Bleakness Plus Siliness and Fun

Trinidad and Tobago's Newsday reviews local exhibitions in Port-of-Spain:

Roberta Stoddard, a Jamaican, resident in Trinidad since 1999, is showing over 30 paintings, mostly to do with death, in a show called The Tear Catcher.
Though they are dark, black and somewhat supernatural, they carry warmth and hope – a strange thing to say about death – rather than a chilling, sinister edge. They’re not like looking at a Francis Bacon, I tell her as she takes me around the room.
Sleepwalkers, a vast work, depicts the characters from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, with Stoddard’s own great-grandfather, a preacher, marrying the ill-fated couple, Mr Rochester and Antoinette.
“Brontë, who did not have the knowledge of this space, made Rochester one-dimensional. He was gruff but non-threatening, but Rhys writes him as a bit of a misogynist and possibly a racist. And these are the truths that we grapple with here in the region,” Stoddard explains.
“The woman of mixed heritage. Spanish Town, Jamaica. That’s me,” she says, referring to her Antoinette. (Joshua Surtees)

Newsday lists the 21 best horror films of the 21st century:

Crimson Peak (2015) An aspiring author (Mia Wasikowska) marries a doomed aristocrat (Tom Hiddleston) and moves into his decrepit mansion. An exceptionally vivid Gothic romance, part Poe and part Brontë, from Guillermo del Toro. (Rafer Guzmán)

Literature inspiring music in The Boar:

When the topic of songs about books arises, ‘Wuthering Heights’ by Kate Bush is usually the most common song to come to mind. It truly is a wonderful song, with Bush’s high vocals lingering in the back of the mind any time the title Wuthering Heights is mentioned. However, I believe this is what makes the song of value. Renowned for its bleakness, Bush adds an element of silliness and fun to Emily Brontë’s tale. Combined with the music video, a true masterpiece, I’m sure it can’t only be my A-level days which were spiced up by Bush and her weird dancing. Aside from its silliness, it also provides a very basic outline of the second half of the plot, covering Cathy’s key characteristics of loneliness and jealousy. (Steph Campbell)

Javier Marías in El País (Spain) is not interested in contemporary fiction based on personal experiences:

Pero cada vez que leo sobre la aparición de una nueva maravilla “disfuncional” o de las características descritas, echo de menos a los autores que inventaban historias apasionantes con un estilo ambicioso, no pedante ni lacrimógeno, y además no procuraban dar lástima, sino mostrar las ambigüedades y complejidades de la vida y de las personas: a Conrad, a Faulkner, a Dinesen, a Nabokov, a Flaubert, a Brontë, a Pushkin, a Melville. Y hasta a Shakespeare y a Cervantes, por lejos que vayan quedando. (Translation)

Tele13 (Chile) and how to become a (great) writer:

Nada garantiza que te conviertas en el próximo Jorge Luis Borges o Emily Brontë, pero si tienes una historia que contar y lo quieres hacer por escrito, aquí encontrarás unas recomendaciones que te ayudarán a hacerlo. (Translation)

More writing advice on Letteratitudine (Italy):

La signorina Eyre si trova in un luogo sconosciuto e ha motivo di essere molto apprensiva. La descrizione che fa della stanza d’albergo, mentre lei dà conto di essere seduta davanti al camino probabilmente tremante, giova a rasserenarla rendendole l’ambiente familiare. Non scandisce stavolta il tempo che passa, ma la tensione che cresce, contro la quale l’io narrante si premunisce elencando e descrivendo gli oggetti circostanti allo scopo di prenderne possesso e sentirli vicini, così come chiede di fare anche al lettore. (Massimo Maugeri) (Translation)

The Non Solus Blog of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign highlights some of the rare books on the collection:

Significantly impacting the genre of prose fiction, Jane Eyre, originally subtitled An Autobiography, was first appeared on October 16th, 1847 under the pen name Currer Bell. Speculation over the author’s identity and the novelty of a book commenting on issues such as religion, class, and sexuality from a woman’s point of view and written in an intimate first-person narrative made Jane Eyre an immediate commercial success. Despite the popularity of the book, several contemporary critics were concerned about the social commentary of Charlotte Brontë’s work, with The Quarter Literary Review describing Jane Eyre as “pre-eminently an anti-Christian composition” in 1848.[1] Although she wrote two other novels, Shirley (1849) and Villette (1853), Charlotte Brontë literary career was cut short by her early death at age 38 due to tuberculosis in 1855, leaving Jane Eyre as the primary evidence of her lasting influence on the formation of the modern novel. [Shelfmark:  823 B78j1847] (Katie Funderberg, Xena Becker, and Kellie Clinton)