The definition of essential reading

The Times has now published a correction of the article from earlier this week.

June 21, 2018
We said in a caption that an official inventory had listed items entrusted to the Brontë Museum as “missing” (News, June 18). In fact, as the accompanying article made clear, the items were listed as “not seen”. We apologise for the error.

Keighley News highlights the Wings of Desire exhibition at the Brontë Parsonage Museum and other events taking place for Emily's bicentenary celebrations.

Birthday celebrations for Emily Brontë are really taking flight as the Parsonage Museum prepares for a second packed six months of activities.
The Haworth museum recently launched its Wings of Desire exhibition, which will run until July 23, and is free with admission to the museum.
And on the Brontë Society website it has released details of the next few events coming up before the end of the summer.
Keighley Central ward councillor Cllr Zafar Ali, the Lord Mayor of Bradford, was among guests during the launch of Wings of Desire this month.
Artist Kate Whiteford has produced new work inspired by the merlin hawk that Wuthering Heights author Emily nursed back to health in the mid-19th-century.
Kate, who specialises in land art, has combined film, poetry, music and paintings, and created a centrepiece film featuring footage of birds of prey in flight, the local landscape, and a birds-eye view of the flight to Top Withins.
The soundtrack includes Chloe Pirrie, who played Emily in 2016 Bronte biopic To Walk Invisible, reading from Emily’s poem The Caged Bird, and music from folk group The Unthanks.
The film can be seen in the Bronte Parsonage Museum, where there will also be Kate’s framed watercolour pictures inspired by Aerial Archaeology photographs of the Yorkshire Dales.
In the exhibition Whiteford meditates upon the iconography of the bird of prey, its metaphorical properties and associations with fight and flight, escape and predation. [...]
Birds that feature in the film will return to the Brontë Parsonage Museum on July 29, for another day of displays and handling by experts from SMJ Falconry.
Visitors can witness the beauty of hawks and other birds of prey in flight above the meadow behind the museum, from noon to 4pm.
The Brontë Parsonage Museum will continue its monthly talks on Tuesdays at 11am and 2pm, and the next one on July 3 will be entitled My Dungeon Bars.
A spokesman said: “Emily Bronte rarely left her native Yorkshire and when she did, it was with reluctance.
“This talk looks at the few experiences Emily had in the world at large and explores the idea that for her, home represented freedom, and her ‘dungeon bars’ were the constraint and alienation she felt when she was away.”
The talk is free with admission to the museum.
The Brontë Society is teaming up with Bradford Literature Festival to present a special event in Haworth on July 8 from 4pm to 5.30pm.
Renowned poet Jackie Kay will return to the village to celebrate the unveiling of her work commemorating Anne Bronte, specially commissioned by the festival, as part of the Bronte Stones project.
Jackie will read her work in Parson’s Field behind the Parsonage, where the Anne Stone is sited, then afterwards in the nearby Old School Room. She will team up with journalist and broadcaster Samira Ahmed to explore her inspiration, her work, and her affinity with Anne Brontë. [...]
Journalist and broadcaster Samira Ahmed presents Front Row on Radio 4 and Newswatch on BBC1, and is a visiting professor of Journalism at Kingston University.
She made a special Front Row about the Brontës on location in Haworth, and while reading English at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, her undergraduate thesis covered the portrayal of property and marriage in Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. [...]
Melanie Abrahams, this year’s guest curator at the Bronte Parsonage Museum, will lead a walk along Bronte pathways and moorlands on July 23.
She will be joined by guest speakers and artists John Agard, Sarala Estruch and Joe Williams, and local writer Tamar Yellin, as well as members of the public.
During a ‘walk of life’, inviting contemplation, reflection, and philosophical musings, they will be able to hear unfolding narratives, alternative stories and flights of fancy along both well-trodden paths, and lesser known routes. [...]
Until August 31, visitors to the museum can see one of the National Portrait Gallery’s most important pictures back in its original home.
The only known surviving portrait of Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë together was painted by their brother Branwell in 1834 and is known as the ‘pillar portrait’ because of the central column Branwell added to obscure his own figure. (David Knights)

The Art Newspaper is looking forward to seeing Lily Cole's film Balls, her contribution to Emily's bicentenary.

