Going to Yoga with Charlotte

We read on Seven Days Vermont about a new and exciting project for 2019:

While creating a graphic biography of 19th-century novelist Charlotte Brontë (best known for Jane Eyre), Burlington cartoonist Glynnis Fawkes has made a rather famous imaginary friend. So we asked her to both tell and draw that story.

On the author's blog we can read about a recent research trip to Haworth:

This past year I've ben working on a graphic biography about Charlotte Brontë for the Center for Cartoon Studies Series. In May, on my way to a residency in Angouleme, I took a detour to Haworth, the village in Yorkshire where the Brontes lived to visit the Bronte Parsonage Museum and walk on the moors. I'm drawing the book now and-- if all goes well--it will be out in later 2019.

A sample of the book, Going to Yoga with Charlotte Brontë, can be read on Medium.

The Telegraph & Argus lists some of the most valuable Brontë books on sale at Peter Harrington Rare Books:

Peter Harrington is highlighting the 200th anniversary of Emily Brontë’s birth as it prepares to auction the first American edition of her novel Wuthering Heights.
Alongside will be an “exceedingly rare” collection of poems published by Emily, Charlotte and Anne Brontë and library sets of the Brontë sisters’ novels.
Harrington is also highlighting the 40th anniversary of Kate Bush’s hit single Wuthering Heights – based on the novel – as attracts interest in the auction.
The company pointed out that Emily and Kate Bush share a birthday, with the singer turning 60 on the day Brontë enthusiasts are due to gather in Haworth to celebrate Emily’s 200th birthday.
Harrington said Wuthering Heights was published in 1847 under the pseudonym Ellis Bell and shocked readers with its ill-fated and unconventional relationship between Heathcliff and Cathy.
Emily Brontë’s name didn’t appear in the first edition and she died in 1848 just a year after it was published, at the age of 30, without knowing how famous she and her novel would become.
Pom Harrington, the owner of Peter Harrington, said: “Emily Brontë only wrote one novel which became a literary classic after her death.
“The first and second English editions of Wuthering Heights are extremely rare, so we are pleased to be able to offer this first American edition of her famous novel for sale.
“Emily along with Charlotte and Anne also published ‘Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell’, (their pseudonyms), in 1846, which was the Bronte sisters’ first publication and we are delighted to have one of the first 1,000 copies of this very rare book for sale too.”
The American first edition, published in April 1848 and’s original price of 75 cents, is described as an excellent copy with a guide price of £8,500.
Pom said: “The book does not contain Emily Brontë’s name and the publisher on the title page misattributed the book to Charlotte Brontë saying ‘By the author of Jane Eyre’.
“The first English edition of Wuthering Heights was published in 1847 and the second English edition in December 1850, after the American edition.
“The first edition along with Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey was rushed out by the publisher Thomas Cautley Newby in December 1847 to try and capitalise on the unexpected success of Jane Eyre, which was published by one of Newby’s rivals.
“Newby then embarked on an advertising campaign to confuse the identity of the three Bell “brothers”, suggesting that all the novels were the work of one person which led to the mistaken attribution on the title page of this edition.
Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, published in 1846, will begin the bidding at £35,000, as it is one of only a tiny number of copies still in existence.
It was originally published in an edition of 1,000 copies, of which just 39 were sold. Following the success of Jane Eyre, the unsold stock of 961 copies was purchased by Smith, Elder and re-issued with a different title page. This is one of the original copies with the first title page.
The slim volume contains 19 poems by Charlotte ("Currer"), and 21 each by Emily ("Ellis") and Anne ("Acton"). Though the book was a commercial failure, Emily’s poetry in particular is now recognized as having real quality, with hauntingly elegiac lyrics written in a spare, natural style.
Starting bidding at £2,500 will be 10 library sets The Works of the Sisters Brontë in 12 volumes, published in 1893. (David Knights)

The Sydney Review of Books celebrates the upcoming Emily Brontë bicentenary in an extraordinary article:

The Brontë Parsonage Museum has a family copy of Goldsmith’s Modern and Ancient Geography, with Gondal place names added to the index, most likely by Emily. In her own imagination she was well travelled. Her French teacher thought that she possessed the disciplined mind and superior will of a great navigator.
The teacher’s comment is especially perceptive, because sometimes the opposite is claimed: that Emily Brontë was cut off from the world and a dreamer and that her novel is an ahistorical fantasy. This Emily conundrum continues to fascinate us. Perhaps she was all those things and more. The writer Joyce Carol Oates insists that above all Wuthering Heights ‘is a history…with exquisite detail, of civilization itself’. And the theorist Terry Eagleton argues similarly, that like her sisters – ‘educated women, trapped in almost intolerable deadlock between culture and economics’ – she was historically aware. If Brontë was not Dickens nor Thackeray nor Gaskell, nonetheless she was a writer with her finger on the pulse of the era that formed her, spanning from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, her parents’ lifetime and her own. (...)
Judging by her close observations of nature, and the genealogies, affinities, chance variations and recursions woven through Wuthering Heights, it’s reasonable to suggest that if she’d had the chance, Brontë might have been drawn to new theories of scientific discovery and evolution. And judging by the transgressions that rise to the surface of her writing and the sparks that fly, her future work could also have concerned itself with radical political ideas. The critic F. R. Leavis called her work ‘a sport’ which John Sutherland points out is ‘a term used by geneticists to indicate life forms outside the main evolutionary line. A freak, or deviant phenomenon’. Charlotte, in one of her most revealing biographical fragments about her sister, wrote: ‘In some points I consider Ellis somewhat of a theorist: now and then he broaches ideas which strike my sense as much more daring and original than practical; his reason may be in advance of mine, but certainly it often travels a different road. I should say Ellis will not be seen in his full strength till he is seen as an essayist’. (Evelyn Juers)

