Dude, Where 's My Brontë Binge?

Brontë binge, anyone? BBC records unabridged classics in The Times:

Works by Charles Dickens, Jane Austen and Emily Brontë are among 20 classic novels being released as unabridged audiobooks by the BBC. (...)
The first tranche of ten novels going live at the end of the month includes Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, Silas Marner by George Eliot and The War of the Worlds by HG Wells.
Dickens is represented by A Christmas Carol and fans of the Brontë sisters can listen to Charlotte’s Jane Eyre and Emily’s Wuthering Heights. (Matthew Moore)

Members of the Thrive community share their favourite authors:

Charlotte Brontë
“Throughout her sophisticated and progressive literary works, Brontë has masterfully conveyed the unapologetic grit that every woman possesses. She chose to highlight women’s self-awareness, courage, curiosity, and intellectual freedom over shallow, idealistic views of beauty. She was ahead of her time in her dissection of critical societal issues.” (Ana-Maria Visoiu, international program manager, New York, NY)

The Toronto Star interviews Ingrid Paulson from Gladstone Press:

“I got kind of tired seeing classics just for scholarly use or school use,” says the inveterate reader who became frustrated, she says, with clunky, boring or dated designs of books, which were not intended to appeal to new readers.
“Classics are good reads, not just good for you,” could possibly be her tag line, but it is the driving idea behind her collection so far of five classic novels restyled into books that are current, relevant and just plain good: Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights; The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle; Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf; Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence and, most recently, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. (...)
We talk about Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, a character always cast as white, always represented as white, but whom Brontë herself describes in an ambiguous way. “He’s not clearly defined beyond his skin being a darker tone and the fact that, when he was brought to Wuthering Heights, he was speaking a completely different language than English,” Paulson says. Rediscovering this idea casts the text in a completely new light. (Deborah Dundas)

The Daily Pioneer (India) reports a screening of Sangdil 1952 in Bhorat:

On Friday, Hindi film Sangdil was screened at Bharat Bhavan. The film was screened under film festival Ekagra dedicated to Dilip Kumar.
Sangdil is a 1952 film directed by R. C Talwar. The film is an adaptation of the Charlotte Brontë classic Jane Eyre. The film stars Dilip Kumar, Madhubala, Dara Singh and Leela Chitnis. The film's music is by Sajjad Hussain and film song lyrics by Rajinder Krishan.

Keighley News talks about Keighley's involvement in Bradford's bid to be UK City of Culture in 2025:

Keighley has a long tradition in the arts, dating back to the mid-1800s when the Brontë sisters wrote their famous novels in Haworth. (...)
In 2017 Haworth Main Street became a film set for the BBC’s Brontë biopic To Walk Invisible, with a replica Haworth Parsonage built on Penistone Hill. In recent years Keighley has developed its own film festival, RATMA (River Aire Ten Minute Amateur), attracting entries from across the globe. (David Knights)

Beyond the Joke (and The Bookseller) announces the new BBC Two series, The Novels That Shaped Our World:

Episode one will examine the response to race and empire, from Robinson Crusoe and Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Things Fall Apart and Wide Sargasso Sea, as well as lesser known but ground-breaking work such as Aphra Benn’s Orinooko to Sam Selvon’s Lonely Londoners. The programme comes up to date with titles such as Malorie Blackman’s Noughts and Crosses and Paul Beatty’s The Sell Out.
Episode two discusses the story of women and the novel - both as characters and authors. With Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale capturing global audiences, the programme will show how the plight of women is a theme that reaches right back to the earliest novels. From Richardson’s Pamela to Austen, the Brontës through to Mary Shelley and Virginia Woolf, and to the post-war publishing boom where a new generation of global writers such as Zadie Smith, Toni Morrison and Arundhati Roy have continued to speak out for women to a new generation of readers. (Bruce Dessau)

Cape Cod Times and 1939 films:

“Wuthering Heights.” William Wyler directed Olivier and Oberon as the passionate young lovers in this beautiful adaptation that concentrates mostly on the first half of the Emily Brontë novel. It remains a gold standard for movie romances. (Tim Miller)

