Providing Solace

The Montreal Gazette reviews the English translation (by Christelle Morelli) of Jane, le renard et moi (Jane, the fox and me) by Fanny Britt and Isabelle Arsenault:

Away from school, however, [Hélène] escapes into a book: Jane Eyre, “by Charlotte Brontë, with two dots over the e.” Jane, an orphan, has had her own problems, but she “grew up to be clever, slender and wise” and found work as a governess “in a huge manor called Thornfield, because in England houses have names.” Jane also found a sympathetic friend in her employer, Mr. Rochester, who, it turns out, has some pretty big crosses to bear himself.
As Hélène suffers through the school year, Jane Eyre provides solace — the promise of a life beyond childhood that is self-sufficient, accomplished and strong. (...)
Arsenault’s depiction of the colourful fox in an otherwise black-and-white scenario is a foreshadowing of things to come. By the time Hélène and her schoolmates head back home, our heroine has found Géraldine, the one good friend who puts life in a new light. (Bernie Goedhart)

Keighley News' The Ticket is including from now on a monthly column by the newly-appointed Brontë Society communications officer, Sarah Browncross:

We have had a wonderful warm summer at the Brontë Parsonage Museum with loads of visitors – and we’ve had lots going on to make the most of it.
All of the staff and volunteers here at the Parsonage have a favourite piece of the collection, from the Brontës’ dog collar to Charlotte’s wedding bonnet or Emily’s sketches, and we’ll be giving ten-minute talks on them at 2pm every weekday in September. Hear a different talk each day then find your own favourite. They’re free with museum entry. Now is also the perfect time to visit our wild meadow. (Read more)

Keighley News also reports a case of acute Brontëiteness (previously reported on the Parsonage Facebook):

Three people from different parts of the globe have been united in friendship through a love of the Brontës.
The trio has been meeting up annually in Haworth since 2010.
And on their latest visit, the three – Flavia Vitale, from Naples, Kathleen Shortt, of Dundee, and Oxford-based Ben Lovegrove – were given a VIP welcome.
They were greeted at the Parsonage Museum by executive director Professor Ann Sumner and Bronte Society chairman Sally McDonald.
Flavia first met Kathleen at a Brontë Society meeting in London, and they immediately became friends. They met Ben on their first trip together to Haworth.
“We knew we had made friends for life,” said Kathleen.
Prof Sumner said: “It’s wonderful to discover Brontë Society members who met in London at one of our events now travel to the Parsonage for an annual reunion.”

And again in Keighley News we can see the picture of the winners of their photography competition, including

Joe [White]’s successful shot (...) of a rustic footpath sign pointing to Brontë country on moorland close to his home.

Wall Street Journal talks about a yoga retreat in Cotswolds:

This pastoral slice of England is what one dreams of while reading Austen, Brontë or Mitford, not where one expects to practice downward dog. (Alexa Brazilian)

Also in the WSJ, George Johnson reviews books about disease:

[Susan] Sontag contrasted society's view of cancer with the strangely romantic aura that once surrounded tuberculosis, the previous century's "dread disease." Poe, Kafka, the Brontë sisters—the tubercular (the famous ones, anyway) were cast as creative, passionate souls, " 'consumed' by ardor." Nobody, Sontag wrote, could glamorize cancer.

Transcendent novels in The Huffington Post:

I first read various other novels I think are A-plus much earlier than two years ago, which is why I didn't mention them earlier in this piece. They include Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, (...) (Dave Astor)

Rosemary Goring asks herself in The Herald:

And if the housekeeper of Dove Cottage or the Brontë parsonage slipped me the keys and said I could spent the night there, I wouldn't say no. I might avoid the chaise-longue where at least one of the Brontës coughed their last, but it wouldn't be these writers' deaths I was thinking about as I prowled around, but the life they lived while here.

The Salem News talks about library book sales:

Whether you are finally ready to read “Jane Eyre” or are hoping someone may have parted with a recent best-seller, there are three library book sales on the North Shore over the next month where you can try your luck. (Will Broaddus)

Santa Cruz Books Examiner reviews Through the Smoke by Rachel McTavish:

Through the Smoke is reminiscent of the classic Jane Eyre. It has love, passion, unbridled ambition and greed, and mystery in an 1840s English setting. (Suzanne Barrett)

Página 12 reviews the comic Segundo Círculo by Ariel Zylberberg, Federico Menéndez and Rodrigo Luján. One of the characters is:

Penélope, una mujer araña, prostituta estrella del cabaret intergaláctico que da nombre a la historia: una amante de las novelas dramáticas a la que fastidian las interrupciones a sus lecturas de Cumbres borrascosas y otros relatos de ese tipo. (Andrés Valenzuela) (Translation)

L'Express (France) explores what the French teenagers read:

Mais là, j'ai déjà un gros livre qui m'attend: Les Hauts de Hurlevent -acheté devinez par qui ? "C'est génial, tu vas adorer", m'a dit mon père en me l'offrant, mais il dit ça tellement souvent que j'ai du mal à suivre!" (...)
Mais avant, c'était simple: à 15 ans, on s'aventurait franchement chez Zola, Dumas, Mérimée, Brontë, Mitchell, parfois Beauvoir. Maintenant, ce sont les parents qui lisent Twilight. On n'appellera pas forcément ça le progrès. (Isabelle Lortholary) (Translation)

Stacjakultura (Poland) presents the upcoming book (September 25) Charlotte Brontë i jej siostry śpiące by Eryk Ostrowski where the author sustains that Charlotte was the author of all the Brontë novels; L'Occhio della mucca (in Italian) posts a Wuthering Heights version for dummies; The Introverted Reader reviews Emma Brown by Clare Boylan; Random Reverie has read a selection of Charlotte Brontë poems; Books Without Any Pictures reviews Tina Connolly's Ironskin; Omnes Mixtae (in Catalan) talks about Wuthering Heights.

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Notes and Queries Free "Issue"

Oxford University Press is celebrating Emily Brontë's birthday with a free collection of articles published in Notes and Queries. Via Oxford Journals twitter:

Celebrate Emily Brontë’s birthday with us by reading this FREE collection from Notes and Queries: http://oxford.ly/14VYvc4 #emilybronte

In celebration of Emily Brontë’s 195th birthday on 30th July, we’ve put together a collection of papers published in Notes and Queries about Emily Brontë, and her life and works.
Read this FREE issue now.

The Gondal Poems and Emily Brontë (1945)
Emily Brontë and Hamlet (1954)
Wuthering Heights and Shirley - A Parallel (1956)
Joseph's Speech in Wuthering Heights (1960)
Mrs Gaskell's "The Old Nurse's Story": A Link between Wuthering Heights and The Turn of the Screw (1961)
Some sources of Wuthering Heights (1977)
Emily Brontë and Epictetus (1978)
Traditional' Lullabies in Victorian Fiction: Wuthering Heights and Tess of the D'Urbevilles (1988)
Emily Brontë and Fanny Burney (1989)
Emily Brontë, Hamlet, and Wilhelm Meister (1992)
An Inconsistency in Wuthering Heights (1997)
Confounded Commas: Confusion in an Interpretation of Heathcliff (1997) 

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Currer's House Welcomes Troubled Heathcliff

The Christian Science Monitor has a quiz on literary villains:

Every story needs a protagonist – and an antagonist. How well do you remember some of the nastiest/scariest/most famous villains in literary history?
(Casey Lee, Contributor)

1. Heathcliff is favored by Mr. Earnshaw. Who grows jealous and treats Heathcliff poorly when Mr. Earnshaw passes away?
Nelly, Mr. Linton, Edgar or Hindley?

