Mothering Heights

In The Telegraph, Samantha Ellis  reviews The Mother of the Brontës by Sharon Wright.

Sharon Wright got to know the Brontës as a cub reporter on a local paper covering stories about “twisted knickers in Brontëland”, and she brings a wry, grown-up approach to this biography of Maria Brontë, née Branwell. Why hasn’t there been a biography of the Brontës’ mother before? It has always been said there was not enough material. “I bet there is,” thought Wright. “If you grab your pen and your notebook and go looking properly.”
Here, her big scoop is that Maria’s family were pirates, or at least in cahoots with smugglers. Was Maria aware of the secret tunnels, yards from her childhood home in Penzance, busy with unscrupulous men carrying stolen goods? Did she sow the seeds for the stories her children would write about swashbuckling pirates? It’s impossible to know, but much of the fascination here comes from trying to trace Maria’s influence on her children.
It has been argued that because she died when Charlotte was five and Anne just 20 months old, she exerted no influence. Yet Charlotte Gordon, in her joint biography of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley, concludes that Shelley really was shaped by her mother’s legacy, even though she was only 10 days old when she lost her. Of course, a biography of the feminist superstar Wollstonecraft is easier to justify. But if Patrick Brontë warrants two major studies (and counting), surely Maria does too. With the boom in motherhood books, it feels a good time to ask whether, just maybe, Maria might have had something to do with how the Brontës turned out.
They certainly felt she did. After her death, Maria’s sister Elizabeth looked after them, and kept her memory alive. Maria’s possessions became talismans; Charlotte avidly read her stash of sensation fiction, while Anne carried her heart-shaped smelling salts bottle. Charlotte described her mother’s letters as “the records of a mind whence my own sprung”. Which is why it’s never been plausible that Maria was the “little, gentle creature” of Elizabeth Gaskell’s account; Wright’s Maria has more independence and courage. [...]
Wright dispels a few other Brontë myths. Haworth was not the back end of beyond; locals called it “the city on the hill”. Patrick did not burn Maria’s new dress in a rage. And Maria was not “delicate”; she walked miles daily, and had six healthy pregnancies. It was a shock when she found she had cancer – unlike previous Brontë biographers, Wright avoids sentimentality about Maria’s painful death. This biography, impressively researched, crisply written, even down to the witty chapter titles (yes, including “Mothering Heights”), gives Maria her rightful place in the Brontë story.

While Metro has  writer Rowan Coleman take a trip to 'where Cathy met Heathcliff', ie. Ponden Kirk.

More famously known as Penistone Crag, a favourite haunt of Cathy and Heathcliff in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Ponden Kirk is an outcrop of gritstone rock sitting atop Penistone Moor, affording the most stunning views of the West Yorkshire countryside.
If you look up to where the hillside cracks open at the very start of the deep valley, you see a landscape forged in the Ice Age, shaped by long-gone glaciers, the huge boulders left in its wake still littering the steep sides of the ravine as if they have been carelessly kicked there by a passing giant.
Turn your gaze out to the open countryside below and you will see the glittering reservoirs, the product of a lifetime’s campaign by Charlotte, Emily and Anne’s father, Patrick, to bring clean water to the people of Haworth. You will also glimpse the chimney tops of Ponden Hall, the setting of my new novel, The Girl At The Window.
Ponden Kirk is a place where even on the warmest summer’s day the racing wind will push and pull you ever closer to the edge of a precarious ledge. In the depths of winter, the streams and waterfall freeze mid-motion and the snow piles up knee deep. In spring, it’s dotted with white wisps of cotton grass and the calls of curlews fill the air. In autumn, the landscape becomes ablaze with colours — purple heather, fiery bracken and trees seeing out the year in a blaze of glory.
It’s easy to imagine Emily sitting there, the whole world unfolding at her feet, as she conjured up stories and poetry. In fact, Ponden Kirk is one of those rare places so unchanged by the passage of time it continues to be an embodiment of her writing.

France Culture discusses set texts at school.

Plus agile, mais sans doute aussi plus habile. Les élèves les plus insérés socialement sont par exemple ceux qui ont davantage tendance à faire le tri dans leurs lectures parce qu’ils ont les codes. La même Chloé dit encore : “Je vois pas en quoi ça aiderait le prof de savoir que je lis des livres comme Cinquante nuances de Grey (…) je lis beaucoup de fantastique, de livres romantiques, Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, ça c’est un peu mieux vu, scolairement parlant, c’est mieux de dire ça qu’une lecture facile.” (Chloé Leprince) (Translation)

Cricket Yorkshire goes to the Bradford Premier League:

As tea was taken, I had already motored through an apple turnover, toffee sponge cake and numerous mugs of tea in an effort to stave off the leeching effects of a climate straight from a Wuthering Heights novel. (John Fuller)