Gigantic Geniuses

The Durango Herald begins an article about an entirely different thing with  this affirmation:

You can start a good library at home by leaving out the works of the Brontë sisters, Mark Twain claimed.

Although we're not completely sure, we rather think that the author has mistaken the Brontës with Jane Austen (who Mark Twain really hated it), but it's hard to believe that the author of Huckleberry Finn said such a thing when he also wrote:

Experience of life (not of books) is the only capital usable in such a book as you have attempted ... I don't see how any but a colossal genius can write a readable prose book before he is 30 years old. Such books have been written, but never by any but gigantic geniuses—like those Brontë sisters, for instance. And yet even they ... had a capital of experience to draw from which was nearly as prodigious as their genius. (S.L. Clements to  to Bruce W. Munro, October 21, 1881)

Hindustan Times looks into the origins of the word juggernaut:

By the 18th century, juggernaut was in common use as a synonym for an irresistible and destructive force that demands total devotion or unforgiving sacrifice — the sense in which it pops up in the novels of Charlotte Brontë and Charles Dickens, and even Robert Louis Stevenson, who applied it to Dr Jekyll’s foil, Mr Hyde. (Shashi Taroor)

Still in India, the Deccan Herald sings the wonders of Kovalam under the rain:

I expected Emily Bronte’s tragic hero Heathcliff to be standing on one of the blackened cliffs. “Varoo, namukku thirichu pokam.” With those words, my autodriver apparated in front of me, his smile wide and starkly different from my imagined angst on Heathcliff’s face. I was quite prosaically brought out of my dark reverie. (Rasmi Vasudeva)

Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung (Germany) loves steam trains like the KVWR heritage line:

Emily Brontë hatte recht. Es ist stürmisch auf den grünen Hügeln rund um Haworth. Jenem Dorf in den Mooren von Yorkshire, in dem drei der bemerkenswertesten Autorinnen des 19. Jahrhunderts, Charlotte, Emily und Anne Brontë, lebten. Nur ein paar Heidesträucher sprenkeln das kahle, wellige Land mit lila Farbtupfern. Mitten in dieser Moorlandschaft, ließ sich Emily zu ihrem Roman "Wuthering Heights" ("Sturmhöhe") inspirieren. (Dagmar Krappe) (Translation)

Novel Notions reviews Jane Eyre.  I Won't Say I'm In Love With Reading posts about Jane Slayre by Sherri Browning Erwin. The Jane Eyre week continues on The Eyre Guide.