Othering Heights in progress

Some ways of celebrating Yorkshire Day in The Independent:

Get swept up in the romance of the Brontë Parsonage
Located high up on the west Yorkshire moors, the Brontë Parsonage was the original home of the prolific Brontë sisters and the place where they wrote their bestselling novels. 2018 marks the bicentenary of Emily Brontë’s birth and there are ongoing celebrations and exhibitions throughout the year to mark this special occasion. Don’t forget the Kate Bush soundtrack. (Joanna Whitehead)

A belated Emily Brontë celebration in Scroll.in:

Why I liked Emily Brontë’s distance from India (and why she might have an Indian connection)
On the 200th anniversary of the English novelist-poet’s birth, here’s what makes her work ‘Wuthering Heights’ special. (...)
[No Coward Soul is Mine]  hints at the influence of Indian thought, possibly filtered through the German poetry and fiction she read in Brussels where she spent a year learning French and German. The deep impression made on European authors by early translations of Kalidasa’s Shakuntala (or Abhijñānashākuntalam) and Buddhist and Hindu texts has been extensively analysed, but that analysis has not, to my knowledge, been extended to the Brontë sisters’ writings. No Coward Soul Is Mine is addressed to god but dismisses as “unutterably vain” the “thousand creeds that move men’s hearts”. It appears similar in spirit to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Brahma, composed a few years later, which explicitly derived its ideas from the Upanishads. Read No Coward Soul Is Mine, and draw your own conclusions about the nature of the god Emily Brontë worshipped. (Girish Shahane)

iNews on Lily Cole's Balls film:

Ms Cole said the film, which explores the links between foundlings and Heathcliff, the orphan anti-hero from Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, had made her reconsider the pressure society puts on women who do not feel they can care for a child, to have a termination. (...)
Ms Cole’s film was commissioned by the Brontë Parsonage Museum to mark the 200th anniversary of Emily Brontë’s birth, a decision that prompted one Brontë Society member to quit in protest that the celebration had been entrusted to a “model.”
Ms Cole said she hoped any sceptical Society members would reconsider after seeing her film. (Adam Sherwin)

The Arts Society interviews Patience Agbabi, writer in residence at the Brontë Parsonage Museum:

Agbabi’s reading of Brontë, too, takes root in the 21st century. ‘I’ve been doing a lot of work around the refugee crisis, and Wuthering Heights is the novel examining how we treat a being from another country.’ She refers to Heathcliff, literature’s consummate anti-hero, a foundling of indeterminate origin. ‘As a nation, do we welcome outsiders, or not? Cathy responds with empathy and compassion. Hindley doesn’t.’
Identity politics are central to the work in progress that Agbabi calls Othering Heights, a collection of poems, each one ‘sprung out of a certain phrase in the novel’, she says. ‘There’s this amazing bit where Nelly’s helping Heathcliff dress, saying how handsome he looks and then she says, “if you were a regular black” and goes on to guess his parentage. It’s incredibly poignant.’ The poet takes one of the book’s enduring skirls – the ‘let me in’ of the ghost at the window – and lets it bleed into the novel as a whole. ‘It’s also Heathcliff; he wants to be let in to the family. There are all sorts of issues there.’ (...)
What is her impression of Emily Brontë the woman? ‘Nowadays, we would classify her as autistic. She had an extreme aversion to the public, she was obsessive, she was very into her routine – on the morning she died she still wanted to feed the animals.’

Still some Emily Brontë bicentenary tidbits: La República (Perú), 海都资讯网 (Taiwan), Patty Smith's Instagram, Haworth Church Facebook... And some pictures. The Brontë Stones Facebook page publishes pictures unveiling Emily Brontë's stone and the Italian Section of the Brontë Society posts pictures of the recent bicentenary events here and here.

Refinery 29's picks entertainment and culture picks for August includes:

Making Thunder Roar: Emily Brontë, Brontë Parsonage Museum, until 1st January 2019
Boy do I love those Brontë sisters, what with their brooding characters, literary melodrama and evocation of the wild moors of Yorkshire. If you haven’t visited the family’s scenic parsonage in Haworth, make the pilgrimage for the host of events taking place for Emily Brontë’s bicentenary.  (Georgia Murray)

Emma Clayton in The Telegraph & Argus:

This week saw milestones for two extraordinary women. Monday was the 200th anniversary of Emily Brontë's birth, and the day Kate Bush turned 60.
I was 10 when I saw Kate Bush perform Wuthering Heights on Top of the Pops, wide-eyed and windswept, like Cathy's ghost. I was later captivated by Emily Bronte's haunting, complex novel.
Kate's recently-unveiled tribute to Emily, carved into a moorland stone near Haworth, leaves their remarkable legacies forever entwined.

The sign of the times. Charlotte Brontë as a 'flirty instagram caption For Your Innocent Heartbreaker Snaps'. On Elite Daily:

Flirting is a woman’s trade, one must keep in practice.

