Charlotte Brontë, rat

It's the Lunar New Year today, the start of the year of the rat, and so many sites list famous people born under that sign, such as Charlotte Brontë.

Desert Sun reports that The Literary Society of the Desert recently welcomed writer Alice Hoffman.

Hoffman told the crowd: “I became a writer because I was a reader. I had two mentors, my professor Albert Guerard and my grandmother.” She claimed to be an escapist writer who writes what she can imagine (not what she knows) and said she enjoys reading fairy tales and telling stories with a universal emotional truth. Her writing continues to be inspired by author Ray Bradbury, “Wuthering Heights” author Emily Brontë and stories of women that haven’t been told. (Marge Dodge)

Joan Bakewell in The Times' Culture Fix:

I’m having a fantasy dinner party and I’ll invite these artists and authors . . .
Aphra Behn, Barbara Hepworth, Angela Carter, Charlotte Brontë.

Out & About Nashville mentions Jane Eyre in a review of the Benjamin Britten opera based on The Turn of the Screw.

There’s something almost peculiarly and particularly English about a story involving a governess, a country house that may actually be permanently swathed in mist, children whose parents are dead by one circumstance or another, and in which the secrets of the house / housekeeper / master of the house provide the crux upon which the entire work revolves.  Seriously… Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, and Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw.  One doesn’t imagine a governess, pale children, and brooding farmhouse in Iowa, for example.
Not surprisingly, all three of the aforementioned works have been set to music.  Paul Gordon and John Caird’s Jane Eyre played on Broadway in 2001.  Marsha Norman and Lucy Simon’s The Secret Garden came before it 1991.  But the progenitor of this lot came in 1954 with English composer Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw, co-created with Myfanwy Piper for that year’s Venice Bienniale.  And it is the Nasvhille Opera’s winter production of The Turn of the Screw that brings us to the haunted moors of the Noah Liff Opera Center on this chilled Tennessee weekend. (William Shutes)

The Brontës as cat people on Korazym (Italy).

Le sorelle Charlotte, Emily e Anne Brontë erano grandi amanti degli animali in generale e in particolare del gatto Tiger, che viene anche raffigurato da Emily in ritratto, che scrisse anche il saggio “Le Chat”, nel quale difende la natura del gatto, che da molti al tempo, e forse anche oggi, era considerata egoista e crudele, definendola persino simile o migliore, in quanto priva di ipocrisia, di quella umana. (Vik van Brantegem) (Translation)

Telegraph India suggests that,

Since the Indian all-rounder, Ravichandran Ashwin, will be following in the footsteps of Sachin Tendulkar, Yuvraj Singh and Cheteshwar Pujara in playing for Yorkshire County Cricket Club this season, he should perhaps make an effort to see something of England’s largest and, in some ways, most beautiful county. [...]
Whitford also suggests that Ashwin, who will be based in Headingley, could also enjoy the rich cultural life in Leeds, visit the National Railway Museum in York and the Yorkshire Moors where Emily Brontë set Wuthering Heights. (Amit Roy)