Modern in many ways

Sally Cookson's Jane Eyre will be on stage at the Grand Opera House, York, from May 22 to 27 and The York Press is having a contest to celebrate:

Book and tickets competition
Courtesy of the Grand Opera House and the National Theatre, What's On has two prizes to be won. First prize is a copy of Charlotte Brontë’s novel and two tickets to the opening night of Jane Eyre in York on May 22 at 7.30pm; second prize is a pair of tickets for the same performance.
Question: Where was Sally Cookson's production of Jane Eyre first staged?
Send your answer, with your name, address and daytime phone number, either on a postcard to Charles Hutchinson, Jane Eyre Competition, The Press, 84-86 Walmgate, York, YO1 9YN, or by emailing charles.hutchinson@nqyne.co.uk, marked Jane Eyre Competition, by next Friday. Usual competition rules apply. (Charles Hutchinson)

North Yorkshire Advertiser also features the production and Nadia Clifford, who plays Jane, and Tim Delap, who plays Mr Rochester and others.

Nadia Clifford has booked all her “digs” for the six-month tour of Sally Cookson's energetic and imaginative new adaptation of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre [...]
"This will be my first tour so I'm really excited about seeing a lot of the places we're going to that I've not been before. I'm up to seeing a lot more of the country because I've never had a chance to travel."
The tour will bring the Manchester born and bred actress to York Grand Opera House in May and Newcastle Theatre Royal in July in the title role. Nadia remains on stage throughout the ensemble piece which is played out on a multi-tiered set with most of the cast playing a variety of characters.
Nadia knew from the start that the production was going to be full-on as her audition was far from ordinary. "Often people will see you for ten or 15 minutes and then you're out the door. Sally really works with you, mining the text in that original audition. That's great because it allows you to play and be free. My first audition was the scene in which Jane is ten years old. Sally said, 'go for it'," explains Nadia during a break in rehearsals.
"There have been a few days where the magnitude of what the show is going to be for me has hit home. It's exciting and I really am relishing the challenge but emotionally and physically I have to pace myself and make sure I get enough sleep. I'm eating well, I'm 'juicing' like crazy, I'm running. Just really looking after myself.
"I don't leave the stage. I'm the only person on stage for the entirety of the show. All my costume changes are on stage. We're hoping it will be thrilling for the audience, but it's a bit like being an athlete in training. We have a movement director with us every day, a voice person, a composer, a fight director, Sally the director, and an assistant director. They're aware how taxing it is." [...]
Nadia has read Jane Eyre several times, first aged 14 when she "completely and utterly loved it". Her love of Shakespeare, drama and writing put her in the minority at school and she identified with Jane "and the idea of having a world in your head and making up stories". At 23, she read the book again and got even more out of it because of the richness of the language and the way Brontë shows the landscape, an important part and another character in the story.
Being Northern (from Lancashire) Nadia is aware of the responsibility to get the Yorkshire accent right, seeking vocal help from friends from the region. She knows how important the voice is as someone who won their first role in a school production at the age of five because "I had the loudest voice and was the smallest in the class".
Tim Delap also went through a rigorous audition process before being cast as Rochester. He'd heard "amazing things" of the production at Bristol Old Vic and later the National Theatre, but not had the chance to see it.
"It was the most rigorous audition process I've been through. It's such an ensemble show with movement and choral work as well as the big emotional scenes that Jane and Rochester have together. Rochester is quite a physical character so Sally just wanted to put me through my paces at the initial audition. I had two or three recalls, then we paired up with different Janes to see how we worked together. Nadia and I were chosen as the pair."
Tim also gets to play other characters and animals. "It's nice not having to focus on Rochester all the time, but come in playing a little brat, then playing a girl at the school and just being part of the ensemble. It's thrilling and a rollercoaster because it's non-stop. You're constantly playing different characters. It's unlike anything I've done before but thrilling." [...]
"Charlotte Brontë's voice is incredibly strong and unique and powerful. It's a brilliant feminist novel about equal rights and the show really puts that across well. Also the love story of Jane and Rochester is not your average love story. There is a real meeting of minds. He's this wealthy, very troubled landowner who has this dark secret and has treated his mentally ill wife in a very dubious way.
"Jane meets him and confronts him. She stands up to him and that changes him. It's a fascinating relationship. Jane doesn't want to get married for the sake of it. Actually she fights against marriage because she doesn't want to be a kept woman. The novel is modern in many ways."

Chichester Observer also has an article about the production.

The Washington Post has an article on how Christina Rossetti was ahead of her time in the dating game, at least when it came to writing poems about it.

