Smithsonian Magazine looks back on the history of the beach read: Indeed, Blanche Willis Howard’s immensely popular first novel, One Summer (1875), exemplified the archetype. Set in a community on the Maine coast, Howard’s enemies-to-friends novel tells the story of a spirited and independent young woman who coolly rebuffs the attentions of a young man after an awkward rainy-evening encounter. (He mistakes her for a maid.) By the summer’s end, they meet again in Bar Harbor, where she at last admits her love for him and the two become engaged. As ephemeral as the season they celebrated, many summer novels were popular (or at least advertised) for just a few months. One Summer, though, appeared in successive printings or illustrated gift editions well into the next century. In 1876, a year after its first publication, Publishers Weekly asked booksellers to identify their most saleable novels. One Summer ranked below Dinah Mulock Craik’s phenomenally popular John Halifax (1856) and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) but ahead of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). (Donna Harrington-Lueker)
Is the literary quality of romance fiction uniformly good? No, of course not. In any massive, varied genre, you are going to find some clunkers — but that is not unique to romance. A more serious critique is that some of these stories romanticize, and maybe encourage, toxic behavior. You could point to the sadism and obsessiveness of Christian Grey, from E.L. James’s “Fifty Shades of Grey”; the abduction and sexual assault in Kathleen E. Woodiwiss’s “The Flame and the Flower”; or even the deceptiveness and amorality of the hero in the romance-adjacent classic “Jane Eyre.” (Christine Larson) Not to offend romance novel readers, but Jane Eyre is so much more than a love story.
This production succeeds not only as an historical drama, but also as a surprisingly funny and deeply human portrait of the siblings as they find their voices in a world determined to silence them. The design is striking in its simplicity. Costumes (by Clare Dewell) are minimal, yet cleverly used to distinguish each character, allowing the audience to focus on the performances rather than elaborate period detail. The set (by Nicola Webb) is similarly understated, but it never feels empty, instead drawing the audience into the Brontës’ world through imaginative staging. Particularly effective are the towering doors that instantly transport us into the intimidating atmosphere of London society. Projections added authenticity by using images taken from the real Brontë home although, while a thoughtful touch, perhaps were too high quality to preserve the period feel. Lighting (by Bruce Williams) is precise throughout, especially during split-stage scenes unfolding multiple locations and conversations simultaneously, and shifting seamlessly with each moment’s emotional tone, from the warmth of family intimacy to the harsher glare of public scrutiny. Sara Benbow’s musical arrangements deserve special mention, particularly her use of haunting choral pieces to connect scenes, creating a distinctly Victorian atmosphere. They also remind us that the Brontë sisters were talented musicians as well as writers. As we’ve come to expect from the Sinodun Players, the acting is particularly strong. Charlotte (Natalie Davies) dominates the stage and carries much of the performance with remarkable energy. Her portrayal combines witty comic timing with a raw emotional honesty that makes her feel completely real. Holly Smithson’s Emily is equally compelling, capturing powerful emotions with intensity while also embodying the understanding and lovable sister at the heart of the family. Anne (Sorrel Gibson) brings a touching innocence to the piece, offering a poignant insight into the experience of being a woman in the Victorian era and the way her more famous siblings overshadowed her. The three main actors bring a strong chemistry to the sisters and their interactions feel natural and established. The ensemble (Heather Banyard, Donna Thomson, Will Lidbetter, Dan Beauchamp, Martha Bullock and Alex Watts) transform into a variety of characters through subtle changes in voice and body language, and their reactions to the Brontës’ novels vividly convey the prejudice faced by women writers of the period, with Dan Beauchamp’s George sharply capturing the entitlement and attitudes of a Victorian gentleman. Dorothy Hirsch deserves enormous credit for the inventiveness of the staging. Moments such as the carriage ride, with ensemble members physically moving the wheels, are wonderfully theatrical, and having the sisters writing their novels in chalk on the stage floor is visually striking. Small details, like servants quietly cleaning up a smashed glass after a lively outburst, add a layer of realism that immerses the audience fully in the Victorian world. This is an imaginative production that sheds fresh light on the Brontë sisters and their creative lives. Thoughtful, funny and emotionally rich, Underdog: The Other Other Brontë never allows the audience a moment of boredom and leaves us with a renewed appreciation for the extraordinary women behind some of English literature’s greatest novels. (Lizzie Pannett)
Still on stage, WhatsOnStage includes London's forthcoming Jane Eyre. The Musical as one of its 'picks of theatre to see this August 2026'.