You know... the problem is that that is not by Charlotte Brontë. As we have said before:

The quote seems to actually come from the Jane Austen biopic Becoming Jane where it is uttered by Eliza de Feuillide

Things that any Yorkshire lad should probably have done in The Huddersfield Daily Examiner:

Visited somewhere with a connection to the Brontë sisters. (Samantha Gildea)

Reader's Digest on things only sisters understand:

Even if you feel in competition with your sister, you ironically also burst with major pride when she achieves one of her goals. Like the Brontë sisters, all three of whom were successful writers, you support each other and push each other along in your pursuits. Seeing your sister in a school play, getting her college diploma, or landing a great job, you can’t help but cheer her on. (Tina Donvito) 

The Spectator reviews People in the Room by Norah Lange:

People in the Room is set in the early 20th century in the affluent Buenos Aires neighbourhood of Belgrano, where the author lived as a child. The idea came to her when she first saw the triple portrait of the Brontë sisters that originally included the artist, their brother Branwell, who then painted himself out, leaving a blurred shape on the canvas. A fitting inspiration for a narrative where shadowy characters reveal only fragments of their lives, seen always through the eyes of the 17-year-old spy. (Lee Langley)

Also in The Spectator, a review of Orphans: A History by Jeremy Seabrook:

Orphans are everywhere in literature — Jane Eyre, Heathcliff, Oliver Twist, Daniel Deronda, and onwards to the present day. (Philip Hensher)

The Mary Sue Book Club's August picks:

The Victorian and the Romantic: A Memoir, a Love Story, and a Friendship Across Time by Nell Stevens
 In 1857, English novelist Elizabeth Gaskell completed her most famous work: the biography of her dear friend Charlotte Brontë. As publication loomed, Mrs. Gaskell was keen to escape the reviews. So, leaving her dull minister husband and dreary provincial city behind, she set off with her daughters to Rome. There she met a dazzling group of artists and writers, among them the American critic Charles Eliot Norton. Seventeen years her junior, Norton was her one true love. They could not be together—it would be an unthinkable breach of convention—but by his side and amidst that splendid circle, Mrs. Gaskell knew she had reached the “tip-top point of [her] life.” (Princess Weekes)

The Times and a German study about the sex lives of Germans:

 While heartthrobs of fiction from Heathcliff to Christian Grey are known for their impulsive behaviour, women get greater real-life satisfaction from a man who is “efficient and organised”, with a sense of Pflicht, or duty, according to German researchers. (Mark Bridge)

God is in the TV talks about the singer Nanna Bryndís Hilmarsdóttir:

Actually, ‘Particles’ was recorded in week #6 of Ólafur [Arnalds]’s sojourns and if I understand it correctly it was in one of the two lighthouses in the tiny community of Garður on the tip of the wind and Atlantic Ocean-battered Reykjanes Peninsula, which just happens to be Nanna’s hometown. I visited it once. If a place can be “romantically isolated”, it is. You half expect Heathcliff and Catherine to walk past at any moment. And that isolation tells me a lot about her writing style and content.  (David Bentley)

The New York Review of Books interviews the writer Marlon James:

 Joshua Jelly-Schapiro: We listened here last night to Jamaica Kincaid talk about the impact Jane Eyre had on her as a young woman—how as a schoolgirl growing up on the small island of Antigua in the 1950s and 1960s, Charlotte Bronte’s novel set her on her way to becoming a writer. You grew up in Jamaica a couple of decades later. What were the Jane Eyres for you?Marlon James: Well, there were a few Jane Eyres—one of them, certainly, was Pride and Prejudice. Pride and Prejudice is not the first great book I read, but it was the first great book I read that felt like a great lit teacher. I remember my actual lit teacher then, Mr. Bryan, walked into our class and said, “It’s a sad day for me, because I get to watch you all experience something for the first time that I have experienced millions of times, which is to read the greatest book ever. This book,” he said, “is even better than D.H. Lawrence.” Which is the perfect thing to say to teenage boys. And it was Pride and Prejudice.

La Repubblica (Italy) vindicates the figure of Jane Eyre as a feminist pioneer:

l riscatto di Jane Eyre in un mondo di soli maschi
La serie / L'istitutrice Eyre di Charlotte Brontë, ma anche Moll Flanders di Defoe e Tess di Hardy. Ecco chi sono le prime eroine della letteratura moderna che rivoluzionano la tradizione e sfidano i pregiudizi. Ancora oggi
Jane Eyre è un'orfana affidata a una zia che la odia, così come la odiano le due cugine e il cugino; quotidianamente vessata, reagisce con una composta dignità, dovuta non tanto alla rassegnazione quanto a un senso tutto estetico del decoro. Così, per un verso, non si lamenta; per l'altro, non esita a dire alla zia quel che pensa di lei e dei suoi figli. (Michele Mari) (Translation)

LiberLibelula (in Spanish) vlogs about Wuthering Heights, El Punt Avui (in Catalan) continues reading Wuthering Heights, Rachel Sutcliffe posts about Anne Brontë and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. AnneBronte.org posts about Yorkshire Day and Brontë birthplaces.

Finally, some pictures. The Brontë Stones Facebook page publishes pictures unveiling Emily Brontë's stone and