Are you saying it’s [...] not okay for me to read Jane Eyre in public?

The Guardian features winner of Man Booker Prize Anna Burns and her novel Milkman.

The novel started with her teenage narrator, 18-year-old “middle sister”, who has a “deviant” habit of walking while reading, something she shares with the author. “I’d go into a shop or a cafe or a pub and someone would say: ‘Oh, you’re that girl who walks and reads.’ I used to think: ‘This is something to comment on?’ I wanted to write about why would people comment on that.” In the novel, middle sister asks longest friend: “Are you saying it’s okay to go around with Semtex but not okay for me to read Jane Eyre in public?” “Semtex isn’t unusual. It’s to be expected,” longest friend replies. (Lisa Allardice)

The Reviews Hub has a review of the Oldham Coliseum performance of Lip Service's Withering Looks.

Fox and Ryding could read the telephone book and have an audience tittering. They are playing two  enthusiastic if shambolic historical reenactors, Audrey and Olivia, whose performances are constantly interrupted by their own petty disagreements, not to mention the need to keep things relevant to the GCSE students they presume to be in the audience. Flipping into and out of character as Charlotte and Emily Brontë, they build up a picture of their subjects which is appropriately confusing, peppered with anachronisms, blighted by the lack of Anne – who ‘just popped out for a cup of sugar’, they keep reassuring us, because of budget cuts – and otherwise delightfully silly.
As for Audrey and Olivia’s take on the Brontës’ writings, it is equally incomplete and distorted. These works of romantic grandeur are conveyed using everything from tabletop puppetry to song-and-dance routines, and the bleak moors, said to be haunted by lost souls, are brought to life in a characteristically irreverent style. The whole show is a cocktail of ideas and skits, tied together by the scenes in which Audrey and Olivia come ‘out of character’ and speak directly to their audience to clarify points or try and flog their ‘authentic Brontë’ merchandise. (Lizz Clark)

Herald reviews the first English translation of the Argentinian book Personas en la sala, translated as People in the room, by Norah Lange.

Lange has indicated that she started writing this novel after seeing a reproduction of a portrait of the Brontë sisters painted by their brother Branwell, who originally included himself in the portrait but later painted himself out (though leaving a ghostly trace). Given this inspiration, People in the Room could be considered a very imaginative, extended, and daring work of ekphrasis, and it’s interesting to see the protagonist also frequently referring to the three women as lifeless sculptures, or portraits, or even eerie ceramic dolls.

Insider recommends '11 audiobooks you should be listening to immediately', including

Thandie Newton gives new life to "Jane Eyre."
The book has 7,816 customer reviews and almost five stars. Amazon
If you missed out on reading "Jane Eyre" in high school, you'll definitely want to take advantage of the audiobook version which was released in honor of author Charlotte Bronte's 200th birthday. The story is read by actress Thandie Newton, who breathes new life into the classic love story about a woman able to find love in the midst of adversity.
Newton told Audible that narrating the audiobook gave her a new perspective on the story. While she respects Brontë's progressive ideas about women's rights that are reflected in the book, her experience helped Newton appreciate being a modern woman with the freedom to make choices. (Angela Johnson)

Jezebel's Pictorial discusses 'How Bluebeard Became the Definitive Fairy Tale of Our Era'.

The story of Bluebeard is central to gothic romance, haunting the halls of all those spooky houses that loom large in the popular imagination. Bluebeard reappears, for example, in Jane Eyre, which makes specific reference to the tale in creating its aura of eerie domestic wrongness: “I, by drift of groping, found the outlet from the attic, and proceeded to descend the narrow garret staircase,” Charlotte Brontë wrote in Jane’s voice. “I lingered in the long passage to which this led, separating the front and back rooms of the third storey: narrow, low, and dim, with only one little window at the far end, and looking, with its two rows of small black doors all shut, like a corridor in some Bluebeard’s castle.” It’s no coincidence that Rochester has a secret chamber where he stores away a secret wife. And rather than mounting a heroic rescue, her brother is stabbed for his fraternal troubles.
In turn, perhaps Jane Eyre’s most influential descendent in terms of 20th-century popular culture is Daphne du Maurier’s perpetually bestselling Rebecca, about a shy frump who marries a rich man and is carried off to his stately English home. Her Cinderella romance abruptly ends when she finds herself confronted at every turn with the lurid specter of his first wife Rebecca. She died under mysterious circumstances that everybody references but nobody seems willing to explain, leaving the heroine—who’s never named—to unravel the awful truth that her husband is the kind of man who murders his wives. But it’s okay, the reader may conclude, because Rebecca was far from perfect. She was vindictive, evil, and manipulative. (Kelly Faircloth)

The Telegraph and Argus looks back on the life and works of local artist Percy Monkman who 'saw beauty in Bradford'.

Percy Monkman often recalled the time he was painting in Brontë country and a small boy asked him, “What are you doing it for?” (Emma Clayton)

Newton Daily News features a local exhibition: Literary Heroines: Their Times, Their Fashions at Davenport’s Putnam Museum.

As staffers at Davenport’s Putnam Museum prepared for a board of directors meeting late last year, they set out several items from storage that aren’t often seen.
They included an 1828 wedding dress worn by an ancestor of the Putnams — the family that established the museum.
A woman attending the board meeting noted that the dress was from the time period of Charlotte Brontë’s novel, “Jane Eyre,” and said she’d often wondered how characters in that story dressed.
It was at that moment that Putnam president and CEO Kim Findlay realized she had an idea for an exhibit[.]

Cine y libertad (in Spanish) features discusses the Spanish edition of Jane by Aline Brosh McKenna.