Linen Crimpers and Bluebells

This month's Chapter & Verse article in Keighley News reports the upcoming events at the Parsonage:

Spring has finally arrived – and we’ve even had an early blast of summer!
We are getting incredibly busy at the museum, with a series of upcoming events, and our events programme for the second half of the year will appear in a couple of weeks.
We are delighted to welcome 2017 Man Booker shortlisted author Fiona Mozley to Haworth on Saturday May 5.
Fiona’s debut novel, Elmet, is rooted strongly within Yorkshire and her depiction of landscape, and the presence of a protagonist named Cathy, have drawn comparisons with Wuthering Heights.
So join us at Hall Green Baptist Church in Haworth at 2.30pm to hear Fiona talk about her ‘rural noir’. Tickets cost between £7 and £2.
We are taking part once again in the national initiative Museums at Night this month, with a late night Thursday opening which allows you to learn more about the day-to-day domestic life of the Brontës.
We have some strange domestic objects in our collection – a linen crimper that looks like a modern day pasta maker! – and during the evening our museum assistants will be getting ‘hands on’ in our historic rooms, in order to allow you a closer look and the opportunity to find out exactly what some of the objects were used for, and how we care for them now.
After 5.30pm, admission is free to visitors who can provide proof of residence in the BD22, BD21 and BD20 postcode areas, or people living in Thornton, and we are open until 8pm.
The weekend of May 19 and 20 is Haworth’s 1940s weekend, and so we’ve decided to screen a 1940s Hollywood biopic of the Brontës, which is called Devotion.
It is not a terribly well known film, but this retelling of the Brontës’ life story features Olivia de Havilland, Ida Lupino and Paul Henreid, and has been described as ‘better as cinema as history’.
Come along and see if you agree! The film screening is free with admission to the museum.
On the following Friday, May 25, a new exhibition opens in the museum – this will be Kate Whiteford’s Wings of Desire.
Kate is a land artist, and her exhibition explores Emily Brontë’s hawk, Nero, through film and aerial photography, depicting a bird’s-eye view of the landscape around the Parsonage and across the moors to Top Withins.
The exhibition runs until July 23, and promises to be a fascinating addition to the Emily celebrations.
And we continue with the theme of Emily’s hawk over the weekend as we welcome Oxenhope-based SMJ Falconry to our museum meadow, Parson’s Field, on Sunday May 27.
Come along between 10am and 4pm to witness flying displays with a variety of incredible birds, including the tiny Merlin hawk similar to Emily’s Nero, peregrine falcons and a red kite. The birds of prey display is free with admission to the museum.
And to conclude with the bird theme, our May half term Wild Wednesday workshop on May 30 is called ‘Flights of Fancy’. Be inspired by Emily and her love of birds, and make your own lovely bird out of paper – with wings to boot! (Jim Seton, Diane Fare)

 The Guardian explores the Cumbria moors. And moors, you know, are Brontë territory:

Moors do much to their observers without much to do it with. No trees. High, stream-veined upland with bones of rock breaking the skin in steps. It’s bare. Bleak, if you like. Associations run deep and dark as the peat. Brontë, bog-body, Baskerville, Brady – the mind’s grasping associations fill all that vacant space. (Simon Ingram)

Also in The Guardian:

Academics, booksellers and publishers curated a list of the “Top 10 books by women that changed theworld”, which was voted on by members of the public. Titles on the list range from Eddo-Lodge’s polemic on race to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl. [Reni] Eddo-Lodge’s book, which won the the Jhalak prize for the best book by a British writer of colour, received 12% of the public vote.
Other books on the list included Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, was conducted for Academic book week. (Alison Flood)

Yorkshire Post on the tourism in the Dales:

It is hard to put a figure on how much hard cash next weekend’s Tour de Yorkshire is worth to our economy, but the travelogue-like pictures of the county at its best, on screen around the world, year in, year out, are creating a familiarity with the county that did not exist before. The region’s increasing use as a movie location also creates imagery that sticks in the mind. But it has to be the right movie. The Railway Children was filmed on the steam line through Haworth and Oakworth nearly 40 years ago, but its lasting appeal, and that of the valley’s most famous residents, the Brontë family, has created a tourist economy that endures today. (David Behrens)

