Fearless, extreme, unapologetic

Financial Times reviews The Unthanks' Lines:

Brontë beat: folk group The Unthanks on giving Emily’s poetry musical life
Preserved like a doll’s house, the Brontë Parsonage Museum at Haworth was “intensely quiet” when English folk group The Unthanks came to record their musical interpretations of 10 Emily Brontë poems last summer.
“I wasn’t allowed to sit on that teeny, tiny piano stool,” says pianist and producer Adrian McNally, looking like Gulliver in Lilliput as he gestures beyond the burgundy rope. “But I was allowed to play that piano. And now I really miss it.”
McNally, who makes up the core trio of the group with sisters Rachel and Becky Unthank, says that the piano wasn’t mentioned when the Brontë Society commissioned the band to “do something” with Emily’s verse. But when he heard her quirky little five-octave cabinet piano had been restored in 2010, he had to come and have a look.
“I’ve always harboured dreams of a perfect, tiny piano,” he says. “I’m drawn to them whenever I see them. But they usually sound cheap and tinny.” At first, the Brontë piano felt like another disappointment. It didn’t operate like a regular piano. McNally found the keys only moved down a fraction of the amount he wanted. Pretty but muted, they seemed to offer little of the gothic drama of Emily’s verse, which her sister Charlotte said generated a “peculiar music — wild, melancholy and elevating”.
“After 20 minutes I nearly gave up,” says McNally. “Then I realised the problem was me, not the piano. I had to find a touch lighter than anything I’d ever used before and the notes really began to shine — especially in the two octaves above middle C. It was pretty, but real. The limitations of the instrument reflected the confines of the Brontës’ lives. The limitations provide the tension. The atmosphere was just incredible — the sound of the clock, the creak of the pedals, everything was heightened.”
In just three hours on that first night, McNally wrote all the music that appears on the Brontë disc of the band’s new three-part album, Lines. A few days later, Rachel and Becky arrived at the Parsonage to record their vocals. Their Northumbrian-accented harmonies echoed through the old rooms, reanimating Emily’s dark, stark lines about the beckoning graveyard beside the family home, and wild storms sweeping through the heather on the moors beyond it. (Helen Brown)

The Guardian features the latest creations by Chloé’s creative director, Natacha Ramsay-Levi.

As well as the familiar motifs synonymous with rugged British terrain, the heroine of her tale took her lead from Emily Brontë. “For me, [my woman this season] was a pioneer of something, she was into this tumultuous landscape.” Ramsay-Levi evoked the gothic romance of Brontë’s epoch through a series of velvet-devoré and silk-jacquard handkerchief-hem dresses with lace inserts and ruffled collars in amethyst, scarlet and deepest indigo blue. A more contemporary portrait of love came via a photograph of a couple holding hands looking out on to a mountain silk-screen printed onto tops and bomber jackets. The motif will match the popularity of last season’s screen-print of two hands cupping the sun into a heart shape. (Scarlett Conlon)

Metrópoles (in Portuguese) and Business of Fashion also discuss the same fashion collection.

Io Donna (Italy) reviews the book L’annusatrice di libri by Desy Icardi.

La scoperta, come succede per tutte le cose importanti, avvenne per caso. Quando Adelina avvicinò il naso alla pagina sentì che le parole penetravano nella sua mente ma non attraverso gli occhi, poteva leggere con il naso. Così in quelle “copie odorose” poteva sentire l’arroganza di Don Rodrigo e l’inquietudine di Jane Eyre, l’esaltazione di don Chisciotte e l’odore di “rape e buonsenso” del suo scudiero. (Monica Virgili) (Translation)

AnOther Magazine features social critic Camille Paglia.

Paglia is fearless, extreme, unapologetic. She talks of Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights as a study in sadomasochism, of the nuclear family as “an artificial and oppressive construction”, of the importance of the elitist criteria of excellence and distinction for maintaining artistic standards – all propositions that diverge wildly from the norm. (Lucy Kumara Moore)

Something to mull on courtesy of The Wellesley News:

Complex ideas like “I love you” are conveyed using a combination of twenty-six letters in English. The arrangement of these seemingly unrelated characters preserves messages and philosophies passed on by minds like Woolf, Brontë and Austen. Imagine what language could look like if we suddenly had 52 letters instead of 26. (Alyssa Li)

Tone Schunnesson, the Swedish playwright who is behind the Jane Eyre adaptation currently on stage in Göteborg, has written an article about the 'profound sadness' of the novel for Göteborgs-Posten:

"Jane Eyre blir inte mänsklig utan kvinnan på vinden".
Tone Schunnesson har dramatiresat Charlotte Brontës klassiska roman "Jane Eyre" som nu sätts upp på Folkteatern i Göteborg lördagen den 2 mrs. Inför premiären skriver hon för GP Kultur om hur det gotiska romanstiska dramat egentligen är djupt sorgligt.