'Walking in here, you feel over 200 years of history'

The education plans of the Brontë Birthplace are discussed in The Telegraph & Argus:

Now the modest terraced house, on Market Street, is in public ownership, thanks to a crowdfunding project attracting more than 700 investors. Brontë Birthplace Limited has raised over £650,000 from the share offer and grants from Bradford 2025 and the Government’s Levelling Up fund. The plan is to turn the Grade 2* listed building into an education centre and literary retreat, with a community cafe and holiday let allowing visitors to stay in the Brontës’ bedrooms.

The restoration will start in coming weeks and the Bronte Birthplace is due to open in January 2025 - Bradford’s year as UK City of Culture. It is, says Steve Stanworth, vice chair of Brontë Birthplace Limited, the “missing piece of the Bronteëstory jigsaw”.

“This was a vibrant family home, with six children and all the hustle and bustle,” says Steve. “Walking in here, you feel over 200 years of history. We’re not turning it into a museum with roped-off areas. We want people to be immersed in the house where the Brontës lived as a young family. It’s a hands-on experience. We have big plans for education, book launches, workshops and talks. It will be a place of interest to schools, universities, writers, artists and Brontë scholars, and also somewhere to come and sit by the fire with a coffee or stop for a night and soak up the atmosphere.”

Steve runs the Brontë Bell Chapel, where Patrick Brontë preached from 1815-1820. “Patrick was fond of Thornton, and Thornton was fond of him. He said his ‘happiest days’ were here. In this house the family was together, before Maria and the two girls died. Our aim is to re-create the feel of that happy family home.”

The house has had a chequered past: after the Brontës left it was a butcher’s shop, later a small museum and more recently a cafe, Emily’s. Saving the house, which has been empty for four years, is the culmination of a 10-year dream and a two-year campaign. “This was a humble home but a house of ambition,” says committee member Christa Ackroyd. “It was from here that three girls overcame barriers to succeed on a worldwide stage. We’ll say to children who come here, ‘Stand by this fireplace, where those girls were born, and you too can have ambition. From a humble home, greatness can spring.”

Adds Christa: “I was adopted and when I came to Bradford, aged 10, I felt a bit rootless. My father took me to the Brontë Parsonage and told me about the ‘three Bradford girls who made their own way’. He said, ‘You can be anything you want’. That started my passion for the Brontës, and it has stayed with me. (Emma Clayton)

The Columbian and romance books:

It’s entertaining and it made me realize I’ve been reading romances for longer than I can remember, even if they weren’t always classified as such.

I’m not the first to point out that if Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and Emily Brontë were publishing today, their books would be called Romances — and the “lady novelists” would likely be able to negotiate a better fee than exploitive publishers gave them 200 years ago. (Chris Hewitt)

The Markup explores censorship on the Internet and in US schools:

Like Perez, Rockwood School District sophomore Brooke O’Dell most frequently runs into blocked websites when doing homework. Sometimes she can’t access PDFs she wants to read. Her workaround is to pull out her phone, find the webpage using her own cellular data, navigate to the file she wants, email it to herself, and then go back to her school-issued Chromebook to open it. When it’s website text she’s interested in, O’Dell uses the Google Drive app on her phone to copy-and-paste text into a Google Doc that she can later access from her Chromebook. She recently had to do this while working on a literary criticism project about the book “Jane Eyre.” (Tara García Mathewson)

Resourceful girl in the land of the free.

If you censor access to information you cannot forget those big evil books. WSMV Nashville reports:

“You won’t find a book. I mean the Bible will have to be removed, of course, but also Scarlet Letter, Jane Eyre, all the classics, all Shakespeare, any biology books,” Sen. Heidi Campbell, D-Nashville, said. We are talking about having our school libraries remove almost all of their materials now.” (Chuck Morris)

 Land of the Brave. You know.

Scroll.in lists some of the April nonfiction new books you'll probably never find in a Tennessee school library:

Reading Lessons, Carol Atherton

How can a Victorian poem help teenagers understand YouTube misogyny? Can Jane Eyre encourage us to speak out? What can Lady Macbeth teach us about empathy? Should our expectations for our future be any greater than Pip’s? And why is it so important to make space for these conversations in the first place?

Books about unhinged women with feminist tropes? Not on my (Tennessee) watch. That liberal Indian Vogue edition covers them all:

Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea is a postcolonial prequel to Charlotte Bronte’s classic Jane Eyre. The short novel dismantles the trope of ‘mad woman in the attic’ by depicting the years of trauma and mistreatment that drive Antoinette, the protagonist, to madness. Here, we see a dark, cold side of Jane Eyre’s hero Edward Rochester. (Saachi Gupta)

Hollywood Reporter interviews production designer Jon Carlos about his work in Palm Royale:

Brande Victorian: How did you find Norma's house?

J.C.: We probably scouted over two dozen houses looking for Norma's, and the second I walked onto the property of this one, I was like, "This is it." It had this sort of Wuthering Heights vibe with the romantic Ivy growing over the house. We had assigned a certain style of architecture that we wanted for each of the women.

 JoyMedias's podcast Take Me to Your Reader latest edition is described like this:

Robert and Lea talk about Kazuo Ishiguro and George Orwell. Rob then reads his account of travels in the Philippines in his story ‘The Road To Wuthering Heights’. A literary quiz follows and finally Lea reads her mystical story ‘Moriac’.

El País (Spain) talks about the Blackwater saga:

Hay algo tremendamente gustoso en la lectura de dramas familiares de la novela canónica como pueden serlo Cumbres borrascosas o Anna Karenina porque, a este lado de la realidad, esa amalgama de cabronadas que se hacen entre hermanos, esposos o cuñados nos calma por un rato el ansia de insultar a los seres más despreciables de nuestra estirpe. (Luna Miguel) (Translation) 

Il Libraio (Italy) explores the life and works of Charlotte Brontë. You can watch now Wuthering Heights 2011 for free on FranceTV if you're geolocated in France. The selection of films bears the name "Du roman à l'écran".