Gruesome tales and Scandalous Essays

Edinburgh Live has an article on the Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine mentioning the Brontës love for the journal, but probably the tone could be a bit less... tabloid:

The Edinburgh horror magazine that inspired Charlotte Brontë with tales of terror
Full of gruesome tales and scandalous essays, Blackwood's was an Edinburgh institution. (...)

The Brontë sisters were so inspired by the stories they read in their father’s copies of the magazine as (somewhat precocious) children that Charlotte Brontë wrote and put together a version of her own. Like the rest of her juvenilia it is a tiny, hand-stitched book around 1 inch by two inches with stories imitating those in the real magazine written in cramped handwriting.

Their dissolute brother Branwell, who never published a novel or reached their heights of literary fame but fully believed he deserved to, frequently wrote grandiose letters to the magazine, and when James Hogg died he wrote to them within days to propose himself as the perfect replacement. He was 18 at the time, so unsurprisingly the magazine passed on his kind offer but his sisters’ gothic tales of passion, insanity and revenge clearly have their roots in the dark, unsettling pages of Blackwoods. (Kaite Welsh)

Harper's Bazaar publishes a selection by the writer Bella Mackie of literature's best antiheroines:

Antoinette from Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
“This book is such a wonderful redressing of Jane Eyre, told from the perspective of Rochester’s first wife, the so-called ‘madwoman in the attic’. It is so interesting to me how unfair Jane Eyre is to this character, how readily she is dismissed. This book gives so much care to her backstory to explain what happened to her. The casual trope of wives being ‘mad’ is so dangerous, and to redress that and explain how her agency was taken away is just fantastic. After everything, she is still able to summon the strength and power to burn everything down. It’s impressive.”

The Guardian reviews After Story by Larissa Behrendt:

Behrendt is able to both celebrate the power of Shakespeare’s or Brontë’s art and mourn the vast cost of their colonial transplantation. She suggests that a Eurocentric “culture” divides everyone – including Europeans – from culture. Literature’s “ideas and ideals” both drive and damage us, an illusory yardstick with which to beat ourselves. Yet this is also a love letter to books as technologies of change, that help us “understand where bias and prejudice hide [and] create a new way of thinking”. If the question is what stories might help us decolonise, Behrendt finds the answer in all of them, from the Magna Carta, to Mrs Dalloway, to the fragments Della salvages from memories of her mother’s cousin Elaine and writes in the notebook on her hotel bedside table. (Imogen Dewey)

Kate Bush News reports the following anecdote by Michael Stewart and Kate Bush:

Michael has just published a new book, Walking the Invisible, dedicating it to Kate, which Grazia magazine has described as “an imaginative and elegant trek through the landscape of the Brontës.” Having sent a copy of the book to Kate he was delighted last month to receive a hand written note from her, saying in a tweet: “It’s not every day you get a letter from Kate Bush!” (Séan)

A local librarian who loves Jane Eyre in Framingham Source.  Magia w każdym dniu (in Polish) posts about Jane Eyre.

The SIlver Petticoat Review ranks and briefly reviews fifteen of the best Jane Eyre movies and adaptations.