Appetite for Connection

Ruth Leon's Theatrewise recommends Underdog. The Other Other Brontë, now in streaming at the National Theatre at Home.

Sarah Gordon’s new play at the National Theatre online is an irreverent retelling of the life and legend of the Brontë sisters, Charlotte, Emily and Anne, and the story of the sibling power dynamics that shaped their uneven rise to fame. (Ruth Leon)

This letter in The Guardian by Michèle Roberts, author of Reader, I Married Him, clarifies some points: 

Sarah Moss, discussing the need for white literary heroines to be thin, asserts that “Jane Eyre, invited to join dinner parties at Thornfield, skulks in corners black-clad and skinny” (‘Hunger numbed my shame and humiliation’, 24 August). Not so. Jane is not invited to those dinners, as she is the governess. She wears black as an indication of her class status and has to keep out of the way. Starved as a child in an orphanage, she is indeed “little”, as Charlotte Brontë puts it, but is able to recognise her appetite, nipping down the back stairs at Thornfield to forage in the larder for supper for herself and her charge, returning with “a cold chicken, a roll of bread, some tarts”.

The Straits Times (Singapore) interviews the fashion designer Esther Choi: 

A book that I find myself returning to multiple times is Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. Every time I reread it, I gain new insights into the characters, and their personalities and emotions.

Today, August 31, in BBC Two, Jane Eyre 1944 (10.25 h). The Telegraph recommends it:

Orson Welles smoulders in this brooding Gothic adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 novel. Robert Stevenson directs, though Welles’s hand is clear in the casting (Agnes Moorehead), the writing credit for John Houseman (shared with Aldous Huxley) and the score by Bernard Herrmann. Joan Fontaine tries valiantly to look plain as the heroine, and little Elizabeth Taylor glows in her uncredited role as a doomed school friend.

The Times reviews The Virago Book of Friendship, edited by Rachel Cooke: 

Among other literary greats, Cooke looks to Charlotte Brontë, who in her 1849 novel Shirley tries to capture the magic of female connection: “The minds of the two girls being toned in harmony, often chimed very sweetly together.” Membership in a close-knit group is like “a dance of belonging with no private space in it, all inside-out intimacy,” Lorna Sage says in Bad Blood. (Ceci Browning)

Queen City The Nerve reviews a production of The Mystery of Irma Vep in Charlotte, NC:

Yet by the time Lady Enid sashays into view, numerous other parodies have already been set into motion in Ludlam’s wicked mockery of the “penny dreadful” style of Victorian England. Sleuthing, sarcophagi, werewolves, vampires, witches, and a Wuthering Heights heath are all mixed into this undeadly brew. Plus the obligatory mummy. (Perry Tannenbaum)

Gasteiz Hoy (Spain) reviews the novel Hasta Morir la Muerte by Verónica García Peña:

Las hermanas Brontë están presente en el libro, así como Gaskell, Wilde o Collins. También Henry James o Poe, pero "por encima de todos ellos, la gran fuente de inspiración de esta novela es Pío de Baroja. " (Sara Esteban) (Translation)

Wuthering Heights 1939 features in a bizarre quiz on BuzzFeed on classic films and European cities you need to visit. Love messages 'straight from the heart', including one by Emily, on Today. Les Soeurs Brontë (in French) returns after a long hiatus with a post that plays with portraits of the sisters generated by IA.