Auction day

Great news today as the fundraising for Charlotte Brontë's little book is now past the target of £80,000. Here are a couple of recent updates from the project's Crowdfunder page:

New stretch target
Thank you, thank you, thank you! As well as putting us in an even stronger position to go to auction on Monday, additional sums raised will be used to ensure the immediate and future conservation of the little book, developing online resources to share it with a wider audience, and a programme of public activity to celebrate its homecoming.
AUCTION DAY UPDATE:  Charlotte's little book will be auctioned at approximately 1300 GMT on Monday 18 November.  Thanks to the incredible support of our crowd, we have now achieved our original target, but we will accept donations up until 1100 (GMT) on Monday morning in order to further increase our chances of success. If we are outbid, all donations will be returned.  Thank you so much for your generosity and kind comments of support and encouragement.  Please keep your fingers crossed that Charlotte's little book will be home in Haworth again soon. 

Let's keep out fingers crossed! By the way, browsing through the auctioneer's website, we see that, apart from Charlotte's little book, Drouot will be auctioning another Brontë-related item later today as part of the 'Autographes et manuscrits : les collections Aristophil. Britannica - Americana' auction:

Source

Lot n° 12 - BRONTË PATRICK (1777-1861)
Estimate 1 500 - 2 000 €
Irish and British Anglican priest and author, father of the Brontë children.
Signed autograph letter, signed « P. Brontë », Haworth 5 December 1850, to John GREENWOOD, book-dealer in Haworth ; 1 page oblong in-8 format (a few slittings to paper)
This document contains a book order for works by Dr CUMMING (Dr Cumming’s Sermons before the Queen), and The Churchman’s Almanack of 1851. Reverend Brontë lived alone in the curacy of Haworth with Charlotte, his only surviving child since Branwell and Emily died in 1848 and Anne in 1849.

Tablet Mag interviews author Anne Fadiman (though not mentioned in the article, let us recommend her book Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader).

My Jewish grandfather was like the mad wife in the attic in Jane Eyre, you know? He was completely hidden from view, because my father, I feel certain, was ashamed of him for sounding and acting and dressing and being who he was. (David Samuels)

Los Angeles Review of Books interviews Kathleen McNerney, translator into English of Catalan writer Caterina Albert who 'like the Brontë Sisters, [...] published her novels, poems, and plays under a male pseudonym': Víctor Català.

When did Caterina Albert begin to use the masculine pseudonym Víctor Català? Did she ever abandon her pseudonym? Precisely at the time of the Jocs Florals of Olot in 1898. The name is taken from a novel she never finished, and it has both masculine and patriotic overtones. She continued to publish with this name, though some critics (Gabriel Ferrater and Marta Pessarrodona) use her birth name consistently, and it is worth remembering how many women writers of the period used masculine names: her own Catalan contemporary Felip Palma [Palmira Ventós i Cullell], the Brontë Sisters, George Eliot and George Sand, et cetera. (Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi)

Her most famous novel, Solitud, has been compared to Wuthering Heights.

A post on the Brontë grandmothers on AnneBrontë.org.