Both Surprising and Strange

The Argus reviews a recent performance of Wuthering Heights by the ChapterHouse Theatre Company in Haywards Heath:

It was a beautiful evening with a good turn-out for the production, which meant that the voices of the eight performers only just carried to the back and were sometimes a bit shouty. It was also difficult to make out the character’s features and expressions in the fading light.
The second half saw the dramatic tension greatly increase as the two feuding families clashed. The quiet Edgar Linton was unable to compete with his dying wife Cathy’s passion for Heathcliff to whom she declared “I want to be with you and only you”.
Adapted by Laura Turner, the character flaws and nastiness of the egotistical protagonists were well presented as they set up their own inevitable downfalls.
Fitting music, which complemented the tragi-romantic theme, was provided by violinist Hannah Dale. (Tania Deaville)

The performance at Nottingham Castle is reviewed by Nothingham Live:

The young actors in this two-hour-plus production have learnt a huge script, keeping close to the complex original text, a daunting task in itself. The result is competent, but understated, keeping all the human emotion of the novel whilst loosing nothing of the characters journey.
A standout performance comes from Emily Rose-Hurdiss, excellent in the starring role as the free-spirited Cathy. Before reviewing I’d watched the recent Tom Hardy version of Wuthering Heights, which worked both ways. Had I not, I probably wouldn’t have had a clue what was going on in the first half due to the sound issues, it was a long time since I’d read the novel, however, living up to a major production is no easy task. Aaron Charles gives an admirable performance as Cathy’s inseparable friend and later lover Heathcliff, but is not dark and villainous enough. One ripped shirt does not a Tom Hardy make. (Tanya Raybould)

Impact Nottingham thinks that Jane Eyre is the quintessential love story:

We’re all familiar with the literary canon, thought to be the realm of dead white men. But when we are always told that the classic love story is Jane Eyre and the quintessential horror is Dracula, we feel like we might be missing something. (Matteo Everett)

Midland Reporter-Telegram interviews a local librarian:

MRT: Who is a fictional and real-life hero and why?
Jessica Waller: In terms of fiction, it's hard to beat Jane Eyre. As a young girl, having a female character that was "poor, obscure, plain, and little" assert her own mind in the face of a man like Rochester was pretty powerful. She was the first heroine I met that was truly active in her story, and she made mistakes and then had to learn how to live with them. For a stubborn girl like me, those were good lessons.

Patheos on Catholicism and feminism:

I discovered that Christianity meant an alternative to the narratives of power of secular society. I noticed that so many landmark feminist novels (The Golden Notebook, The Awakening) upheld sexual liberty as a guarantor of genuine freedom, while at the same time defining sexual liberty only through relation to men. Now, I do believe in sexual liberty, but I believe it leads beyond the orgasm, and that escape from institutional marriage into a hedonistic paradise with the man of your choosing is still a sort of dependence on males for pleasure and identity. The liberation of the feminist whose devotion of God gives her the freedom to walk away from men (see Jane Eyre) is a greater one. (Rebecca Bratten Weiss)

Awesome Gang interviews the writer Kellyn Roth:

If you were going to be stranded on a desert island and allowed to take 3 or 4 books with you what books would you bring?
Ooh, that’s a hard one! Well, I’d take the Bible (ah, I’m such a good girl!), A Girl of the Limberlost by Gene Stratton Porter, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, and Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell.

And the Wear Valley Advertiser interviews Talulah Riley:

After reading Fifty Shades Of Grey she decided to transpose the stereotypical misogynist, making the female character the dominant party.
"In a lot of romance literature, the male characters have characteristics which would be considered quite misogynistic, like [Jane Eyre's] Mr Rochester. Yet those guys are considered really attractive to women.
"What if there was a female character that was equally obnoxious, sexually manipulative, conniving and out for herself? That was the genesis of the book. (Carolyn Hill)

Emily, writing posts about the the recent Brontë Society Conference in  Manchester. Check it out:

It has been a brilliant weekend, full of thought-provoking, challenging, fantastic ideas and new readings and theories that were both surprising and strange.

Freya Gowrley posts about her visit to the Parsonage part of a research project on the commonplace books of Ellen Warter:

Since beginning my research on the commonplace books of Ellen Warter, I – like their author – have been preoccupied with the Brontës. For Warter, the sisters were the objects of estimation, affection, and interest, and she obsessively documented them within her own literary productions. Made around 1880, and now housed in the Centre for Research Collections, University of Edinburgh, her commonplace books are quite unlike ‘conventional’ examples of the genre, which traditionally compile excerpted texts from a broad array of writers upon various topics. Instead, Warter devoted over 300 pages of her volumes to the lives and literature of the Brontës, rendering them more of a record of the family than anything else.