'Elegant but confined houses'

The Telegraph and Argus reports that

A survey is being launched today that will help form a new 10-year cultural plan for the area.

The organisation behind the survey, Bradford Cultural Place Partnership, aims to understand what culture really means to the people of Bradford.

It could be the National Science and Media Museum or Brontë Parsonage, or the bright lights of Leeds Road, or Billy Pearce in pantomime at the Alhambra.

“Bradford District is a strong contender to be the next UK City of Culture for 2025. Regardless of the outcome of our bid, we believe that a thriving culture is key to the future success of our district. That’s why we’re making a 10-year plan for it and that’s why we need your help,” starts the survey. (Jo Winrow)

The Telegraph suggests 'Five beautiful corners of Britain that really need you to visit this autumn' including

Haworth Moor: tourist honeypot becomes novel encounter

Brontë country is deservedly popular. It’s easy to get to – with lovely Haworth and Hebden Bridge at its edges. It’s dotted with teashops and inns, and the house-museum – aka The Parsonage, recently helped survive by a £20,000 grant from the TS Eliot estate – provides welcome shelter from the sudden inclemencies that blow in on the unceasing westerlies. When you head out on to Haworth Moor in October, though, you feel the full impact of a landscape that inspired one of the greatest English novels. Nothing much stands between the Atlantic Ocean and the West Riding Pennines and fists of wind can suddenly blow in as if from nowhere. The uplands darken and the sky turns the shade of drystone walls. This is a time for a fast striding up to Top Withins to marvel at the way a young female writer forged a cosmic romance from the raw material of her immediate locality. “Lengthen night and shorten day,” wrote Emily. “Every leaf speaks bliss to me. Fluttering from the autumn tree.” Who could possibly disagree? (Chris Moss)

British Comedy Guide interviews actor Brian Blessed.

Is there a book or film that changed your life?

The book that absolutely changed my life was Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. It was the strangest thing because when it came out, the critics hated it, and it nearly broke her heart.

Eventually, I played Heathcliff in a Brontë Festival in Yorkshire and I went all over Brontë country - to the Brontë house, where she wrote Wuthering Heights. Wuthering Heights actually exists - just outside the Brontë home at Haworth Parsonage, where Emily Brontë is buried. Wuthering Heights is on the hill in the background; it's a cottage called 'Top Withins'.

The book, when it came out, was just too strong for the critics and they criticised it really heavily. The great tragedy is - and nobody really knows this - that she had written a second novel and she was so horrified, and so heartbroken, that she burned it. We don't know, to this day, what it was about.

Of course, months later, the world suddenly appreciated Wuthering Heights for what it was: bold, brilliant, powerful and dramatic - much more dramatic than Jane Eyre. (Si Hawkins)

The New Yorker has a very interesting article on Jane Austen which seems to place Charlotte Brontë's opinion of her in context.

But Austen was hardly a best-seller, and by the eighteen-twenties her books were often out of print. The critical line on her, even from admirers like Sir Walter Scott, was that she was a miniaturist specializing in an exceedingly narrow sector of British society, the landed gentry. Everyone agreed that she captured that world with astonishing precision; not everyone felt that it was a world worth capturing. “A carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden with neat borders and delicate flowers,” Charlotte Brontë described “Pride and Prejudice” to a friend. “I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen in their elegant but confined houses.”

Queen Victoria was a fan (a taste, possibly the only one, she shared with B. B. King), and after the publication of Austen-Leigh’s memoir, in 1869, Austen enjoyed a revival. What had put off readers like Charlotte Brontë now became the basis of her appeal. Her books transported readers to a simpler time and place. They were escapist fiction. Winston Churchill had “Pride and Prejudice” read aloud to him when he was recovering from pneumonia during the Second World War. “What calm lives they had, those people!” was his thought. “No worries about the French Revolution, or the crashing struggle of the Napoleonic Wars. Only manners controlling natural passion so far as they could, together with cultured explanations of any mischances.” [...]

Where Charlotte Brontë and Leslie Stephen went wrong was in assuming that the world of the Woodhouses and the Knightleys, the Bingleys and the Bertrams, was Jane Austen’s world, that she was writing about her own social circle. But Austen did not belong to that circle. She knew and observed people in it, of course, but her own family belonged to what is called the “pseudo-gentry”—families that lived like the gentry, had the gentry’s taste and manners, and often married into the gentry, but depended on a male family member with a job to maintain their style of life. (Louis Menand)

Fosters has asked the staff of York Public Library (Maine, USA) about their current reads.

Michelle read “Mexican Gothic” by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (Fiction):

“This is a very visual novel with a strong sense of ‘place.’ It’s descriptive such that I could picture everything as it was unfolding. The characters are well-drawn and the narrative so intriguing I couldn’t wait to pick the book back up again. The novel is Emily Brontë (dark, eerie) crossed with Isabel Allende (magical realism) with a smidge of H.P. Lovecraft (old school horror) thrown in for good measure. Bonus: it’s currently in development as a dramatic series for HULU. And I. CAN’T. WAIT.” (Jane Siviski)

The Tab talks to athletics star Amy Hunt about how she plans to balance a BA in English with running.

So how is she feeling about the actual academic bit? “Supervisions excite and terrify me, the first few might be really horrible. The most terrifying thing is that I know I need to start reading faster; it’s scary to think how much I need to read in one week.” She’s passionate about her course and its breadth of study. “We have the whole span of literature on the course; James Joyce and Bronte but then also last year’s Booker Prize Winner ‘Girl, Woman, Other’. It’s great to see that diversity and learn about a whole range of different people’s lives and times and experiences. Because it is so broad it is an amazing subject to do, I’ll be interested to see what I gravitate towards throughout my degree.” (Xanthe Robertson)

SyFy Wire's Chosen One of the Day is Catherine Linton's ghost.

October is nearly upon us and the spoopy times are a-comin’! So let’s talk about Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, obviously. 

The novel is a mainstay in high schools and colleges all over the country, and there’s a lot happening in those hundreds of pages — everyone sucks, everyone’s sad, and everyone’s mad. It’s great. But early on, there’s a particular passage from our narrator, Mr. Lockwood, relating a series of nightmares he’s had while staying in the Heights — Wuthering, obviously, and not to be confused with 96,000? Dollars? Holla!

ANYWAY, so this dude Lockwood is having some nightmares and one of those nightmares scared me so intensely as a reader that I still think about it a decade and a half after reading the book for the first time. In it, a small ghostly hand grabs his hand from outside of a window and he hears a child’s voice crying, “Let me in!” [...]

I have legitimately been haunted by this scene from Wuthering Heights since I was 20 years old—which, incidentally is how long that little kid ghost was haunting the moors, which I'm sure is just a coincidence and not significant at all. But it is horrifying and I’m probably going to have a nightmare because of this Chosen One of the Day so thanks a lot, internet. (Preeti Chhibber)

El cultural (Spain) mentions several Spanish writers who did translation on the side.

Como Ferlosio traduciendo a Collodi o, ya más conocidamente, Carmen Martín Gaite traduciendo a Flaubert, a Svevo, a las Brontë, a Virginia Woolf y un largo etcétera. (Ignacio Echevarría) (Translation)

Youth Journalism has an article on Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca, describing it as 'A modern-day adaption of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre'. For the Literature posts about Jane Eyre.