Delirium Jubilee

In Psychology Today Laura Otis writes about her experience with Covid-19 and particularly the neurological effects of it. She thinks that Charlotte Brontë's Villette provides good metaphors:

Lucy ventures out at night not once but twice. The first time, her students have gone home for vacation, and for weeks, she has been living nearly alone at the private school where she teaches. Depressed, sick, suffering alternately from insomnia and nightmares, Lucy yields to a compulsion to go out: “One evening—and I was not delirious; I was in my sane mind, I got up—I dressed myself, weak and shaking. The solitude and the stillness of the long dormitory could not be borne any longer” (Brontë I: 231). In her wanderings, Lucy, a devout Protestant, comes upon a Catholic church and asks a priest to hear her confession. He kindly refuses, and after leaving the church, Lucy collapses in a storm, leading to a transformative break in the narrative. Like some of Edgar Allan Poe’s characters, Lucy uses a word, “delirious,” to characterize a mental state she denies having. As she heads out into the wind and rain, she says in a parenthetical aside, “I could not be delirious, for I had sense and recollection to put on warm clothing” (Brontë I: 232). Her repeated denials suggest that sick, sleep-deprived, wet, cold, starved Lucy really is delirious.

The second time that Lucy wanders into Villette at night, she is on drugs. In the nightmare that preceded the first episode, she feels herself forced to drink a bitter draught; in the second episode, the nightmare comes true when a servant sent by the headmistress gives Lucy a drink to make her sleep—except that it doesn’t work. “Instead of stupor, came excitement,” Lucy tells readers. “I became alive to new thought—to reverie peculiar in coloring. A gathering call ran among the faculties, their bugles sang, their trumpets rang an untimely summons” (Brontë II: 305). Lucy rises, sneaks out of school, and walks to the city center, where she finds that “Villette is one blaze, one broad illumination; the whole world seems abroad; moonlight and heaven are banished; the town, by her own flambeaux, beholds her own splendor … It is a strange scene, stranger than dreams” (Brontë II: 309). “Delirium” fits Lucy’s mental state better in this second night adventure, since she feels overexcited. Her episodes of night wandering relate to each other like yin and yang; the first dark and depressed, the second bright and energetic. Lucy’s two bouts of night-wandering share a quality that brought them to mind when I tried to describe my COVID-19 state. On both occasions, Lucy comes across as a ghost wandering a world in which she seems to have no place.

Last February, in about the same shape as Lucy, I thought that movement and fresh air would do me good. 

The Big Jubilee Read list has been published and Wide Sargasso Sea is on it:

Wide Sargasso Sea
by Jean Rhys (1966, Dominica/Wales)
Born into the oppressive, colonialist society of 1930s Jamaica, white Creole heiress Antoinette Cosway meets a young Englishman who is drawn to her innocent beauty and sensuality. After their marriage, however, disturbing rumours begin to circulate which poison her husband against her. Caught between his demands and her own precarious sense of belonging, Antoinette is driven towards madness. Her husband, on the other hand, is destined to end up in the arms of another novel's heroine.
Rhys's classic study of betrayal tells the backstory of Jane Eyre's 'madwoman in the attic', Bertha Rochester.

Vulture reviews the latest episode of Sanditon:

In this episode, Charlotte’s friends show terrible judgment, except in their personal romantic choices. Alison and Georgiana are all in on Lennox when Alex is right there. Again, I know Jane Eyre hasn’t been written, but the parallels are so clear!! And he doesn’t even have a wife locked in his attic! That we know of! Anyway, Alison agrees to go the ball (the ball!!). (Alice Burton)

Zenda Libros (Spain) reviews the recent compilation of translated letters by Charlotte, Como Fósforos de Lucifer:

El ansia de escribir y publicar que acompañó toda su vida a Charlotte Brontë palpita en las cartas que escribió a sus allegados a lo largo del tiempo. En esta preciosa compilación epistolar que ha publicado Altamarea nos deleitaremos con la trayectoria anímica de la inolvidable escritora. (...)

Uno de los puntos fuertes de esta obra es la naturalidad con la que Brontë desmenuza su obra más paradigmática, Jane Eyre, desvelando en varias de estas misivas el reverso que se esconde tras esta ficción: cuánto de realidad hay en el universo de su protagonista. (Raquel Jiménez Jiménez) (Translation)

Le Monde (France) reviews the latest album by Cécile McLorin Salvant, Ghost Song:

C'est par une version étonnante de Wuthering Heights, de Kate Bush, que débute l'album Ghost Song, de Cécile McLorin Salvant. (Translation)

BuzzFeed compiles some 'tweet jokes for intellectuals' including a Wuthering Heights one. AnneBronte.org explores Easter in the lives and works of the Brontës. Keighley News posts an update of the Save Haworth Main Street Post Office campaign. In a nutshell, the Post Office Ltd still wants to close it, ignoring the pleas of the community. Finally, Massive Cinema publishes a top 100 of the Best British films of the century (the current one, that is), and Wuthering Heights 2011 is Number 66.