A contributor to New University wonders 'Why can’t Hollywood win with adaptations?' “Wuthering Heights” took the opposite bet. Fennell even put the title in scare quotes — a warning that this was her version, not Emily Brontë’s. She amped up the sexuality, modernized the soundtrack with Charli XCX, and cast Jacob Elordi, a white Australian actor, as Heathcliff — a character Brontë explicitly describes as dark-skinned. The reviews split almost down the middle: 57% positive on Rotten Tomatoes and a 55 on Metacritic. Critics argued the film flattened a story about class and racial exclusion into glossy, decontextualized romance. Yet “Wuthering Heights” made $241.7 million worldwide against an $80 million budget. Creative risk didn’t work with the critics, but the discourse fed the box office. Put both side by side and the pattern becomes clear. Faithfulness and riskiness were never the real tests. What’s being measured is whether an adaptation matches the version each viewer has carried privately for years: a childhood memory, a favorite scene, one detail that mattered the first time. No writer’s room can adapt nostalgia. Audiences aren’t asking for the original story back. They are asking for a feeling. (Meghna Srikumar)
The Star highlights 'The magical places you must explore in Derbyshire and Peak District this summer' such as 45. Hathersage Hathersage has strong literary connections - having inspired Charlotte Brontë while she was writing Jane Eyre. The nearby North Lees Hall (pictured here) also became the main inspiration for Thornfield Hall. The Grave of Little John, Robin Hood’s second-in-command, can be found at St. Michael’s Church in the heart of Hathersage. While there is little evidence proving he is buried here, ballads suggest that he originated from Hathersage and settled there again later in his life. (Tom Hardwick)
A recent Bachelor's Thesis:
by Marta Sánchez Romera Departamento de Filología Inglesa, Francesa y Alemana, Universidad de Málaga May 2026
Throughout this dissertation project, I will provide some context on how Victorian values affected the relationship between women, creating a bond that sometimes went further than a simple friendship. Since the category ‘’lesbianism’’ did not exist and homosexuality was widely seen as bad, Victorians romanticised these friendships and were blinded to the fact that something deeper could occur between them. In order to reflect all this, after giving some historical context and theory, I will analyse Villette by Charlotte Brontë, in which there is a clear subtext of sapphic desire, with the aim of revealing how lesbianism was portrayed and seen in the 19th century.
And a new paper which features Shirley:
by Sara Malton
This essay focuses on the nineteenth-century ‘fasting girl’, a phenomenon scrutinized in medical writing and the popular press, as well as the period’s literature. Fasting girls were typically purported to survive on only the Eucharist and sips of water – for weeks, months, or even years. They often became objects of intense public interest, alternately the locus of legal and medical enquiry or sites of pilgrimage. In evoking earlier fasting saints, whose behaviour was considered anorexia mirabilis, the fasting girl claims to embody the miraculous consequences of devotion to her saviour. The medical establishment would increasingly seek to discredit this earlier understanding of fasting. Cases such as that of the Welsh girl Sarah Jacob (1857–1869), who has been ‘resurrected’ by authors from Dickens to Emma Donoghue (in her recent historical novel, The Wonder [2016]), were at the nexus of this transition from the perception of self-imposed starvation as redemptive sacrifice to pathologized illness, anorexia nervosa (1873). Dickens offers varying treatments of fasting women in his journalism and his portrait of Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop (1841). Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849) identifies maternal healing as a tonic to destructive, idolatrous forms of self-starvation. Finally, in its depiction of dangerous religious devotion and the limits of medicalization, The Wonder offers us a prism through which we can critically examine the ongoing cultural construction of the fasting girl. Collectively, the texts considered here invite a more thorough confrontation with the religious dimensions of female self-deprivation and its vexed relationship to female agency.