Is there no end to Lily Cole’s talents? The supermodel, actress and activist has co-written and directed a short film to mark the 200th anniversary of Emily Brontë’s birth. Balls, which will be shown at the Foundling Museum in London and the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, Yorkshire (31 July-2 December), reflects on the progress of women’s rights over the past 200 years. The film explores the links between the story of the Foundling Hospital, the UK’s first children’s charity, and Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights. Cole was awarded the Foundling Fellowship, alongside the artist Bob and Roberta Smith, in 2016.

The Star features the Great Exhibition of the North.

Organisers have tried to offer something for everybody. People can see Stephenson’s Rocket, which is making a visit ‘home’, John Lennon’s piano and Emily Brontë’s writing desk. (Richard Blackledge)

New Statesman celebrates 20 years of the British Library at its main building in St Pancras.

What most people know about the British Library is that we collect a copy of every book, magazine, newspaper and website published in the UK. We are also one of the great world libraries: our collections include almost every written language, and range from 3,000-year-old Chinese oracle bones to cutting-edge scientific research.  We now try to share our collections and knowledge with audiences internationally, building relationships and sharing expertise. Most recently, we loaned a selection of our greatest literary treasures to institutions in three Chinese cities, where the appetite for British culture is astonishing.
The fair copy manuscript of Jane Eyre – displayed at the concluding chapter, with its famous line, “Reader, I married him” – attracted enormous interest from both visitors and journalists in Shanghai. Jian Ai, as it is known in Mandarin, is read by many at school, and re-read later in life as affectionately as it is by English-speaking readers.
Such encounters reinforce the message – vital in the post-Brexit landscape – that the UK has an offer that is hugely attractive to Chinese audiences, across literature, culture, tourism and higher education. But if we are to grow into a world leader in the soft power stakes, careful but generous investment will be necessary. Our China project is supported by £1.6m of funding from the Treasury; such visionary support enables us to be more ambitious and target new audiences around the world. (Tessa Blackstone)

Bustle recommends My Plain Jane by Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton, and Jodi Meadows and shares an excerpt from it.

My Plain Jane centers on Charlotte Brontë's titular, fictional heroine, but this is definitely not the story you know and love from the original novel. Instead, the trio of authors bring their super-fun, tongue-in-cheek style to a madcap, Gothic ghost story (and yes, it has their witty commentary, just like in book one).
Now, aspiring author Charlotte Brontë is friends with Jane Eyre, who can see ghosts. Charlotte pushes Jane to take a job at the Society for the Relocation of Wayward Spirits, but Jane has fallen for the patriarch of Thornfield Hall, Mr. Rochester, and doesn't want to leave. (And don't worry, some of Rochester's more sexist habits get their ribbing—via a ghost that almost no one can see or hear, but still.) Add in supernatural investigator Alexander Blackwood, and you've got a supernatural adventure that clearly pays homage and respect to Jane Eyre, but isn't afraid to poke a little fun at it, either. (Caitlin White)

Alexa Loves eBooks also posts about the book.

Lucy Mangan reviews Sally Bayley's memoir Girl with Dove for The Spectator:

Bayley retreats into books in a way even the most intensely bookwormish have surely rarely managed. [...]
Later, characters such as Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, Jane Eyre (who else are you going to identify with when you have a madwoman upstairs in your home?) and Betsey Trotwood become as virtually living beings to her and she slips in and out of their stories and imagined thoughts in life and in the book. The voice and experiences of young Sally slide in and out of that of the Red Room’s suffering inmate, various mysteries in St Mary Mead and David Copperfield’s travails (unless he merges with one of the many other Davids, aside from the missing infant, that pepper the book) until the whole thing takes on a distinctly hallucinatory quality. It makes for a brilliant evocation of the porousness for children between reality and fiction; but in the absence of any factual footholds elsewhere, it makes judgment and orientation impossible.

My Domaine recommends '12 Books to Read in Your 30s (They're Life-Changing)':

Charolette [SIC] Brontë Jane Eyre
Featuring one of literature's most compelling protagonists, this classic is the definition of essential reading. (Megan Beauchamp)

The Penguin Classics editor suggests books for the summer holidays, including:

A Room of One's Own
Virginia Woolf
Woolf delivered two lectures at Cambridge University in 1928, under the title ‘Women and Fiction’. From these she developed A Room of One’s Own, an iconic extended essay that ranges through the history of literature, discussing Aphra Behn, Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and Judith, Shakespeare’s imaginary sister. Woolf famously concludes that ‘a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.’ Hermione Lee called it ‘probably the most influential piece of non-fictional writing by a woman in this century.’ (Henry Eliot)