Instagram-Friendly #MeToo era

Lucasta Miller presents her new biography, L. E. L.: The Lost Life and Scandalous Death of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, in The Telegraph:

Think “19th-century woman poet” and the image conjured up is other-worldly: Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), all in white, slipping away at the sight of strangers, or the equally reclusive Emily Brontë (1818-1848). Neither made a penny from their poetry in their lifetimes. They dressed like nuns and barely went out, let alone had sex. (...)
Among her admirers were the great German poet Heinrich Heine, the American writer Edgar Allan Poe, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the young Brontë sisters.

John Carey reviews it in The Sunday Times:

In her landmark book, The Brontë Myth (2001), Miller showed how literary reputations are constructed. This new book shares that theme, though in terms of power and interest Landon is clearly worth less attention than the authors of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Instead, Miller applies her investigative skills to the Regency literary culture that made and destroyed Landon, and finds it brutally misogynistic and riven by envy, spite and mischief-making. 

We live in bizarre and challenging times. Times where articles like this (on Bustle) have readers who make sense of them:

5 Instagram-Friendly Tea Brands, Because Sometimes You Gotta Do It For The 'Gram (...)
Look. At. Those. Colours. Only a brand that specialises in capturing "the wildness of the Yorkshire Dales [...] with a haunting dark touch from the Brontë moors" could produce this mesmerising tea, and that's what Tarn & Moon specialise in. (Sophie McEvoy)

Some Mother's Day-related articles:

Helen Graham from The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë:
“It is my son. I do not care to leave him alone. He is my only treasure and I am his only friend. We don’t like to be part.” Helen is a woman in her mid-twenties who gives up her family, escapes a debauched husband to protect her son from his influence, and decides to live life as a widow – all in an era where women were utterly dependent on their husbands. She is committed to young Arthur and claims that he is her only treasure. Through Helen, we see how a mother is capable of completely sacrificing the life she has known to protect the happiness of her child. We realize how motherhood brings with it immeasurable courage and makes heroines of everyday women. (Mehak Daleh in Financial Express)

Durante siglos las mujeres dedicaron sus horas, sus días, sus vidas, a servirle a los demás y por eso Woolf resalta una curiosidad: las cuatro grandes novelistas del siglo XIX en Inglaterra, George Eliot, Jane Austen,Charlotte Brontë y Emily Brontë, fueron escritoras sin hijos. (Adriana Villegas Botero in  La Patria) (Translation)

The Westmoreland Gazette recommends a walk following the Ingleton Waterfalls Trail:

Visit Yordas Cave, which is uphill on the left. This former Victorian show cave is reputedly the lair of an infant-devouring Norse giant and may have provided inspiration for the Fairy Cave in Brontë’s Jane Eyre. (Adrian Mullen)

Tanya Gold is back on Jane Eyre-ranting-guilty-pleasure-mode on UnHerd. At your own risk:

Bad men thrive in fiction, as if there weren’t enough in life. The object of desire is usually a monster, although he isn’t called that. He is called, instead, a romantic hero – that means dickhead – and the pages are littered with his crimes: Heathcliff, Rochester, everyone who ever walked into a Mills & Boon novel and negged a woman into bed.
This self-hating genre – it is written, almost exclusively by women and feminine low self-esteem is its engine and its shy subject matter – won’t survive #MeToo. It doesn’t deserve to. But there was a novelist who exposed the monster long ago even if few people read her: Jean Rhys.
Her masterpiece was Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). It is usually called a prequel to Jane Eyre – but it is more important and interesting than that. It demolished Jane Eyre and made it look silly; it looked forwards, through Rhys’s marvellous bitterness, to a time when women were less masochistic. It exposed Jane Eyre as the sexual fantasies of a virgin who dreamed of that never-to-be-found contradiction in love, and realised it so finely that the fantasy is still in print: control of a controlling, vicious man. If the fantasy is definitive, so is the book that murders it. (Read more)

The Italian Section of the Brontë Society has posted the winners of the 8th De Leo-Brontë Literary Prizes.