"This material should be kept together" #SavetheHonresfeldLibrary

The Irish Examiner titles its article on the auction of the Honresfeld Library:

A treasure trove of Emily Brontë material opens a new chapter 

The most important Brontë material to come to light in a generation. (Des O'Sullivan)

And they aren't exaggerating at all. The Brontë Society appeal to the authorities to save this treasure for the nation is in The Sunday Times:

There has been a growing backlash over the sale in England, where the curator of the Brontë Parsonage Museum, Ann Dinsdale, called on Sotheby’s to put the first July sale on hold in order to keep major parts of the collection together.

One of the first items under the hammer in July is Emily Brontë’s handwritten collection of her poetry, with revisions from Charlotte, which is expected to fetch up to £1.2 million. The auctioneer declined to comment yesterday.

With a wide range of unique Brontë and Jane Austen material on the auction block, campaigners are calling for a blanket export bar on items from the library leaving the UK, with institutions including the Bodleian Library exploring how to safeguard the collection.

“This material should be kept together. The three sisters were writing much of it around the same table,” Dinsdale said. She said that for institutions strapped for cash after the Coronavirus epidemic “July doesn’t give us much time at all”.

The UK Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport would not comment ahead of the sale.(...)

In a measure of the library’s worth, Sotheby’s recently offered one of the jewels in the collection, seven miniature books handwritten by Charlotte Brontë between the ages of 13 and 22, covering 174 pages, to the Brontë Parsonage Museum in a private sale for £4.5 million, which would keep it out of the auctions.

In November 2019 the Parsonage ran a major fundraising campaign to buy a single miniature work, called the The Young Men’s Magazine, at a Paris auction for €600,000. Dinsdale said the Parsonage was not ruling out an attempt to buy the books, but “all our energy is focussed on trying to keep the collection as a whole together. We have always tried not to be involved in inflating the prices of Brontë material.“ (Tim Cornwell)

La Opinión de Málaga (Spain) celebrates a new Spanish edition (well, really a new paperback edition) of Shirley: 

Publicada ahora en España por Alba en un volumen de excelente factura, y dentro de la línea de esta editorial de recuperar grandes clásicos de la literatura universal,es ‘Shirley’ una novela producto de su época, es decir una historia de amor y desamor, del choque de clases, del deseo frente a la obligación, y por ello un excelente retrato de la Inglaterra que miraba desde lejos como muchos de los suyos peleaban en las guerras napoleónicas en el Continente mientras el país trataba de pelear con sus propios problemas sociales y económicos.  (...)

Con una prosa propia de su tiempo, a veces densa pero nunca pesada, Charlotte Brontë demostró en esta historia su dominio de la palabra y su capacidad de ser una magnífica retratista de las contradicciones del ser humano y también de los paisajes que habita. Atmósferas densas, como un amanecer con neblina de esos que no dejan ver más allá como si fueran futuros inciertos, vidas marcadas desde el nacimiento por la clase social y sentimientos que quedaban en un segundo plano cuando el deber era simplemente sobrevivir. (Virginia Guzmán) (Translation)

Far Out Magazine lists great songs by Kate Bush: 

Inspired largely by the BBC adaptation of Wuthering Heights instead of the Emily Bronte novel, the track that launched Kate Bush was written in the leafy South London suburb in the summer of ’77. As London was swollen with the vicious angst of punk, Kate Bush was creating a masterful pop record: “There was a full moon, the curtains were open, and it came quite easily,” Bush told her fan club in 1979.

Bush’s iconography only grew from this moment. Her employment of dance, mime, theatricality began to herald in a new era for pop music. Still, nobody could have predicted, least of all the teenage Bush herself, how successful ‘Wuthering Heights’ would become. That people like you and I would be still so enchanted by its whimsical nature, high octave notes and the sheer fantasy it inspires.

It even landed Bush with the wonderful accolade of being the first woman to top the UK charts with a song written and performed by herself. A landmark moment in a glittering career that has always shined. (Jack Whatley)

Todo Literatura (Spain) interviews the writer Fernando J. Múñez:

Javier Velasco Oliaga: La novela aunque tiene un entorno histórico, el misterio y la intriga está muy presente. ¿Encuadraría su novela en el género del thriller histórico?
FJM: Los géneros son herramientas útiles porque permite a los lectores saber el tipo de novela que están llevándose a casa, es decir, qué ingredientes hay en esas páginas. En ese sentido, me gusta que mis obras tengan algo de inclasificable: Los diez escalones es un thriller histórico, tiene el misterio, las muertes, el suspense, pero tiene mucho de las novelas románticas del siglo XIX como «Cumbres Borrascosas», con esos amores turbulentos. Y bebe de las novelas de detectives, en el sentido de las pistas que llevan a pasadizos y estos a puertas secretas. (Translation)

An alert for today, June 6, in Naples (Italy):

Domenica 6 giugno ore 18.00 alle Catacombe di San Gennaro è in programma Lettere d'amore, un progetto di Mario Gelardi che porta in scena le parole d’amore di poeti, pittori, grandi scrittori, uomini di cultural. (...)
Poeti, pittori, grandi scrittori, uomini di cultura, hanno sempre dedicato lettere alla loro amata o al loro amato, epistolari di centinaia di missive, parole d’amore che dovevano essere tenute segrete. In questa edizione di Lettere d'amore in scena le parole di Eduardo De Filippo, Frida Kahlo, Irène Némirovsky, la corrispondenza tra Dino Campana e Sibilla Aleramo, e ancora i pensieri di Charlotte Brontë, Oscar Wilde, Jack London, Luigi Tenco e Fernando Pessoa. (Il Mattino) (Translation)

ReReading Jane Eyre posts another entry of her Jane Eyre in Flash Fiction; The Fictional Café posts the audio of the Wuthering Heights adaptation by Rachel Pulliam.