The Telegraph & Argus devotes a whole article to promoting a YouTube channel that has recently posted several Haunted Haworth videos. A sort of low-cost version of Most Haunted for this world of social networks and influencers. Well, if this kind of silly Victorian creepypasta wannabe is your kind of thing, there are certainly worse things you can watch. A ghost hunter says he has realised a lifelong ambition in launching a four-part series exploring paranormal activity in a historic Bradford district village. Jacob Haw-Wells, just 20 years old from Bradford, has created Haunted Haworth. It's a documentary-style series on YouTube that delves into eerie legends and supernatural reports in the iconic village of Haworth. (...) The series explores some of Haworth’s most intriguing locations, including Church Street, Haworth Old Hall Inn, the Old White Lion Hotel and Spooks. His investigations combine historical research with first-hand interviews. He said: "First I like to go to the location and speak to the owners, talk to people that have knowledge on the area, local businesses, people living in the surrounding area, I like to get them people on the show for interviews. "The series follows real investigations into these locations while also highlighting Haworth's fascinating heritage and ghost stories." (Freya Thomson)
Libertad Digital (Spain) reviews Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, but the reviewer cannot avoid quoting (not in a nice way) a previous Jane Eyre adaptation ( this one): No me llamen exagerada, que yo con estos ojos que se ha de comer la tierra presencié en el Teatro Español de Madrid un brutal atropello teatral de Jane Eyre, la obra de Charlotte Brontë donde una mujer –bastante 'odiseica', por cierto– construye su destino y sus sentimientos de espaldas a los corsés de la época y asumiendo cierta humana imperfección, tentativa de poligamia incluida. Intentar convertir eso en un cántico a la sororidad, con la protagonista lanzando salvas solidarias a la neurasténica esposa del hombre que ama y que la ama... en fin. (Anna Grau) (Translation) City News Service (China) announces a new Jane Eyre musical which opens in a couple of weeks in Shanghai:
Jane Eyre: A New Musical, The Journey to Self August 13, 2026 to August 16, 2026 889 Dongdaming Road 东大名路889号
Charlotte Brontë's "Jane Eyre" has been given a brand-new musical adaptation, which will be presented to Shanghai audiences from August 13 to 16 at AIA Grand Theater. This story of freedom, dignity, selfhood, and love is familiar to many. Jane's poignant question – Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? – has moved countless readers over the years. This new musical unfolds Jane's story in nine chapters. It is as if she has traveled across 180 years to the present, showing audiences through her actions that one can be plain, poor, or even unloved, but must always stay true to oneself. "Many people tend to see Jane Eyre as a symbol of the nineteenth century; a textbook icon of the 'independent woman,' or a romantic legend," said director and musical singer Jin Shengquan. "In fact, her dilemmas are our dilemmas, and her defiance is exactly what we long for. Her wholeness lies in her ability to remain self-possessed while also daring to love deeply," he added. Jin hopes that the musical, created in a contemporary theatrical language, will give this "female epic" a fresh look and inspire today's audiences.
The Big Rapids Pioneer announces an upcoming meeting of the Novel Tea book club at Artworks : Thursday, Aug. 20, 2026, at 3 p.m. in the lower level of Artworks, 106 N. Michigan Ave., Big Rapids, MI Wuthering Heights "Wuthering Heights" is a challenging but memorable read because the novel does not offer a simple love story or a clear division between good and evil. There is a dark atmosphere surrounding "Wuthering Heights" and Thrushcross Grange. The reader is pulled into a world shaped by obsession, pride, revenge, class expectations, and emotional suffering. (...) Reading Wuthering Heights is unsettling because many of the characters are difficult to admire. Brontë does not ask readers to approve or condemn them. Instead, she asks us to think about how love, pride, class, and suffering shape people’s choices. It is a story that stays with the reader because it shows both the destructive power of obsession and the possibility of healing through compassion. (Barbara Ross)
We are not sure if this article in The Telegraph does more harm than good to the fight against the windfarm project threatening Calder Valley's landscapes. This is a list of "historic villages threatened by Labour’s net zero obsession". To align Haworth's fight with a political side is ill-advised and wrong: Haworth Handsome, cobbled Haworth, former home of the Brontë sisters, is threatened by the construction of England’s largest wind farm. If approved, the Calderdale Energy Park will sit on the moors above the village where the Brontës wandered and composed. A total of 34 turbines – scaled back from an initial 61 – will blight the skyline, ruining the special atmosphere of places associated with the sisters such as Top Withens, the remote ruined farmhouse that inspired Wuthering Heights. “People come to Haworth to see the landscape and it will have a hugely negative impact on that,” said Robbie Moore, the Conservative MP for Keighley and Ilkley, whose constituency includes Haworth. (Christopher Winn)
And just for the record, there are local Labour politicians clearly against the project: Josh Fenton-Glynn, Labour MP for Calder Valley ( BBC), Kate Dearden, MP for Halifax ( The Yorkshire Post), or, at least, urging for a revision: Anna Dixon, Labour MP for Shipley ( UK Parliament, Hansard)
AnneBrontë.org posts about Patrick Brontë's 1850 thank-you letter for portraits of Charlotte and the Duke of Wellington
Disclaimer: For the writing of this post, AI has been used to extract and compile information from the listed links.
The long running soap-opera Days of Our Lives (currently on Peacock) has featured Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights as a recurring plot device connecting the characters Cat Greene (AnnaLynne McCord) and EJ DiMera (Dan Feuerriegel) since October 2025. The novel has appeared in scenes spanning a bookstore introduction, a recovered memory, two rounds of hypnosis, and the reveal of an ISA investigation. Below is a chronological record of the confirmed on-screen events, dated by episode air date or recap publication.
