A really bad painting

The architect Jamie Fobert explores the National Portrait Gallery with The Globe and Mail:

The rise of Kingston-born designer Fobert, whose latest project is a £35-million overhaul of Britain’s National Portrait Gallery, hints at a pendulum swing away from flashy starchitects and toward something more thoughtful, welcoming and even morally guided. (...)
Back inside, he veers seamlessly from the smallest details to the largest questions of the gallery’s identity. He leads the way to “a really bad painting” – the only group portrait of Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë – to underline the building’s hybrid nature, both a history museum and an art gallery. (Katherine Ashenburg)

The Conservative Woman ridicules (with good reason) the story of these poor GCSE pupils:

They’d better not try Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and Jane Eyre is also decidedly dodgy. Young women used to love it but now they know better.
‘I decidedly preferred these fierce favours to anything more tender,’ says misguided Jane. Her chosen man, Rochester, often seems to be on the brink of violence. He has also unforgivably locked his mad wife (driven insane by him no doubt) in the attic. Then there’s Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights by sister Emily. Better not go anywhere near him, even if being played by Cliff Richard in a musical. (Jane Kelly)

Diane Hessan in The Boston Globe compares Jane Eyre and Donald Trump (yes, it gave us chills just writing such a thing):

Jane Eyre, the heroine of the famous Charlotte Brontë novel, stated, “I am not an angel, and I will not be one ’til I die”, and we cheered as she said it. Trump may be no angel, but in 2020, disapproving Americans just might vote for him anyway.

The River Journal talks about the new Sing Sing Prison Museum:

The Power House will also be the entrance to a passageway through the prison wall, leading to a viewing space within the original cell block. It’s planned that the block itself – with some of its original ironwork still in place – will remain as it is today, an echoing shell, desolate yet strangely beautiful, like Mr. Rochester’s home after the fire in Jane Eyre. (Elsbeth Lindner)

La Jornada (México) talks about Camille Paglia and quotes from her book, Sexual Personae:

Ningún libro sobre estudios de género aporta e ilumina tanto como Sexual personae, acaso porque a Camille le importa un comino herir la sensibilidad de algún purista cuando afirma, por ejemplo, que el muy masculino Lord Byron es un escritor hermafrodita (“metrosexual”, dirían ahora) … o que la sacrosanta Emily Brontë, autora de Cumbres borrascosas, se identificaba con su salvaje héroe, Heathcliffe (sic), y no con Catherine Earnshaw. De una vez por todas, Camille le arranca a esta obra maestra la etiqueta de Novela Rosa, y expone el monumental temperamento de la dulce Hermanita Brontë, sin que ello signifique que haya sido lesbiana. (Eve Gil) (Translation)

AnneBrontë.org posts about The Death And Funeral Of Patrick Brontë.