'I suspect L.E.L.’s enigmatic persona may have inspired Brontë’s own cagey first-person narration'

Poetry Foundation discusses Lucasta Miller's book L.E.L.: The Lost Life and Scandalous Death of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, the Celebrated 'Female Byron'.

In 1830, Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country was founded, and its London Tory staff reveled in literary gossip—much of it too specific to literary inner circles for readers (including the Brontë sisters) to comprehend. Fraser’s had somehow gathered particulars on Landon’s sex life, which they delighted in referencing with lewd innuendo. The magazine featured caricatures of her—sometimes lasciviously implying her fallenness—by artist Daniel Maclise. Within four years, Landon was a laughingstock in the male-dominated literary world, and she could only bite her tongue in response.  [...]
Like any female writer of the era, she was vulnerable. Charlotte Brontë, who lived apart from the literary marketplace—and who grew up reading L.E.L. together with her sisters—understood this precarity too. I suspect L.E.L.’s enigmatic persona may have inspired Brontë’s own cagey first-person narration: Lucy Snowe of Villette (1853) and, to a lesser extent, the titular Jane Eyre. “Absence was the heart of L.E.L.’s aesthetic,” writes Miller. “[She] made meaning radically unstable. Epistemologically she was a skeptic, who believed that ‘no one sees things exactly as they are, but as varied and modified by their own method of viewing.’ She vested her identity in the eye of the beholder, and yet constructed herself as a moving target. She was indeed moonlike, always waxing and waning.” L.E.L. was “a co-creation between the poet’s imagination and the reader’s fantasy,” as Miller notes. She understood the genesis of a reputation—and a brand—better than most: we can influence perception and fancy, but we cannot orchestrate it. Contemporary celebrity culture teaches us this as battalions of public relations flacks run damage control for a prominent figure who says or does something ill-advised. (Rachel Vorona Cote)

In the USA, May is national Get Caught Reading Month and so a contributor to Iowa Information shares what she's read this year so far. Here's an eye-rolling moment for you:

2) "Wuthering Heights" by Emily Bronte
How this is a classic? I have no idea. The only other book that has made me this bored was "The U.S. Financial Crisis: Analysis and Interpretation: Lessons for China" by Cheng Siwei." (Lana Bradstream)

Cultured Vultures discusses the last episode of Game of Thrones with spoilers aplenty. We have extracted this spoiler-free:

 (If women abruptly going mental and dying seems a little overdone to you, why not look up Jean Rhys’s novel ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’?) (Huw Saunders)

A couple of newspapers are reminded of the Brontës in their reviews of the film Portrait d’une jeune fille en feu, directed by Céline Sciamma.

Lectrice, ça commence un peu comme Jane Eyre. Une femme qu’on devine éduquée, indépendante mais pas très bien née, arrive de nuit dans une grande demeure. Cette femme n’a rien d’autre à vendre que ses talents, ce qui n’est déjà pas si mal, en France au XVIIIe siècle, et se rend sur une île bretonne pour peindre le portrait d’une jeune aristocrate.
Tu te frottes les yeux, lectrice, car jusqu’à aujourd’hui, et la découverte du beau Portrait de la jeune fille en feu en compétition, la comparaison entre Charlotte Brontë et Céline Sciamma t’aurait fait hurler, et sans doute que nous aussi. Mais attarde-toi quand même ! Car voici deux créatrices dont le geste si simple, regarder d’autres femmes, leur donner la parole, les laisser dire «je», se charge encore de quelque chose d’inflammable qui nous a fait les trouver alliées. «Prenez le temps de me regarder !» ordonne Marianne, à la première réplique du Portrait…, avec une voix franche et directe qui n’est pas sans rappeler celle de Jane. Et comme elle a raison ! Jusqu’au bout l’on se prêtera à cette leçon de regard et l’on prendra le temps d’observer cette peintre, jusqu’à en tomber amoureux, car elle est sûrement l’un des plus beaux personnages qu’il nous sera donné de contempler lors de ce Festival, magnifiquement regardée par le film lui-même, et incarnée avec une précision folle par Noémie Merlant, aux grands yeux chargés d’intelligence et de désir. (Elisabeth Franck-Dumas in Libération (France)) (Translation)

È un melodramma, Portrait de la jeune fille en feu. Un melodramma algidissimo, dove il fuoco cui fa riferimento il titolo non è certo un falò o un rogo, ma una fiamma debole e languida come quella dei camini del film, che scalda lentamente e passioni delle sue protagoniste e le lascia a sobbollire senza mai farle debordare davvero da un racconto studiatissimo e fin troppo perfettamente bilanciato nell’uso dei suoi riferimenti letterari espliciti e impliciti: dai miti di greci, alle sorelle Brontë. (Federico Gironi on Coming Soon (Italy)) (Translation)