Carrying Jane Around like the Bible and Going for a Pint with Charlotte

The Clare Champion is excited about the visit of Ann Disndale to the Kilkee Brontë Festival:

One of the world's leading Brontë experts is to attend the 2026 Kilkee Bronte Festival, which will take place this coming weekend. 

Ann Dinsdale, principal curator at the Brontë Society and Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, England will be joining the festival in Kilkee, the place where Charlotte Bronte honeymooned, and where the Atlantic coast made such an impression on the famous author. 

Ms Dinsdale who has 36 years' experience caring for the museum's collection, organising exhibitions and working on important acquisitions will be making her first visit to the festival in Kilkee. 

Speaking to The Clare Champion this week, Ann said she is really excited to visit the West Clare seaside town, "I have been reading biographies about the Brontës for years - since I was a child really - so all these names of places in Ireland are really familiar to me.  (...) (Sharon Dolan D'Arcy)

ArtsHub recommends a visit to the Summer Show of the Frith Street Gallery - Golden Square in London:

Multiple Narratives brings together works by eight gallery artists. The pieces are linked through their use of repetition, series and classification, some are narrative-driven, while others focus on visual exploration. Spanning drawing, sculpture, photography and found objects, the exhibition ranges from the minimal and abstract to the richly figurative.

The show includes Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press, Anna Barriball, Tacita Dean, Shilpa Gupta, Cornelia Parker, Raqs Media Collective, Thomas Schütte, and Dayanita Singh. (...)

Progressing further into the gallery, the corner features two works by Cornelia Parker. White Cliff Crossings (2024) (...) [and]  [a]djacent is Parker’s Brontëan Abstracts (2006) – photographs of Charlotte Brontë’s original manuscripts for Jane Eyre which are held in the British Library. These images give us a direct insight into the immediacy of the progress of the celebrated novel. Here Parker invites the viewer to be present at the author’s elbow, we enter Brontë’s consciousness as she edits her masterpiece and become privy to her ideas as they emerge and recede.

A new installment of the Behind the Glass podcast is online:

Behind The Glass: A Parsonage Podcast

S4 E3: With... Murray Tremellen

Sam and Mia are joined by their colleague Murray, who is one of the Museum's curators! Before taking on the role, Murray worked at other Museums and historic houses and undertook a PhD specialising in architectural history.

In this episode, we ride the highs and lows of Britain's railways during the 1840s, looking at Branwell's time as a Railway Clerk and the investments the family made into this booming industry..

Collider is a bit extreme when listing Wuthering Heights 2026 among pointless movie remakes that have no reason to exist: 

Wuthering Heights is a novel that has never been perfectly adapted, as even the Best Picture-nominated 1939 classic was only based on half of Emily Brontë’s novel. Instead of taking the opportunity to make a more thorough adaption, Emerald Fennell reduced the material even further by cutting out major characters and inserting more raunchiness; this is a complete misreading of the source material, as it is the unfulfilled longing between Catherine Earnshaw (Margot Robbie) and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) that is supposed to heighten the sexual tension. 

Fennell’s film casts actors who are far too old to realistically be playing their characters and uses shock value to visualize Catherine’s sexual awakening; the result is a film that feels made by someone who had only skimmed the novel and didn’t understand what it was actually trying to say about loss and love. (Liam Gaughan)

The Bromsgrove Standard reports a variation on the Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever: 

The Synchro StingRays will be performing to three Kate Bush tracks in the water at Lakeside Adventures in Hartlebury tomorrow (Saturday, July 18).

That will be ahead of Kate Bush Day next Sunday, July 26.

StingRay choreographer and swim coach Ray Farr will then lead the official Wuthering Heights dance on land before inviting wannabe Kates into the lake to perform the dance there. (Tristan Harris)

Frank Miller describes Rebecca, his favourite Hitchcock, like this in New York Magazine's The Strategist:

 It’s classic Hitchcock, but not as a twist but as a pivotal, shocking revelation. When it first came out, I believe it was considered almost a poor man’s Wuthering Heights, but I think Rebecca actually was the more truly gothic one. It’s a masterpiece.

The Hollywood Reporter interviews Samantha Morton, who remembers her Jane Eyre in Jane Eyre 1997: 

David Canfield: How would you describe that interpretation? I’m curious how you conceive of this character, this scene, when he first presents you with the role, and how it then evolves once you start digging in.

Samantha Morton: I did a bit of research into the source material and I bought the Madeline Miller book [Circe]. But I opened that book and then something just stopped me from reading it. The thing about me and my work is, my relationship to a movie script or a play or a TV episode or whatever I’m doing — that’s my special thing. Research is incredibly important for me, but it also depends on who I’m playing. Years ago, I was about 19 years old and I was playing Jane Eyre. It was a big ITV production. It was a TV movie, but they’d spent a lot of money on it. I remember literally carrying the book around with me like the Bible, with passages highlighted and all my notes, and talking to the person who adapted it and going, “Why isn’t this there? This doesn’t make sense.” I was almost in conflict with the script, which was very good, because I had issues with the choices. I vowed to myself moving forward that, while you have to do your research, you have to know what you’re doing, I didn’t want to be bogged down by everybody else’s interpretation, view, opinion, anything. 

The Irish Independent interviews Maggie O'Farrell:

Aoife Rooney: Who would you most like to go for a pint with?

Maggie O'Farrell: I’d like to go for a pint with Charlotte Brontë. I think she’d be very interesting, and it’s probable that she died of extreme morning sickness, so I’d like to talk to her about that. I feel like we lost so many books because she died so young. I’ve also read that she had an Irish accent, and I would love to know if that was true. Her father was Irish and her mother died when she was young.