Country Life lists the best houses for sale this autumn:

Kildwick Hall, £1.85m, Knight Frank

Set in 70 acres of formal gardens and grassland overlooking the Aire Valley between Skipton and Keighley-a favourite stomping ground of the Brontë sisters, as an article in Country Life (January 28, 1911) reminds us-the Grade II*- listed Jacobean manor house was built in about 1642 for John Coates, before passing to the Currer family, who extended it in the fashionable Palladian style in the early 1700s. (Penny Churchill)

To say a favourite stomping ground is to go a bit too far. The only sure thing is that Frances Currer (1785-1861) who was a rich book collector lived in the house at the time that Charlotte and her sisters were looking for pseudonyms and that makes her a good candidate for inspiring Charlote when choosing hers.

Grantland quotes Jean Miller telling how she met J.D. Salinger:

His ex-paramour Jean Miller recalls their relationship. "We were in Daytona Beach, and I was sitting at this rather crowded pool at the Sheraton Hotel. I was reading Wuthering Heights, and a man said to me, 'How is Heathcliff?' I turned to him and I said 'Heathcliff is troubled.' (Molly Lambert)

The Guardian explores how spoken English is changing:

It's not just London that has picked up these patterns. Listen to a modern Leeds or Bradford accent and you can hear the influence of Pakistani English as clearly as the Yorkshire dialect of Heathcliff and Cathy. Meanwhile, the scouse accent owes as much to its Irish immigrant population as it does to traditional northern English. (Rachel Braier)

The Atlantic Wire is concerned about TV mash-up concepts:

Here's how to pitch a TV show: Take a well-known piece of literature (or, hey, a TV show will do) and add a wacky concept. Today this adds up to "Present-day Les Miserables." (...)
What about a Lord of the Rings-type drama set in present-day Chicago? Or maybe you could have a sitcom described as Jane Eyre in the 90s. (Though, perhaps that's just The Nanny.) Play around. Make your own. Become famous. (Esther Zuckerman)

The Quietus remembers a highlight from last year's Beacons Festival:

One of the highlights of last year’s Beacons was the Impossible Lecture tent, which in 2012 saw a mélange of curated chaos, including an almost naked man named Paul Young spinning around the central tent pole whilst singing ‘Wuthering Heights’ in a terrifying falsetto; a semi-bemused, semi-terrified audience looking on as he writhed around on the floor screaming, "Where the fuck is Heathcliff?" over and over again. (Sophie Coletta)

The Daily Mail suggests that Eartha Kitt could have been a great Antoinette Cosway:

What a tragedy that no enterprising producer thought to cast her in a production of Wide Sargasso Sea. Jean Rhys’ great novel could have been about her. (Roger Lewis)

Cáscara Amarga (Spain) reviews K.H. Ulrichs' short story Manor from a gay perspective:

Su relato tiene algo de Emily Brontë y algo de la literatura gótica de la época, en un ambiente humilde pero donde el amor entre dos hombres desafía todas las barreras sociales y familiares. (Eduardo Nabal) (Translation)

The audience ratings of the last two episodes of Jane Eyre 2006 as shown on ARTE TV are discussed on Jeanmarcmorandini:

Arte diffusait une série britannique pour son prime-time. "Jane Eyre" a captivé 566.000 téléspectateurs, soit 2,4 % de part de marché. (Translation)

The Huffington Post includes Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights on a list of one-hit literary wonders; For Books' Sake gives ten reasons to love Jean Rhys, including Wide Sargasso Sea; Walking with "The Taxi Driver" posts about a walk through Brontë Country: Haworth to Top Withins round and Worth Valley Railway; Natalia Kinsey reviews the Shanghai Ballet's production of Jane Eyre; look at this Jane Eyre 2011 character study on the Run you clever boy tumblr (via fuck yeah jane eyre); Rachellovesbooks and Ron Lit review Wuthering Heights.

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New Bespoke Range at the Parsonage Shop

A press release from the Brontë Society:

New bespoke range at Brontë Parsonage showcases Charlotte’s art skills

On the 2nd September the Brontë Parsonage Museum will launch an exciting new range of bespoke merchandise based upon the botanical watercolours of Charlotte Brontë.

Painted between 1830 and 1832 when Charlotte was just a teenager, the studies show a young girl with great talent. Charlotte exhibited some watercolours in Leeds and had early ambitions to be an artist. Almost 200 drawings, watercolours and miniatures survive by Charlotte and her botanical works are amongst her most popular.

The range includes bookmarks, exercise books, fridge magnets, greetings cards, spiral notebooks and mounted prints of three of Charlotte’s stunning artworks: Wild roses from nature, painted when she was just 14, and Study of a heartsease and Blue convolvulus, painted when she was 16 and away from home at Roe Head School.

Despite her skill in capturing these beautiful flowers, Charlotte was not a keen gardener. The Parsonage garden was, according to Ellen Nussey, “nearly all grass and possessing only a few stunted thorns and shrubs”. Instead Charlotte would have taken inspiration, as always, from books.

To celebrate the release of the new range, the Parsonage will be hosting a botanicals workshop on 5th October 11am-4pm. Adult Education tutor and botanical illustrator Imogen Collins-Thomas will help participants to look through Charlotte's eyes, and use her drawing and painting techniques to create images with a feel of her work. Tickets £15. To book contact Sue Newby on 01535640185 or email susan.newby@bronte.org.uk.

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Blame it on the Biros

The Wakefield Express reviews the restaurant at the Healds Hall Hotel in Liversedge:

I’m often a little wary of eating out at hotels: there’s always that nagging suspicion that running a restaurant might merely be a way of keeping the kitchen busy and supplementing the revenue from the residential side of the operation.
However, it soon became clear that there’s no such distinction at Healds Hall, a sensitively-converted late 18th century mansion which has previously served as a boarding school and the home of a wealthy carpet manufacturer, among other roles, as well as inspiring a character in Charlotte Brontë’s novel Shirley.

The character is, of course, the Rev. Helstone, based on Hammond Roberson, owner of Healds Hall between 1795 and 1841.

