The cry of a newborn baby

Official London Theatre asks music-related questions to part of the cast and band of Sally Cookson's Jane Eyre:

The National Theatre are currently presenting Jane Eyre in uniquely acclaimed fashion, with Sally Cookson’s popular adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s masterpiece set to a wide range of musical arrangements - including a surprising cover version or two.
But what do the cast and band members themselves listen to to get into performance mode? We posed our Playlists challenge to Melanie Marshall, the superb vocalist who plays Bertha in the show, and the band behind the music: Matt, Alex and Dave (who themselves have their own band [called Branwell]).
Based on everything from first public performances to guilty pleasures, their stories, told through music as like Jane Eyre's, are fascinating. (Robin Johnson)

While My Theatre Mates highlights a quote from Sally Cookson's Jane Eyre text:

“A drone. The musicians and ensemble enter and take positions around the stage. Jane enters alone, walks along the gantry and down the ramp on to the stage. She makes the cry of a newborn baby.” – Sally Cookson’s Jane Eyre

LitHub shares part of the introduction to Emily Midorikawa and Emma Sweeney's book A Secret Sisterhood: The Literary Friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf.

But while these male duos have gone down in history, the world’s most celebrated female authors are mythologized as solitary eccentrics or isolated geniuses. The Jane Austen of popular imagination is a genteel spinster, modestly covering her manuscript with blotting paper when anyone enters the room. Charlotte Brontë is cast as one of three long-suffering sisters, scribbling away in a drafty parsonage on the edge of the windswept moors. George Eliot is remembered as an aloof intellectual who shunned conventional Victorian ladies. And Virginia Woolf haunts the collective memory as a depressive, loading her pockets with stones before stepping into the River Ouse. [...]
Like her predecessor Jane, Charlotte Brontё is rarely imagined outside her apparently narrow world—in her case, the Yorkshire village where she dwelt with her literary siblings. But we’d learn that she enjoyed a lively friendship with the pioneering feminist writer Mary Taylor, whom she had met at boarding school in 1831. From frictions during these early days, to daring adventures abroad as young women, to a shock announcement from Mary, these two weathered many storms. Their relationship paints a picture of two courageous individuals, groping to find a space for themselves in the rapidly changing Victorian world.
As in the case of Jane Austen and Anne Sharp, surviving correspondence between Charlotte and Mary is similarly limited. Frustratingly, in this case Mary was the one who destroyed almost all missives from her friend “in a fit of caution,”[i] to protect the women’s reputations. But mentions of Mary litter Charlotte’s wider communications, and that of other individuals close to this pair. And when, after the death of Charlotte, another literary friend, Elizabeth Gaskell, was working on the first biography of the famous novelist, Mary sent her pages of recollections. It was Mary’s hope that The Life of Charlotte Brontё could become a vehicle for her own anger at the social restrictions she felt had held Charlotte back throughout her life. But to the forward-thinking Mary’s dismay, Elizabeth, mindful of Victorian notions of propriety, instead portrayed Charlotte as a compliant, saintly figure who suffered her many hardships with acceptance. Stung by the experience, Mary often refused to cooperate with the requests of future biographers. This reticence allowed a more socially acceptable, but less fully-rounded image of Charlotte to emerge. Meanwhile the importance of Mary’s influence on Charlotte’s writing has been allowed to slip away—something that our exploration of their friendship has tried to address.

The Washington Post has a selection of 'Ghastly Halloween gifts for the literary witch or warlock in your life' including

Literary Witches (Seal, $20). It’s an enchanted anthology of 30 great female writers — from Anais Nin to Zora Neale Hurston. Each one is captured in a folkloric illustration by Katy Horan and then, on the facing page, illuminated with a bewitching description by Taisia Kitaiskaia.
These mini biographies — “the hexen text” — are more witchopedia than wikipedia. Kitaiskaia boils each writer down to three invocations, weaving historical facts with her own surreal visions. Emily Brontë, for instance, “Watcher of the Moors, Fantasy, and Cruel Romance,” “makes a telescope from ice and twine. Though this tunnel, she stares into her own eye until she sees a galaxy, and through the galaxy until she sees a stranger’s eye.” (Ron Charles)

The Daily Mail reviews the book on Daphne Du Maurier Manderley Forever by Tatiana de Rosnay.

As soon as Daphne could decipher the alphabet, she read voraciously, from Peter Rabbit to the Romantic poets and the novels of her paternal grandfather, artist, writer and Paris-dweller, George du Maurier. Dickens, Scott, Wilde and the Brontës followed. Then her ultimate writer’s pash — Katherine Mansfield. (Ginny Dougary)

There's a new definition of Gothic in The Globe and Mail:

Although many of Mr. Schott's pieces are classically elegant – the dining table is a glass ovoid on a pearly white base – there is another impulse at work: the gothic. Not "gothic" like Wuthering Heights or eighties teen culture, but gothic in our moment, the era of Rick Owens, Kanye West and Blade Runner 2049. Think: macho, grotesque, seductive. (Simon Lewsen)

The Los Angeles Review of Books' blog Avidly discusses 'Heathcliff's Amours' and is an article well worth reading. Writergurlny features Linton Heathcliff. Books N Me posts about Jane Eyre.