You can own your own piece of Brontë history

The BBC also reports on the campaign being carried out in order to save the Brontë birthplace in Thornton.

The birthplace of the famous Brontë sisters has gone up for sale, with campaigners saying they hope to take it into community ownership.

A crowdfunding drive has been launched to buy the Grade II*-listed building in Thornton, near Bradford.

The aim was to turn the site into a cultural and educational centre, campaigners said.

Since launching on 9 October, the Brontë Birthplace Committee's appeal has already raised nearly £20,000.

People have been encouraged to buy shares to help fund the committee's plans to restore the house in Market Street and "create a lasting tribute".

Campaigners said it was a chance "to own your own piece of Brontë history".

According to the committee, an additional £280,000 would be needed to purchase the stone-built terraced house where the sisters once lived before moving to the better known Parsonage in Haworth in 1821.

To sympathetically renovate the building would cost an estimated additional £300,000, members said. [...]

Brontë Birthplace Committee vice-chair Steve Stanworth said: "Three world famous authors were born in this property. It should be preserved and remembered that the Brontë story started in this house."

He added: "For any Brontë fan - any literature fan - it's a key stop-off place."

Since the Brontë family left the village to move to Haworth, the building has changed ownership frequently and has served as a butchers, a small museum and a cafe.

The committee said it now hoped to raise enough funds to convert it into a cultural and educational centre, holiday lets and a cafe.

It has already been awarded £10,000 from the Architectural Heritage Fund and £9,000 from Bradford Council.

Campaigners said the site would complement Thornton's Brontë Bell Chapel, where Patrick Brontë gave his sermons, and St James Church, where the sisters were baptised.

Mr Stanworth said: "I run the Brontë Bell Chapel site and I always felt that the campaign needed to include the house.

"At the moment, it is all about raising the funds, we need to get the message out there: you can own your own piece of Brontë history."

Once bought, it was hoped the building would be open by 2025, when Bradford celebrates being the UK City of Culture, the committee said.

Rebecca Yorke, director of The Brontë Society and Brontë Parsonage Museum, said they "fully supported" the campaign.

Ms Yorke told the BBC: "The former parsonage at Thornton, where the famous Brontë siblings were born, played a significant part in the family's story.

"The house is currently inaccessible to admirers of the Brontës and the general public alike.

"It feels important that it should be preserved and play a part in celebrating the legacy of the extraordinary Brontë family." (Victoria Scheer)

Here's how you can help, too.

Spooky season is upon us and so Wealth of Geeks ranks 'Val Lewton’s Scariest RKO Movies' including

5. I Walked With a Zombie (1943)

The second film Tourneur made with Lewton overwhelms the audience with atmosphere. I Walked With a Zombie merges inspiration from an article of the same name as the film and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre to construct a movie that makes the viewer believe in magic. 

Here, voodoo fills the role of magic, the kind that allows someone to make a controllable zombie through ritual. The narrative follows a young nurse, brought to a Caribbean island to care for the ill wife of a plantation owner, who acts as a point of view character for the audience in a film that serves as a perhaps not entirely accurate but certainly entertaining journey into (white American filmmakers’ understanding of) voodoo. (Kyle Logan)

The Face looks at 'five Brit films that stole the show' at the London Film Festival.

Starve Acre

Bones and all: the second feature from Apostasy director Daniel Kokotajlo is a period folk-horror of grief and loss, encroaching madness and long-buried offerings excavated from the bottom of the field. In this rhapsody of 1970s browns, Yorkshire greys and pagan greens, Juliette (Morfydd Clark) and Richard (Matt Smith) are living in his late parents’ remote farmhouse with their troubled son Owen. After the five-year-old, who’s been hearing an eerie whistling in his head, pokes a wooden stick in the eye of a pony in the village, the family turn inwards and seek professional help. When things go from weird to devastating, Richard, an archaeology lecturer, starts digging: in his dad’s old journals, in ancient tales of ​“wood sprite” Jack Grey and in the secrets-concealing dirt of the property.

Smith is a moody, brooding, haunted Heathcliff, pacing the windswept moors as he tries to locate a long-buried piece of local legend called the ​“womb of nature”. Clark, in a performance familiar from the terrifyingly devout nurse she played so brilliantly in Saint Maud, is an unsettling presence throughout. Add a perfectly shivery score by Matthew Herbert and you have an atmospheric British chiller, adapted from modern gothic maestro Andrew Michael Hurley’s 2019 novel. (Ibrahim Azam and Craig McLean)

Deadline mourns the death of actress Lara Parker.

Parker, who also authored four popular Dark Shadows-related novels from 1998-2016, arrived on the supernatural soap opera in 1967, not long after Canadian actor Jonathan Frid had been cast as vampire Barnabas Collins. Frid’s storyline changed the show from a moody, Gothic Jane Eyre-type serial into a flat-out horror show. (Greg Evans)

Inspired by the release of Elizabeth Hand’s Haunting on the Hill, an authorised follow-up to Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, The New Yorker looks at similar instances of novelists carrying on what another novelist started.

Yet not a few literary classics, too, are constructed as revisions of previous ones, typically works in the public domain. Think of how Jean Rhys revised Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre” in “Wide Sargasso Sea,” excavating a Caribbean backstory for that madwoman in the attic. (Kristen Roupenian)

El Nacional (in Catalan) features Anna Moner's novel La por de la bèstia.

Emily, la petita i àvida lectora, està obsessionada amb la mort i l'espera oferint-nos una rica selecció de textos: Charles Dickens, Maupassant o les Brontë. L'autora ens alimenta el personatge amb les seves picades d'ullet literàries, ens l'imaginem i el visualitzem, ja que eren les novel·les més llegides de l'època, moltes d'elles per lliuraments. I com mostra el Minotaure els seus assassinats al món? Recreant quadres de retrats femenins renaixentistes, una idea extraordinària, on la recerca de la bellesa de l'ideal clàssic es barreja amb una atmosfera mortuòria. (Clara Asín) (Translation)

A cliché-ridden take on Branwell's life in El confidential (Spain). Moncloa (Spain) recommends several love stories, including Wuthering Heights.