Well+Good and friendship:

Finally, you have the ultimate goal: the friendships of the good that’ll only come along a few times in the course of your lifespan. These BFFs embody a quote from Emily Brontë: “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.” These people are down to talk about everything from the minutiae of life to the deepest depths of you soul.  (Kells McPhillips)

The Hindu and the wonders of convalescence:

Once, in a period such as this one, recovering from viral fever, I read all of Graham Greene — requesting friends to return and issue two books a day from the school library. Another time, everything by the Brontë sisters. (Janice Pariat)

The Times and holidays with kids:

Now, if the sunlight touches the skin of an infant, they will instantly die, which is the reason why our children returned looking as pale as a portrait of the Brontë sisters. (Ben Machell)

The Wall Street Journal and marijuana studies:

Literature. “The Wasted Land” would focus on actual stoners—Hunter S. Thompson, Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey, the list goes on—who wrote while either dazed or confused, or both. Other courses would take a peek further back in literary history at the works of famous drug users, from Coleridge to Baudelaire. And authors don’t need to have used creativity enhancers themselves for their masterpieces to be reinterpreted for a new age: “Mary Jane Eyre,” anyone? (Joe Queenan)

Also in WSJ, an article about Virginia Woolf's A Room Of One's Own:

Her hosts had assigned her the topic, which was general enough, she noted, to perhaps include a few polite remarks on Fanny Burney, Jane Austen and the Brontës. (Danny Heitman)

Refinery29 and black girls being ignored at school:

When she reached her A-levels, Heather found that attempts to set her apart from her peers during classes continued. "My teacher picked me to read excerpts from Wide Sargasso Sea [a 1966 anti-colonial response to Jane Eyre set in Jamaica with a Creole protagonist], imploring me multiple times to 'do the accent'. I refused but she would not let it go, citing 'but they’re your people" and 'it's just Creole'. I was excessively uncomfortable and told her so, but she laughed it off and then attempted to do the accent herself." (Paula Akpan)

We fail to understand this mention in The Inquirer:

It was not until I had re-read the book Jane Eyre, an old favorite that I remembered why I liked books set in the middle ages. (Christy Aho)

Or this other one in Aydinlik (Turkey):

Hatta bilirsin, çoğu insan resim der fotoğrafa, değil mi? Fotoğraftan, sinemadan sonra yazılan roman da bunlardan öncekiler gibi olmayacaktı. Fotoğraf makinesi o vakitler bilinseydi Jane Eyre öyle uzun sürer miydi? (Onur Caymaz) (Translation)

Vatican News (in Italian) talks about the winners of the Strega Award:

Leggere i classici della letteratura è, per Antonella Cilento, la chiave di lettura per interpretare il tempo presente: “Bisognerebbe tornare a molti classici – ci racconta la scrittrice - che purtroppo da tempo sono diventati faticosi o impossibili da leggere perché non ben presentati. Ci sono tanti libri che ci riconducono, in un modo o nell’altro, a quello che stiamo vivendo". Tra i libri consigliati dalla Cilento, 'Il maestro e Margherita' di Michail Bulgakov: "grande romanzo sulla libertà e ironia che scopro essere sempre letto e riletto da generazioni differenti". Ma anche 'Cime tempestose' di Emily Brontë e "tra le letture indispensabili" considerate dalla scrittrice napoletana: Balzac, Flaubert, Čechov, Tolstoj. "Si può ricominciare da un punto qualunque dalla grande rete della letteratura, e - chiosa quasi a sorprea - da lì tornare indietro". (Eugenio Serra) (Translation)

Brecha (Uruguay) reviews the film Svanurinn:

Sin detenerse a explicar ni prolongar historias que apenas esboza, la película bordea así, suavemente, tanto las experiencias nuevas que debe encarar Sól en su nuevo hábitat como la atracción que comienza a sentir por ese joven, que, se insinúa, tiene un trasfondo trágico a lo Cumbres borrascosas, dada su inestable relación con la altanera hija de los dueños de casa. (Rosalba Oxandabarat) (Translation)

The Brontë Babe Blog shares pictures of her many Brontë books.