The Guardian interviews Bridget Christie, winner of the Forster's Comedy Award at the recent Edinburgh Fringe Festival with her show A Bic for Her:

As she discusses the fact that Bic really did make a pen "for her", she holds a regular biro as if struggling with the weight and size of it, and says: "I expect that's why the Brontës were so shit at writing." (Rebecca Nicholson)

First Things seems to have discovered the BabyLit board books:

A baby book publisher has caught on to this concept. Jane Eyre: A BabyLit Counting Primer (by Little Miss Brontë), counts from “one governess” to “ten books”—and quotes Jane here and there, i.e. “It is always dangerous to keep a candle lit at night.” Moby Dick, Wuthering Heights, and Anna Karenina also come in square board books by BabyLit. How Wuthering Heights is made appropriate for babies I don’t know. An alphabet book perhaps? “A is for Anger, B is for Betrayal, C is for Corpse. . . .” (Ashley Thorne)

The Huffington Post complains about TV Dramas where 'men have secrets but women are crazy':

The trope of the insane woman has been prevalent for centuries in literature. Lady Macbeth was one of the earliest examples, but Jane Eyre's crazy woman in the attic is cliché at this point, and Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar is almost painful to read, given Plath's death by suicide. (Tamara Shayne Kagel)

The Mumbai Mirror talks about the need for male pseudonyms for women writers:

Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life, and it ought not to be, said the Poet Laureate Robert Southey to the young Charlotte Brontë. There you have it, in one sentence: one of the million things that a woman's life ought not to be. Not surprisingly, major women writers in the 19th century adopted male pseudonyms: the Brontës, George Eliot and others. Once it was known who they really were, it is said, reviewers became hostile, and charged Charlotte, for instance with "coarseness," and "an unseemly knowledge of passion." (Eunice De Souza)

Metro is presenting the new BFI series of screenings on Gothic Film:

‘There’s a big, fearful thing going on, particularly over sex, and that’s the draw of gothic films. Think of some women’s obsession with Byronic, bad-boy heroes such as Mr Rochester and Heathcliff, or Fifty Shades Of Grey. The British discovered sex in Technicolor through gothic.’ (Larushka Ivan-Zadeh)

Missoula Independent reviews I Await The Devil's Coming 1902 by Mary MacLane:

Less depressing tangents do crop up here and there, as when the author muses on the merits of Charlotte Brontë or Charles Dickens and fires off a brilliant stream-of-consciousness regarding Butte's turn-of-the-century melting-pot dynamics. There's also a four-page tutorial on the art of eating an olive. (Michael Peck)

Judy Jerome in Utica Observer-Dispatch never connected with Salinger's literature:

Holden Caufield never held the same allure for me as did Hardy’s Bathsheba Everdene or Brontë’s Jane Eyre.

The North Devon Gazette tells the story of a retired carpenter who now creates scaled models of noteworthy buildings:

The houses are often built on his kitchen table and the hobby began when his late wife Doreen asked him to build one after he retired.
“She asked if I could make a miniature house as she was going to join a club - she wanted one like the Brontë sisters,” he said. (Tony Gussin)

The Indianapolis Public Library Kids' Blog recommends Catherine Reef's The Brontë Sisters;  The Limited Editions Club & Heritage Press Imagery discusses the famous 1943 Random House editions of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights with the Fritz Eichenberg engravings.

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The IFRWH visits the Parsonage

The International Conference on ‘Women’s Histories: the Local and the Global’organised by the International Federation for Research in Women’s History (IFRWH) and the Women’s History Network, UK (WHN) begins tomorrow, August 29 at the Sheffield Hallam University, UK. No Brontës in the conference programme but with some Brontës in the social programme:

Excursions

Optional excursions to the Bronte Parsonage in West Yorkshire are planned for the afternoon of Sunday 1 September. The cost of the outings will be £25 per person based on a minimum attendance. Outings will leave Sheffield at approximately 1:00pm with arrival back at approximately 6:30pm. (...)

The visit will included a guided walk through the village of Howarth (sic) beginning at the atmospheric churchyard in front of the Parsonage and finishing at the infamous Black Bull where it is said that Branwell Brontë spent much of his time. This will be followed by an independent viewing of the museum; there are free room guides and museum staff to answer your questions.

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A Brontë Biopic for 2016?

The Telegraph & Argus reports the announcement by Clothworkers Films that they are preparing a biopic about the Brontës for 2016. The film will be directed and written (?) by David Anthony Thomas. They have promised more information in the coming weeks on their Twitter and Facebook accounts:

A big-budget movie about Haworth’s legendary literary sisters is in the pipeline, it has been revealed.
Yorkshire-based Clothworkers Films has announced it is planning a blockbuster biopic about the Brontë siblings – Charlotte, Emily and Anne.
The cinema production company, which specialises in period drama, said the film would be the world’s first English-language project of its kind.
More information, including details of an A-list cast and crew, will be unveiled on April 21, 2016 – the 200th anniversary of Charlotte’s birth date.
News of the pending production has created a frenzy on Twitter, where the company said it was gaining about 150 new followers a day. (...)
Previous productions have included the Three Sisters of the Moors in 1944, directed by John Larkin and starring Cedric Hardwicke, Molly Lamont and Lynne Roberts.
And in 1973, Yorkshire Television produced a hugely-acclaimed series – The Brontës of Haworth – which was lauded for its accurate portrayal of the family’s lives. (...)
“New productions about the Brontes are brilliant for us,” said Mrs [Ann] Dinsdal, [collections manager at the Brontë Parsonage Museum].
“We had our highest ever visitor figure – 220,000 – in the year that The Brontës of Haworth was screened.
“Invariably we see increased interest and although I don’t know a great deal about the latest planned film, I am sure it will have a similar effect.”

It should be clarified though that Three Sisters of the Moors was a promotional short film made by Twentieth-Century Fox to create momentum for the forthcoming release of Jane Eyre 1944. The only English-spoken briographical (or sort of) feature film about the Brontës is Devotion 1946 (Warner Bros). The most reputed version, however, is André Téchiné's film Les Soeurs Brontë 1979.

Jane, Le Renard et Moi has been awarded with several big awards at the Joe Shuster Awards (the Canadian Comics Awards):

Best Artist / Dessinateur
Isabelle Arsenault - Jane, le renard & moi (La Pastèque) / Jane, The Fox and Me (Groundwood Books)

Best Writer / Scénariste
Fanny Britt - Jane, le renard & moi (La Pastèque) / Jane, The Fox and Me (Groundwood Books)

(Via Radio Canada)

As we have reported, Bridget Christie's A Bic For Her won the Foster's Comedy Award for best act at the Edinburgh Fringe:

She writhes ludicrously on stage under the weight of a normal ballpoint pen and imagines a conversation between the Brontë sisters in which they bemoan the challenges of writing with a "male" pen. (Stephen Eisenhammer on Reuters)

Her rage is then turned on ballpoint pens designed for a woman's hand, a Bic for Her, by re-imagining the Brontë sisters flummoxed at their inability to write with their masculine pens[.] (Jennifer McKiernan in The Skinny)

BBC History Magazine lists the Brontë Parsonage Museum as 'Undiscovered Museum':

Haworth Parsonage, once home to Yorkshire's famous Brontë sisters, is now a top UK tourist attraction. Newly refurbished for 2013 with an exciting £60,000 decorative scheme, the Museum has never offered a more powerful experience of the famous authors of Jane Eyre (Charlotte), Wuthering Heights (Emily) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Anne).

The Parsonage is sometimes at the centre of curious initiatives.The Telegraph & Argus reports:

Keighley Buddhists walked across Brontë Country to raise money to feed the hungry.
Members of Keighley Interbeing, a meditation group, raised money for international aid charity Buddhist Global Relief.
The charity works to relieve hunger by supporting grassroots solutions and empowering girls and women through educational sponsorship. The walk on Saturday crossed the moors to Hebden Bridge from the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth.

