'Jane Eyre was the novel I most loved. I was Jane Eyre'

Today marks the 173th anniversary of the death of Anne Brontë in Scarborough.

The Scotsman gives 4 stars to Wise Children's Wuthering Heights at King’s Theatre, Edinburgh.

Despite their status as pillars of 19th century literary culture, the radicalism of the Bronte sisters never fails to astonish. Charlotte is bold enough, with her blazing defence of Jane Eyre’s equal humanity against the patriarchal power and patronising attitudes of Rochester before his fall. And in Wuthering Heights, Emily goes further, exposing not only what we would now call the toxic masculinity embraced by Heathcliff and his bullying adoptive brother Hindley Earnshaw, but also the unspoken politics of race and empire that is now recognised as part of Emily Bronte’s world – with Heathcliff, the dark-skinned “other”, allegedly found on Liverpool docks by old Mr Earnshaw – and the politics of the earth itself, in the form of the wild Yorkshire moors that are adored by Heathcliff and Earnshaw’s daughter Cathy, and that themselves embody resistance to a fast-encroaching industrial and commercial revolution that will change the face of the earth.

In Emma Rice’s thrilling and sometimes startling stage version of Wuthering Heights – substantially rewritten, yet always faithful to the spirit of the original, with Rice’s powerful lyrics driving the action to music by composer Ian Ross – The Moor becomes a character in her own right, replacing the novel’s servant-narrator Nellie, and leading the chorus-like cast in a wild and irresistible backbeat to the narrative, ranging from fierce dance sequences to the wails and howls of the windswept moor at its most brutal.

Nandi Bhebhe is magnificent as the Moor, Liam Tamne and Lucy McCormick epic and unforgettable as Heathcliff and Cathy, bound together by a compulsion that seems more cruel than loving, given the brutality of the world that shapes them. And if Rice’s occasional resort to comedy and send-up sometimes jars a little – notably in the scenes involving the over-civilised Lintons, and other assorted metropolitan toffs – the huge power of her theatrical storytelling soon sweeps us onward again, in a production that Rice conceived as a Greek-style tragedy about what might happen if, as individuals and as a society, we allow cruelty to take hold; and which she fully succeeds in endowing with all of that status, and power. (Joyce McMillan)

The Reviews Hub gives it 4 stars as well.

Lucy McCormick, more than anyone, has a duty to carry a character so often misjudged – a fiercely energetic woman, a devourer of the banal and chaser of enjoyments, McCormick’s presence is notable through the performance – even when remaining silent for significant periods. There is undoubted chemistry she shares with the cast, not only the blazing passions of Heathcliff, but the manipulations of her neighbours, and the mournful, sorrowing gaze she shares with her daughter.

Liam Tamne, swallowed by self-conceited revenge, avarice, and a desire to live beyond the view his darker complexion affords him. Left behind by Catherine, Heathcliff resides in a world of no meaning, a ramshackle collection of degraded memories and self-destruction, emulated in his manner of trashing Mortimer’s distressed set. Tamne succeeds in progressing Heathcliff’s physical changes, but more so in the mental and psychological strength, he gains at the loss of so much.

In a world in which the Gods of Chaos and Revenge command much of the Moors, the voice given to the landscape itself, of a gnarling, yet embracing presence for those ‘lost’ to their homes, Rice adapts Wuthering Heights, not into a comedy, but a pastiche, an advancement handled with deft care and respect – while flinging open the doors of the Manor House to encourage as diverse an audience as possible. (Dominic Corr)

The Times publishes a Jubilee books list: the best novels of the past fifty years. Including:

 Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (1966)

The “mad woman in the attic”, Mr Rochester’s first wife in Jane Eyre, is one of literature’s most notorious characters. For Jean Rhys, in this prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s novel, she’s also among the most overlooked and least understood: the fate of the marginalised the world over. Rhys allows her to tell her own story and to reclaim her Creole identity, turning fiction’s most infamous bout of arson into an act of justice. (James Owen)

The Guardian has several well-known men of the arts recommend their favourite books by women.

As well as genre, there is the question of how we train young boys to read. [Novelist Howard] Jacobson grew up on Jane Austen, George Eliot and the Brontës: “That was my world. Jane Eyre was the novel I most loved. I was Jane Eyre.”  (Mary Ann Sieghart)

The New York Times recommends '8 new horror novels to read this summer' and one of them is The Hacienda by Isabel Cañas.

“The Hacienda” is a supernatural Gothic romance in the vein of “Rebecca” and “Wuthering Heights,” and like its predecessors, a furious woman is at the bottom of the trouble: María Catalina, Rodolfo’s first wife. “Her essence was the sickness, and the house was festering, rotting with her from the inside out.” Beatriz doesn’t have a chance at happiness. (Danielle Trussoni)

CrimeReads interviews writer Sarai Walker.

MO: As a followup, is the gothic a particularly potent place for feminist stories?

SW: There are so many powerful stories by women that could be described as feminist gothic, including classics like Jane Eyre and “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and also Southern Gothic fiction about women from authors such as Carson McCullers and Toni Morrison. So I think writers today can build on that legacy. The gothic is a powerful form for exploring trauma and what has been repressed, so that makes it ideal for telling feminist stories. (Molly Odintz)

The Guardian discusses 'bionic reading', which highlights 'a limited number of letters in a word in bold [...] allowing your brain – or, more specifically, your memory – to fill in the rest'.

In a way, some novels are already made for the ADHD brain. Books should encourage a wandering mind. Inspire rumination. Prose like Margaret Atwood’s fizzes and pops, but there are other moments where it lilts and glides; you put it down, and reflect and grow. Readers would miss that if they read through the bionic lens, where everything becomes supercharged as if the writer was scribbling during a massive speed binge. Still, it would improve Wuthering Heights. (Daniel Lavelle)

La Vanguardia (Spain) believes blindly in the misread facts put forth by this LitHub article a few weeks ago claiming that the Brontës' early deaths were due to the water they drank (which, again, is false, as they were pretty lucky when it came to their drinking water, unlike most of the Haworth population at the time).