A mono-opera for Emily

Operawire has an announcement:

Tenri Cultural Institute has announced the world premiere of “Emily Brontë – Through Life and Death, A Chainless Soul,” a poetic mono-opera in one act based on selected poems of Emily Brontë by composer Akemi Naito.
The opera is set to make its world premiere on Friday, Jan. 5, 2018, followed by a second performance on Jan. 6. The work will honor the 200th Anniversary of the birth of Emily Brontë in 2018. The work is a collaboration with mezzo-soprano Jessica Bowers, pianist Marilyn Nonken, actor Robert Ian Mackenzie, and visual artist Toshihiro Sakuma., whose “Healing” exhibition will be on view. Each of the performances will also include a pre-performance reading of the seven poems by the actor Robert Ian Mackenzie.
Composer Naito, whose work has been featured all over the world noted, noted, “I wanted to express Emily Brontë herself in this work, using her poetry as the text. Because of the extraordinarily powerful inner voice that resonates in her poetry and the root of her creativity coming from deep within her spirit, I felt it would make a perfect libretto. I have felt a deep connection with her poetry for decades, and knowing that the year 2018 is the bicentennial of her birth, the idea of this composition seemed a natural way to celebrate her, and hopefully expand the audience and venue for new music.” (Francisco Salazar)

And more Emily Brontë-related music as NPR has chosen 'The 100 Best Songs Of 2017' and among them is

15. Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir
"Fall Leaves Fall". The tightly-wound emotions and windswept moors of Emily Brontë's poetry shimmer and soar in brilliant writing for chorus and string orchestra by Tõnu Kõrvitz, one of Estonia's rising composers. "Fall Leaves Fall," with its nocturnal themes, begs for long nights and short, dreary days. Like Van Gogh's "Starry Night," the music swirls in bold, dark strokes for the strings (especially cellos), which entwine with female voices, radiant as moonlight, from the Grammy-winning Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir. (Tom Huizenga)

According to KCRW, Wuthering Heights is one of several books 'to restore your faith in the human spirit'.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (Any Edition)
I stayed away from this classic for years until I read about it in Bataille’s Literature and Evil. Evil? Yes, absolutely. The poetic and dark Brontë has written one of the scariest books about passion in literature. (Michael Silverblatt)

And another list, this one compiled by Bustle, of '13 Unexpectedly Creepy Books That Will Keep You Up All Night Long', which includes

'Jane Eyre' by Charlotte Brontë
Charlotte Brontë's famous novel is known for being an early feminist milestone, or for being an emblem of British colonialist thinking, but it's not usually remembered as creepy. But boy is it creepy. Most of the novel is a haunted house tale, as Jane wonders who could be walking the dim halls of Thornfield in the dead of night. (Charlotte Ahlin)

Los Angeles Review of Books interviews Sarah Mesle and Sarah Blackwood, creators of Avidly, who are about to launch a new book imprint, Avidly Reads.

So then why a book series? Partly, some more time opened up for us, and we wanted to fill it by giving some of our writers a chance to explore something bigger than just a single song or movie or even TV show. Our tagline for the Avidly Reads series is: “a series of short books about how culture makes us feel,” and each book will get after not just a particular event, but rather what we’re calling a cultural phenomenon. (So like: not Jane Eyre, but rather, “Girl Books” or “Madwomen,” or even “Empire Waists.”) (Evan Kindley)

Los Angeles Review of Books also features Elizabeth Hardwick’s Essays:

Women writers — and women in literature more generally — were the focus of Hardwick’s most influential collection of essays, Seduction and Betrayal, published in 1974. (Regrettably, and a little ill-advisedly, it is not included in The Collected Essays; it was reissued separately, in 2001, also by NYRB Classics.) These stirring, evocative portraits — of the Brontë sisters, Zelda Fitzgerald, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Wordsworth, and others — have sometimes been viewed as a veiled response to Lowell’s betrayal, though this notion seems reductive, as if Hardwick needed Lowell to betray her in order to challenge perceived truths about literary history. Seduction and Betrayal was a challenge to precisely such notions: the romantic view that women writers are either victims or heroines (or both). [...]
She was not a romantic of the self; living with Robert Lowell and witnessing the self-destruction of so many of her contemporaries (Randall Jarrell, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman) probably inoculated her against the myths of the mad genius. Thus what she admired in the Brontë sisters was not the romantic notion of them having managed to write any novels at all but rather “the practical, industrious, ambitious cast of mind too little stressed. Necessity, dependence, discipline drove them hard; being a writer was a way of living, surviving, literally keeping alive.” (Morten Høi Jensen)

Les Soeurs Brontë (in French) has a selection of gifts for Brontë fans.