On Blue Plaques and Parocosms

The Halifax Courier publishes pictures of all the blue plaques in places in and around Halifax:

1. Emily Brontë

Wuthering Heights author Emily Brontë has her own blue plaque in Calderdale which is located on Law Hill House, Southowram, where she lived when she taught at Elizabeth Patchetts school for girls. (Abigail Kellett)

The picture is from August 2018, when the plaque was erected. Source: Halifax Civic Trust. 

The novelist Sarah Moss explains in The Guardian her complicated relationship with Jane Eyre and classical heroines in general. 

Both the reading and the hunger were with me for life, a wild freedom and a dark trap, but I think now that it’s not quite so neat. The protagonists of the girls’ canon, from Joey Bettany of the Chalet School to Jo March of Little Women, from Jane Eyre to Esther Greenwood of The Bell Jar, were ostentatiously thin, and not because their high minds were distracted by the vanity of slimming.(...)

Mine’s a chef’s salad and a grapefruit juice, please. Jane Eyre, invited to join dinner parties at Thornfield, skulks in corners black-clad and skinny, judging the opulent clothes and curvy bodies of her rivals in love; later she will look with disgust on fat, mad Bertha Mason, the original madwoman in the attic, and on Bertha’s muscled, porter-drinking carer Grace Poole. I wanted to be Jane, Esther, Jo but I knew I was really hysterical, greedy Bertha; Anne Shirley’s dim, cake-loving friend Diana; at best Jo’s plump, frivolous sister Meg. I knew that my failure to be thin was inseparable from my failure to be clever and to control my emotions.

It escaped my notice as a child but does not now that Bertha is mixed race and Grace working class, that the ideal female body displaying the perfect control of the ideal female mind is racialised and classed. 

Scroll.in (India) reviews The Provincials by Sumana Roy: 

She adds the Brontës sisters to her lists of provincials when she engages with the notion of pedigree, who found their inspiration in the landscapes around them, and then there was Jane Eyre from the parocosm who had “invented” the Yorkshire village of Haworth. (Swati Rai)

India.com and El Placer de la Lectura (Spain) have lists of the nine greatest books of all time or books you should read before you die:

Jane Eyre (1847). Written by Charlotte Brontë, it combines from both Gothic and Victorian literature, revolutionizing the art of the novel. 

Jane Eyre. Esta novela histórica que redefinió la conciencia narrativa se centra en la homónima Jane Eyre, una huérfana nacida en la Inglaterra de 1800. A medida que Jane crece, toma su destino en sus propias manos, lo que se vuelve particularmente conmovedor cuando se encuentra con el melancólico Sr. Rochester en Thornfield Hall. (Translation)

Daily Camera recommends Gin & Gothic, A Brontë Rocktale in Denver. The Brontë Sisters YouTube channel explores the original Brontë church in Haworth, which was replaced in the 1870s due to poor conditions, including water seeping through the graveyard into the church, with a new Gothic-style church preserving the Brontë family vault. Through the Eyes of the Brontés describes a visit to St John the Baptist Church in Tunstall, where the Brontë sisters attended services while at boarding school.