Branwell Brontë singing Wuthering Heights

The Boar discusses 'The failure of Jacob Rees-Mogg and his venture into literature'.

Jacob Rees-Mogg, Conservative MP for North East Somerset, has attempted a venture into literature and has released a history book which has been lambasted by critics across the board. The Victorians: Twelve Titans who Forged Britain is a collection of biographies of twelve prominent Victorians who Rees-Mogg has deemed the most important, the most influential, and the most noteworthy figures of their era. Unfortunately for Rees-Mogg, the book and its biographies have been branded as ‘staggeringly silly’, ‘sentimental jingoism’, and ‘a dozen clumsily written pompous schoolboy compositions’.
Many have criticised Jacob Rees-Mogg for his choices in selecting the twelve eminent Victorians around whom his book centres. Only one ‘titan’ is a woman – Queen Victoria herself – and four of the twelve are prime ministers, such as Robert Peel. For a book that centres on an age of great innovation and technological advancement, it seems illogical that there is no mention of Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, or Charles Darwin – or any mathematician, scientist, or naturalist for that matter. Similarly, no consideration is given to such literary giants as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, or the Brontë sisters, despite their huge cultural and social significance for the Victorian age. (Jasmine Morris)

And yet another 'the Brontës should have been mentioned in this book' instance in the review of The Lark Ascending. The Music Of The British Landscape, by Richard King published by The Scotsman.

It’s also slightly off-key that in a book that advertises itself as being about music and landscape, there is no mention of Bush’s most famous song, Wuthering Heights, which does align itself with Emily Brontë’s novel in which the heaths on which Heathcliff stalks are, to all intents and purposes, a character in their own right. (Stuart Kelly)

However, Emily Brontë is mentioned in this excerpt from Lauren Acampora's novel The Paper Wasp shared by LitHub.

Back home, I squirreled the dress in the rear of my closet and pulled the yearbook out again. There I was: fat-cheeked and stunned in a black turtleneck, my eyes latched to a focal point somewhere over the photographer’s head. My hair hung limp, black as a carrion crow. Beneath ran the words of Emily Brontë:
I have dreamt in my life, dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they have gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the color of my mind. I cannot express it; but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is or should be an existence of yours beyond you. What were the use of my creation, if I were entirely contained here?I can still clean up when I need to. I’m not unattractive.There might even be something enticing about me if you look the right way, if you’re the right kind of person. My eyes are wide and yellow-hazel like a cat’s. My dark hair—jet when I dye it—is striking against my pale skin, and my patch of acne scars can be camouflaged with concealer. I’ve always been short and heavy, but the extra cushioning gives me curves. And so, looking at myself in the mirror on the day of the reunion, in the glass still gummy from old stickers, I wasn’t displeased. I put my shoulders back and posed a little. The dress was stiffer than I remembered, a little more severe, but maybe that was all right. It would be armor.

Palatinate reviews the production Minge Unhinged.

Marking the beginning of the Spare Room’s three-day festival of theatre, ‘Minge Unhinged’ is fearless, outrageous and commanding. Created by Your Aunt Fanny, an all-female comedy sketch group made up of women from the North East of England, the production offers a unique brand of comedy relentless in its’ humour.
‘Minge Unhinged’ is performed in the Spare Room, the Assembly Rooms Theatre’s temporary studio space. As intimate as the venue is, the audience experiences the presence of the performance with all the more intensity. Although this theatrical space is not permanent, it adds to the show’s intentions of capturing ‘a night out on the town with your wildest, oldest, filthiest friend.’
An audacious performance featuring interlinked comedic sketches, the audience is captivated with potent story-telling. From our first entrance into the Spare Room, we are met by the performers. Comfortable in the space, they laugh with one another and sing to the music playing, the audience feel as if they are sat with their own friends. The sketches introduce to the audience characters we are all too familiar with, and places the audience in situations common to many of us. From school classrooms, spoken word poetry performances and even cervical smear tests, the show is brilliant in destroying the taboo. The audience meets bold characters from history too, with a favourite moment when the Brontës appear and Branwell performs his rendition of Bush’s ‘Wuthering Heights’. The performance oozes boldness. The comedy sketches, in featuring scenes common to the audience and from history too, creates a feeling of universality. (Bethany Townsend)

Los Angeles Times interviews actress Ruth Wilson about her take on her grandmother's life, Mrs Wilson.

Has exploring this story so publicly changed you as a person? The memoir has had influences on my choices — subconsciously and unconsciously. She died before I went into acting, but my first big job was “Jane Eyre,” and I remember thinking her story is like that. She was a quiet, introverted woman — but also full of emotion and passion and sexuality, all trapped inside. I think I understood Jane Eyre through my grandmother. It’s made me realize that someone can be a duality of a person — you can be one way on the inside and a complete other way on the outside. We’re all made up of those things. It’s changed my life. (Randee Dawn)

Yesterday, Dissent celebrated the birthday of American film critic Pauline Kael.

Pauline loved it when people’s craziness, which is to say their individuality, their willingness to go-for-broke, came through. Which does not mean, as those who have conveniently misread her great essay “Trash, Art and the Movies” insist, that she championed trash over art. What she insisted is that any response to art that doesn’t involve pleasure is, at best, academic admiration. And she believed that good work could come from anywhere. If you can’t recognize the craziness in Wuthering Heights or in those Turner paintings where the contours of landscape give way to the massing of fog and light, how deeply, how honestly, are you responding? (Charles Taylor)

In The Conservative Woman, a man tries (and in our opinion, fails) to reply (with mansplaining overtones) to Tom Watson's recent speech about Europe.

Tom Watson then added other writers such as ‘Byron, who died fighting for Greece in their war of independence, and Mary Shelley who conceived of Frankenstein in Geneva, and Charlotte Brontë, whose novel Villette was based on her time teaching at a Brussels school and Keats, whose life and death in Rome is celebrated at the foot of the Spanish Steps. And of course of John Dryden, not just a great writer of English drama, but a great lover and student of French drama, and a translator of Virgil, Ovid, Homer, Boccaccio – the great canon of European classical literature that was the base of everything these English geniuses knew.’
Yet this works against his point that staying in the EU brings greater freedom. Europeans have always criss-crossed continents to and from Britain. Just as our writers travelled to Greece, Geneva, Brussels etc, so too was London a melting-pot of immigration, just as it is today. (Daryl Baldwin)

Pittsburgh City Paper recommends the exhibition A Sporting Vision at the Frick Art Museum.

Even so, the Frick’s chief curator and director of collections, Sarah Hall, believes the show’s appeal extends beyond dog and pony people, as the romantic scenes of English life would please any Anglophile taken with Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, or Downton Abbey. (Amanda Waltz)

Medium has a couple of Brontë-related articles: “Idiots and Maniacs Through Three Generations”: How Brontë’s Jane Eyre Champions Its Heroine at the Expense of the Colonial Other and Dating Advice for Vicars Spurned by Beautiful Women in 19th Century British Novels. Actualidad Literatura (Spain) has included both Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights on a a list of the 25 best British novels of all time. Sky TG 24 (Italy) lists Jane Eyre as one of Franco Zeffirelli's films worth rediscovering. The Eyre Guide reviews André Téchiné's Les Soeurs Brontë.