Lincolnshire Live recommends The CB Inn, in the Yorkshire Dales:

It has the Wuthering Heights-style scenery, for a start - although Bronte hometown Haworth is about sixty miles away.
In fact, that geographical fact is important - it actually feels sixty miles grimmer and more isolated even than the desolate country around Haworth. God only knows what Wuthering Heights would have been like if it had been set here. (Robert Rowlands)

Financial Times reviews the novel All the Beautiful Girls by Elizabeth J Church

Church’s heroine, Lily Decker, is orphaned at the age of eight in Kansas, after a car crash in which her beloved mother, father and sister are all killed. Wards with harsh or evil guardians are legion in fiction, and Lily’s Aunt Tate and Uncle Miles, who take her in, are as bad as anyone Jane Eyre or Oliver Twist encounter. (Susie Boyt)

Radio Times interviews the new BBC2 Front Row Late presenter, Mary Beard:

And then there’s the library. “I’m afraid this sounds frightfully old-ladyish. I read Jane Eyre again, which I first read when I was 12.” (Michael Hodges)

Bustle and books according to your favourite podcast:

For fans of literary podcasts: 'Texts from Jane Eyre: And Other Conversations with Your Favorite Literary Characters' by Daniel Mallory Ortberg
Book-lovers are probably already familiar with bookish podcasts such as Reading Women or Overdue. And if you want a book that mashes up classic literature with conversational dialogue and smart phone technology, then Texts from Jane Eyre is the book for you. Written by the brilliant Daniel Mallory Ortberg (of Dear Prudence fame), this book is a clever, strange, hilarious tour of all your literary faves. (Charlotte Ahlin)

The Australian reviews The War on the Young by John Sutherland:

Sutherland’s mainstream books on English literature —such as Is Heathcliff a Murderer? and Can Jane Eyre be Happy? — have won him a sizeable readership. The War on the Young is his second polemic in Biteback’s “Provocations” ­series. The first, The War on the Old, argues ‘‘institutional neglect and universal indifference’’ towards the aged has reached lethal ­levels. (Richard King)

The Asian Age loves comics:

Comics, I suspect, are still seen by people as being not quite the thing, old chap. To these people I say, “Go away”. Go away, and take your barren, strait-laced pleasures with you. There is a time for Jane Eyre and a time for Hawkgirl: comics are far too pleasurable to be sullied by the vapidity of a bunch of sanctimonious puritans. (Meher Mirza)

Libreriamo (Italy) lists novels for being proud of being a woman:

Jane Eyre
Jane Eyre è  la protagonista dell’omonimo romanzo di Charlotte Brontë.  Jane è una donna forte e decisa, caratteristiche che si vedono fin dalla sua infanzia: la sua forza e decisione, nonostante un’infanzia per niente facile, sono descritte in tutto il romanzo. Diversamente dalle favole, in cui la dama viene salvata dal principe azzurro, qui Jane lotta da sola per la sua vita e la sua felicità. (Translation) 

Librópatas (Spain) talks about 'bibliophile detectives in crime novels':

Thursday Next. En este caso se trata de una detective que trabaja en el departamento dedicado a los crímenes literarios (que suena de los más sugerente, sí) y después se pasará a la policía de la ficción (o Jurisficción) para asegurarse de que la trama de los libros no sufra alteraciones significativas. Lo cual ya nos permite hacernos una idea de cómo es el mundo de las novelas de Jasper Fforde; uno de ciencia ficción en el que la frontera entre realidad y literatura es muy fina, y en el que encontramos títulos como ‘El caso Jane Eyre‘, ‘El pozo de las tramas perdidas’ o ‘Algo huele a podrido’.

Still echoes of the unveiling of the Brontë Stones project with Kate Bush being the main news attractor: Lonely Planet, Keighley News, Keighley Online, Far Out Magazine, Star Magazine, The Current, Oxford Mail, It's Nice That, i-D...

Mishal Husain quotes Emily Brontë's The Bluebell in BBC Radio 4 Today (around 1:27 h). LILBooKlovers reviews Brightly Burning by Alexa Donne. Książkowir (in Polish) reviews Jane Eyre.