The Brontës humming 'Memory' all the way back to Haworth

Apollo Magazine has a lovely article mixing the Brontës, cats (or Cats) and T.S. Eliot, illustrated by drawings of their cats by the Brontës themselves.

The Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, West Yorkshire, has long been one of the favourite pilgrimage sites of English literature buffs, up there with Dove Cottage, Jane Austen’s House and, erm, a luggage trolley wedged into a wall at King’s Cross station. In less turbulent years than this one, some 70,000 people visit the parsonage, which in the 1840s was a formidable fiction factory; it was here that Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall were written.

So it is heartening to see that the museum’s crowdfunding campaign, which is aiming to raise emergency funds to make up for some of the revenue lost due to the Covid-19 pandemic, has at the time of writing achieved more than £70,000 of the £100,000 that the organisation is looking to raise to ensure its survival into 2021. That’s in no small part thanks to a £20,000 donation from the estate of T.S. Eliot, which has long benefited from the royalties it receives from the musical Cats. [...]

What the Brontës would have made of Cats is anyone’s guess. Cats they were certainly fans of, though, keeping two at the parsonage – as well as dogs such as Grasper and Flossy, whose collars survive at the museum. As Ellen Nussey wrote in her Reminiscences of Charlotte Brontë: ‘Black “Tom”, the tabby, was everybody’s favourite. It received such gentle treatment it seemed to have lost its cat’s nature, and subsided into luxurious amiability and contentment.’

Another cat, Tiger, was painted in watercolour by Emily Brontë in 1845, alongside Keeper, her bull mastiff and Flossy, Anne Brontë’s spaniel. [...]

Perhaps the Brontë siblings would have jumped at the chance of West End tickets, after all – and hummed ‘Old Deuteronomy’ and ‘Memory’ all the way back to Haworth. (Rakewell)

The Good Men Project recommends 'Three Books to Revisit This Fall' including

Jane Eyre

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë opens on a “dreary November day” and Jane has been banished away from her aunt and cousins while they warm themselves by the fire. She reads while catching glimpses of the scene outside the window.

“Afar, it offered a pale blank of mist and cloud; near a scene of wet lawn and storm-beat shrub, with ceaseless rain sweeping away wildly before a long and lamentable blast.”

Charlotte Brontë , Jane Eyre

Her cousins are warming themselves by the fire, but she is not invited. This scene will repeat itself later at her boarding school where the bigger girls stand in the way of the fire. The gusts of wind and unrelenting weather are also a motif throughout the book. The weather symbolizes Jane’s emotions and often foreshadows upcoming events.

Jane grows throughout the novel, from an orphaned and isolated girl to a strong woman who understands her own strength. She has weathered the storm. It’s a good lesson for those of us who will have to do so over the coming fall and winter. (Catherine Lanser)

The Island (Sri Lanka) reviews The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree by Shokoofeh Azar.

In a striking episode, a zealous mullah arrives in the village, confiscates the family’s entire collection of books and burns them in the village square. With broken hearts, the family watches “as the fire spread to the intertwined lovers Pierre and Natasha, Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw, Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler, Elizabeth and Mr Darcy, Abelard and Heloise, Tristan and Isolde, Salaman and Absal, Vis and Ramin, Vamegh and Azra, Zohreh and Manuchehr, Shirin and Farhad, Leyli and Majnun, Arthur and Gemma, the Rose and the Little Prince, before they had the chance to smell or kiss each other again, or whisper ‘I love you’ one last time.” (Anushka Hosain)

In The Times Helen Davies is transported

back to my earnest 14-year-old self when, after nailing most of Agatha Christie and the Brontës, I discovered Alice Walker's The Color Purple.

Corriere Romagna (Italy) features Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca.

La du Maurier, che sembra avere come punto di riferimento Charlotte Brontë e il suo “Jane Eyre”, opera qui una fusione tra elementi fiabeschi, avventura gotica e thriller, regalandoci un personaggio, quello della protagonista che parla in prima persona, in grado di rompere lo schema del romanzo vittoriano con le sue fantasie nevrotiche e con le sue domande senza risposta (protagonista a cui, per una vera e propria “sfida stilistica”, la du Maurier decide di non dare un nome…). (Andrea Bernardini) (Translation)

Jane Eyre 2011 is one of several films selected by Perfil (Argentina) as movies which make you want to read the books they are based on.