'Nothing nice about the Brontës'

Charlotte Brontë's little book sold for 1.25 million dollars and to be returned to the Brontë Parsonage thanks to the Friends of National Libraries is still in the news: Evening Standard, BBC News, etc.

Also this:

ICYMI, you can hear Ann Dinsdale, our Principal Curator, talking to @EvanHD @BBCPM about Charlotte's little book here, at about 53 mins in. https://t.co/38iEeB3e2t

— Brontë Parsonage (@BronteParsonage) April 26, 2022

The Hindu celebrates 175 years of Jane Eyre (though the novel was actually published in October).

Terry Eagleton says in a review essay, “There is nothing nice about the Brontës, as there is about Elizabeth Gaskell, for example. They have the voracious demand and implacable sense of entitlement of emotionally deprived children, which in some ways is what they were.” Jane is full of a murderous passion, which is at its rawest in Emily’s heroine, Wuthering Heights’ Catherine Earnshaw. Both girls scratch, thrash around and lash out. In the very first few paragraphs of Jane Eyre, Jane has thrown a book at her cousin, John Reed, for bullying her. The Brontë sisters seem to have inherited their father’s notorious temper, made worse in them by the fact that as women they could not vent it freely. They risked being labelled as mad and laughed at, or worse, if they did. [...]

It is strange that there is not much representation of female rage in literature even now. Maybe authors risk losing readers’ sympathy if they create an unwomanly female protagonist yelling in anger. The ancient Greeks knew what a dangerous form it could take — think of Medea slaughtering her children. A recent novel that hardly got the attention it deserves is Elizabeth Macneal’s The Doll Factory (2019), set in Victorian London of the 1850s and about an aspiring artist, Iris, who becomes the muse of a fictional Pre-Raphaelite painter. If the women in Pre-Raphaelite paintings are gorgeous, sullen and boring in their stillness, Iris is gorgeous, sullen and gloriously difficult in her fits of fury. (Anusua Mukherjee)

South Coast Register (Australia) reports that,

The Shoalhaven Entertainment Centre is excited to host award-winning Brisbane-based shake & stir Theatre Company as it rehearses and remounts its production of Charlotte Brontë's iconic gothic tale, Jane Eyre, ahead of a six-month national tour. [...]

Boldly adapted for the stage, audiences will be swept into Brontë's tale of the spirited orphan searching for love, family, and a sense of belonging.

On Tuesday, May 3, Jane Eyre director Michael Futcher and lead actress and co-adapter Nelle Lee will host an artist talk to discuss moving this much-loved story from the novel to the stage. After the performance on Saturday, May 7, Shoalhaven Entertainment Centre members are invited to stay to meet and greet with the cast.

This stunning new production, featuring original music written by multi-ARIA Award winner Sarah McLeod (The Superjesus), will set a fire blazing in your soul.

Revista de Arte (Spain) reports that Museo Picasso Málaga has a new exhibition on the work of Paula Rego. On June 17th they will screen Jane Eyre 1944 as part of it. ABC also mentions her Jane Eyre-related works.

Irish Examiner reviews a recent concert by Mitski in Dublin.

These uncanny bops – more wuthering frights than Wuthering Heights – were allied to tunes that crackled with a gothic punch (not even what sounded like a fire-alarm going off briefly during Goodbye, My Danish Sweetheart could knock her off her stride). (Ed Power)

Finally, according to Lonely Planet, Elizabeth Gaskell's House is 'the best museum for literature lovers' in Manchester.

Manchester has nurtured many creative geniuses over the centuries. This includes Elizabeth Gaskell – best known for her novels Cranford and North and South – who lived in the city during the height of her career. 

Her former home, a Grade II-listed villa on Plymouth Grove, is now known as Elizabeth Gaskell’s House and serves as a museum of her life and works. As well as seeing how she and her family lived, the venue reveals plenty of details about her most famous novels and how they painted an accurate portrait of life (especially for the poor) in Victorian England. 

The Regency-style home has been restored to its original mid-1800s state. Strolling around, it’s not hard to picture Gaskell writing in her study or sipping tea in the handsome drawing room with prolific literary acquaintances such as Charles Dickens and Charlotte Brontë. (Jemima Forbes)