Genius born of hardship and rock

Being (or not) defined by your gender in The Sydney Morning Herald:

In the 19th century, when women were not allowed to go to university, or have a career and remain respectable, they developed strategies in order to be taken seriously. The Brontë sisters, Charlotte, Emily and Anne, first published their writings under the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, and Mary Anne Evans is better known to this day as George Eliot. Only when their success was established did they reveal their gender. Another strategy, still employed today, is to only use one's initials, like J.K. Rowling. (Maureen Matthews)

100 places where the past seems to linger on The Sunday Times:

72. The Brontë Parsonage, Haworth, West Yorkshire. 1820: Home of the Brontë sisters, genius born of hardship and rock.

Cary Fukunaga's works in The Stuff:

Fukunaga is eager to point out he wasn't the first filmmaker to direct an entire series - he cites Tom Hooper's John Adams as an earlier example. But having endured the painful process of reducing Jane Eyre into a two-hour feature, he craves a larger canvas.
"I love David Lean's films, and larger epics just don't have a place anymore in cinemas," he says. (Meredith Blake)

The Guardian reviews the audio drama Get Carter:

Audio fiction is a day-to-day job at the BBC, of course, and thus can be rather mundane. So I was pleasantly surprised by last week’s 15 Minute Drama: five dramatic interpretations of Angela Carter’s feminist fairytales. This is tricky stuff to put on radio. Carter is so literary and dramatic that an audio version can easily collapse into ridiculousness. But these dramas are made by Olivia Hetreed, who wrote the wonderful screenplay for Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights, and they are fantastic: atmospheric, scary, gripping, wild. Perhaps I’m not such a stick-in-the-mud after all. (Miranda Sawyer)

Doppiozero (Italy) is all about loving chestnuts. Quoting Jane Eyre, of course:

Dicevamo degli inglesi che ne hanno presto capito e goduto i pregi; nella loro letteratura alberi e fiori han sempre un posto di riguardo. L’ippocastano ha il suo nel romanzo di Charlotte Brontë Jane Eyre: è sulla panca circolare sotto l’ippocastano gigante del parco della tenuta di Thornfield che Jane e Mr Rochester si siedono per il colloquio che si crede d’addio e sfocia, invece, in una dichiarazione d’amore. Ma i segreti di Mr Rochester incombono sulle volontà e sui desideri di entrambi, e l’albero scelto come testimone di fede promessa diviene annuncio di una separazione e di una rovina prossima, di un amore che va purificato con un fuoco che non sarà quello della passione. (Angela Borghesi) (Translation)

Our Daily Bread opens an article with a Wuthering Heights (via Joseph) quote. Head to Head, Heart to Heart talks about Charlotte Brontë's responses to critiques as a writer; Redgal Musings reviews My Plain Jane; the Brontë Babe Blog reviews Charlotte Brontë's Emma.