LitHub has an article on exploring literary Yorkshire.
Popular wisdom tends to paint Yorkshire as a united entity, hewn together by nostalgic romanticism and unshakeable home county pride. After all, this is the region that its residents dub God’s Own Country, even the most atheistic of them.
And yet, England’s largest (and arguably greatest!) county has also produced a sizeable clutch of writers with a penchant for pessimism and a keenly tuned ear for the flaws which lie at its core. At the hand of Ted Hughes, Yorkshire became “a gorge of ruined mills and abandoned chapels / The fouled nest of the Industrial Revolution.” For Emily Brontë’s Mr. Lockwood, it was a beautiful, solitary place, “a perfect misanthropist’s Heaven.” [...]
Start with the region’s most famous former writers-in-residence: the Brontë sisters. Their works, from Jane Eyre to The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, have transported readers to the blustery, expansive moors of Yorkshire for nearly two centuries. Head to the Brontë Parsonage in Haworth for an insight into their lives, as well as a peek at the landscapes which inspired them, or detour to Top Withens, the farm reimagined by Emily as Wuthering Heights. Listening to Kate Bush on the drive up there is, of course, optional but entirely recommended.
For poetry, not prose, hike into the glorious hills and mountains of the Pennines, and read the Stanza Stones. Pip Hall carved seasonal verses by Simon Armitage into these six vast boulders, situated between Marsden and Ilkley. (Hall also worked on the Brontë Stones.) (Lauren Cocking)
“I love the Yorkshire Dales,” she says. “There’s so much wrapped up in it all from the Brontës to Ted Hughes. I’ve always loved the tiny farm houses tucked away on the side of hills and the River Wharfe winding its way along, it’s just incredibly beautiful to my eyes.” (Chris Bond)
The Washington Post reviews
Women Rowing North. Navigating Life's Currents and Flourishing As We Age by Mary Pipher.
I don’t deny the value of optimism. But too often Pipher’s suggestions misfire, especially ones concerning the healing uses of literature. In a long passage about all the things aging women can do to forestall loneliness, Pipher suggests reading and sharing “our day” with Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary and Jane Eyre. By my calculation, that’s two suicides and an ill-treated orphan who ends up marrying a blind wannabe bigamist. This is supposed to make us feel good? (Sibbie O'Sullivan)
Ten Daily (Australia) asks you to imagine this hypothetical situation:
Imagine a woman. She’s conventionally very physically attractive.
She tells you two truths and one lie: she loves Keeping Up With The Kardashians. She studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford. She enjoys sunbathing on the beach.
Which do you automatically think is the lie?
Imagine a man. He is conventionally very physically attractive. He tells you two truths and one lie: he loves watching a game of footy. Outside of that, he enjoys reading the classics -- anything by Jane Austen or the Brontë sisters. His guilty pleasure is Maccas.
Which is his lie?
Although these situations are hypothetical, the answers your mind immediately jumps to may reveal your unconscious bias: that ‘good looking’ people are less likely to be intelligent. (Gary Nunn)
Together, books one to six in Bernard Cornwell’s The Saxon Stories series number almost 2000 pages. That’s roughly War And Peace plus Jane Eyre, if you’re a fan of useless equivalents. (Louisa Mellor)
Artezblai (Spain) reports that Carme Portaceli's
Jane Eyre has been nominated to a couple of ADE awards (Direction and Scenography). The winners will be announced on February 4.
For some reason, a columnist from
Forbes includes just Anne Brontë (why not Emily?) on a list of child-free people. We thought child-freedom was about choice, not about circumstances, which would definitely be Anne's case and some others' too (Emily Dickinson, for instance).
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