A last word on pen names in The Hindu:

Pseudonyms have been used by authors for different reasons. The Brontë sisters published their famous works under male pen names- Ellis (Emily), Currer (Charlotte) and Acton (Anne) Bell- as women writers were not taken seriously in Victorian England. (Arundhati Hazra)

Dysfunctional book couples in The Huffington Post:

Heathcliffe (sic) + Catherine ("Wuthering Heights")
Mr. Rochester +Antoinette ("Wide Sargasso Sea")
"Wide Sargasso Sea" gives us a very different perspective of the crazy woman in the attic that tries to set Mr. Rochester on fire. It makes Rochester seem like a heartless man, and Antoinette seem like a girl who wants to make it work but is, unfortunately, a little unhinged. Rochester ends up married to another and Antoinette ends up dead.

Lizzie Porter writes in The Times about her problems with anorexia. It contains a brief Brontë reference:

As other girls were losing their virginity aged 16 or 17, I was completing a gym session of frantically scribbling away about Wuthering Heights (obsessive working is an obvious complement to the sequestration you get from starving). 

ofeminin (Poland) has a curious way to promote The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks:

"Wichrowe wzgórza", "Duma i Uprzedzenie" oraz "Jane Eyre" są już dawno za wami? Zatem, podpowiadamy na jakie książki o miłości warto zwrócić uwagę. (Translation)

Entomology of a Bookworm gives details and dates for their Septemb-Eyre readalong; news from the Parsonage Twitter: the visit of the Japanese Brontë Society, the baby bonnet made by Margaret Wooler for Charlotte Brontë and the hair bracelet (from Anne) which Charlotte gave to Ellen Nussey.

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Workshop with Anne Caldwell at the Parsonage

More alerts from the Brontë Parsonage Museum:

Heaven is a Home: Drop-in Writing Workshop

Join writer Anne Caldwell in creating a 'memory house'

Showing:
August 28th 2013 11:00am - 04:00pm

The Brontës' fictional houses are icons of English literature, and the literary sisters firmly believed Charlotte's words, ‘heaven is a home’. But what does 'home' mean to you? Anne Caldwell, writer and poet, explores the concept of home through poems and stories, and creates a ‘memory house’ out of writing.

Free with entry to Museum

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Jane on Heathbars

The Limerick Leader talks about the efforts to preserve Tarbert House and its heritage:

Sadly too, there is no record of author Charlotte Brontë’s visit to Tarbert House. The author of Jane Eyre stayed there as part of her honeymoon journey. She married her father’s curate Arthur Bell Nicholls in April 1854.
“She went to West Clare first and then came here and spent a night or two here. They then went on to Tralee and Killarney. In Killarney, she missed her step getting into a boat,” Ursula says, recounting the story. It turned out Charlotte was pregnant at the time but soon after had a miscarriage and died as a result.
But it is not too difficult, Ursula believes, to conjure up the scenes at Tarbert House as they might have been during the Brontë visit: the formality of dinner, the after-dinner withdrawing of the ladies.
After all, she points out, the house remains largely the same as when it was first built. A second stairs was added at one stage and she herself installed a small kitchen on the ground floor. But the floor plan is the same. The view is almost exactly the same. And the stark plainness of the house in its parkland remains the same.
And last weekend, as part of the Tarbert Gathering, Daniel O’Connell and Charlotte Brontë walked the woods of Tarbert House again as part of a dramatic re-enactment. (Norma Prendiville)

Well, Charlotte was probably pregnant when she died, but it is also quite probable she didn't die from a miscarriage. Hypemeresis gravidarum is the current main hypothesis for the cause of her death.

About.com reviews The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman:

The young female narrator finally finds escape, with her own insanity (as the mad woman in the attic in Jane Eyre).  (Esther Lombardi)

Den of Geek! reviews John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars 2001:

 When Ghosts Of Mars begins, Ballard's found alone on the train, and the rest of the film's violent events are a flashback, as Ballard recounts her sorry tale to some sort of tribunal. But in a nod to the narrative complexity of the gothic novel Wuthering Heights, Ghosts Of Mars doesn't stop there. (...)
What we have here, then, is a flashback within a flashback within a flashback. Inception, eat your heart out. (Ryan Lambie)

We have on Policymic two poor souls who never were able to enjoy their Brontës:

8. 'Jane Eyre,' Charlotte Brontë, 1847
What we were supposed to take from it:
Female independence; rising up through class structure. The horrors of colonialism.

What we took from it:
"Nothing happens, then nothing happens, and then right at the end … nothing happens." -Laura Dimon, Publishing Editor
"This could be Wuthering Heights I'm remembering, but isn't one of the protagonists in Jane Eyre named after a candy bar? Heathcliff or something? Heathbars?" –Nick Baker (Laura Dimon)

Chrisbookarama reviews Wide Sargasso Sea; Club de Lectura 2.0 (in Spanish) continues reading Jane Eyre; metamorphosis posts about Wuthering Heights; the Brontë Parsonage Facebook posts a video of the 10-minutes talk 'Charlotte Brontë's Wedding Bonnet".

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At Home with the Brontës

A special event taking place today, August 27 at the Brontë Parsonage Museum:

At Home with the Brontës: Architecture of the Parsonage
A special evening exploring the Parsonage's architectural features

To mark the 'Heaven is a Home' exhibition, and the recent redecoration of Haworth Parsonage, a special evening at the Brontë Parsonage Museum will explore aspects of its domestic history: David Cant of the Yorkshire Vernacular Buildings Group takes participants on a tour of the Parsonage to reveal its unique and interesting architectural features.

The event takes place after hours and includes an opportunity to see the new decorative scheme and enjoy tea and cake.

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An Outsider's Masterpiece

Charlotte Mendelson joins the ranks of the Villette worshippers in The Telegraph:

It wouldn’t surprise Charlotte Brontë’s Lucy Snowe that the brilliant Villette (1853) is seldom read. Snowe is lonely, clever, pessimistic; others have charms she lacks. It is an outsider’s masterpiece, which should be left on the bed of every new female undergraduate.

Bridget Christie is the winner of this year's Edinburgh Comedy Award for her show A Bic for Her. In The Independent:

 The show’s title comes from a ballpoint pen – “in pastel shades and with an easy grip” – which is marketed just at women. There is an inspired section about how the Brontë sisters may not have been able to write their masterpieces without it, and she links Sir Stirling Moss’s recent fall down a lift shaft with his disobliging comments about female racing drivers. (Veronica Lee)

Financial Times reviews the exhibition Unseen Lowry in Salford:

 Yet alongside are portrait heads that could illustrate D.H. Lawrence or Jane Eyre: the leathery, resilient “Head of an Old Man with a Neck Tie”, the passive, unemployed “Seated Man in Flat Cap with Knees Raised”: it is a panorama of changing British society, filtered through Lowry’s private sensibility, that complements Tate’s show of grand public works. (Jackie Wullschlager)

The Berkshire Eagle reviews a concert by the Boston Pops in Tanglewood, conducted by John Williams and, exceptionally, David Newman:

 Appropriately, Newman led his father’s "Fox Fanfare" (originally composed for and rejected by film mogul Samuel Goldwyn), selections from "Captain from Castile," "How the West Was Won," and "Cathy’s Theme" from "Wuthering Heights" with a shimmering solo turn by Elita Kang, a BSO assistant concertmaster, needlessly amplified. (Clarence Fanto)

New York Magazine has an advance of the literary autumn season:

 ‘Longbourn,’ by Jo Baker
The servants take center stage in this retelling of Pride and Prejudice—a sort of Wide Sargasso Sea meets Upstairs, Downstairs. Knopf, Oct. 8.

tvblog (Italy) remembers the good old days of Italian public TV, the fifties:

Vennero una lunga serie di “sceneggiati”. Dickens, Stevenson, Gautier, le sorette Brontë, Dostoevskij, Fielding, Flaubert, Hugo, Tolstoj, Alcott e tanti altri, uscirono dagli scaffali scrollandosi di dosso la polvere dei secoli per tessere meravigliose storie, spettacolarizzare nei pochi metr degli studi, senza o con pochi esterni, costumi di epoche lontane, baffi, molti baffi, cascate di sontuose parrucche, moderate scollature. (Itali Moscati) (Translation)

the Brontë Sisters posts about Ann Dinsdale's At Home with the Brontës; Teach Mentor Texts reviews Wuthering Heights.

