A new Brontë-related paper:
Hannah Markley Studies in the Novel, Volume 58, Number 2, Summer 2026, pp. 121-137
This essay explores how debilitated appetites in Wuthering Heights spread among the novel’s characters as diseases. While critics comment on the ways Heathcliff’s hunger engenders Catherine’s anorectic refusals, Hindley’s alcoholism and Frances’s tubercular consumption also respond to Heathcliff’s arrival at Wuthering Heights, exposing more complex entanglements of physical illness, emotional suffering, and traumatic experience. By situating these appetites in relation to nineteenth-century medical ideas about Anorexia nervosa, inebriety, tuberculosis, and miasma theories of disease, the disabling effects of racial persecution (Heathcliff), gendered confinement (Catherine and Frances), and social dispossession (Hindley) disclose biopolitical distributions of risk along the lines of race, gender, class, and disability that underwrote British racial capitalism, structuring both appetite and embodiment in the provincial scene of the everyday.
Broadway World Scotland reports that the play Jane Eyre Convention will be part of this year's Edinburgh Fringe after a run in London. Double Fringe First winners Theatre Caddis are set to bring their comedy, Jane Eyre Convention to Edinburgh Fringe this August, following a run in London earlier this Summer. The show is set at the world's first ever Jane Eyre Convention, where we find a group of slightly neurotic Brontë-aficinados [sic] gathered to reenact scenes from their favourite novel. As the group share their passion for all things Jane Eyre, they squabble and fight over the best bits, and conflict over authentic interpretations; also experiencing real emotions as they follow the character of Jane on her journey, including wailing running across the moors! More memorable scenes from the book are relived, as the group attempt to rescue shackled Bertha from the attic. In this fast-paced farce, the enthusiasts feel that they gain new insights and a better understanding of the story of Jane Eyre, and potentially one another. The show promises audiences a funny, uplifting and quirky jaunt - with unrealistic violence, bonnets, and minimal raunch! The show has enjoyed sell-out runs at Lambeth Fringe, and recent shows at the Bread and Roses Theatre, London. The show may also appeal to Brontë fans who enjoyed the recent hype around Emerald Fennel's [sic] adaptation of Wuthering Heights. Theatre Caddis is a London-based theatre company known for staging new, eclectic work, showcasing performances that blend humor, literary homage, and character studies. Jane Eyre Convention is performing at Edinburgh Festival Fringe 6th - 28th (not 10th and 18th) August at 12.25pm (60 mins), Just The Snifter Room at Just The Tonic at The Mash House venue number 288). (Stephi Wild)
Perhaps no artifact captures the intimacy of Victorian hair work quite like a small bracelet housed in the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth. Composed of six light brown braids belonging to each of the three sisters – Emily, Charlotte, and Anne – it remains one of the most talked-about pieces of hairwork in existence. The bracelet is technically unwearable now; the clasps are open and one of the braids has come loose. Its power lies not in its intricacy, as the braids themselves are simple up close, but in the identity of its owners. The fact that the Brontë sisters belonged to a lower-middle class family only reinforces how universal the practice was. This very bracelet recently found its way back into popular culture. When Margot Robbie attended a London premiere of Emerald Fennell’s take on Wuthering Heights, she wore a dress adorned with light brown braids inspired by the Brontë piece. Robbie even accessorized her look with a replica of the bracelet itself – a gesture that bridged Victorian sentimentality and contemporary red-carpet fashion in one deliberate styling choice. Hair charms also appear in the literature the Brontës produced. In Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff removes a lock of Edgar Linton’s hair from Cathy Earnshaw’s corpse’s locket and replaces it with his own, sending a piece of himself and their love off with her spirit. The plan unravels when Nelly, the housemaid and narrator of the novel, entwines Linton’s hair with Heathcliff’s. Scholar Deborah Lutz described this act as opening up the possibility of a postmortem storm of jealousy between the two men. Though it is the only Brontë novel to directly reference mourning jewelry, the scene underscores how central hair work was to Victorian emotional life.
