Profoundly saddened

More reactions to the shameful auction of Mary Taylor's Red House. From BBC News:

A date has been set for when a Grade II* listed former museum with Brontë connections will be auctioned off.

Kirklees Council said the Red House, a Georgian mansion in Gomersal, would be listed for sale with Pugh Auctions on 3 December, with a guide price of over £650,000.

The property, which was once the home of Charlotte Brontë’s friend Mary Taylor, was previously a museum which closed in 2016 and a plan to turn it into holiday accommodation and wedding venue fell through.

Kirklees Council announced it would dispose of several assets to address a £47m deficit last year. The Red House Yorkshire Heritage Trust, formed to try and save the site in 2019, said they were "profoundly saddened" by the decision to sell it.

A statement on their Facebook page said they had worked with Communities Together to put forward a bid to purchase the house and gardens with a view to restoring community access, but the council did not accept it.

"As a result, Red House will now be sold by auction," the group said.

“We are profoundly saddened by this outcome and fully understand and share the community’s strong disapproval of the council’s decision.”

According to the Local Democracy Reporting Service, Graham Turner, the council's cabinet member for finance and regeneration, said: "As this building is now surplus to the council’s requirements, it could generate crucial capital funding to help us deliver a better future for Kirklees.”

Mary Taylor's family lived at the Red House and she met Charlotte Brontë at Roe Head School in Mirfield and maintained a lifelong friendship with the writer. (Abigail Marlow)

Yorkshire Live features Haworth's Main Street.

We’re on Main Street in Haworth, a few miles from Keighley. This steep, cobbled thoroughfare was the stomping ground – or in the case of Branwell, staggering ground – of the legendary Brontë family.

The literary connection attracts thousands of international visitors to this Pennine high street lined with bookshops, cafes and gift shops. On a crisp but sunny Wednesday, the majority of visitors are British but you can hear the odd conversation in a foreign language.

And yet Main Street is a working street with a surprisingly large number of long-established residents. It’s not all holiday rentals after all.

Claire and her husband Barry have run Hawksbys, a gallery and craft shop near the top of Main Street, for 23 years. Because of Main Street’s persistent popularity the couple work seven days a week with only sporadic breaks.

“When you go out of the village you get a lot of perspective. You realise how beautiful it is. You get that ‘homecoming’ feeling,” says Claire, 43.

“You look down the street and you think, how many people have that view?...and it’s so atmospheric.”

I ask Claire if she’s a Brontë fan because one shouldn’t assume everyone on Main Street is. “I prefer Jane Austin [sic],” she says and laughs.

Down the hill with slightly less of a view is a woman we’ll call Janice. Janice (she doesn’t want to give her real name) is more openly ambivalent.

“It’s lovely,” she says before adding cautiously, “I just wish the tourists would be a bit more respectful.” [...]

Janice finds some of the international tourists amusing, especially those from parts of the US where a 100-year-old building is considered ‘ancient’.

“They think our houses are [film] sets or fascias. They don’t realise they are real houses,” she says.

And while Janice doesn’t necessarily love Haworth’s visitors, she has a soft spot for Japanese visitors. The Bronte canon is immensely popular in Japan to the extent signs to the Brontë Waterfall and Top Withens are in Japanese.

“You can be shamed by the Japanese tourists; the amount they know about it,” says Janice. (David Himelfield)

Image interviews Martina Devlin, author of Charlotte.

Tell us about your new book, Charlotte. Where did the idea come from?

The novel is about memory, family secrets and the power of objects. It tells of Charlotte Brontë’s brief marriage to Irishman Arthur Nicholls through the voice of his second wife, Mary. The idea sprang from my interest in the Brontë sisters and their work – they wrote women characters with emotional depth who were independent and resourceful, like themselves. I’ve visited Haworth several times and the museum in the parsonage where they lived is a little jewel.

What do you hope this book instils in the reader?

For people to realise that Ireland exerted a stronger pull on Charlotte Brontë’s imagination than has necessarily been acknowledged. And that although the Brontës are regarded as jewels in England’s literary canon, they had an important Irish connection which fed into their work. Their father, Patrick, was Irish and fired his children’s imaginations with stories, books and newspapers.

What did you learn when writing this book?

That in marrying Arthur, Charlotte was reaching out to life and hope. We have a view of the Brontës as doomed, tragic figures but Charlotte was happy with Arthur during their nine months of married life; also, the sisters’ letters show them to be creative, loyal, resilient, witty and sharp observers. They were proto feminists in an era where women were more or less the property of a father or husband. (Sarah Gill)

The Irish Times reviews Night & Day by John Connolly.

It’s a story that echoes the power of writing theme Connolly explored in his Lost Things series and, despite a second visit involving Emily Brontë’s Cathy feeling slightly rushed, a worthy addition to his impressive oeuvre. (Pat Carty)

Our Culture has an article on how Jane Eyre and others inspired Fazerdaze's new album Soft Power.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, The Awakening by Kate Chopin

I read them quite early on in the album process, and it’s only now I’ve thought about them again. I hadn’t really been exposed through education to feminism. I was in a relationship that wasn’t balanced, and these books showed me women that were fighting for that balance and fighting to be equal. I read them, and they stuck with me. And then I went on with my life. Looking back on those books, what they were about, why they made me feel certain things – it’s so much of the character traits that I really was too afraid to embody myself. When I came to the end of the record and I had finally learned to embody these characteristics, like dignity, independence, sticking to your moral compass despite what society wants, equality in a relationship. Especially with Jane Eyre, she wanted to be seen as an equal and didn’t want to sacrifice her own values. All of these qualities were things I had to learn in the making of this record. And now that I’m finally getting there with those qualities, these books have popped up again in my head. (Konstantinos Pappis)

A contributor to Varsity is still thinking about the casting for the new Wuthering Heights.

Helen Mirren once said ‘All you have to do is look like crap on film and everyone thinks you’re a brilliant actress. Actually, all you’ve done is look like crap’. It’s a bold statement, the kind you can only expect from a seasoned professional who’s been around the image-conscious Hollywood block a few times. But although Mirren is nearly eighty, her proclamation is no less resonant nowadays than it was during her days as a young actress. [...]

A BBC article hyperbolically entitled ’Wuthering Heights: Hollywood’s worst casting decisions’ (surely that title belongs to James Corden in Cats?) begins with a summary of the novel that reads like a thirteen-year-old’s panicked last-minute copy-and-paste from Wikipedia: ‘Catherine is a teenager who lives on a farm in England in the late-1700s. Heathcliff is a dark-skinned foundling of the same age’. The treatment of Heathcliff’s race as his defining feature in the second sentence comes across as somewhat problematic, and what the rest of this article impeccably (if inadvertently) encapsulates is the problem with movie releases in the Internet epoch, when social media vultures seize on a singular piece of casting information like a freshly killed impala and tear it apart with frightening zeal — without actually having seen the film. The professed motivation behind the freshest feast is that Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie are considered too polished and beautiful to play Emily Brontë’s tortured, gurning, windswept youths. The author expresses this by describing them as ‘impossibly good-looking’, but then fumbles around for something to back up this superficial argument, going on tangents about so-called ‘iPhone face’ (a phenomenon whereby certain actors’ faces look too modern or ‘Instagrammable’ for period dramas) and Heathcliff’s ethnicity (equating the absence of a black actor in the ambiguous role of a traveller to Laurence Olivier playing Othello in blackface). But the beauty argument is an empty critique, as it is patently untrue that glamorous actors cannot play dishevelled or unattractive characters. Were that the case, millions of hair and makeup artists would be out of work. (Daisy Simpson)