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Charms and Prints

Here's a selection of some Brontë-related items from Etsy shops that have caught our attention lately.

Antique Fashionista's main focus seems to be on Jane Austen, but she also has a few creations inspired by Jane Eyre.

• Jane Eyre
• Jane at Gateshead (pictured)
• Jane Eyre miniature watercolour
• (Another) Jane Eyre
• Thornfield Hall

StravaganzaArt has been inspired by Jane Eyre too. And there is a lovely and one-of-a-kind hand-cut silhouette papercut of Jane Eyre by tinatarnoff.


The Brontëite knitters out there won't be able to resist Knitcubby's Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre 3-dimensional book stitch marker.

A Jane Eyre inspired charm for those who don't knit is also available courtesy of charms4you.

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Julie Harris. In Memoriam

Several newspapers publish the death of the Tony-awarded actress Julie Harris (1925-2013). In the Brontë-related world is celebrated for performing in Currer Bell, Esq. by William Luce. This play was first conceived as a radio play for Julie Harris in 1979. Later on the play was adapted for the stage with the name Brontë. A Solo Portrait of Charlotte Brontë and even filmed in 1983.

William Luce wrote Brontë first as a radio play for actress Julie Harris to perform on Masterpiece Radio Theatre, Elinor Stout directing. Entitled Currer Bell, Esq. (Charlotte Brontë's nom de plume), this production won three prestigious broadcasting awards - the Peabody Award, the Ohio State Award and Columbia University's Armstrong Award.
Miss Harris next performed Currer Bell, Esq. as a Caedmon Records production directed by Ward Botsford. With the new title of Brontë, the play's third presentation became Irish Television's movie version filmed on location in the green moor country of County Wicklow and directed by Delbert Mann. The film premiered in New York's Lincoln Center, followed by public television airings in North America and the UK.
Brontë's final incarnation was Luce's current stage version, with Julie Harris being directed by Kristoffer Tabori, and subsequently by Charles Nelson Reilly. Brontë has had theater productions throughout the United States, Canada, Scandinavia, South America, Europe and Japan. (Source)

In 2012 the piece was revived in New York by the Alloy Theater Company with Maxine Linehan in the title role.

Here you can read contemporary reviews of the play.

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Match a Rochester

Helen Dunmore reviews for The Guardian the new Stevie Davis book, The Awakening:

Like Charlotte Brontë in Shirley, Davies is funny and perceptive about the clergymen who flock around the sisters, and her social comedy breathes life into an oppressive world. She is lyrical and pitiless in her dissection of religious zeal. Awakening burns with anger against the abuses of the past, while recognising that the present has no right to condescend. 

Kate Mosse discusses in The Guardian her personal experience in literature:

I inherited from my Dad a love of good old-fashioned swashbuckling adventure stories. Little Women and Wuthering Heights sat cheek by jowl on my teenage bookshelf with King Solomon's Mines, A Journey to the Centre of the Earth and Treasure Island. (...)
When I began to write, I looked to the sorts of novels I'd loved when I was growing up for inspiration: the dominating landscapes of Willa Cather and Emily Brontë, the quests of Rider Haggard and Jules Verne and Walter Scott.

The Boston Globe interviews screeenwriter Jerusha Hess:

Her taste in movies is closer to “Clueless” and “Bridget Jones’s Diary” than to literary adaptations, but Hess claims she’s a fan of Austen, the Brontë sisters, et. al. “I love good girl Brit lit. It’s what my mother fed me my whole life. She didn’t tell me about the birds and bees,” says Hess. “She gave me [Thomas Hardy’s] ‘Tess of the d’Urbervilles.’” (Loren King)

The Sunday Times talks about two of the main Brontë topics this week. Bridget Christie sketch at the Edinburgh Fringe:

Her set piece on the Brontës flailing hopelessly at their manuscripts, unable to shape plot and character with man-pens in their women's hands, bubbles with mischief. (Stephen Armstrong) 

And the Shanghai Ballet Jane Eyre performances in London:

The ballet's action is overcomplex, mingling the real, the imagined and the symbolic. (...) But the plot is cluttered with peripheral characters, and the recorded music offers no unity, a mishmash of Elgar, Britten, Debussy, Barber, Dowland, even Greensleeves: it's a distracting case of spot the tune. The climax of the piece, with the three leads as angels in underwear, strains credulity. (David Dougill)

Rachel Spangler, author of lesbian romance novels, talks to The Observer (Dunkirk):

"I don't know that my books are more than romance, so much as they are more than people's stereotypes of romance," she says. "The genre has gotten a bad rap in recent years, but some of the world's most cherished books are romances. Jane Austen wrote romances. So did Charlotte Brontë. These weren't just frivolous stories: They spoke to the real issues facing real women, and I hope that's what my work does, too."

Greater Kashmir talks about the power of stories:

The orphan child Heathcliff of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is a character who is apparently full of vengeance and sinister designs, but deep inside harbors heroic virtues as well. The duality of his persona and transformation from clumsy poor to a rich gentleman leaves the readers baffled. He is an embodiment of paradox, like many of us in this world whose repulsive layers of contradictions are wrapped by the wonderful façade.¨

The Independent reviews San Miguel by T.C. Boyle:

 What looks at first like an homage to Wuthering Heights – an unsympathetic husband, a sickly wife, hostile terrain, then an unhappy second generation where sheer loneliness brings people together – swerves halfway through to give us something different altogether. (Lesley McDowell)

FemaleFirst interviews the writer Shelagh Mazey:

Who are your favourite reads?
I have always loved the Brontë sisters, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Thomas Hardy, but also modern day writers like Margaret Dickinson and Catherine Cookson. (Lucy Walton)

Ok... this is one of the weirdest Brontë references we have seen in quite some time. From PRWeb:

The classical loving words still touched our hearts even if it has been more than 150 years since the publication of Jane Eyre.
“Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! - I have as much soul as you, - and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you!”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
We can obviously observe that Jane stressed the spiritual equality between her and Edward Rochester when they fell in love. But why she said that? She is neither rich nor pretty, while Edward Rochester is a single millionaire who is perfect for dating in modern words. The disparity of wealth is the main cause of the psychological distance between them. Mr. Rochester never thought Jane was ugly and poor, but Jane herself and other people did. This psychological distance is more like a barrier that the non-millionaire part feels humble and unequal. While that feeling is hard to be understood by the millionaire part. So spiritual equality should be considered if you want to date a millionaire either on a millionaire dating site like MillionaireMatch.com or in real life.

