Patrick Brontë would be pleased

Great news for the Old School Room in Haworth via The Telegraph and Argus.

Small charity The Brontë Spirit has spent the past 12 years sourcing sufficient funds to make the Old School Room waterproof again.

In 2016 the charity succeeded in getting the two extensions to the building, in Church Street, Haworth, re-roofed.

Now work is underway on restoring the original section, thanks to grants from the Government-financed Keighley Towns Fund, the Bernard Sunley Foundation and Pilgrim Trust.

It is hoped that the final phase, being carried out by York-based Pinnacle Conservation Ltd, will be completed next month.

The latest work is costing around £150,000, which when added to the amounts spent on the extensions takes the total to just over £250,000.

The Old School Room was built by the Rev Patrick Brontë, father of the famous literary siblings, as a national school in 1832.

The extensions were added to the building in 1851 and 1871.

Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne Brontë all taught at the school.

And Charlotte's wedding reception was held there in 1854, when she married Arthur Bell Nicholls.

Now the Grade II-listed premises, a stone's throw from the parsonage where the children grew up, are considered one of the most important parts of the village's literary heritage.

Averil Kenyon, chair of The Brontë Spirit, says: "We are really grateful to the sponsors for enabling us to undertake this major project as well as our architect, Stephen Dixon, of Calls Architecture, who has been so patient and supportive down the years.

"We hope that Patrick Brontë would be pleased that we've succeeded in re-roofing his national school building, a far-sighted project he undertook to educate the village’s children.

"The roof restoration will ensure that this historic building will still be available to the people of Haworth for many years to come and that a valuable community space will provide many opportunities for both families and organisations." (Alistair Shand)

BBC reports that, 'A new wave of books is getting inside the intriguing inner sanctums of the mega-wealthy' and wonders why these stories 'fascinate generation after generation'.

An appetite for such drama is stoked everywhere from reality shows like Real Housewives or Below Deck to Jane Austen and Edith Wharton, Downton Abbey,  Bridgerton and Queen Charlotte.

It might also account for why so many novels about the upper echelons are told from the point of view of outsiders: think of Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair, Jane Eyre, Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited, the unnamed narrator of Rebecca, Nick Guest in The Line of Beauty, Richard Papen in The Secret History… Such protagonists function as a proxy for the ordinary reader, who can wonder how they'd fare in such situations. Who can see all the allure – but also all the problems. (Holly Williams)

The Michigan Daily has a column on new ideas.

Every art form has its own standard foundational elements — their own Universal Grammars, so to speak. There are certain tropes and ideas in fiction that have existed for centuries. Take the “star-crossed lovers” trope, which can be found in the most famous of romances from “Romeo and Juliet” to Catherine and Healthcliff of “Wuthering Heights.” These classic stories encompass the most quintessential elements of the trope, yet people continue to write about forbidden love, and understandably so. (Talia Belowich)

A contributor to The Press-Enterprise writes about not being good at sports as a kid.

My sort-of-friends could climb a chain-link fence in nanoseconds. I just fell flat on my back and, after I caught my breath, staggered home to finish reading “Jane Eyre.” (Marla Jo Fisher)