Real Women

The Telegraph & Argus talks about the August City of Film initiative in Bradford:

Throughout August City of Film will host free family film screenings on Big Screen Bradford in City Park, and each film will be complemented by a short film from the Yorkshire Film Archive , with a focus on holiday scenes.

One of the selected short films is Jack Eley's 1959 Yorkshire Curiosities which features very briefly the Brontë Parsonage (10'50'') in Howarth (sic).

Claire Fallon lists in The Huffington Post the best books capturing how is to be an introvert person:

Jane Eyre. Jane can be passionate and fiery when it comes to her rights as a person, but for the most part she’s a quiet, unobtrusive presence. Capable of forming profound attachments to others, she cares little for the company of those who are not among her chosen few loved ones. A stimulating conversation with her friend Helen or Mr. Rochester is more than enough to fill her with happiness, and larger social gatherings leave her cold. Jane enjoys her solitary time, dreaming wild dreams or working on paintings; though she isn’t a highly skilled artist, she plans her pieces carefully and executes them thoroughly. Much of Jane Eyre is spent inside Jane’s active, contemplative mind, an effect heightened by the fact that Brontë physically isolates Jane by mostly depicting her in rural settings where she rarely needs to interact with others. And though Jane seems to dream of far-off adventures, in reality she is frightened by the possibility of traveling to India as a missionary, and the lonely moors of England are more than enough for her as long as she's accompanied by a kindred spirit like Mr. Rochester.

Elise Waters discusses on The Federalist the need for pretty heroines (it seems that things haven't changed so much since Charlotte Brontë's days):

When I think of fiction with strong female heroines I automatically go to Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice. I love these books, and they are often held up as paragons of literary success. Additionally, the central female figures are not pretty. Let’s do a quick breakdown of the heroines, shall we?
Jane Eyre: 18, plain, independent, quiet, rejected by her family, school teacher/governess, refuses marriage to a man she doesn’t love, ultimately marries Edward Rochester (after abandoning him when she finds out the truth about his first wife). Jane marries Rochester after his wife dies, he is badly burned, and she realizes she cannot live without him. (...)
These are real women, not cookie-cutter females who need to fall in love to justify their own self-worth. A question to ask, though, is: Would these books today be lauded any less if Austen and Brontё had made the heroines a little bit prettier? I doubt it.
You could argue that these characters are so insightful and interesting to read about because they are not pretty and they’ve compensated for their lack of appearance through wit and understanding of human emotion. But I call bullshit. Austen and Brontё were exceptional writers, and their books succeed because of the depth of character they convey, which could be achieved if the women were plain or even labeled “pretty.” (...)
Now that we’ve established what could be considered acclaimed literature with realistic heroines—how do modern-day fantasy books with pretty heroines who fall in love compare? Well, they can’t, because the comparison isn’t possible. How can we understand how books of today will be viewed 150 years from now, when novels such as Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice were initially brushed off as smut?

Sheila Kohler, author of Becoming Jane Eyre, writes in Psychology Today about heroines from a different angle:

Even 19th century women heroines like Jane Eyre are capable of integrity and physical bravery when facing difficult situations. After her aborted marriage, when she discovers that Mr. Rochester already has a wife locked up in the attic at Thornfield, Jane runs away across the moors without any sort of sustenance. Her wanderings on the bleak moors without food or shelter are not entirely unlike the modern Katniss and her adventures in the Hunger Games.

Vermont's Seven Days reviews the novel The Hundred-Year House by Rebecca Makai:

In this volume, evocative of the gothic classics whose conventions Makkai both emulates and spoofs (Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Citizen Kane), many of the secrets lie — surprise, surprise — in the attic. (J.T. Price)

The tragedy of the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 is recalled in this article in The Huffington Post with a Brontë mention:

One of the ghastly, can't-look-away fascinations of this week's Malaysian 17 crash is simply a narrative foible: coincidence. As an English professor, I can attest that coincidences happen much more often in literature than in real life. Literary coincidences, which will appear corny and sloppy if they're not done right, are necessary fictional contrivances to bring two strands of a story together in a way that normally wouldn't happen without authorial artifice. (Victorian novelists, for whatever reason, were the champions at coincidence-crafting: Dickens, Eliot, Austen, the Brontës.) (Randy Malamud)

A tweet by the Keighley News editor Richard Parker reveals a quite interesting teaser for tomorrow's news:

Latest @BronteParsonage feature in tomorrow's Keighley News reveals exciting purchase of 1920s Wuthering Heights film script and photos.

Laura Inman is promoting her book The Poetic World of Emily Brontë on Infinite House of Books,

What initially got you interested in writing?
I always had a bent for writing in college and in my work as a lawyer, but did not pursue it until late in life, starting in the last ten years. Although I might not have realized it when I started writing, my interest in it must have been the creativity of writing—all writing is creative writing. Writing and writing for publication went hand in hand. With very minor exceptions, I never kept journals or wrote stories or poetry for myself. I did not think about writing for publication until I took a graduate English course a few years ago as part of getting a master’s degree to teach English. I wrote a lot of short papers for that class and then wrote a long one on Wuthering Heights in which I proposed that I had discovered something new about that book. I turned that paper into an article that I got published in Brontë Studies. The research for that article set me on my course of devotion to Emily Brontë and writing about her, including an article on her poetry published by Victorians: Journal of Culture and Literature. In addition to scholarly writing, I wrote a screenplay about the last six years in her life when she wrote Wuthering Heights, turned that into a fictionalized biography, and wrote another novel in which she has a cameo appearance (neither got published, which doesn’t trouble me anymore.)

or on Roxanne Kade's Reviews.

Portal Cwb (in Portuguese) posts about Villette. View from Section T reviews Jane Eyre. Cronton College shares some pictures of their recent Jane Eyre. The Musical production. Interesting Literature recommends ten classic Victorian novels including Jane Eyre, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Wuthering Heights. Books&Bits reviews among others Wuthering Heights and The Tenant. Katie Doyle reviews The Writer's Digest Annotated Jane Eyre edition. Finally a picture of Top Withins by Christine Barraclough.