Spring Break

Stars Insider publishes an article about some siblings that are considered geniuses:

The Brontë sisters—Charlotte, Emily, and Anne—were responsible for writing some of the most celebrated novels in English literature. Acknowledged as literary geniuses for works such as 'Jane Ayre,' (sic)  'Wuthering Heights,' and 'The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,' the siblings honed their craft at a young age, creating imaginary worlds vividly described in poetry and in plays. As adults, they quickly found success, drawing on life experiences—good and bad—to produce the classics we know and admire today. But the career of each author was also desperately short.

Counterpunch quotes from a Marxist reading of Wuthering Heights:

There’s no silly hope for “the good rich man,” the benevolent capitalist good capitalist in an amazing novel that came out one year before The Communist Manifesto. A brazen lack of sentiment and a daring affront to Victorian morality is no small part of what makes Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights a better novel than anything Dickens ever wrote. There are no decent bourgeois to pat on the back in Bronte’s masterful tale, where we confront a very different orphan than the passive Oliver. Heathcliff is a Liverpool waif who grows up to take bitter revenge on his class oppressors and the love of his life, Catherine, his childhood ally against Christian capitalist tyranny. Catherine, born to a propertied family whose moral hypocrisy and whose vicious classist oppression of her beloved Heathcliff she despises. She has a special relationship with the proletarian servant boy Heathcliff, forged in common rebellion against her older brother’s regime at Wuthering Heights. But after Heathcliff is forced to leave in the face of recurrent class humiliation, Catherine betrays both him and herself by marrying into bourgeois comfort over at a different and propertied estate, Thrushcross Grange. The betrayal proves fatal, sparking a suicidal depression when Heathcliff returns as a new and vicious bourgeois. Heathcliff’s retribution comes not through proletarian revolution but through a climb into wealth that permits him to sadistically use his former class oppressors’ own weapons – money and property – against them. His payback is complete but it brings no relief. Near the end of the novel, one of the finest ever penned in English,  (Paul Street)

Emily, the film, is reviewed on dev-usasports:

There’s a central, almost callous, irony to the film. In its first minutes, her sister asks, “Why did you write Wuthering Heights?” And in the final minutes, we return to that question. But the film’s never really concerned with the why and how of novel-writing — plenty of boring movies have been there and done that. Everything between those scenes is a study of this woman who was never allowed to achieve the things she wanted to. Emily Brontë was born in the wrong time to be a human being with freedom, rights, and happiness, but she was born at the right time to be a good writer. Ain’t that a kick in the head?

Stuff (New Zealand) on the origins of a particular sheep breed, the Drysdale sheep:

Accompanying [Francis William] Dry to Aotearoa was his wife Florence Wilson Swinton, who studied the Brontë sisters. The couple’s research interests had more in common than it might seem: Emily Brontë’s great anti-hero Heathcliff was a sheep farmer. (Russell Poole)

Movieweb celebrates the 50th anniversary of the film Papillon:

There are two main takeaways from 1973’s Papillon. The first is — don’t trust nuns (and after watching Spotlight, maybe the entire Catholic Church). The second — a man is nothing without his freedom, or as Charlotte Brontë wrote in her seminal novel, Jane Eyre, “I am no bird, and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.”  (Patrick Hayes)

Bad weather as the quintessential British thing in Daily Express:

 We will never know for sure, but inclement weather is a frequent presence in their stories.

Imagine King Lear without the storm, or how much less compelling Heathcliff would have been in Wuthering Heights were it not for the backdrop of the “wily, windy moors”.

That, of course, was Kate Bush’s description rather than Emily Brontë’s, reminding us this little island has for long periods also dominated music. (Patrick O'Flynn)

According to Her Campus Jane Eyre is a 'coquette' novel to time travel back to Victorian romance. Whatever:

“Jane Eyre” by Charlotte Brontë – We follow the narrative of a young governess, Jane Eyre, and her tumultuous relationship with her employer, Mr. Rochester. With themes of love, morality, and societal norms, this novel is a must-read for any fan of Victorian literature.

Things to do in a Spring Break. Glam recommends:

 Of course, you don't absolutely have to do anything new on spring break. If you're feeling a bit of nostalgia this year, it could be time to revisit an old favorite book. Maybe you read a classic in high school that you've been dying to read again, like "Atonement" or "Jane Eyre." ( Emily Hunt)

The Irish author Louise Kennedy has a love/hate relation with the Brontës. In The Guardian:

 The book or author I came back to

I had a hard time with the Brontës. I adored Jane Eyre up to the line “Reader, I married him”; she lost me after that. I read Wuthering Heights twice and on both occasions found it demented.

SoloLibri (Italy) celebrates the anniversary of Charlotte Brontë's death:

Il 31 marzo 1855 si spegneva, incinta del primo figlio, la scrittrice Charlotte Brontë. Ricordiamo le protagoniste rivoluzionarie dei suoi romanzi: da Jane Eyre a Lucy Snowe, voce narrante di Villette. Scopriamo analogie e differenze tra le eroine create dalla penna di “Currer Bell” alias Charlotte Brontë. (Alice Figini) (Translation)

El Taquígrafo (Spain) reviews Crisanta by Juan Ramón Biedma: 

Parece una investigación noir sobre un cuadro famoso desaparecido como en La tabla de Flandes  de Arturo Pérez Reverte, y una historia de fantasmas durante la Guerra Civil como en El Orfanato de Guillermo del Toro, y una intriga sobre sociedades esotéricas como Inferno de Dam Brown, y una novela gótica con caserón encantado e historias de amor a lo Cumbres borrascosas de Emily Brontë, y una novela política y sociológica sobre cómo se gestó se activó y sucedió la guerra civil española como Los cipreses creen en Dios de José María Gironella, y una novela sobre luchas intestinas de bando como La novela numero 13 de Wenceslao Fernández Flórez y, en suma, una muy entretenida y tenebrosa alegoría sobre nuestro oscurantismo nacional… (Luis Artigue) (Translation)

A story about an A.I. writing a novel in The Age is a bit harsh on the Brontës:

There was a tranche of silence between us. We’d suddenly found ourselves at God’s right hand and had no idea how to behave. I was happy for the fact of this new maestro, but sad for myself. If I could write stories better than those written by Twain, Dickens and the Brontës I’d have written them. I can’t. This person had. I reread the novel, Iratus Avis, and it confirmed my obsolescence, Twain’s irrelevance, and the Brontes as a trio of cheap masochists. (Anson Cameron)

Just Jared Jr. interviews the actor Blake Draper:

I love reading! Whether that’s novels or plays. My favourite book of all time is Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights”. Heathcliff is my dream role.

WWWItalia interviews the writer Beatrice Gioia: 

La sua lettura e il suo autore preferiti?

Ho sempre avuto una passione sconfinata per Jane Austen e le sorelle Brontë, dalle quali mi sono lasciata ispirare per l’ambientazione e i balli di società.  (Translation)

The University News celebrates the Women's History Month listing female writers who used male pen names, including the Brontës. The best spring walks in Yorkshire according to The Yorkshire Post include "A walk on the moors above Haworth in the Brontë countryside". Playcrazygame talks about Emily and shows the wonders of automatic translation when Wuthering Heights became Whirlwind Mountain or Whirlwind Hill.