Bookish lists and other news

Diane Fare from the Brontë Parsonage Museum writes about what's on at the museum in Keighley News.

We have a very busy May and June approaching, starting with Museums at Night on Thursday May 16.
You’ve still got time to get along to the museum to enjoy the Parsonage after-hours.
We have some intriguing domestic objects in our collection, and on this evening our museum assistants will be getting ‘hands on’ in our historic rooms, in order to allow you a closer look and the opportunity to find out exactly what some of the objects were used for, and how we care for them now.
Join us to discover the day-to-day domestic life of the Brontës. As always, on our late night Thursdays, after 5.30pm entry is free to visitors who live in the BD22, BD21 or BD20 postcode areas or in Thornton, birthplace of the Brontës. Last admission is 7pm.
The weekend of May 18 and 19 is Haworth’s 1940s weekend, so at 2pm we’re screening the Hollywood classic Devotion.
Often forgotten, this retelling of the Brontës’ life story features Olivia de Havilland, and has been described as ‘better as cinema than history’. Come along and test that theory! The film is free with admission.
Join us during May half-term holiday for short guided walks, museum trails and ‘hands on history’ sessions. In our Wild Wednesday! workshop on May 29, you can have a go at making one of the little books that the Brontë children are famous for.
All activities are free with admission to the museum, and keep checking bronte.org.uk/whats-on for more details.
Parsonage Unwrapped on May 31 has proved popular in the past, as you get chance to play house detective! A member of our curatorial team will guide you around the house and help you discover a different side to the Parsonage through uncovering hidden clues.
Tickets cost £22.50/£20 and places are limited so please book in advance by calling 01535 640192 or visit the website.
Our free Tuesday talk on June 4 focuses on Patrick Brontë’s role as father. History has sometimes viewed Patrick’s paternal skills harshly, but 200 years on, how do we now judge him as a father?
This talk will explore his approach to parenting, and the impact on his children. Tuesday talks are free with admission to the museum at 11.30am and 2pm.
Finally, the museum will be very busy over the weekend of June 7-9 as we welcome Brontë Society members from all over the UK and beyond to Haworth for our annual Summer Festival Weekend.
There are talks on Patrick Brontë, Shakespeare’s impact on the work of the Brontës, and Anne Lister, of Shibden Hall, Halifax, subject of Sally Wainwright’s new drama Gentleman Jack, which is due to air on May 19. After the success of Wainwright’s Brontë film To Walk Invisible, we’re all looking forward to learning more about another fascinating West Yorkshire woman! (David Knights)

The New York Review of Books has an article on poet and playwright Louis MacNeice.

This brutal history was no doubt present, too, for Louis MacNeice. Born in Belfast in 1907, the youngest of three siblings, he grew up mainly in Carrickfergus, after the family moved there the following year when John MacNeice took up his position at St. Nicholas’s. The MacNeices did not find themselves welcome: the parishioners had wanted for their rector the existing curate, not a newcomer from the west. I found an echo in the family’s struggle for acceptance in the difficulties of settling in Yorkshire experienced by the Brontës, whose paterfamilias, Patrick, was himself a clergyman from Ireland. Soon after they settled in Haworth, in April 1820, death plagued the Brontës. The MacNeices, too, had their misfortunes, though to a lesser degree. Four years after arriving in Carrickfergus, Louis’s mother, Elizabeth (Lily), suffered severe depression following a hysterectomy. She died two years later, in December 1914, in a Dublin mental hospital. (Stuart Franklin)

Bustle writes briefly about the origins of the Gothic genre.

Since it first showed up in the late 18th century, gothic literature has been a fairly constant presence in the lives of readers. After the 1790s, when Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis came onto the scene with spooky thrillers like The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Monk, the gothic novel remained intermittently popular throughout the 19th century, as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) gave way to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847) and Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). In the early 20th century, the Southern gothic of writers like Flannery O'Connor and William Faulkner took hold, and their legacy continues today in the works of Dorothy Allison, Toni Morrison, and Anne Rice. (Kristian Wilson)

Lots of bookish lists today. Book Riot recommends '10 Novels Featuring Loving, Dedicated, Hard-Working Single Mothers' such as

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë
This Brontë classic was originally published in 1848, and it was completely unique in its time for portraying a woman in pursuit of an independent life, one of the first feminist novels. Fleeing an alcoholic husband and vowing to protect her son, Helen assumes a new name and seeks refuge at an old mansion in a small village. She makes her living as an artist while raising her son alone. The locals distrust the outsider, but she is steadfast in creating a new life for her son. (Heather Bottoms)

