Solitude and Unrequited Love

ShowBiz Cheatsheet highlights Must-Read Celebrity Book Club picks for this month:

Between Two Books (Florence Welch): ‘Villette’ by Charlotte Brontë
Did you know that Florence Welch has a book club? The Florence and the Machine singer periodically shares her book picks with her Between Two Books book club. This season’s pick in Villette by Charlotte Brontë. This lesser-known title from the author of Jane Eyre follows a young 19th-century woman as she leave England to take a teaching job in Belgium.
Villette is “an autobiographical study of solitude and unrequited love,” noted the Between Two Books Instagram. (Megan Elliott)

The Times Daily Quiz includes the question: 

7. The married Belgian professor Constantin Heger inspired which character in the novel Jane Eyre? (Olav Bjortomt)

The Wuthering Heights drama-rama between Sky Ferreira and Charli XCX continues to develop in the media: NME, Billboard, Daily Mail, Socialite Life,..

In a since-deleted post, the same X user also uploaded a screenshot to the platform of a text conversation with an “industry insider” who alleged that two songs on Charli’s Wuthering Heights album were “ripped” from Ferreira demos dating back to 2018 and 2015. Ferreira responded to those claims via Instagram comments as well, sharing, “Your industry ‘insider’ is wrong. Close but wrong…It isn’t worth the trouble bc I know how the world works.”‘

Ferreira is, however, credited as a featured artist, co-writer and vocal producer on Wuthering Heights track “Eyes of the World.” (...)

When asked for comment, her management team shared the following statement with Billboard: (...)

“Ahead of the Wuthering Heights album release, a standard review process was conducted on a small number of tracks from the album, including fragments of material originating from earlier sessions. This process involved managers, legal representatives, artists and producers, and included a thorough review of archival materials and demo recordings. (Lyndsey Havens)

La Razón (México) reviews the film:

Fennell tan sólo se interesó en adaptar medio libro y a unos pocos de sus personajes, pero no perdió oportunidad para sembrar sugerencias eróticas visuales y auditivas, así como insinuaciones de bondage y S&M. Lamentablemente, más que una obra estimulante, nos conduce por el terreno del fan fiction calentón, ese universo de fantasías juveniles o amateurs, a la vez morbosas y puritanas, desahogo sin literatura, “plagio” legitimizado y cursilería masturbatoria desenfrenada. (...)

Este ejercicio de estilo muestra una obsesión física muy oportuna en tiempos de looksmaxxing, en que todo mundo es bello y nadie quiere tener sexo (aun cuando lo tengan en exceso). Pero lo importante es que nos obliga a preguntarnos qué significa y para qué sirve una adaptación de la literatura al cine (especialmente al tratarse de un clásico). Y la respuesta tal vez es que sirve para ayudarnos a diferenciar el melodrama de la tragedia. (Naief Yehya) (Translation)

On Wednesday, 8 April at 6.30pm, the Boiardo cinema theatre in Scandiano (RE, Italy) will host a special screening of Wuthering Heights 2026, where the audience is invited to knit along, with dimmed lights to keep needles and eyes busy at once. The initiative grew out of a Friday knitting group led by Katia Tosi accoding to Il Resto di Carlino.

The writer Katriona O'Sullivan shares her cultural touchstones in The Irish Examiner. Regrettably, she chooses the wrong sister:

I loved Charlotte Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (sic). It’s a classic. I love a dramatic love story and it’s the ultimate bad love story. I love its imagery and its language, the way land is used to depict emotions. I was a cool kid that was with a gang who were robbing cars but reading Wuthering Heights at the end of the day, but I couldn’t tell them. You can't smoke your smokes at the back of the bike sheds while you're reading Charlotte Brontë (sic again). 

The Guardian reviews the play Victoira: A Queen Unbound at the Watermill Theatre in Newbury. In the play a well-known fact (that Queen Victoria read Jane Eyre) is mentioned: 

Teasing becomes taunting, care becomes control and sexy times on the sofa become furious spats over Christmas presents (“You gave me a brooch made of teeth, Albert!”). The relationship is coercive, yes, but perhaps also co-dependent: Victoria’s panic keeps her obedient. A scene in which she reads from Jane Eyre signals the gothic fate which, [Daisy] Goodwin imagines, Albert might have planned for her. (David Jays)

AnneBrontë.org  shares an 1853 Easter letter from Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey, in which Charlotte declines a visit due to her duties as a vicar's daughter while also defending Lucy Snowe as a deliberately less idealized heroine than Jane Eyre.