Witchy Vibes and Other Silly Things to Say

The Telegraph & Argus reports the online fundraising for restoring the steps of the St Michael & All Angels church in Haworth:

An online fundraising page has been launched as part of a campaign to restore the steps of a world-famous church.

The weather and years of use have taken their toll on the 19th-century steps at St Michael and All Angels, Haworth.

Patrick Brontë, father of the literary siblings, was vicar at the church for over 40 years and most of the family are interred there.

Visitors are drawn to the site from across the world.

But the condition of the steps has deteriorated, and they have had to be partially closed for safety reasons.

Now a GoFundMe page is set up, at https://gofund.me/b1b760a86, with the aim of raising £10,000 towards the cost of repairs.

The Rev Oli Preston, rector of Haworth and Cross Roads, says: "For about the last 18 months we have been working on plans to repair and restore the steps.

"We started with the idea that this might be a fairly limited repair, but as time and assessment has gone on it has become clear that it's the right time to do a fuller restoration.

"We've managed to secure good community support already and have raised over £20,000 – two thirds of the estimated cost – from a few key grants and donations.

"With the backing of other leaders and businesses in the village, we have launched the GoFundMe page to ask for wider public support to enable us to complete the project."

So far, the fundraising page has coined in over £1,300. (Alistair Shand)

Daily Express recommends a visit to Haworth:

Haworth in West Yorkshire will draw you into another time with its cobbled lanes and old alleyways, some which lead to an ancient church and graveyard where novelist sisters, Emily Brontë and Charlotte Brontë are buried. Younger sister Anne Brontë also lies at rest in the cemetery of St Michael & All Angels Church in Haworth, the three siblings wrote seven books, including Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. The village’s high street is full of ‘totally wonderful’ shops, including some with a magical witchy vibe, a ‘divine’ chocolate retailer and several unique gift and book stores to enjoy. (...)

Also, edging the countryside that leads to the moorland is the Brontë Parsonage Museum - and this is well worth a visit if you are a fan of the Brontë sisters literature as this is where the family lived in the 1800s. (Katie Oborn)

Also in Express the classic book you must read according to 'bookworms': 

6. Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys

Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea is a bold and haunting prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, giving a voice to Bertha Mason, the "madwoman in the attic." Set in Jamaica, the novel explores themes of colonialism, identity, and madness through the story of Antoinette Cosway, a young Creole woman caught between two worlds. The author's lyrical prose brings depth to the marginalised character, revealing the emotional and cultural turmoil that shaped her tragic fate. (...)

9. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë

Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre is a groundbreaking Gothic novel that follows the resilient orphan Jane as she overcomes hardship and adversity to find love and independence. Working as a governess at Thornfield Hall, Jane falls for the mysterious Mr. Rochester, but their romance is shadowed by dark secrets. The novel's deep psychological insight and timeless exploration of morality, identity and social class make it a must-read work of literature.  (Jennifer Pinto)

The Irish Times makes some interesting points in this discussion on the Wuthering Heights 2026 film:

This is not an attempt to scold Emerald Fennell for perceived liberties in her upcoming adaptation of Wuthering Heights. We haven’t seen it. What is of interest here is the brilliance of the prerelease marketing campaign.

Warner Bros’ translation of a Gothic romance from the mid-Victorian era is, half a year before its arrival, on St Valentine’s Day, already the most-discussed film of 2026. Wuthering Heights is the new Barbie. If they moved it back five months to collide with Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey we could have ourselves a ... Wutherssey? Odyssing? Okay, that really doesn’t work. But you get the idea.

A large part of the controversy stems from unique and irrational antagonism towards the director in the online bear pit. (...)

The content in both films was provocative, but few would have cared so much if Fennell didn’t seem so baldly posh. (...)

That lurking hostility nudged the door open when, last September, Fennell announced the leads for her assault on Emily Brontë’s great novel. The horrible phrase “book accurate” now pollutes online discussion of adaptations. Nobody much gave a toss when, for his classic 1939 version, William Wyler scrapped whole acres of Brontë’s plot. But 21st-century book-accurate zealots blew a gasket at the news that Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi were to play Cathy and Heathcliff.

It mattered that they were significantly older than the lovers when, in the source, they first meet. It mattered a lot more that Elordi was white. Over the past decade or so the reasonable argument that the rugged Heathcliff, often regarded as Romani, could be black has, among many younger readers, evolved into a certainty that he’s a person of colour. Fennell was therefore “race swapping”. Few of these folks seemed concerned that she had cast Hong Chau, an American of Vietnamese descent, as Nelly Dean, the robust Yorkshire housekeeper. (...)

The tabloids faked outrage. The Daily Telegraph commissioned an article that ran under the headline “A woke Wuthering Heights reboot is another tedious attempt at provocation”. What is “woke” about nuns groping hanged men? Didn’t the internet just identify the casting of Heathcliff as an assault on wokery? (...)

If this Wuthering Heights does turn out to be a deranged, sexed-up, wildly violent deconstruction, like something by the late Ken Russell, that is surely preferable to a drably faithful walk-through of a text that has been so adapted more often than is healthy. (Donald Clarke)

Hear, hear.

The Wuthering Heights 2026 trailer is still generating news on Hipertextual (Spain), Entertainment Now, Muse by Clios, The Ringer, Comic Basics, Fiction Horizon, Cliomakeup (Italy), Welt (Germany)... Yesterday's New York Times mini crossword had a Brontë-related question: 

Literary sisters behind "Jane Eyre" and "Wuthering Heights".

Black Hills Pioneer recommends Wuthering Heights as a Gothic quick pick. Several Latin American websites report the death of the actor Eduardo Serrano (1942-2025) who played Edgardo Linton in the Venezuelan soap opera Cumbres Borrascosas 1976. The Brontë Sisters UK explores Haworth graveyard's notable gravestones, including that of the doctor who attended Charlotte Brontë's deathbed, while revealing why the local church clock has been silent.