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Wednesday, January 23, 2019

Keighley News reports that visitor numbers were down from the previous year at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in 2018.
Visitor attractions in and around Keighley had mixed fortunes in 2018, with some attributing a fall in numbers to extreme weather.
These included the Brontë Parsonage Museum, which saw a 12 percent drop in numbers.
Keighley & Worth Valley Railway also reported lower footfall, though managed an increase in revenue.
Rebecca Yorke, of the Brontë Parsonage, said: “Visitor numbers for 2018 have not yet been audited, but our admissions and ticketing records show just over 77,000 people visited us or attended a museum event last year.
“Despite our programme of celebrations for the bicentenary of Emily Brontë and a significant amount of worldwide media coverage, this figure is approximately 12 per cent lower than in 2017.
“Evaluation is underway, but we’re attributing the decrease to a number of factors including economic uncertainty, heavy snowfall in late February and early March, when we unusually had to close three times, followed by an uncharacteristically hot summer, when an indoor attraction may not have had the same appeal as outdoor activities.
“We hope that shining a spotlight on the life and legacy of the Rev Patrick Brontë in 2019 will inspire people from nearby, as well as further afield to visit Haworth and the museum this year.” (Miran Rahman)
We are truly saddened by this as, in our humble opinion, the museum looked great in 2018. Let's hope for the best for 2019.

A columnist from The Argus writes,
I have kept, and will always keep, my first copy of Wuthering Heights, a Penguin edition now falling apart, because it takes me back to my early teenage years, when I first read it and was so gripped by its difficult yet evocative language and the violence of its romance I read it again and again and again. (Katy Rice)
Every Brontëite has a Brontë novel (or several) like that. It's usually a Penguin too.

Feminism India quotes us on this:
DH Lawrence also thought that Jane Eyre was nothing but a pornographic book, as it talked about stories of sexual repression, while many people don’t agree with the same. (Racheeta Chawla)
We are still as flummoxed by D.H. Lawrence's comment as we were back in 2009 (there's our #tenyearchallenge for ya!). Back then, a kind comment shared the context of the quote:
"And I’m sure poor Charlotte Brontë, or the authoress of The Sheik, did not have any deliberate intention to stimulate sex feelings in the reader. Yet I find Jane Eyre verging towards pornography and Boccaccio seems to me always fresh and wholesome…Wagner and Charlotte Brontë were both in the state where the strongest instincts have collapsed, and sex has become something slightly obscene, to be wallowed in, but despised. Mr Rochester’s sex passion is not “respectable” till Mr Rochester is burned, blinded, disfigured, and reduced to helpless dependence. Then thoroughly humbled and humiliated, it may be merely admitted."
- “Pornography and Obscenity”, 1929, in Late Essays and Articles
Ed. J.T.Boulton (2004)
Poughkeepsie Journal on what to expect of this year's Modfest at Vassar.
 “Wiley, Windy—Roll and Fall,” in which Vassar College senior Saski Plum Globig will be “looking to invocations of weather in Emily Brontë’s ‘Wuthering Heights” with a video and movement installation that will be “probing the boundaries of randomness and intention, chance and fate.” (John W. Barry)
Rohan Maitzen writes about rereading Wuthering Heights. Brussels Brontë Blog reviews Si j’avais des ailes, by Nathalie Stalmans.

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