The (in)famous Charlotte Brontë words about Pride and Prejudice are quoted once again in The Independent (Ireland); Agora Magazine (Italy) has an article on Wuthering Heights; The Republican Massachussetts reviews a recent Boston Pops concert conducted by John Williams where Alfred Newman's Wuthering Heights was played; The Book Cellar interviews Alison Croggon, author of Black Spring.

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Scholar Brontës (V)

More papers and theses around Anne Brontë's works:

Anne Brontë's Shameful Agnes Grey
Katherine Hallemeier, Queen's University
Victorian Literature and Culture
Volume 41 / Issue 02 / June 2013, pp 251-260

For much of the twentieth century, literary criticism tended to be relatively dismissive of Anne Brontë's novels. While recent scholarship has argued for the complexity of gender and class dynamics in Agnes Grey (1847), there is little consensus as to what, precisely, those dynamics are. Elizabeth Hollis Berry suggests that Agnes “takes charge of her life” (58), and Maria H. Frawley argues that her narrative is a “significant statement of self-empowerment” (116). Maggie Berg and Dara Rossman Regaignon, however, highlight the continued subjugation of Agnes in the course of her narrative. These scholars’ divergent readings demonstrate how Agnes Grey and Agnes Grey can be read both as illustrative of what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has famously described as the nineteenth century “female individualist” (307), and as instructive of the social strictures that circumscribed this identity. In this essay, I outline how shame works in and through the novel to bridge these opposing readings.

The Situation of Governesses in the 19th Century Based on Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Anne Bronte's Agnes Grey

Autor : Silye, Laura
Advisor: Rácz, István
Debreceni Egyetem elektronikus Archívum

In my essay I would like to reflect upon a fragment of nineteenth century female society that lacked wealthy positions and therefore opportunities for leading a carefree lifestyle devoid of money-related hardship and dependence on others, the latter one of which was considered “the great curse of a single female life” (MacPherson 1). In the first half of the nineteenth century, a new layer of society, namely, the new middle-class was beginning to emerge, who most of all consisted of the ‘novoeaux riches’ manufacturers, as they were then called (Sherry 31). These people provided the “impoverished gentlewomen” with work, therefore offering them the chance to come by money and make a living out of it (Sherry 31). Those women who set out to work by wealthy middle-class families were usually descendants of the clergy. They were competent to give proper education to children, and besides teaching they were also qualified enough to lay the grounds of the right manners and etiquette in them. The nature of the work these women completed from time to time was not at all homogeneous as not only teaching and moral education occurred among their tasks, but they were frequently requested and expected to perform certain duties of a housemaid as well... (Introduction)

Religions Sensibility in Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall『アグネス・グレイ』と『ワイルドフェル・ホールの住人』におけるアン・ブロンテの宗教的感受性
OGAWA, Kimiyo
Journal Title: 上智大学外国語学部紀要
Bulletin of the Faculty of Foreign Studies, Sophia University
Issue: 47,1-21, 2013-02-28

《阿格尼斯·格雷》是女作家安妮·勃朗特的作品,展示出一位善良并具有女性意识的女性形象.从女性主义的视角分析女主人公阿格尼斯的女性主义意识及形成原因,从而探索女性在社会中如何确定和实现自我价值. (Analysis of the Protagonist's Feminist Consciousness in Agnes Grey)
Author ： 王新春 , 张男 (WANG Xin-chun ZHANG Nan)
Journal： Journal of Heilongjiang College of Education, 2013, 32(3)

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Lucy Snowe's Paige Mahoney

NBC's Today Books unveils how one of the biggest influences of Samantha Shannon's The Bone Season is no other than Charlotte Brontë's Villette:

Samantha Shannon is a devoted fan of stories set in dystopian futures — which is why her debut novel is just that. The 21-year-old phenom, whose book, “The Bone Season,” came out Tuesday, cites a variety of classics among her biggest influences. Characters like Lucy Snowe from Charlotte Brontë’s “Villette” helped her forge a path for Paige Mahoney, the female protagonist of “The Bone Season.”
“Lucy is a fascinating character,” said Shannon. “She's very enigmatic and somewhat passive on the surface, but she faces a great deal of psychological pain. The way Brontë handles Lucy, wrapping the character in a kind of emotional façade, is something I'd like to emulate with Paige.” (Vidya Rao)

The Times also features Samantha Shannon:

She has been compared to J.K. Rowling, the Brontë sisters and even E.L. James. Even before her novel The Bone Season was published this week, in a six-figure deal, film rights had been sold to Hollywood and The New York Times had named her as one of its “game-changing” men and women under 30. (Catherine Nixey)

The New York Times publishes a good review of the English translation of Jane, le Renard et Moi by Fanny Britt and Isabelle Arsenault:

The first illustrations in the Canadian author Fanny Britt’s graphic novel, “Jane, the Fox and Me,” are of a school’s large campus, with buildings, stairways, paths, shadows, scattered trees, even a far-off forest and this line: “There was no possibility of hiding anywhere today.” (...)
But there’s some good news. Like so many loners before her, Hélène finds refuge in a book. Hers is “Jane Eyre,” and when Hélène discusses the book, the magnificent, deeply sad illustrations by Isabelle Arsenault (the winner of a New York Times Best Illustrated Children’s Books award for “Migrant”) go from stark, wintry colors to bold vermilion and blush rose. The handwritten text suddenly changes from brutal block letters to a curvy italic hand. Jane Eyre! Now here is someone Hélène can get behind! See, like Hélène, Jane is. . . . Well, she’s. . . . To be honest, I’m not sure why Hélène falls in love with Jane Eyre, except that perhaps she’s actually fallen in love not with Jane Eyre but with the refuge that a great book gives you in a time of struggle. When we’re young and unpopular, we need a hero most valiant, as gallant as Rapunzel’s prince, to rescue us from the horror of our daily life (and to deliver us to a semi-happy ending, even when it includes blindness). Sometimes that hero is the book’s protagonist, and sometimes it’s the book itself. (Taffy Brodesser-Akner)

Alison Croggon is clear in the Herald Sun Leader. No sequels for Black Spring:

She has just written and published another novel for young adults, Black Spring, inspired by Emily Brontë's gothic classic Wuthering Heights, but she swore this would not spawn sequels.
"I made a resolution I would never write another series, which may or may not work out,'' she said. (Fiona O'Dogherty)

Janice Clark compiles a list of coming-of-age novels for Publishers Weekly:

1. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë - In the time-honored throwdown of Wuthering Heights vs. Jane Eyre, I bet on Jane every time. Cathy, incomplete and suffering without her Heathcliff (or with him), can’t hope to hold up against fierce Jane, who struggles through a painful, loveless childhood and past a foiled marriage—a madwoman in the attic having long since beat her to the altar—to preserve her independent spirit, only returning to Rochester when she can feel herself an equal partner to him.

