diversionary Theatre. (Pat Launer)

Bookneeders reviews Manga Classics' take on Jane Eyre.