Symbolic Conduit

Lucasta Miller reviews in The Guardian Caryl Phillips's The Lost Child. 

Wuthering Heights is the inspiration for a novel that explores darkness and dislocation in a 20th-century family.
Wuthering Heights has inspired countless sublime and ridiculous spin-offs, ranging from poetry by Ted Hughes to the Cliff Richard vehicle Heathcliff: The Musical. Caryl Phillips’s new novel takes its cue from Emily Brontë’s original, but only at a slant. For him, it functions as a symbolic conduit for ideas of alienation, orphanhood and family dislocation.
The Lost Child is bookended by two scenes that feature the seven-year-old Heathcliff. Left purposefully mysterious by Emily Brontë, his origins are here fleshed out by Phillips, who makes him the illegitimate son of Mr Earnshaw by an African former slave. In the early scene, the boy’s mother is dying of disease in Liverpool; the novel ends with her son being led over the moors by Mr Earnshaw to Wuthering Heights. A central section imagines Brontë on her deathbed, a woman alienated from quotidian reality. Charlotte described her sister being “torn panting out of a happy life”; but this is the Emily of myth, who “lives in two worlds” and yearns for “the bosom of eternity”. If the idea of a black Heathcliff appears to have been inspired by Andrea Arnold’s film of 2011 starring James Howson, Emily’s mystical death-dreams recall her portrayal in the 1946 biopic Devotion. (Read more)

Radio Times lists the films on (British) TV today:

Jane Eyre ★★★
8.30-10.20pm BBC2

Charlotte Brontë's classic gets another screen makeover with Michael Fassbender and winsome Mia Wasikowska. Swoon... (Rose Thompson)

Herts & Essex Observer gives more details:

Is It Any Good? Charlotte Brontë's novel is brought to Gothic life by Cary Fukunaga, a second-choice director after Lynne Ramsay turned the film down.
Mia Wasikowska, fresh from her breakout turn in Alice in Wonderland, is excellent in the title role, with Michael Fassbender and Jamie Bell also performing well.
Anything Else? The location of Jane's cottage was so remote there was no mobile phone signal. The crew stationed someone at a nearby phone box and equipped him with a walkie-talkie just in case anyone needed anything.
Locals took pity on the man and brought him tea and biscuits throughout the day.
Star Rating: **** (2011)

And The Carlow Nationalist adds:

Charlotte Brontë's novel is brought to Gothic life by Cary Fukunaga, a second-choice director after Lynne Ramsay turned the film down.
Mia Wasikowska, fresh from her breakout turn in Alice in Wonderland, is excellent in the title role, with Michael Fassbender and Jamie Bell also performing well.

The Sydney Morning Herald reviews Motherhood & Creativity: The Divided Heart by various authors:

Novelist and columnist Nikki Gemmell observed that as a young woman she realised that none of her favourite female writers such as Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters had children. "I thought that was the path I would choose for myself." However once she had her babies Gemmell also realised that motherhood imposed its own discipline on the writer. "I wasn't faffing around making endless cups of tea." (Rachel Power)

Also in the same newspaper an article about the Bausch brothers (Richard and Robert):

Discovering that a beloved author has a sibling writer prompts a similar thrill of pleasure. We race through the houses of Brontë or Mitford, gathering clues that will tell us more about the individual writers and also about the entire family. (Kevin Rabalais)

An Emily Brontë poem will be recited in the Poetry in Voice national finals (Canada)

Jeremy Mallette's skills with prose have earned him a trip to Montreal on April 20 to compete in a national championship.
Mallete, a Grade 12 student at St. Joseph's Catholic Secondary School, is one of 12 students from across Canada who've qualified for the Poetry in Voice National Finals in the bilingual stream. (...)
The two poems that Mallette will be reciting are, "Shall earth no more inspire thee" by Emily Bronte and "L'Automne" by Alphonse de Lamartine. (Sarra Lalonde in Cornwall Standard-Freeholder)

More poetry at The Fort Morgan Times:

Last Friday night's Open Mic Poetry Night with the River City Nomads was full of laughter and large doses of quiet profundity and raucously irreverent wisdom. Over 35 people filled Bloedorn as 13 poets and readers from Morgan Community College, both faculty and students, and the larger community shared fine, original work — some in free verse, some in formal rhyme — as well as the work of greats like Emily Brontë, Dr. Seuss, and Seamus Heaney. (Rachel Kellum)

The Fort Wayne News-Sentinel interviews a local teacher:

I grew up reading 'Little Women' and 'The Secret Garden' and 'The Little Princess.' Then came 'Jane Eyre' and 'To Kill a Mockingbird' and anything by Laura Ingalls Wilder. (Betty E. Stein)

Kwasi Kwarteng remember when he was on University Challenge some years ago in The London Evening Standard:

Then we got a starter for ten right, and then another. We answered the bonus questions quite well, and then pulled level. I think we won the round on the last question, when one of our team buzzed and just said, “Wuthering Heights”. I can’t even remember the exact details of the question but the answer is seared into my memory.

Huddersfield heritage is celebrated in The Huddersfield Daily Examiner:

Dewsbury, Batley and the Spen Valley are not the most fashionable places today but they are steeped in the rich history of the Brontës, Luddites and Chartists, while the Spen Valley’s woollen industry heritage is evident in the towns of Cleckheaton, Heckmondwike and Gomersal. (Robert Sutcliffe)

and here

[Joanne Harris] said: “Yorkshire is amazingly diverse, rich in heritage and culture.
“My neighbours, among many, are the Brontës; Sylvia Plath; David Hockney; Ted Hughes; Alan Bennett; Bruce Chatwin; W.H. Auden; Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore. (Chloe Glover)

Marcus Berkman in The Australian is categorical here:

Every song, of course, sounds a little like another song, except possibly for Wuthering Heights.

This comment on Le Temps (Switzerland) about economic bubbles is quite exaggerated when says that two of the Brontës (why not the other ones?) were impoverished by the railway shares madness of 1840s:

Ainsi, l’émerveillement de la bonne société victorienne devant le chemin de fer et sa mobilité décuplée n’est pas étranger à l’envolée extraordinaire que les titres de ce secteur connaissent dans les années 1840, sans doute la plus grande bulle financière n’ayant jamais existé et dont l’éclatement fin 1845 appauvrira deux des sœurs Brontë avant d’ébranler l’Europe deux ans plus tard. (Jean-Pierre Béguelin) (Translation)

Los Tiempos (México) lists the 17 books to read before you turn... 17:

“Cumbres borrascosas”
¿Te encanta el drama amoroso? ¡”Cumbres Borrascosas” de Emily Brontë es para ti! En este libro encontrarás el drama más auténtico y telenovelesco de amor que jamás habías imaginado. (Translation)

The Hampshire Chronicle is eager to see the Northern Ballet's performances of Wuthering Heights in Southampton next week.  RTCG (Montenegro) announces a screening of Wuthering Heighs 1992 next April 22 in the context of the "Svjetska književnost na filmu" festival. Cai tlin Moran complains about the austerity measures in libraries in The Times Magazine. The Sleepless Reader lists a series of Brontë-related favourite books. The Brussels Brontë Blog reviews a new edition of Path to the Silent Country by Lynne Reid Banks (originally published in 1977).