Half in Love with Easeful Death

Another positive review of The Unthanks' album Lines in The Guardian:

The Brontë set is the obvious headliner, setting Emily’s poems to music and recording them at the Brontës’ parsonage home using their regency piano. It’s haunting – Emily seems half in love with easeful death – but less resonant than its companions. The Sea Is a Woman, with lyrics by Peake, has Rachel Unthank at her most poignant. The first world war set features singer Sam Lee and a string accompaniment for a Siegfried Sassoon poem. The piano arrangements of Adrian McNally sometimes fly, sometimes plod, but the ethereal sibling harmonies rarely falter. (Neil Spencer)

Meera Sabaratnam argues in The Sunday Times for the importance of decolonising British education and gives the example of Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea. A piece of advice: your arguments seem more solid if you choose the right sister:

I was quite young when I first read Jane Eyre. I chose it because I had read Roald Dahl’s Matilda, and she had read Emily Brontë’s Jane Eyre (sic). Being a girl who wanted to be clever, I decided to read it too. Jane Eyre was also a young clever woman — plucky, spirited, hard-working, independent, discreet, self-sacrificing and so on; she was eventually rewarded for her moral forbearance with a sudden inheritance from an uncle in Madeira and marriage to the man she had forsworn for his attempted bigamy.
It was more or less two decades later that I read Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys. This multi-vocal novel focuses on the fate of Bertha Mason/Antoinette Cosway, the first Mrs Rochester — a Creole woman with her own tumultuous upbringing and struggles, who Rochester married hastily in the West Indies in search of a fortune. Antoinette, renamed Bertha by her husband, suffers unstable mental health, removal to England and the breakdown of her marriage before becoming the woman locked in the tower at Thornfield Hall. She eventually burns it down.
With Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys, a Dominican author with a Creole mother and a Welsh father who had moved to England, puts Jane Eyre into a critical dialogue with the colonial historical conditions of its own production. Most crucially it calls on the reader to confront the significance of the “others” whose own life journeys, quests for justice and sacrifices are intertwined with, but meaningfully distinct from, Jane’s own. I experienced reading this as a form of “growing up”. It was of course destabilising to have the neat morality of the first novel torn open, but ultimately it disclosed a fuller, richer, more difficult and more interesting view of the world and of humanity.
In studying literature, can we read and think about Jane Eyre now without also reading and thinking about Wide Sargasso Sea? We could, although this would be both an unnecessary restriction and disservice to our students. So would a literature curriculum that failed to introduce students to the broader diversity and richness of writing in English from around the world, as well as within Britain. This is even before we get to questions of how to unpick our habitual monolingualism and the narrowness it produces.

Intriguing news in Broadway World:

Director at the Ophelia Theatre Group. Billie Aken-Tyers is currently developing an adaptation of Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, slated for pre production in 2019. for more information visit www.billieakentyers.com.

Megan Kenyon in The Student didn't like Lily Cole's approach to Emily Brontë in The Secret Life of Emily Brontë. Too personal in her opinion.

Recently, a documentary aired on the BBC, detailing The Secret Life of Emily Brontë. Instead of being an elegy to the tragic life of one of Britain’s most extraordinary authors, the programme delivered an ego-boost for its already widely successful host, Lily Cole. Cole, a philanthropist, model, and actress, repeatedly took possession of Emily Brontë, comparing their lives, discussing her personal experiences of Brontë’s writing and introducing a documentary which Cole herself had created based upon Wuthering Heights. As a viewer, I felt detached from my own experiences of Emily Brontë’s writing. It appeared that everything I had felt whilst reading Brontë’s exhilarating novel and haunting poetry, was invalid.
But let us not forget that Emily Brontë wrote Wuthering Heights neither for Cole, nor me. Brontë wrote her novel for an unquantifiable audience, for anyone and everyone who could relate to the words on the page. Lily Cole already has a platform, she already has a voice yet hers was seemingly the only one that mattered. 

The bedrooms of American TV shows in The Huffington Post:

From the posters in Seth Cohen’s bedroom, I learned that he was into comic books and video games. From Rory Gilmore’s (Gilmore Girls) bedroom I found out that she wanted to go to Harvard and liked reading Charlotte Brontë and Shakespeare. (Chandni Doulatramani)

Kirkus reviews The Confessions of Fannie Langton by Sara Collins:

Most of all, she has created in her title character a complex, melancholy, and trenchantly observant protagonist; too conflicted in motivation, perhaps, to be considered a heroine but as dynamic and compelling as any character conceived by a Brontë sister.

Eidos on Patheos posts about Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston:

The novel’s main character is like Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Janie becomes a free and independent woman through suffering. Unlike Bronte, Hurston does not choose a conventional happy ending, yet Janie is no less content than Jane. (John Mark N. Reynods)

Stuff (New Zealand) describes a trip to Puglia, Italy:

Studded with cacti and luxuriantly-leafed trees, radiant, butterfly-attracting flowers and Baroque buildings made with the distinctive yellow "Lecce" stone that is so common in this part of Puglia, the courtyard has such a timeless charm you half-expect to see characters from a costume drama, say the Italian equivalent of a story by Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte or Thomas Hardy, milling about. (Steve McKenna) 

The Wardrobe (Italy) interviews book blogger Elena Giorgi:

Simona Melani: Quale tra i romanzi classici della letteratura tratta meglio l’amore secondo te?
Mi viene subito in mente Jane Eyre di Charlotte Brontë, che racconta l’amore in ogni sua sfumatura.
Jane è davvero un’eroina straordinaria, un’antesignana dell’indipendenza femminile, soprattutto se pensiamo che il romanzo fu pubblicato nel 1847.
Fin da bambina Jane conosce maltrattamenti e freddezza, che poi inizia a colmare con l’amore per l’amica Helen, incontrata in collegio; grazie alla passione per i libri e lo studio riesce a emanciparsi e a diventare un’istitutrice; conosce l’amore adulto quando si ritrova a lavorare per Mr. Rochester e rinnova l’amore per la propria dignità e indipendenza quando scopre che egli nasconde un terribile segreto.
Insomma, Jane Eyre racchiude in sé buona parte delle forme d’amore possibili, che Charlotte Brontë racconta senza cadere nei cliché dell’epoca. (Translation)

Culturepoing (France) reviews the DVD edition of Mario Bava's La Frusta e il Corpo:

Dès le générique sur fond rouge avec ses accords de piano déchirants, Le corps et le fouet s’inscrit dans un ailleurs, invoque les fantômes littéraires des Hauts de Hurlevent et des nouvelles d’Edgar Allan Poe. (Emmanuel Le Gagne) (Translation)

A walk across the Pennine moorland in The Telegraph & Argus; Salamanca al Día (Spain) briefly talks about the local performances of Jane Eyre by the Teatre Lliure. Rebeca Garza (in Spanish) posts about the song I Belong to the Earth from Bernard J. Taylor's Wuthering Heights musical.