Irish Diaresis

The Westminster Abbey's dot affair is still commented all around the news:

Those two dots, known as a diaresis, have long since disappeared, but this week we can celebrate their return in a very specific place: a memorial plaque at Westminster Abbey to the Brontë sisters. Thanks to the Brontë Society, the names on the plaque, 85 years after they were first inscribed, are dotless no more. At a time when many of our punctuation marks seem to be on a juggernaut to extinction, the move feels like a soothing recognition of their past importance.

The diaresis – which takes its name from the Greek for “taking apart” and which is used to indicate where a vowel should be pronounced separately – was part of the only spelling of their name that Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë ever knew. Their father, Patrick, had changed his surname of Prunty or Brunty when he arrived at Cambridge in 1802, although no one is quite sure why. Perhaps it was to achieve greater sophistication, or simply to aid pronunciation, but his rebranding certainly proved positive for his future family. (...)

Quite what the Brontë sisters would have thought of such evolution is anyone’s guess, but the restoration of their proper name shows that we can preserve the past whilst still embracing the future. (Susie Dent in iNews)

And inshorts, Euronews, Associated Press, Newser, ianVisits, La Razón (Spain), infobae (Argentina), El Noticiero Universal (Argentina), Terrafemina (France)...

The other hot topic on Brontë news is still Emerald Fennell's Wuthering Heights project. The cast is discussed in Cinemablend, Cultureless, Into... which repeat the usual flat electroencephalogram noise. The Irish Times, on the other hand, has a more interesting opinion:

It is, however, something else that has really got the internet in a fury. In recent years there has been much discussion about Heathcliff’s ethnicity. The vast majority of actors cast in the role have been white: Laurence Olivier, Richard Burton, Timothy Dalton, Cliff Richard (no, really). Yet the text boils with something like racial othering. Heathcliff is described as “a dark-skinned gypsy” and compared to a “lascar”, a word for an Indian or Asian sailor. One might counter that elsewhere his face is “as white as the wall behind him”, but it remains reasonable to admit the possibility that Heathcliff was a person of colour.

Preparing her innovative, underappreciated 2011 adaptation, Andrea Arnold initially looked for an actor from the UK’s Romani community but eventually settled on a black performer named James Howson. Though the reactionary blowhards hadn’t yet fastened on to the word “woke”, they had “PC gone mad” to throw back in the film-makers’ faces. Counterarguments quoted the references above and convinced the open-minded that such an interpretation was reasonable.

A decade is a long time in discourse. The online response this week confirmed that a large swathe of the commentariat has moved from allowing the possibility that Heathcliff is black to an assertion that he is, to quote one X user, “canonically Bipoc” (which stands for black, indigenous and person of colour). Heathcliff “is described as a black/mixed race man”, someone else overclaimed. There was a lot more where that came from. Heathcliff is, it seems, now as black as Othello. Olivier playing Brontë’s creation in 1939 is, perhaps, no less a transgression than his blacking up for Shakespeare’s “Moor” in 1965. How did that happen? (...)

It would be a more boring world if we were all in agreement. And we are better off leaning into oversensitivity than blithely accepting discriminatory representation. But let us at least admit ambiguity into the conversation. Heathcliff could well have been Irish. He was found in Liverpool, you know. (Donald Clarke)

B.D. McClay's column in The New York Times discusses Sally Rooney's works and persona:

This tendency to conflate female novelists with their characters, and to misunderstand them as being somehow incapable of the imaginative work of novel-writing, long predates Ms. Rooney. In 1850, when Charlotte Brontë revealed that Ellis Bell, the purported author of “Wuthering Heights,” was in fact her late sister Emily, an immediate question arose that hadn’t occurred to anyone to ask about Mr. Bell: Where in the world did she get these crazy ideas? How could a sheltered young woman have come up with such a bizarre story?

The simplest answer — that Emily Brontë simply made her book up — seemed scarcely plausible. No, she must have had a dramatic love affair nobody knew about, or she was some sort of passive vessel of inspiration, or perhaps her brother, Branwell, was the writer — all arguments that echoed the notion that Percy Bysshe Shelley, not his wife Mary, really wrote “Frankenstein.”

The Guardian has a selection of this season's key fashion collections. Describing a piece by Chloe, a Brontë reference drops out:

Town and country

Embrace your Brontë heroine out on the moors, with an ankle-skimming tweed coat. Cape coat, top and knitted shorts, over-the-knee boots and bag. (Jo Jones) 

We are not sure if this really applies to the Brontës.  But the Financial Times says:

It’s no secret that many great artists were set upon their creative journeys via convalescence, or following a period in which they spent huge chunks of time alone. The Brontë sisters, Frida Kahlo, Katherine Mansfield, George Orwell and Marcel Proust were all confined to bed or remote locations, often for spells during childhood, and it has been argued that this shaped the unique way in which they saw the world. (Jo Ellison)

Times Nows News recommends classic novels going from "Easy Reads to Literary Heavyweights":

7. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

'Jane Eyre' is a compelling blend of romance, mystery, and social critique, following the life of its titular heroine from her harsh childhood to her stormy romance with the enigmatic Mr. Rochester. Brontë’s evocative prose, combined with Jane’s strong, independent voice, make the novel engaging, though it does demand more attention to its rich language and detailed narrative. The novel’s deep exploration of themes like love, morality, and social class solidifies its status as a classic worth the effort. (...)

9. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

This dark, passionate novel tells the story of Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw, whose destructive love and vengeance haunt the isolated moors of Yorkshire. Brontë’s complex narrative structure, with its shifts in time and perspective, adds layers of intrigue but requires careful reading. The novel’s intense emotions, gothic atmosphere, and exploration of human cruelty and redemption make it a challenging yet deeply impactful read, leaving a lasting impression on those who brave its stormy narrative. (Girish Shukla)

SoloLibri (Italy) discusses the poem Fall, Leaves, Fall by Emily Brontë.

"Fall, Leaves, Fall” è il titolo originale di questo celebre componimento di Emily Brontë che si presenta come una ninnananna di autunno, un canto crepuscolare delle cose che finiscono. Una filastrocca in rima, quasi un presagio di felicità. Ecco che nella vibrante cantilena di Fall, Leaves, Fall avvertiamo lo stesso sinistro e sibilante sussurro che anima Wuthering Heights, Cime tempestose, in cui si avvera il desiderio di Heathcliff. (Alice Figini) (Translation)

Villains we love in BuzzFeed (Germany):

Heathcliff – „Sturmhöhe“ von Emily Brontë

Heathcliff aus Sturmhöhe ist der tragische Antiheld, dessen finstere Pläne und Rachegelüste das Leben derer, die er einst geliebt hat, zerstören. Sein Herz wurde so oft gebrochen, dass er selbst zu einem gebrochenen, grausamen Menschen wurde. (Florian Menzel) (Translation)

Quotes for your "little man" in Parade, including one by Anne Brontë.