8000 UK addresses

The Times anticipates a very curious study made by the Royal Mail which will be available, we hope, very soon:

Brontë Walk, now there’s a novel address
Haworth, a village south of the Dales in West Yorkshire, is famous for being the former home of the Brontë sisters — Anne, Emily and Charlotte — who wrote classic novels such as Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre.To mark the bicentenary of Emily Brontë’s birth on July 30 the Royal Mail has researched links between the family and addresses. The research, shown exclusively to The Times, reveals that almost 8,000 UK addresses have been inspired in some way by the sisters. This includes more than 5,500 house names, from a Wuthering Heights in the West Midlands to an Eyre Court in north London. There are also more than 700 streets and houses that use the family name, ranging from Brontë House in Kent to Brontë Walk in Bridlington, Yorkshire.
Hotspots include: Bradford, the nearest city to Haworth, Leeds in West Yorkshire, Salford in Greater Manchester, St Albans in Hertfordshire, Southampton in Hampshire, and London.
It is not only the more well-known novels that appear; less recognised novels such as Agnes Grey and Villette also make an appearance as house names. (Carol Lewis)

The Conversation engages in a particularly slippery subject, incest in Wuthering Heights and the relationship Branwell-Emily. But don't panic, the article does a good job tracing the origins of the incest myth:

Emily was private, reclusive, and difficult to understand. But the strength of collective desire to uncover who she really was, and how she came to create her masterpiece, inadvertently also gave rise to one of the coarsest and most curious legends to have attached itself to the Brontë family – the myth that Wuthering Heights was the product of incestuous longings. (...)
Still, seeming to take their cue from Cathy and Heathcliff’s relationship, biographers and creative writers have characterised the relationship between Emily and her brother Branwell as particularly close. As early as 1883, A. Mary F. Robinson argued that Wuthering Heights could be explained if one looked into Emily’s relationship with Branwell. Later, during the interwar period, as the Brontës’ lives became the subject of acknowledged works of fiction and drama, that sibling bond was sexualised and offered as an explanation for the novel.
In some of these texts, Branwell and Emily’s relationship is sexually abusive. In Ella Moorhouse’s Stone Walls (1936), for instance, Branwell tries to force a knife and bottle of liquor into Emily’s mouth. In others, it is loving and supportive. Clemence Dane’s play, Wild Decembers (1932), features a fictional Branwell indulging in masturbatory fantasies while looking at his sister. But he also supports Emily’s writing and collaborates with her to bring Wuthering Heights – their symbolic child – into the world.Branwell Brontë - a self portrait.
There are a number of texts that simply revel in the salaciousness of imagining sibling love, too. In Kathryn Jean MacFarlane’s Divide the Desolation (1936), Emily and Branwell engage in a form of childhood S&M play, with Emily delighting in the fact that her brother cares enough to hurt her. While Emilie and Georges Romieu’s The Brontë Sisters (1931) features an extended erotic faº while wearing a translucent, wet night gown. (...)
Quite apart from the fact that we have no evidence for incest in the Brontë family, the incest myth is problematic because it makes Branwell ultimately responsible for Wuthering Heights. It reduces Emily from a spontaneous genius or deliberate artist to a woman grappling with forbidden desires or subject to sexual abuse. Let’s hope that in the year of her bicentenary, Emily’s genius will finally be allowed to stand on its own. (Amber Pouliot) 

Also in The Conversation, a vindication of graphic novels:

For those of a humorous inclination, Kate Beaton’s webcomic Hark, A Vagrant (published as a book in 2011) is an affectionately irreverent look at literature and history, including the hilarious Dude Watchin’ With the Brontës. (Claire Nally)

The July 31st Peter Harrington auction of a first US edition of Wuthering Heights among other Brontë things appears in Arts & Collections; Contactmusic publishes a digest of the Lily Cole interview in The Guardian.

