The haunted and haunting landscape of Yorkshire

The Independent (Ireland) questions author Jane Urquhart about her cultural life.

Book: Jane Eyre
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë was the first adult novel I read as a child. It was an ideal introduction to grown up literature in that the opening chapters dealt with a little girl who was fully misunderstood by the those in power - the adults - who cared little for her but nevertheless controlled her fate. Every child, regardless of the warmth and stability of their home life, can imagine themselves in this predicament. It was also a highly visual reading experience for me as a child as I conjured the tough, haunted and haunting landscape of Yorkshire in my imagination.

Meanjin Quarterly (Australia) has an essay by a college student discussing her experience there.

Throughout nineteenth century literature written by women, inner unrest is reflected in the dimensions of inhabited space. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar taught a Women in Literature course in the early 1970s and found that ‘Images of enclosure and escape … metaphors of physical discomfort manifested in frozen landscapes and fiery interiors’ were recurring patterns in the texts explored. Riddled with ‘fantasies with maddened doubles functioned as asocial surrogates for docile selves’, the literature firmly establishes its own tradition. A classic example is the Madwoman in the Attic of Jane Eyre. Bertha dramatically represents a lineage of women who, in a historical, male-dominated space (which can also be likened to literature itself) the woman is captive, wreaking havoc in her dark corner, until her temperament imposed by the walls ignites destruction and/or escape. Enclosure, as inflicted by a male overbalance, catalyses change.
Gilbert and Gubar observed that ‘not only did a nineteenth-century woman writer have to inhabit ancestral mansions (or cottages) owned and built by men, she was also constricted and restricted by Palaces of Art and Houses of Fiction male writers authored’. They look at how the female writer has worked, oscillating between a desire to escape and the persistence required to write. This relates to the act of writing and to the challenges of contributing to a body of literature with a male gatekeeper. (Agatha Moar)

According to Feminism in India,

There exists a Jane Eyre like angel-demon dichotomy in Urdu poetry. Either the woman is the evil beloved or she is angelic and indescribable. On one hand, there is the docile, innocent, ‘angelic’ woman with her ‘bholi surat‘ whereas, on the other hand, there is the extremely beautiful woman just waiting to trap men with their ‘kali zulfein’. (Ismat Ara)

The Telegraph reports that, 'Robin Hood's 'grave' could be bulldozed and covered in concrete'.

Max Rathwell, Chairman of Spen Valley Civic Society, said: “The whole plan is tragic and stunningly stupid. People are enraged. The whole idea is bonkers.
“We know how well preserved the land is because it is still exactly as Charlotte Brontë described it in Chapter 12 of Shirley.
“It is a treasure island in an industrial landscape and Robin Hood’s grave would be a focal point.
“If this crazy idea goes ahead it will devastate the area. Instead of woodland and meadows and fields of wheat and barley it will just be a sea of monstrous sheds.” (Victoria Ward)

It does sound like a shortsighted decision.