The Brontë sisters gone goth

The Yorkshire Post features Shaun Usher and his compilation Diaries of Note: 366 Lives, One Day at a Time.

Diaries of Note: 366 Lives, One Day at a Time was finally published last month. The book gathers 366 diary entries, one for each day of the leap year, written by people from all walks of life, from Virginia Woolf to Alan Rickman, Elton John to Nelson Mandela, and countless others not touched by fame. It’s a reminder, says Manchester-based Usher, that the act of keeping a diary, however ordinary it might feel at the time, can end up offering extraordinary glimpses into someone’s life.

“The book is a celebration of diaries,” he says. “It's a celebration of all these different diarists. It's a celebration of the year. And it's a celebration of humanity as seen through these little snapshots.” Usher will be in conversation with historian and author Lucinda Hawksley at the inaugural Whitby Lit Fest this week. Actors Miriam Margolyes and Ace Bhatti will give diary readings at the event, bringing to life such voices as novelist Charlotte Brontë, artist Salvador Dali, documentarian Louis Theroux and gardener Monty Don. (Laura Reid)

Also in The Yorkshire Post, Bradford-born businessman Andrew Hields talks about all things Yorkshire.

Name your favourite Yorkshire book/author/artist/CD/performer.

Emily Brontë, author of Wuthering Heights. She captured the wildness of the moors and the spirit of an isolated building. I’d like to think she would have stopped by Tan Hill in her day to warm herself by the fire.

The Collector lists '13 Defining Works of Gothic Literature' and one of them is

3. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë

One hundred thirty years before it was a Kate Bush song, Wuthering Heights was a great Gothic novel. Like Frankenstein, it was the first (and in this case only) novel by its young female author, with vast, sublime landscapes for its setting and a tragic outcast for its protagonist. Like Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights explores how the haunted can come to haunt others.

Heathcliff is the most Gothic element of Wuthering Heights. Depending on your reading of the novel, he might be considered literally haunted, or he might be a victim of trauma. Like Frankenstein’s creature, Heathcliff has an uncertain sense of his origins and is left eternally in search of a home. He believes he will find this at Wuthering Heights, the remote and forbidding house of the novel’s title.

But Heathcliff is—like many of the Byronic heroes who entered the pages of fiction following Polidori’s The Vampyre—doomed. When his beloved Cathy dies, he descends into cruelty and dies himself after being visited by her ghost.

The novel ends with a vision of the tragic pair’s phantoms haunting the desolate Yorkshire moors they once roamed. One character, keen to reassure himself that they are at peace, watches over their graves and asks himself, “how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth” (Brontë 1996, ch. 34), but the ghostly lovers have had a long, unquiet afterlife. (Dr. Victoria C. Roskams)

Country Life has a column on 'Why we love period drama'.

Yet the beleaguered question of how best to adapt a period piece — which, depending on your view, has either plagued or sustained the narrative surrounding Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights —is less interesting than considering why we’re obsessed with period pieces in the first place. (Will Hosie)

The Mirror US claims that Wuthering Heights 2009 is the best version of the novel.

Yahoo! Entertainment features writer E. Lockhart and her new book We Fell Apart, part of her We Were Liars series.

Lockhart described the new book as a “beachy gothic” that pulls inspiration from novels like Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle. (Kaitlin Reilly)

Irish Times reviews Florence and the Machine's new album Everybody Scream.

Windswept and awestruck, it’s the Brontë sisters gone goth – the Florence and the Machine witching hour glam revival aesthetic distilled into five irresistible minutes. (Ed Power)