'After I found Jane Eyre, nothing was the same again'

BBC News has a piece on the return home of the Pillar Portrait.

The only-known surviving portrait of Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë together has returned to the literary's family's home in Haworth.
It was painted by their brother Branwell in 1834 and then bought by the National Portrait Gallery in 1914 after it was rediscovered.
The painting is returning to West Yorkshire to mark the 200th anniversary of Emily Brontë's birth.
It is at the Brontë Parsonage Museum for the first time since 1984.
It will be hung on the wall of the exhibition room in its former home, and previously only a copy hung in the museum.
Ann Dinsdale, the museum's curator, said: "It's a big day for the parsonage."
The painting is creased because it was discovered folded up on top of a cupboard in 1914 by the second wife of Charlotte's husband.
Its existence was known of because it was described by novelist Elizabeth Gaskell in 1853.
The picture was thought lost for many years
In the centre of the painting a figure can be seen concealed by a pillar painted over it.
It is thought the ghostly image could well be Branwell.
Ms Dinsdale said of the painter brother "he never quite mastered the technique of painting in oils".
The portrait will be on display until the end of August before returning to the National Portrait Gallery.

This columnist from Aiken Standard has visited Haworth and Brontë country:

The car we hired in Hebden Bridge to take us 9 miles across the moorland of West Yorkshire to the village of Haworth dropped us at the bottom of the main street. From there we climbed the steep cobblestoned thoroughfare to its crest, turned left, and eventually came to the object of our long-anticipated pilgrimage: the Brontë Parsonage Museum.
Just beyond the old parish church where most of the family is entombed and the former schoolhouse the Rev. Patrick Brontë established in 1832 to ensure, in part, that his extraordinary children had a place of temporary employment is the house where Charlotte, Emily, Anne, and Branwell were raised and spent most of their creative years.
Maintained by the Brontë Society, which since 1893 has been collecting relics of the famous family, the parsonage is a two-story, gray-bricked building, most of whose rooms have been restored to their appearance between 1820, when the family moved in, and 1861, when Patrick Brontë died, having outlived his wife and children (Dr. Tom Mack) (Read more)

Discover Northern Ireland lists local literary places to visit and the Brontë homeland is among them.

9. The Brontë Homeland
"There was no possibility of taking a walk that day." So begins Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. However, the Brontë sisters own story starts in Northern Ireland, and there is every possibility of enjoying a tour of the Brontë Homeland. It starts at the village of Drumballyroney, County Down, and the school where the sisters’ father, Patrick Brunty – he changed his name later – taught. It has been restored as a small museum.

Buzzfeed selects several new novels which broach the subject of mental illness and recalls the fact that,

Back in 1979, professors and feminist critics Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar published The Madwoman in the Attic, in which they identified the trope exemplified by Bertha Mason, the titular madwoman, locked in Mr. Rochester’s attic in Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. Gilbert and Gubar use a feminist lens to view how madness is utilized in the texts of various Victorian authors, and for them, madness is always symbolic of something: repressed sexuality, for example, and women writers’ lack of independence. Which isn’t to say that there hasn’t been literature directly addressing madness as well — there is suicide in Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, depression pretty clearly depicted in The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, and germophobia and hallucinations portrayed in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey. (Ilana Masad)

The Guardian has writer André Aciman pick five books about first love.

Another great unconsummated passion is described in Wuthering Heights. Emily Brontë’s novel tells of the obsessive, destructive love between Heathcliff, a foundling, and Catherine Earnshaw, the daughter of the man who brings him home one day. Whatever blossoms between them starts when they are children growing up together in the same household. “He’s more myself than I am,” says Catherine. There was never a more direct way of describing chaste, adolescent love.

Financial Times reviews Girl With Dove by Sally Bayley.

Reading provides a refuge from the baffling complexities of this childhood. By the age of 11, Bayley has read all of Agatha Christie and memorised great swathes of Jane Eyre. The fictional figures populating her imagination blur seamlessly with the adults who appear and disappear so mysteriously in real life. Miss Marple, her first best friend and guide, teaches her that “peculiar things happen in English villages all the time” and that “women waft about in their nighties when things are going wrong”.
From Miss Marple she also learns that a good detective needs an excellent memory and the job of a detective is to explain things. “Let me explain . . .” the young Bayley frequently says, but memories and explanations prove elusive. It is Jane Eyre who emboldens her to look deeper into the perplexing non-sequiturs of her childhood world. “After I found Jane Eyre, nothing was the same again,” she writes. “She was always there, always looking and hearing the things no one else dared.” (Rebecca Abrams)

Telez (France) recaps the latest instalment of Tv programme La grande librairie.

Sur le plateau, Leïla Slimani ne vient pas parler d’un de ses romans, mais de la postface qu’elle vient de signer pour Deuxième sexe (Éditions des Saints Pères) de Simone de Beauvoir. À l’occasion du bicentenaire d’Emily Brontë, l’auteure de Chanson douce est accompagnée de Lydie Salvayre, prix Goncourt 2014, qui vient quant à elle de signer la préface des Hauts de Hurlevent (Ed. Pavillons poche – Robert Laffont). (Anaïs Pala Bilendo) (Translation) 

Also in Actualitté,  Toutelatele...

The Stage reviews the play Adam and Eve review at Hope Theatre, London.

Along with the biblical allusions – Adam’s ‘fall’, rather than Eve’s – the Jane Eyre parallel, in the form of Nikki’s homework in which she is required to write an essay about a woman who shares characteristics with Charlotte Brontë’s heroine, feels like an attempt to insert additional intertextuality that isn’t fully formed. (Julia Rank)

According to The Consulting Detective,

Death is a constant of life and it is the answer to a question that we all want to answer. The continual turn of the wheel of life is a phenomenon that we have constantly tried to explain and find some root to throughout the history of literature. From the Bible to Hamlet, from The Divine Comedy to Wuthering Heights, from The Odyssey to Frankenstein we have sought to find some explanation to how we came to be and what ensures that we continue to remain here. 

KACU discusses cursive vs print.

I can understand the prejudice against print. When I was growing up, I thought of it as a childish form of writing that you abandoned when you started to learn grown-up cursive. But print styles go back to the Renaissance. And over the years, a lot of authors have chosen to use print over cursive, from Charlotte Brontë and J. R. R. Tolkien to Jack Kerouac and David Foster Wallace. (Geoff Nunberg)

My Jane Eyre Collection features a highly-annotated edition of the novel (with an unusual cover too). Some of the annotations seem to focus on the 'autobiography' aspect of the book.