A curious way to find love material and an article. In The Times:

Some people give themselves a year to find a new home. Others challenge themselves to read the complete works of the Brontë sisters.
A Scottish comedian set herself a truly life-changing challenge when she gave herself 12 months to find a husband — by the time she opened her show on the Edinburgh fringe. (Mike Wade)

The Great American Read includes occasional podcast discussions like this one on WGBH:

In our second installment in this discussion series, we ask how romance novels and the literary expression of love have changed over the last 200 years. Susan Weaver Schopf, Professor of Literature at Harvard University, and Jackie Horne, President of the New England Chapter of Romance Writers of America, join host Callie Crossley, of WGBH's "Under the Radar with Callie Crossley," in examining how modern romance novels like Americanah, The Notebook and Twilight, compare to classic romance novels like Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, and Wuthering Heights.

The Guardian reviews A View of the Empire at Sunset by Caryl Phillips:

His new novel explores the life of Ella Gwendoline Rees Williams, otherwise known as Jean Rhys. Phillips’s previous book, The Lost Child, imagined the childhood of Wuthering Heights’s Heathcliff, presenting him as the illegitimate son of Mr Earnshaw and a former slave. Rhys, in her most famous work, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), cast that first net with her haunting portrait of Antoinette Cosway, the young Caribbean heiress who provided a backstory to Jane Eyre’s Bertha, “the madwoman in the attic”. It seems almost inevitable that Phillips should turn his attention to Rhys. (Sharon Millar)

Expanding the boundaries of video game storytelling on US Gamer:

 "I really like ghost stories myself and for this particular example, my inspirations were tales written by Edgar Allan Poe and Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë," says (Marcin) Blacha, regarding the haunted manor portion of the Hearts of Stone expansion. (Caty McCarthy)

The Rolf Boysen Wuthering Heights German audiobook is number one of the August audiobook selection of Hr2 Radio.

Dieser Roman voller Leidenschaft und Selbstzerstörung, voller Stolz, Wut und Wahn ist eine ideate Partitur für den gro&en Dramatiker Rolf Boysen. Sein kantiger, schroffer Ton treibt alles Sentimentale aus dem Text heraus und bringt Brontës illusionslose, in der Tradition Shakespeares stehende Kunst der Menschendarstellung zur Geltung. So fühlt man sich sofort in die unwirtlichen sturmgepeitschten Anhöhen der Moore von Yorkshire versetzt und Iauscht gebannt dieser Ieicht gekürzten Lesung des NDR von 1988.  (Translation) (Via Boersenblatt)

My Random Musings interviews writer Christine Asbray:

Debbie: And your favourite book(s)?
Jane Eyre, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, I loved The Chronicles of Narnia, and The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe when I was a child.

Trip (Brazil) interviews author Isabela Figuereido who changes the nationality and the surname to Charlotte. The genre is right, though:

Carol Ito: Quais escritoras te inspiram?  A primeira obra de uma mulher que me marcou foi o romance Jane Eyre, da francesa Charlotte Bronsteins. (Translation)

The Objective (in Spanish) posts about the Brontës. The article is not bad, except when is very bad:

Hoy en día, gracias a estudiosos y libros dedicados al análisis de sus vidas como Las Brontë ilustradas de Haworth de Brian Wilks, Los diarios secretos de Charlotte Brontë de Syrie James o El mito Brontë de Lucasta Miller se cree que la inteligencia de Emily junto a sus delicados estados de ánimo y su predilección por el aislamiento serían en realidad señales de Asperger. (Romhy Cubas) (Translation)

Erm... WTF?

Several Argentinian websites announce the death of the actress María Concepción César who appeared in a local radio adaptation of Wuthering Heights.

A Gothic (and Brontëite) girl on Vice; Imma Merino continues reading (and writing about it) Wuthering Heights in El Punt Avui (in Catalan); Modern Mrs Darcy classifies the Catherine-Heathcliff relationship  as Type 4: The Individualist. Women's Web (India) describes a visit to the Parsonage, Haworth and the moors. Words can't Fathom and Viva Media review Jane Eyre.

Finally, The Pool publishes a nice Emily Brontë. A Day in the Life video where Sam Baker visits the Parsonage:

Ahead of Emily Brontë's bicentenary Sam Baker journeyed north to uncover the wild and unconventional life of the Wuthering Heights author.