Wall Street Journal reviews Inconvenient People by Sarah Wise:

It is a shocking story in itself, and the more so because it wasn't an isolated case. There were many alleged "lunatics" hidden away in the back bedrooms and attics of Victorian England—the real-life counterparts of Mrs. Rochester in "Jane Eyre"—and thousands more who were forcibly detained in asylums on flimsy and often downright false evidence of insanity. (Charles Nicholl)

Oye! Times has visited Westminster Abbey:

We walked on graves and memorials to many famous historical figures from hundreds upon hundreds of years of British history. Of course, we stopped at the Poets Corner and paid homage to the wealth of literary figures honored there. My favorite, tucked away under a ledge had the names, Emily, Charlotte and Anne Brontë. (Ann Lonstein)

A bizarre reference on Noozhawk:

Always a sucker for English cottage seaside ambiance, I pulled off Highway 101 into the Cottage Inn and got my Wuthering Heights-cottage-on-the-moor fix. (Judy Crowell)

L'Orient Le Jour reviews 7 Femmes by Lydie Salvaire:

Pour ces amazones de la plume, on nomme Emily Brontë, Marina Tsvetaeva, Virginia Woolf, Colette, Sylvia Plath, Ingeborg Bachmann, Djuna Barnes. Pour ce tir groupé d’écrivaines, l’écriture c’est la salvation ou la damnation. Ou les deux à la fois. (...)
Destins tragiques pour la plupart, avec Brontë morte de la tuberculose à trente ans, Marina Tsvetaeva retrouvée pendue, Sylvie Plath suicidée au gaz, Ingeborg Bachmann brûlée vive dans une chambre d’hôtel, Djuna Barnes dépressive, aux liaisons féminines multiples, Virginie Woolf noyée dans une rivière avec des poches alourdies de pierre... (Edgar Davidian) (Translation)

Presently in the Past interviews Caitlin Greer, author of Eyre House:

Diana: What’s the story behind your story (which sounds like a really cool concept, by the way!)?
Caitlin: Ah, well, Eyre House is a retelling of Jane Eyre. I’m not sure what sparked the original idea, or what really spark any of my ideas (which are all brilliant, of course). But I was talking over the beginnings of the idea (which, if I remember right, involved an old house on the beach with a lot of secret passages, and some crazy person using them to do all sorts of things) with one of my CPs (Kat Ellis), and she made an off-hand comment that it could even be a Jane Eyre retelling. Obviously I told her she was the most brilliant and smart person in the world, and immediately started working it out.

The Australian reviews the film Stoker and describes Mia Wasikowska's portrait of Jane Eyre in Jane Eyre 2011 as 'impressive';  Mest om bøger (in Norwegian) reviews the original Charlotte Brontë novel; L'Île aux livres (in French) does the same with Wuthering Heights.

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Lupin III in Wuthering Heights (via New York Hell)

We don't know if these Wuthering Heights are related to our Heights but we rather suppose so. The song has been used as the opening song of the Japanese anime series Lupin the Third: The Woman Called Fujiko Mine:

Wuthering Heights
Naruyoshi Kikuchi & Pepe Tormento Azucarar
From the Album New York Hell Sonic BalletOriginal Release Date: September 5, 2011
Label: Plaza Mayor Company, Ltd.
Copyright: (c) 2011 Plaza Mayor Company, Ltd.
Duration: 5:51 minutes

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Those Wild Brontë Sisters

Hollywood Chicago reviews the Blu-Ray edition of Les Soeurs Brontë 1979:

In a way, Téchiné’s approach is as audaciously artful as Andrea Arnold’s recent adaptation of Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights,” which spent its first act conveying the essence of the author’s prose through haunting, wordless imagery. Rather than explore how the Brontë women conceived of their timeless literary masterpieces, Téchiné illustrates their origins by simply focusing on the character’s relationships with one another and with nature itself. Fraught with isolation, the lives of these siblings were cut short well before they were able to witness the influence of their achievements, with the sole exception of “Jane Eyre” author, Charlotte (Marie-France Pisier). As middle sister, Emily, Isabelle Adjani gets many of the film’s juiciest scenes, cutting through the morose proceedings with a fiery temperament. (Matt Fagerholm)

Daily Mail presents the book What's in a surname? by David McKie:

Authors are prone to preserve their privacy under noms de plume, ever since the Brontë sisters pretended to be the brothers Bell. (Peter Lewis)

The Inland Valley Daily Bulletin describes Jane Eyre in a simplistic kind of way:

Even in the fiction category, there are motivational rags-to-riches stories such as “David Copperfield” by Charles Dickens, ”Jane Eyre” by Charlotte Brontë, the tales of Horatio Alger and many other titles that are sure to quicken the pulse of even the most intransigent indigent. (John Weeks)

Keighley News reports the winner of their phototographic competition, Joe White from Stanbury is the winner:

His successful photo is of a rustic footpath sign pointing to Brontë country on moorland close to his home.
“It’s on the route of a walk I do between my house and Top Withens,” said Joe, 26, a buyer for Morrisons in Bradford.
“I was just trying to capture the image from a different perspective.

The Tampa Bay Times talks about Austenmania:

Austen (1775-1817) had six novels published, two of them posthumously, but was little known in her lifetime. Her reputation grew steadily, however, and she has long been considered one of the finest writers of fiction in English. Authors from Henry James to J.K. Rowling have acknowledged her influence. Not to mention that Austen, with some help from those wild Brontë sisters, more or less birthed the modern romance genre. (Colette Bancroft)

San Francisco Weekly describes like this the first season of the cult series Dark Shadows:

A Gothic romance loosely patterned after Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, the series offered hints of the supernatural, but never delivered upon that promise. (David-Elijah Nahmod)

Ada Calhoun shares the best lesson she ever received about writing in the New York Times:

I didn’t go to journalism school, so I knew I had a lot to learn about reporting. (I concentrated in Sanskrit, mostly because I love grammar.) But I grew up reading a lot: the Brontës and Oscar Wilde and Tolstoy and T.S. Eliot and Marilynne Robinson and comic books.

The Stuff (New Zealand) discusses the importance of studying arts:

I actually think it's a mistake to discourage, or at least not to encourage, young people to read and study literature. A lot of teenagers will moan that Shakespeare is incomprehensible, or that Jane Eyre is boring, but teens tend to complain about everything. What they like and dislike could change at any random moment according to the shift of their hormones. Yet there are certain lessons that can stay for life. (Karen Tay)

Now some Brontëites and writers:

Deborah J. Lightfoot on Laurie's Thoughts and Reviews:

Some might describe my style as "Brontian." I admire Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre and Emily's Wuthering Heights. My dark, dangerous leading man, Lord Verek, owes aspects of his personality to Heathcliff and Rochester. And in my heroine, gutsy Carin, readers may catch echoes of a famously strong female character: Jane Eyre. Writers are shaped by what we read.

Abigail Keam on Taryn Raye:

What book(s) most influenced you as a writer?
(...) Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

ARD (Germany) and Culture Femme (France) talks about the current screening of Jane Eyre 2006 on ARTE:

Enfin, Arte diffusait une série britannique pour son prime-time. "Jane Eyre" a captivé 482.000 téléspectateurs, soit 2,5 % de part de marché. (Jeanmarcmorandini) (Translation)

The CinemaScope Cat  briefly reviews Les Soeurs Brontë; Esther's Narrative posts about Wide Sargasso Sea; grande_caps posts caps of the webseries The Autobiography of Jane Eyre; The Coffee Girl will enter into Entomology of a Bookworm's Septemb-Eyre Readalong; the Parsonage Facebook posts some pictures of Wednesday's Heaven is a Home drop in craft day; Ron Lit posts on YouTube an hilarious review of Charlotte Brontë's juvenilia novelette The Foundling.