It’s weird that a prickly old maid can describe us with such prescience and poignancy. But she did, and she’s not the only one. Emily Dickinson, Emily Brontë and Flannery O’Connor have all had their moments on the big or small screen since the start of the year. Our current world is different from theirs, but these secluded, single women can still speak so precisely and powerfully to our lives. (Nancy Ritter)

On the Oxford University Press Blog, Carol Dyhouse, author of Heartthrobs: A History of Women and Desire, discusses 'Heartthrobs and happy endings'.

We don’t lack literary heartthrob types who bring heartache rather than happy endings. Think of Heathcliff – an exemplar of dark passion, but full of brutality towards women and dogs. Emily Brontë makes Heathcliff himself sneer at Isabella as deluded for making him into a ‘hero of romance’, and for feeling soft-hearted about him. Or think of Charlotte Brontë’s Mr Rochester. A potential bigamist, who becomes eligible only when he’s nearly burned to death along with his mad wife. There’s a kind of happy ending, but Rochester’s injuries are serious, and Jane has to take on the heavy duties of carer, even though this gives her some kind of power over him.

NRJ (France) discusses set texts by women writers and considers Wuthering Heights an easy read for teenagers.

A l’inverse, il existe des auteures plus abordables, et dont l’importance dans la littérature n’est pas à remettre en cause. Elles sont aussi bien plus susceptibles de plaire aux adolescents. On peut par exemple citer Emily Brontë et Les Hauts de Hurlevent. . . (Translation)

Speaking of teenagers and Wuthering Heights, Tiroler Tageszeitung (Austria) reviews the film Siebzehn in which

Paula (Elisabeth Wabitsch) schickt an ihre Freunde ein Foto von einem Kuchen neben der DVD einer Verfilmung von Emily Brontës „Sturmhöh­e“ und schon kuschelt und weint man zu dritt in Paulas Bett über Cathys tragische Liebesgeschichte mit Heathcliff. (Translation)

The New York Times reviews Stéphane Brizé's film Une Vie, based on a novel by Guy de Maupassant, and finds that its protagonist

is at once a captive of cruel circumstances and a willful, intelligent human being. Her kinship with other 19th-century fictional heroines — Emma Bovary, Jane Eyre, Anna Karenina — is evident. She suffers, but she also reads, thinks and desires, and strives to find a zone of freedom within boundaries dictated by fate and society. (A.O. Scott)

Zeit Online (Germany) wonders whether sports and writing are compatible.

Die Wahrnehmung, dass Schriftstellerinnen falsch (nämlich zu verzärtelt und gebrechlich) auf die Welt gekommen sind, wurzelt übrigens im Viktorianismus, der Epoche, in welcher Männer den Sport als erlaubten Schutz vor Übergewicht und Langeweile entdeckten: Während man sich an Jane Austen oder die Brontë-Schwestern als im Siechtum Schreibende erinnert (und sie an Universitäten immer noch gerne als solche unterrichtet), ist Lord Byron trotz Klumpfuß der boxende Poet, der außerdem die Dardanellen durchschwommen hat. (Tijan Sila) (Translation)

Paste Magazine reviews the game Prey and finds nothing new under the sun:

On one hand, that fear of what is next feels very much like something in the vein of the Bioshock or Silent Hill franchises. That is to say that the way the game presented its partial information (and the revelation that it was partial) felt very familiar to me, a person who has played all of these games that are getting referenced. On the other hand, and this is the important one, all of those methods date back to 19th century novels like Jane Eyre and The Woman In White and 20th century films like Psycho and The Conversation. The history of the thriller and all of its information control is long and varied within every other medium, and the release of Prey might be the time to fully grab that genre term and wrangle it for the videogames world. (Cameron Kunzelman)

The Tablet finds an unexpected 'barometer of British political life' in Keighley and accompanies an article about it with this illustration:

Source

In recent years, the voters of Keighley have always elected an MP of the winning party so, given the latest polls, Labour’s man faces an uphill battle. But there are factors in his favour
Tucked away along the banks of the Pennine river Worth in the heart of Brontë country, Keighley is an unlikely barometer of British political life. Its stone chapels, Victorian terraces and old mills speak of socialism and Methodism, not the language of focus groups and spin doctors. But over many decades, “Keethli” (as it is pronounced) has sent an MP of the majority party to Westminster. Whoever wins here usually wins the country. (Paul Routledge)

La Vanguardia (Spain) tells about an initiative in Madrid through which locals can vote for the books they want to see in their libraries. Wuthering Heights is said to have been voted among other classics. Süddeutsche Zeitung (Germany) lists Charlotte Brontë among other authors mentioned in the works of writer Carlos Ruiz Zafón.