Emily’s ghost was quietly approving

Northern Soul reviews the performance of The Unthanks' Emily Brontë Song Cycle at  Leeds Town Hall.

An opening piece of audio instantly transports the audience to 19th century Haworth. Rooks wheeling overhead, the slam of the parsonage front door and the sound of hurried footsteps to the backdrop of a ticking clock that Reverend Brontë no doubt inspected daily for its accuracy.
What followed was an atmospheric and haunting musical re-working of some of Emily’s poetry, hand-picked by The Unthanks. The melancholic theme of much of Emily’s work dovetailed perfectly with the ‘other-worldly’ vocals of Rachel and Becky. The sound created by the two, with Adrian at piano, bored into the soul. It’s not too much of a stretch of the imagination to say that as She Dried Her Tears and They Did Smile drifted across the heads of those assembled, Emily’s ghost was sitting, quietly approving, in a corner of the Town Hall. (Colin Petch)

Still locally, Leeds List recommends '7 Undeniably Awesome Waterfall Walks in Yorkshire' including

The Haworth Circular
Not only is The Haworth Circular packed full of history, but it’s also one of the best waterfall walks in Yorkshire. From Haworth Moor to Penistone Hill Country Park and Top Withens, you’ll go on a 7-mile journey across the Brontë Country to see the places that inspired the work of the famous family. But it’s the breathtaking Brontë Waterfall that will be the main attraction. It’s a series of stepped falls that roar downstream from the famous Brontë Chair, which is where Emily would sit and gaze down at the flowing water. (Joseph Sheerin)

The Peterborough Examiner reviews the novel The Shakespeare Requirement by Julie Schumacher.

Among the English department members there are twelve tenured professors (all eccentrics) who not only fight among themselves but for the most part do no meritorious academic research on their specialized subjects. Only two have serious academic projects—Professor Sandra Atherman (Victorian Literature) is devoted to all things Brontë (she is a model of cult building and superficiality in the academy) and the other is Dennis Cassovan, a detached but serious elder statesman who is committed to teaching Shakespeare's work and worries that the university might choose to eliminate the Bard from the curriculum. (Michael Peterman)

The Independent wonders whether popular literature can be great literature.

[FR] Leavis would infamously announce that “the great English novelists are Jane Austin, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad”, leaving out, as he mischievously declared, the Brontës, Trollope, Wilkie Collins – and Dickens. But the latter’s tomb in Westminster Abbey calls him “England’s most popular author” (which is not the same as ‘England’s greatest’) and even Leavis was to admit in later years that Hard Times was “a masterpiece”. (Robert Fisk)

The New Republic discusses Virginia Woolf's diaries.

We are used to literary works responding to one another: Ulysses rewrites The Odyssey, Wide Sargasso Sea imagines a story adjacent to Jane Eyre. But these are published works speaking to other published works. Woolf’s dialogue with other diarists is different. A diary is a private monologue by one writer, made public posthumously (in Pepys’s case, centuries after it was written), and Woolf is responding in turn in her own private setting. (Colin Dickey)

The Scotsman also mentions both Virginia Woolf and Wide Sargasso Sea in a review of Salt On Your Tongue. Women and the Sea by Charlotte Runcie.

There are some odd exceptions in the book. When I read the subtitle, and as I read her impassioned defence of female creativity, I kept thinking – sooner or later we must be coming to Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, where Lily Briscoe only becomes the artist she is because of a sea-crossing. Or Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, where the frustrated ambitions of the first Mrs Rochester are played out against an azure ocean. (Stuart Kelly)

NME argues that 'the main character from ‘You’ isn’t romantic – he’s a horrible, murderous creep'.

There’s a wider social issue at hand, here, too. For centuries, countless questionable behaviours – from pursuit, to possessiveness – have been re-sold to us as ‘romance’. Wuthering Heights’ Heathcliff is another character too-often held up as romantic, when really his fanatical tendencies should have Cathy running a mile. We’re told to see these things as endearing, or hopelessly devotional – more often than not, these actions come almost entirely from men, too. When women exhibit similar traits, they’re painted as ‘crazy’, or ‘obsessive’. (Tom Connick)

The Buzz comments on season 3 of TV series Victoria.

“For the first time in quite a long time in England, we have a female ruler,” she said. “The fashionable male figure became very feminine — a narrow waist, a puffed-out chest.”
Manliness was expressed through longer hair, combed forward on the face, and sizable sideburns. “Hairy is good at this point,” [costume expert Dorothy] Smith said. “Think Heathcliff on the moors.” (Jane Dunlap Sathe)

Jane Eyre's Library (Spain) shows a 2011 American edition of Jane Eyre.