October 16, 2025 — Bookstore scene
At Julie's newly acquired bookstore, Foster asks Cat Greene whether she has read Wuthering Heights. Cat says she doesn't think so, though she is drawn to a particular edition. EJ DiMera arrives shortly after and is also drawn to the same book. (Soaps.com/SheKnows recap; Celeb Dirty Laundry)
November 11, 2025 — Cat's memory fragment
After an encounter with Sami Brady, Cat has a flash of memory: Sami standing beside a bandaged man in a hospital room. Cat recalls reading Wuthering Heights to that same man. The location is later identified as a clinic in Italy, where Cat underwent facial reconstruction after a car accident, and where EJ was recovering after being shot and presumed dead. (Soap Opera News)
February–March 2026 — Continued reading
By February 2026, EJ has Cat read passages from the book aloud to him again, in an attempt to trigger his memory of their time at the clinic. ( Soap Dirt) Recaps from this period describe EJ and Cat as having been reading the novel independently, and note that EJ keeps a copy on his hospital desk. ( Days of Our Lives Fandom Wiki)
April 28, 2026 — EJ requests hypnosis
EJ asks Marlena Evans to hypnotize him in order to recover memories of his time at the Italian clinic. Marlena agrees. (Soap Hub)
May 27, 2026 — First hypnosis session (EJ)
Marlena hypnotizes EJ. Under hypnosis, he returns mentally to the clinic and hears Cat reading Wuthering Heights to him, but cannot recall further detail. Marlena, judging that he is forcing the memory, ends the session. (Soaps.com/SheKnows; Celeb Dirty Laundry; The Soap Scene; TVMEG; Daytime Confidential)
June 1, 2026 — Second hypnosis session (EJ)
EJ undergoes a second hypnosis session with Marlena. He again recalls hearing Cat read to him, with no further detail retrieved. Marlena becomes agitated and tells him the memories he is seeking may not exist in retrievable form. ( Soap Hub)
July 7, 2026 — Hypnosis session (Cat) and ISA reveal
Cat undergoes hypnosis herself. She recalls reading Wuthering Heights to EJ, him squeezing her hand as she read, and a kiss she gave him on the cheek. During the same session, Marlena determines that Cat has been working for the ISA, and Cat confirms this, including that her position as EJ's assistant was part of the operation. (Celeb Dirty Laundry; TVMEG)
Further information and context on Daily Soap Dish (November 2025) and Daily Soap Dish (May 2026).
The Brontë Sisters. All born in Thornton, Bradford, but more closely associated with Haworth where they were raised and penned their celebrated novels, the Brontë sisters created some of the most iconic and beloved works in English literature. From The Tenant of Wildfell Hall to Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, these novels have captivated and enchanted millions of readers. (Sebastian McCormick) Cada julio, cientos de personas rinden homenaje al fantasma de Cathy, protagonista de la novela de Emily Brontë; a la vez que celebran el cumpleaños de dos mujeres que marcaron el arte británico. (...) El videoclip, en el que Kate Bush aparece bailando descalza con un largo vestido rojo y que encarna el fantasma de Catherine Earnshaw, terminó convirtiéndose en una de las imágenes más icónicas del pop británico y es justamente esa escena la que recrean las participantes, llamadas a sí mismas Cathys, durante la particular celebración anual. Pocas novelas han dejado una huella tan inmensa como Cumbres borrascosas. La única obra de Emily Brontë ha sido —y sigue siendo— una fuente de inspiración para incontables adaptaciones cinematográficas y televisivas. La más reciente llegó a la gran pantalla este mismo año, constatando que el relato de Catherine y Heathcliff sigue fascinando a nuevas generaciones. (Elsa Saom) (Translation)
The Newcastle event is also on the Newcastle Herald, and the Haworth one is mentioned in the BBC.
This Dark Night: The Life of Emily Brontë by Deborah Lutz A new biography drawing on previously unexplored archival materials to examine her life and creative process. Also published by Bloomsbury.
[David] Morrissey plays Michael Polly, an English headmaster who falls under suspicion after the disappearance of his wife, Sarah. As taciturn as Jane Eyre’s Mr. Rochester, Michael is seemingly incapable of rising to the emotional moment, insisting, for example, that he is still the man to coach the school’s rugby squad even as Sarah’s body turns up in a nearby woods. (Graham Hillard) According to Steinman, the song was inspired by Wuthering Heights and was intended as "the most passionate, romantic song" he could create. Meat Loaf, who had collaborated with Steinman on many of his hit songs, had wanted to record the track for years, but Steinman refused, saying he viewed it as a "woman's song". Vulture thinks it's great we are arguing about filming the classics, now with The Odyssey, but a few months ago were Wuthering Heights or Hamnet: But it’s great that people are engaging with these ideas. We are in a resurgence of humanities in cinema. Wuthering Heights came out and everybody was suddenly talking about how faithful it was to Heathcliff. A similar thing happened with Hamnet. That’s the kind of back-and-forth we’ve been sorely lacking for a while. (Bilge Ebiri) Finally, the Brontë Birthplace publishes how the Elizabeth Gaskell's Society recently visited them in Thornton. More Recent Articles
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