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Tredition Brontës

The Tredition Classics Book Series has recently published a few Brontës they missed in their catalogue:

These books are part of the TREDITION CLASSICS. It contains classical literature works from over two thousand years. Most of these titles have been out of print and off the bookstore shelves for decades. The book series is intended to preserve the cultural legacy and to promote the timeless works of classical literature. Readers of a TREDITION CLASSICS book support the mission to save many of the amazing works of world literature from oblivion. With this series, tredition intends to make thousands of international literature classics available in printed format again – worldwide.

Anne Brontë
Agnes Grey (December 20, 2012)
ISBN-10: 3849189805
ISBN-13: 978-3849189808

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (October 24, 2011)
ISBN-10: 3842439105
ISBN-13: 978-3842439108

Charlotte Brontë (October 29, 2011)
The Professor
ISBN-10: 3842445040
ISBN-13: 978-3842445048

Jane Eyre (August 14, 2013)
ISBN-10: 3849553167
ISBN-13: 978-3849553166

Shirley (August 14, 2013)
ISBN-10: 3849553175
ISBN-13: 978-3849553173

Villette (August 14, 2013)
ISBN-10: 3849553183
ISBN-13: 978-3849553180

Emily Brontë
Wuthering Heights (August 14, 2013)
ISBN-10: 3849560449
ISBN-13: 978-3849560447

Patrick Brontë
Cottage Poems (October 25, 2011)
ISBN-10: 3842443218
ISBN-13: 978-3842443211

Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell (October 29, 2011)
ISBN-10: 3842445032
ISBN-13: 978-3842445031

Elizabeth Gaskell
Life of Charlotte Brontë (October 24, 2011)
Part I
ISBN-10: 3842441002
ISBN-13: 978-3842441002
Part II (February 17, 2013)
ISBN-10: 3849511332
ISBN-13: 978-3849511333

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Wuthering Likes and Dislikes

Saira Khan complains about modern feminism on Spiked:

Feminism used to view women as self-sufficient rather than requiring the protection of the state
If recent debates are anything to go by, feminism now seems to be about protecting the delicate, sensitive, victimised female of the human species. For example, we apparently need to be protected from pictures of topless women in the Sun, lest these images destroy our self-esteem. Feminism perpetuates the view that women are fragile – in the words of Andrea Dworkin, ‘to be rapeable, a position that is social, not biological, defines what a woman is’. In contrast, the feminists of the early twentieth century were keen to show that they needed little help and could fend for themselves, just like any man. Indeed, as early as 1847, Charlotte Brontë wrote: ‘Women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer.’

New Statesman reviews the new book Victoria's Madsmen by Clive Bloom:

The Victorians were hypocritical prudes, covering up piano legs by day and visiting prostitutes by night. The men were stuffy, the women domestic paragons (Mrs Beeton) or hysterical (Jane Eyre’s Bertha Mason). Modern representations of the 19th century might not be so simplistic but they’re not far off.
Clive Bloom is the latest historian to object to such stereotypes. In Victoria’s Madmen, he marshals a crowd of men and women to help him dismantle the myth of Victorian conformity and uniformity. (Hannah Rosefield)

In the same magazine, another review, Telling Tales: Selected Writings 1993-2013 by Amit Chaudhury:

“There Was Always Another” is his intriguingly titled introduction to Shiva Naipaul’s first two novels, Fireflies and The Chip- Chip Gatherers, written as forewords for the Penguin Classics editions. Here, Chaudhuri reflects on the varying subjectivities of writing families (William and Henry James, the Brontës, the Tagore family) and points out that they are usually “quite odd in their intensities”. (Deborah Levy)

Irish Times complains about the lowering of standards in the Leaving Certificate exams:

The lowering of standards is most obvious in the case of English. In the 1980s students taking higher-level English were asked to discuss the proposition that “though all is eventually resolved in Wuthering Heights, there is a great sense of what has been lost”. In 2011 the proposition for discussion on the same novel was: “Catherine Earnshaw is a character that readers can like and dislike”. Three “likes” and three “dislikes” and an A1 is in the bag! (Sean Byrne)

Like/Dislike is the kind of modern criticism on the Facebook/Instagram era.

The Mirror's crossword contains today a Brontë-related question:

Down 18. Actress who played the title role in 1973 BBC TV drama series Jane Eyre. 

Zee News (India) interviews the teen writer Shriya Sekhsaria:

The budding writer also loves reading the classics and terms `Wuthering Heights` by Emily Brontë as her all-time favourite. (PTI)

Santa Maria New Times interviews another writer, Ashley Schwellenbach:

NT With the orphan story, and the boarding school high in the mountains, one thinks immediately of Harry Potter. Was that a conscious thing?
AS I did that very deliberately. There’s a couple points in the book where one of the girls says something about being an orphan: “Oh, who would want to write about an orphan?” And that’s a very deliberate joke, because long before Harry Potter there was a lengthy tradition of orphan protagonists. I would contend that Jane Eyre was kind of more the orphan inspiration, you have the strong female character who is ridiculously intelligent and has a very rich interior life, and obviously religion played a significant role in that book, too. (Interview by Anna Weltner)

Bookish Libraria talks with the author Jennie Fields:

Which are your favorite classical authors?
Well, Edith Wharton, of course! I also love Charlotte Brontë, early Henry James, John Steinbeck and Willa Cather. Any Brontë lover is a friend of mine!!

MadelineDyer.co.uk talks to Tim Bedford:

My all time favourite book is Wuthering Heights; I’ve read it most years since I was thirteen which unfortunately means nearly thirty times. I’ve read widely over the years and ultimately I love any good teller of tales.

We are Movie Geeks may go a bit too far finding precedents of the Mortal Instruments: City of Bones film:

With literary antecedents going back to the Brontë sisters and continuing through Gothic archetypes and on to the Telzey Amberdon stories by James H. Schmitz in the 1960s, the modern “empowered young woman” phase may have begun with a little cinematic heroine named Buffy, created by Joss Whedon over 20 years ago. (Dana Jung)

The infamous words of MEP Godfrey Bloom (you know, the Bongo Bongo one) are also mentioned in The Telegraph:

He went on to say that female artists and writers had achieved little in the past few hundred years. “Women, in spite of years of training in art and music – and significant leisure time in the 18th and 19th centuries – have produced few great works.” So that puts Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontës, Mary Shelley and Christina Rossetti in their place. (Linda Kelsey)  

The Christian magazine The Briefing on singleness quotes from Jane Eyre:

My favourite Jane Eyre quote springs to mind here. The man she loves is trying to persuade her to abandon her moral convictions and live with him, even though he already has a wife. She responds by saying:
“Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation; they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour; stringent are they; inviolate they shall be. If at my individual convenience I might break them, what would be their worth? … Preconceived opinions, foregone determinations, are all I have at this hour to stand by; there I plant my foot.”

Pen to Paper posts about marriages in Wuthering Heights; Bookaroo reviews Margot Livesey's The Flight of Gemma Hardy; film | captures uploads caps of Jane Eyre 2011.

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