The latest episode of The Handmaid's Tale (S02E12, Postpartum) continues to be analysed on social networks and news outlets:

While it’s thrilling to see The Handmaid’s Tale test its borders a bit, to try on a little Jane Eyre for size and play with the bleakly comic potential of a well-timed sip of dark beer, the late arrival of this change seems to undermine its potential. (Allison Shoemaker on AV Club)

The entire Joseph storyline, in fact, is weirdly gothic, from the moment the one-eyed Martha smirks, “Well, you’d better come in then,” at Emily, to the moment Joseph’s mad wife sneaks into Emily’s room to hysterically whisper a secret before Joseph bundles her off to lock her up, while Emily stands there in her shift with her hair loose, pale and thin and wide-eyed. It’s very Jane Eyre in Thornfield Hall with Bertha Rochester ripping up her wedding veil, very Mia Wasikowska in Crimson Peak walking in on her husband having sex with his sister: here is our heroine, pale and fragile and dressed exclusively in a white nightie, and she is trapped in a dark and mysterious house of sexually perverse secrets; have fun. (Constance Grady and Todd VanDerWerff in Vox)

But the real story here is straight out of “Jane Eyre”: Lawrence’s wife, a former art professor, has been driven mad by the knowledge that her husband masterminded the Colonies. Considering that Emily killed Marisa Tomei’s character in the Colonies for simply being a wife, we probably shouldn’t look forward to a “Reader, I married him” ending. (Judy Berman in The New York Times)

ScreenRant lists some trivia about Jim Henson's Labyrinth:

Jareth was inspired by Jane Eyre and Marlon Brando

Jareth the goblin king is a fascinating character. He's charismatic, with an edge of danger. So how did Jim Henson and his creative team conceive of him? For inspiration, they turned to classic literature and one revered motion picture.
Conceptual designer Brian Froud wrote a book called The Goblins of Labyrinth, which chronicles, in great detail, how the movie's creatures and characters were initially envisioned. He states that "the romantic figures of Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights and a brooding Rochester from Jane Eyre" were both used as references for Jareth's overall vibe. (Mike McGranaghan)

Nursing Times shares the memories of nurses who trained sixty years ago on Guy's Hospital:

Lorna Horman, aged 80 and from the island of Jersey, also took part in the reunion and said she would never forget her time at Guy’s.
“One of my earliest memories is the porters’ office at the front entrance – the matron would check every morning to see who had arrived back after 10pm,” she said.
“We had to sign in by many of the nurses often wrote ‘Florence Nightingale’ so as not to get found out and I used to choose ‘Jane Eyre’,” said Ms Horman. (Jo Stephenson)

The Herald on Florence Welch:

The wild flame-haired woman behind Florence + The Machine has always been fierce, poetic and exhilarating, much in the way Kate Bush was in her Wuthering Heights prime.  (Josh Leeson)

The New European reviews the play The Lieutenant of Irishmore:

[Aidan] Turner has always had about him the Byronic, romantic aura of Laurence Olivier playing Heathcliff, which makes our first sight of him – casually torturing a man hanging upside down from a rope fastened to the rafters – all the more shocking. (Tim Walker)

New Statesman has an article on Gypsies in Britain:

Pale-skinned, he doesn’t look like Gypsies are supposed to look – think Heathcliff. But, as he says, who is true-bred anything now? (Kathleen Jamie)

The Writing Cooperative on Historical Romance:

Romance brings to mind misty moors, scowling Scots, and windswept women. Perhaps it’s not surprising that Scotland is where most romance readers prefer their stories to be set. (I blame Wuthering Heights.) (Erica Verrillo)

Eticamente (Italy) on Bildungsromans:

Jane Eyre narra la storia di una donna che con forte spirito di indipendenza riesce a superare i tabù della sua epoca, affrontando tutte le sfide che si presentano sul cammino con tenacia. Ribelle per natura, non si arrende allo status quo, vuole vivere una vita autentica ed è disposta a lottare pur di riuscirci.
Nel romanzo Charlotte Brontë narra con stile magistrale l’evoluzione morale, sentimentale ed emotiva della protagonista, coinvolgendo riga dopo riga il lettore. (Laura da Rosa) (Translation)

12 mesi (Italy) reviews the novel Il silenzio e l'abisso by Pietro Citati:

“Il silenzio e l’abisso” sembrano sovvertire gli stereotipi intorno alle vette dell’anima: la cima ed il fondo del percorso ascetico si avvicinano e si allontanano più di quanto si possa immaginare. Francesco, Angela da Foligno, sant’Ignazio, don Milani, Montaigne, Chateaubriand, Balzac, Charlotte Brontë, Dostoevskij, Tolstoj, Stevenson, Conrad, Virginia Woolf, Calvino, Gadda non sono soltanto grandi scrittori universali, ma quasi sacerdoti e sacerdotesse laici che con le loro trame bramano l’assoluto e rappresentano il disperato tentativo di offrire un appiglio al mondo fluttuante del reale. (Translation)

Elle (Germany) and a newly designed chair:

Stell dir vor, du sitzt auf einer Felsenklippe an der bretonischen Küste und liest „Sturmhöhe“ von Emely (sic)  Brontë. Den optimalen Sessel für diese emotionale Story hat Sebastian Herkner für die Firma Dedon entworfen. Sein Name: „Mbrace“. (Translation)

Go Into the Story reviews Jane Eyre 2011.