The imagery as it was written

More wishful thinking for after-lockdown as The Telegraph and Argus recommends 'Five top-rated West Yorkshire hotels to visit after lockdown'.

The Fleece Inn, Main Street, Haworth

Rating: 9.3

Estimated cost: £100-£175

Fancy visiting the Haworth parsonage museum or taking a trip to the Brontë Waterfall? If so, The Fleece Inn is the perfect accommodation to return to after a day of exploration.

The rooms are traditionally refurbished but each benefit from freeview TV as well as coffee and tea making facilities.

The on site restaurant is also enviable, serving home-cooked dishes using local ingredients.

An English breakfast is served each morning and guest can also enjoy a beer on the rooftop berr garden.

One person wrote: “We had an excellent stay and were well looked after – even with Covid.

“The room was fantastic and the views to die for.” (Sarah McGee)

Independent (Ireland) interviews poet and playwright Rita Ann Higgins.

What was the first book you loved?

Wuthering Heights because I could see the imagery as it was written. I felt I knew Heathcliff and Cathy. (Bairbre Power)

A columnist from Enid News & Eagle looks 'clearly at our society, through the eyes of Anne Brontë'.

While reflecting on the recent inauguration of our nation’s first female vice president, I happened on some notes I wrote on the birthday of Anne Brontë, on Jan. 17, 2017, and they seemed appropriate to our time — and to the persistent misogyny of our society, which did not magically go away on Jan. 20. [...]

One of the reasons her work is overshadowed by her sisters is the criticism it received in its day. In “gentle” Victorian society, Anne had the audacity to point out evils like misogyny and endemic injustice. And she paid a price with her male critics.

Her response to the critics speaks volumes to our contemporary “let’s pretend injustice didn’t happen, and isn’t still happening” sensibilities: “O Reader! if there were less of this delicate concealment of facts — this whispering ‘Peace, peace’, when there is no peace — there would be less of sin and misery to the young ... who are left to wring their bitter knowledge from experience.”

These are the words of a strong woman, living in a time when strength was neither encouraged nor accepted from women, challenging us all to face down the injustice and misery of our world, rather than hide them behind a socially acceptable facade.

Anne was excoriated for her unvarnished treatment of society. But, surely today we wouldn’t patronize, hush-up, marginalize and vilify someone simply for pointing out the difficult and painful shortcomings of our society. Right? Unfortunately, no. (James Neal)

Daily Mail picks up the story of the 1950s so-called Battersea Poltergeist.

Art historian Susan Owens, author of The Ghost: A Cultural History [...] claims the heyday of ghost stories was the Victorian era. 

During this time some of the most famous ghosts of literature emerged: those in Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol (1843) and Cathy's ghost in Emily Brontë Wuthering Heights (1847). While Scrooge's ghosts came to him as a warning, clad in chains, Brontë's creation was much more human and could even bleed. (Stephanie Linning)

Wuthering Heights has made it onto the '27 best romance novels ever' according to Glamour.