Five Books has selected '5 Novels Promoting The Value Of Forgiveness And Loyalty', including

5 Jane Eyre.
by Charlotte Brontë
What can I say? This is a great Victorian classic of English love stories. The love feels real, and is more mature (and sweeter) than her sister Emily's love story in "Wuthering Heights", which doesn't feel like love at all, rather passionate infatuation. Of course the path to true love is never easy, and loyalty and forgiveness must save the day. (Jason Sanders)

Women celebrates 'Life With 6 Books for Women Over 50' (apparently books have a reading age too now...). One of them is

6. A Secret Sisterhood: The Literary Friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf by Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney
Friendship is a powerful, lifelong experience, and Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney's book, A Secret Sisterhood, dives right into it, discussing the friendships between women in the literary world. Friendships between men in the literary world are heralded in research and studied in school, while the equally valid friendships between women writers are overlooked. Not any longer.
Midorikawa and Sweeney use letter and diaries entries as they researched their book. Some of the friendships may be surprising, but they're all incredible. A few covered include:
• Jane Austen and amateur Anne Sharp, who was one of her family servants
• Mary Taylor and Charlotte Brontë
• George Eliot and Harriet Beecher Stow
• Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield, two women often seen as foes, but actually had a complex friendship (Kelley O'Brien)

According to the Vancouver Public Library on Vancouver is Awesome, Jane Steele by Lyndsay Faye is one of '8 retellings that might be better than the originals' (it is not):

Jane Steele by Lyndsay Faye
If you’ve ever wanted to see Jane Eyre’s horrid childhood oppressors punished, you will enjoy this extremely loose retelling featuring Jane Eyre as a serial killer.

The St Lucia Star has compiled a 'To Read' list which includes

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
This novel maintains themes of racism and post-colonial struggles for West Indian blacks, in the author’s own take of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. [...]
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
A classic tale of romance that has yet to be rivalled by worthy prose, style or characters.

Ciarán Hinds is the subject of Paste Magazine's Actor Appreciation Day.

I suppose what Ciarán Hinds isn’t is comic relief. You wouldn’t cast him if you were looking for a clown (Phantom of the Opera notwithstanding). He’s not your man if you’re looking for superficial or insubstantial or fey. But if you need someone with some serious incantatory prowess? A priest, say. Or a professor. Or a revolutionary, or Albus Dumbledore’s disaffected bartender brother for that matter. Or a brooding romantic hero (Captain Wentworth in Persuasion or Rochester in Jane Eyre? (Hell, in his mid-sixties I’d still cast him as Mr. Darcy). If you need someone for whom pregnant silences are important—the words unsaid more powerful than those spoken—you want Ciarán Hinds for that. (Amy Glynn)

Opera Wire has published an obituary about English tenor Joseph Ward, who has died at the age of 87

In 1965 he went on to be principal tenor with the Sutherland-Williamson Grand Opera Company in a tour of Australia and in 1972 he founded the Opera School at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester.
During his years on stage, he went on to make numerous recordings including Britten’s “Albert Herring,” and Bernard Herrmann’s “Wuthering Heights,” both conducted by the composers, respectively. (Francisco Salazar)

Keene State College features student Lexi Palmer, who has

just landed a prestigious Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship – known around campus as a SURF grant – which provides a $4,000 stipend for a handful of top students to do research or creative work.
In Lexi’s case, creative writing will be the focus of her SURF project. An English major who is specializing in both writing and literature and minoring in women’s and gender studies, she’ll spend the summer writing modern gothic fiction. “The project is to use elements of gothic fiction to explore a 21st-century female perspective, speaking to the female experience. So it’s using those elements – the grotesque, the uncanny – in a new way,” she says.
She’ll start out by doing research – reading gothic novels (Jane Eyre is a big inspiration, as is Frankenstein) along with literary theory, like Freud’s essay “The Uncanny.” Then she’ll be writing a collection of eight short stories, each five to seven pages long.
“I’ve come up with a list of ideas,” says Lexi, who is interested in exploring issues that women deal with in real life, like eating disorders, drug abuse, and sexual assault. Storytelling, she says, she can look at this kind of trauma in a way that encourages conversation.

iNews has an article on bluebells and quotes Anne Brontë about them.