More popular among Chinese readers than she is in her native land

In the Evening Standard, Roly Keating, Chief executive of the British Library, writes about Where Great Writers Gather: Treasures of the British Library, the exhibition at Shanghai Library where, among others, the manuscript of Jane Eyre is on display.

Charles Dickens is big in China. So is D H Lawrence. As for Charlotte Brontë, the affection expressed by people in Shanghai for Jane Eyre (known in China as Jian Ai) suggests that she may be more popular among Chinese readers than she is in her native land.
Brontë’s handwritten fair copy of Jane Eyre, with other manuscript treasures from five of the greatest writers in the English language, have just gone on display in a major exhibition at Shanghai Library — Where Great Writers Gather: Treasures of the British Library.
As well as the immortal line “Reader,  I married him”, the Jane Eyre manuscript bears the inky fingerprints and the name of one of the typesetters who prepared the blocks of type for printing.

Gen Twenty draws several life lessons from Wuthering Heights:

Learn to Take Care of Yourself
The weather at Wuthering Heights is dreary and miserable, with rain or snow storms happening pretty regularly.  This isn’t a big deal unless you’re not properly dressed, which is the case with certain characters of this book.  The lesson here: learn to dress appropriately and take care of yourself!
This latter point is driven home by the fact that children at Wuthering Heights have an especially difficult time surviving. It’s a cutthroat environment where parents are prone to shaking their children and dropping them over staircase banisters. This is unacceptable behavior but emphasizes how important it is to be able to care for oneself. Sometimes life can be difficult, but the least you can do is make your own health and happiness a priority.
Take Everything in Stride
One thing that readers are quick to point out is that a lot of really weird stuff happens in “Wuthering Heights.”  This book includes everything from attacks by rabid dogs and cats being hung from trees to people throwing rocks and waking up from dreams to find ghosts scratching at the windows. Nobody in the book itself though appears to take notice of how strange everything is.
Accepting random acts of violence as part of your daily routine is not recommended.  However, as disturbed as the inhabitants of Wuthering Heights can sometimes be, they don’t allow such strange events to get in their way. Weird things happen and everyone moves on. Going with the flow and not getting hung up over a few mishaps is an excellent philosophy to keep in mind.
Catherine Earnshaw Linton is Your New Idol
“Wuthering Heights” is arguably one of the best examples of a traditional Gothic novel, which were all the rage back in the 1800s.  However, prior to Brontë’s foray into literature there were only two types of women found in a Gothic novel: the perfect maiden and the femme fatale.  Young, innocent, and a virgin pure in body and mind, the perfect maiden could suffer everything yet wish with her dying breath for everyone she’s ever known to know nothing but peace, happiness, rainbows and sunshine.  Meanwhile, the femme fatale was a passionate and pitiless woman who indulged her every desire and paid for it by being locked away in a tower and left to starve to death.  No woman wanted to be the femme fatale, but neither could they live up to the impossible standards set by the perfect maiden.
Enter Catherine. For her, Brontë took elements from both the perfect maiden and the femme fatale to create a new kind of heroine.  Catherine is beautiful and strong-willed, light-hearted and fierce. Most important and impressive though is how well she knows herself.  She’s one of the first female characters to be self-aware and able to think constructively for herself about how she feels and what she wants. (Lindsey J. Gooden)

It seems that the Haworth public toilets drama is finally at an end. As reported by The Telegraph and Argus:

Months of uncertainty over the future of Haworth's public toilets are at an end, as the village's parish council confirmed it had reached an agreement to operate the loos.
At their latest full meeting on April 9, members of Haworth, Cross Roads and Stanbury Parish Council unanimously agreed to enter into "Tenancy at Will" arrangements with Bradford Council for the toilets in the parsonage museum car park and in Haworth Central Park.
Commenting after the meeting, parish council chairman Councillor Gary Swallow said: "This will allow us to take on responsibility for the running of the public toilets.
"There remains a lot of work to be done around the fine detail of this agreement.
"However we are hopeful that with the support of local volunteers and the Bronte Parsonage Museum we will be in a position to re-open the toilet blocks in the very near future."
Both public toilet blocks shut at the start of this month as funding from Bradford Council had ceased. (Miran Rahman)

An alert for later today in Houston as announced on Culture Map:

14 Pews presents I Walked With a Zombie
Don’t let that title fool you. RKO handed the producer a title, and got an atmospheric, literate film, known among aficionados as Jane Eyre in the Tropics. Nurse Betsy Connell (Frances Dee) is hired as caregiver to a plantation owner’s comatose wife. Her disease is undiagnosed, but Connell soon suspects that her patient may not need medicine but voodoo.
EVENT DETAILS
WHEN
4.11.18 | 6:30 pm
WHERE
800 Aurora St.
Houston, TX