On this episode of “Read All About It!,” the four hosts give our long-awaited review of the film “Wuthering Heights.” Hosts discuss whether the film is a true adaptation, as many characters were omitted entirely from the movie. (Vanessa Hanna)
A recent Spanish special edition with a die-cut dust jacket of Wuthering Heights:
Emily Brontë Translation by Nicole d'Amonville Alegría Foreword by Cristian Olivé Editorial Molino ISBN: 978-8427254589 February 2026
En los páramos desolados de Yorkshire, el amor y la venganza se entrelazan en una historia tan salvaje como el viento que azota la mansión de Cumbres Borrascosas. Heathcliff, un huérfano marcado por la humillación y el desprecio, consagra su vida a un amor imposible por Catherine Earnshaw, una obsesión que lo consume hasta la destrucción. Emily Brontë creó una de las novelas más intensas e incomprendidas de la literatura, desafiando las normas sociales de la época y dejando a su paso un reguero de censura y escándalos.
The Times Literary Supplement has an article by Samantha Ellis on Eleanor Houghton's excellent Charlotte Brontë's Life Through Clothes.Charlotte Brontë was famously “plain” – and possibly also vain. She cared very much about clothes, and there are many insights to be gained from paying close attention to what is left of her wardrobe. In this unusual biography, a nine-year labour of love, Eleanor Houghton even includes a bar chart tracking the many references to clothes in Brontë’s letters. The author, a Brontë scholar, fashion historian, couture milliner and costume consultant on period dramas, would go so far as to call Brontë’s clothes the only surviving “witnesses” to her subject’s life. The “testimonies” in Charlotte Brontë’s Life Through Clothes derive from chemically analysing fabrics, painstakingly establishing provenance and poring over everything from Brontë’s intricately stitched baby bonnet to the knitted baby socks given to her for the baby she was carrying when she died. At the age of sixteen, Brontë drew a picture of a woman wearing the kind of frock she probably yearned for, with dropped shoulders, puff sleeves and a high waist. Two years later, in 1834, her brother painted her, in the “pillar portrait”, more soberly attired in a dress matching those of her sisters: dark and sombre, with a high neckline, a large modest collar and sleeves that might seem voluminous in 2026, but, Houghton writes, “lack the exuberance (and internal scaffolding) of their peers”. This painting has “disproportionately shaped our views of … [her] appearance and clothing … This drably dressed Charlotte has haunted us through the years”. The real Brontë did eventually manage to indulge her sense of style, and this book shows her, quite literally, fashioning herself. Houghton notes, for example, how Brontë made a dress for her first job as a governess that fastened at the front, so she could dress without help, in privacy, and inserted large hidden pockets so that she could keep her secrets from her prying employers. In a tour de force exegesis of a “greying corset”, Houghton conjures up Brontë in Brussels, in love with her married French teacher, slipping away to buy a “punitive” corset, which gave her such a narrow waist that, much later, George Smith, her editor, would worry that tight lacing had shortened her life.
AnneBrontë.org focuses on Charlotte Brontë's letters to her cousin (on her mother's side), Eliza Kingston.
A new Brontë-related thesis: Muckle, Lacey Nicole; Siegel, Jonah (chair); McGill, Meredith (member); Luciano, Dana (member); Grossman, Jonathan (member); Rutgers University ; School of Graduate Studies, 2026
This project focuses on how the ideological and stylistic strategies that Frederick Douglass used in his first autobiography influenced Charlotte Brontë’s immensely popular novel Jane Eyre (1847). Subsequently, Jane Eyre’s widespread influence created a subsection of mid-nineteenth-century reform novels that contain “the rebellious aesthetic,” a narrative style in which authors imported the aesthetic aspects of rebellion from Douglass by-way-of Brontë without considering how different representational strategies might be necessary for different political projects. The first part of this project explains Douglass’s influence on Brontë, and how Brontë’s novel subsequently reproduces the aesthetics of (rather than actually imagines or incites) rebellion. The rest of this project tracks how Douglass’s rhetorical strategies were refracted through Jane Eyre into a set of novels written between the aftermath and enactment of the British Slavery Abolition Act (1833) and the end of the American Civil War (1865). Techniques created by authors of slave narratives came to shape the way white authors represented different political projects. Ultimately, when these authors attempted to portray other social issues using the style of Douglass’s narrative (mediated through Brontë’s novel), the rebellious aesthetic limited how they could imagine or portray different forms of social transformation.
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