Lodestar Emily Brontë

 The Yorkshire Post is glad to see the Brontë Parsonage Museum reopen.

The Brontë sisters were undoubtedly dreamers who would map out their aspirations, which ultimately became a reality as they were responsible for some of the world’s best-loved novels such as Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre.

And as the Yorkshire museum dedicated to their lives re-opens today [19 May], visitors will be given the chance to follow one particularly quirky habit of two of the sisters, Emily and Anne.

A new exhibition at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth will feature a new ceramic vessel each month into which visitors can place a slip of paper on which they have written their own hopes.

The work by artist Layla Khoo has been inspired by the diary papers of the two younger Brontë sisters, whose eldest sibling was Charlotte. They would store the papers in a cash box, and revisit them after four years to look back on the aspirations they had written down.

A selection of the original diary papers will also be on display. The exhibition, which was originally planned for last year, has taken on an added resonance since the coronavirus pandemic, with a focus on the future at the forefront of so many people’s minds.

Harry Jelley, the museum’s audience development officer, said: “In the turbulent times in which we live, it’s poignant how Layla has connected with the emotional and topical threads that we share with the Brontës’ time – disease, political movements, ambition, apprehension, hope.

"We hope visitors will find some peace and calm to reflect with this installation.”

The Parsonage will welcome back its first visitors today, and anyone passing through the entrance will be given unprecedented access to some of the 7,000 artefacts which are in its collection.

Visitor numbers will be limited to just six people every 15 minutes, meaning the venue will be free of the crowds who normally pack into its corridors and rooms.

Each year, as many as 80,000 visitors descend on the Parsonage, but admissions will be scaled back to adhere to social distancing regulations.

Among the highlights will be the exhibition marking the bicentenary of Anne Brontë’s birth, which has been extended to this year after the Parsonage was forced to close in 2020.

Another new exhibition is Gondal Arise!, an installation by Isabel Greenberg, the author and illustrator of Glass Town, a graphic novel about the Brontës and the stories written in their youth.

The installation, which will be in place until December, will feature new maps that explore Emily and Anne’s imaginary world of Gondal. (Paul Jeeves)

The Guardian reviews a new biography of poet Charlotte Mew.

There were other reasons too for Mew’s lack of traction. She published erratically and refused to give her editors even the sketchiest of biographical details. She believed, as she wrote of her lodestar Emily Brontë, that literary genius is “purely spiritual, strangely and exquisitely severed from embodiment”. (Kathryn Hughes)

Our Culture reviews Rosali’s third album, No Medium.

The title for Philadelphia/Michigan musician Rosali’s third album, No Medium, is taken from the Charlotte Brontë novel Jane Eyre. The full quote from that is helpful in evoking the tension that controls Rosali’s record: “I know no medium: I never in my life have known any medium in my dealings with positive, hard characters, antagonistic to my own, between absolute submission and determined revolt. I have always faithfully observed the one, up to the very moment of bursting, sometimes with volcanic vehemence, into the other.” (Conor Lochrie)

While Esquire shares a 1991 article on Sinéad O’Connor.

“I think I’d like to play roles where I could draw from my own personality rather than having to become another person, because I don’t think I’d be good at that. I’m so used to expressing different elements of myself that it would probably have to be something like that. But I wouldn’t do musician things or anything like that. I think the more melodramatic, the better. That’s what I like, I like old stuff, like Wuthering Heights and that sort of thing, you know. Because I fancy myself as . . . I want to be Kathy [sic], I want to be Scarlett O’Hara, I want to be St. Bernadette.” (Marcelle Clements)

ActuaLitté (France) claims that the Brontës died because of Haworth's 'corpse-infused water'. Well, actually, the Brontës had the best water in the area because they had their own well in the upper part of the village. But yes, many of the Haworth inhabitants who lived and used the few wells in the lower part of the village were drinking that plus sewage that filtered down too.