Not bizarre, but independent

Rita Cipriano has written a long article about Emily Brontë on her 200th anniversary, heavily based on Clare O'Callaghan's Emily Brontë Reappraised. From the Portuguese newspaper Observador.

Teimosa, com um espírito indomável e antissocial: há 200 anos que Emily Brontë é considerada a mais estranha das "três irmãs estranhas". Uma nova biografia mostra-a como uma mulher à frente do tempo. (...)
Em Emily Brontë Reappraised, O’Callaghan tentou separar o trigo do joio, a verdade das muitas possíveis mentiras. E mais do que isso, tentou perceber se a poetiza e romancista de Yorkshire foi de facto “um mistério no seu próprio tempo”, ou se essa aura misteriosa, que persiste até aos dias de hoje, se deve simplesmente ao facto de ter sido “uma mulher à frente do seu tempo”, que os seus contemporâneos tinham dificuldade em entender. Talvez agora, em pleno século XXI e à luz da “cultura contemporânea”, seja finalmente possível saber quem foi Emily Brontë. É isso que a biografa espera ter ajudado a fazer. (...)
Nesse sentido, a professora de literatura inglesa espera que Emily Brontë Reappraised inspire uma nova abordagem da vida da autora de Yorkshire, e que “os leitores se sintam inclinados a pensar em abordar Emily de uma forma mais empática. Ela, como todos os seres humanos, não era perfeita, mas não era a eremita irada em que foi transformada. Não ouvimos o suficiente sobre outros traços seus e qualidades — o seu lado carinhoso, em particular –, por isso espero que comecem a olhar para ela de uma forma mais redonda”. Está na altura de Emily sair a sombra das irmãs, menos “estranhas” do que ela. (Translation)

The Herald reviews the novel The Light in the Dark by Horatio Clare:

His eagerness to connect with the past can sometimes seem tenuous or desperate, as when he pounces on the fact that porridge is something Europeans have eaten since the Palaeolithic, or imagines that a February afternoon indoors in Yorkshire probably resembles a typical winter day for the Brontë sisters. (Alastair Mabbott)

Michelle A'Court in The Stuff (New Zealand):

I am a newly minted fan of Mary Taylor. She arrived in Aotearoa in 1845, did a little cattle trading, opened a draper's store, and wrote a bunch of letters home to her old friend, Charlotte Brontë.

The postcolonial contradictions of Jane Eyre on DNA (India):

“What it was, whether beast or human being, one could not, at first sight, tell: it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal: but it was covered with clothing, and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane...”
This skulking monster is not from a horror story, but from the good old Victorian classic Jane Eyre. The hideous creature is the wife of mixed blood from the West Indies, kept hidden by the saturnine Rochester, who courts virginal governess Jane. Jane is plain and poor, but belongs to the “pure” white race.
In schools across Commonwealth countries Jane Eyre was taught as a revolutionary text. Author Charlotte Brontë, as also sisters Emily and Anne, dared to publish their novels under a male pseudonym, in an age which saw women only as homemakers.
It needed Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar to publish their Mad Woman in the Attic (1979), for us to realise that the discordant notes in Jane Eyre are not the screams of the mad woman. Driven to insanity by solitary confinement in a cold, alien land, Bertha jumps from the top floor — a relief to her husband — as to the empathising reader. How ironical that generations of students in colonised lands were taught to scorn a woman for not belonging to the “right” race! (Gowri Ramnarayan) 

The Times interviews the writer Paraic O'Donnell:

At school he got into the classics, citing the novels of George Eliot and Jane Austen. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre was an obvious early influence; Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials and John Milton also get a mention. “But my formative years were wildly eclectic, and trashy in a way, and I would never change that,” he says. “I think it’s really valuable and I continue to read in that way, across genres.” (Eithne Shortall)

ABC (Spain) explores the life and work of Balthus:

Cree Guillermo Solana, director artístico del Museo Thyssen, que Balthus «era un fabulador nato. Decía que no fue un pintor erótico y cada uno de sus cuadros destila erotismo. Extrae un placer perverso negando la evidencia. Fabuló sobre su propia vida. Insistía en que desciendía de la nobleza polaca. No es cierto. Adopta un título de conde inventado y desmentía que su madre fuera judía». Llegó a decir que era primo de los Romanov e incluso sobrino-nieto de Lord Byron. Balthus es la reencarnación viva de Heathcliff, el protagonista de «Cumbres borrascosas». Si metes en una batidora la novela de Emliy Brontë con «Alicia en el País de las Maravillas», de Lewis Carroll, y cuentos como el cruel «Pedro Melenas», saldrían las pinturas de Balthus. (Natividad Pulido) (Translation)

Rodrigo Fresán writes about the Coen Brothers in El Tiempo (Colombia):

A Heathcliff como el forastero que retorna a Cumbres borrascosas para vengarse y reclamar lo que considera suyo. (Translation)

Cannonballread10 posts about the Thandie Newton Jane Eyre audiobook;  Howling Libraries reviews among others the recent Manga version of Jane Eyre; The Once Lost Wanderer talks about Wuthering Heights.