'There are countless afflictions in the world'

In The Guardian, Blake Morrison offers advice on how to write a memoir.

The best memoirs are always transgressive. They are alternative history – voices you didn’t expect to hear; candour that breaches the norms of polite society; episodes that seem shocking till you recognise their truthfulness. They allow self assertion. But they aren’t selfish. They have a unique story to tell – a story that resonates with everyone else’s story. Even their anguish can be uplifting, making us aware that, as Charlotte Brontë said, “there are countless afflictions in the world, each perhaps rivalling – some surpassing – the private pain over which we are too prone exclusively to sorrow.”

We don't see any seasonal joy here, but somehow Austin Daily Herald does:

In thinking of the need to see and experience, think of meditating on a kind of joy that is present in the novels of Charlotte Brontë. Note: This is reflecting on seeing. “We set out cold, we arrived at church colder; during the morning service we became almost paralyzed. At the close of the afternoon service, we returned by an exposed and hilly road, where the bitter winter wind, blowing over a range of snowy summit to the north, almost flayed the skin from our faces.” (From the 1847 novel Jane Eyre.) (Marvin Repinski)

In The Wall Street Journal, Maureen Corrigan reviews Jean Stafford: Complete Novels.

Stafford’s debut, “Boston Adventure,” is surely one of the most haunting depictions of female isolation in fiction, rivaling in its unrelenting sense of imprisonment Charlotte Brontë’s “Villette.” Sonia Marburg, the novel’s shrewd main character, is just entering adolescence when the story opens. With her miserable Russian- and German-immigrant parents, Sonia lives in a shack in a fishing village across the bay from Boston. From there, she stares at the golden dome on the State House, a symbol to her of all that’s graceful and American. In summertime, Sonia works with her mother as a chambermaid at the nearby Hotel Barstow, where she fixates on a “clean, tart” Boston Brahmin named Miss Pride, whose approval she craves. After her father deserts the family and her mother is packed off to a sanitarium (following a bizarre episode in which Mother forces Sonia to accompany her to the shuttered hotel in winter to pick lint out of wicker furniture), Sonia leaps at Miss Pride’s offer to move her into her Beacon Hill mansion and have her trained as a secretary.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has selected the 'best mysteries of 2019', including

"The Au Pair" by Emma Rous (Berkeley).
The classic gothic novels of "Jane Eyre" and "Rebecca" echo from the pages of Rous’ twisty debut about loss and longing set on the Norfolk coast. Twins Danny and Seraphine’s mother committed suicide days after they were born. Years later, after the death of their father, Seraphine finds a photograph of their mother holding a baby the day before she killed herself. Seraphine’s grief compels her to find out why her mother holds only one child? (Carole E. Barrowman)

The London Free Press features Emily McGovern’s graphic novel Bloodlust and Bonnets.

You don’t need an intimate knowledge of the works of Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë to enjoy Bloodlust and Bonnets, but it  helps. As would an understanding of Dungeons and Dragons. (Dan Brown)

Hindustan Times' word of the week is 'rodomontade'.

Literature students might recall this lovely usage in the 19th century novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë: ‘She knows what she’s about; but he, poor fool, deludes himself with the notion that she’ll make him a good wife, and because she has amused him with some rodomontade about despising rank and wealth in matters of love and marriage, he flatters himself that she’s devotedly attached to him’. (Shashi Tharoor)

Clarín (Argentina) features an exhibition of the works of artist Norah Borges at MNBA.

“Aunque decía que no necesitaba leer porque entre su marido y su hermano lo habían leído todo, era una gran lectora; leía y en especial releía constantemente”, cuenta Miguel de Torre. Su índice es amplio y no siempre se solapa con el de su hermano: Conan Doyle, Mansfield, Kipling, Wilde, Chesterton, Wilkie Collins, Dickens, Henry James, Stoker, las Brontë, Woolf y Proust. Bernárdez, Mujica Lainez, Molinari, Silvina Ocampo, Mastronardi. Bécquer, Santa Teresa, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Antonio Machado y las coplas de Manrique. El Quijote le resultaba soporífero y, como revela Miguel de Torre, “para escándalo de la familia no usaba señaladores: ¡doblaba la punta superior de las páginas!”. (Matías Serra Bradford) (Translation)

In El Mundo (Spain), Peruvian writer Alonso Cueto looks back on the literature that saved him.

Pensé entonces que el único modo de escapar a aquella situación era buscar la compañía de todo lo mejor que me había pasado. Empecé a recitar en silencio los grandes poemas de mi vida, versos de Vallejo, de Eguren, de Quevedo, las églogas de Garcilaso, algún trozo de Calderón y de Cervantes. También me decía pasajes de El Aleph, el primer párrafo de Conversación en La Catedral y el final de Las bostonianas y de El extranjero y también momentos memorables de Cumbres borrascosas, como cuando Heathcliff va al lecho de muerte de Catherine y la llena de oprobios y reproches, una muestra final de su amor. (Translation)

Oubliette Magazine (Italy) compares Jane Eyre to Harry Potter.