Jane Eyre's Antarctic expedition

A copy of Alice in Wonderland read by the men on board the 1901-04 Discovery expedition to the Antarctic is to be auctioned in a couple of weeks and The Telegraph looks into the ship's library contents.

According to the Scott Polar Research Institute, the library also held fiction books including Jane Eyre, A Christmas Carol, Three Musketeers, The Jungle Book and War of the Worlds. (Hannah Furness)

No mention of Wuthering Heights and we wonder whether the men on board would have been 'shocked' by it as BoldSky includes it on a top 10 of 'books that shocked the world'.

When it was published in 1847, this novel shocked the suave British readers with the descriptions of unbridled cruelty and passion. (Anwesha)

Express looks at 'pop provocateurs' and posits Kate Bush as one of them:

In that context it was a very big deal when Kate Bush performed acrobatic cartwheels in a swirling white dress for the video of Wuthering Heights. But suggestive it wasn’t – her facial expressions and the rest of her hand gestures look like the French & Saunders pastiche it was destined to spawn. (Simon Edge and Julie Carpenter)

With all the above in mind we are surprised to find the Brontës still used sometimes as a byword for boring or dull. Such as in this column from The Eugene Register-Guard:

It’s fascinating how some sports fans respond to defeat.
In the aftermath of Oregon’s 17-14 kick-to-the-gut loss to Stanford on Saturday night, I found this intriguing exchange between two Facebook friends:
“Why, oh why, did I ever start caring about football?” a woman asked. “It used to be easier when I was just reading a good book instead.”
“It’s easy to go back to not caring,” someone else responded. “Come to my place on future game days and we’ll spend the time eating cheese-laced appetizers and debating the relative merits of the Brontë sisters.” [...]
I’d like to think that the best reaction to losing lies somewhere between the Bronte sisters and Meltdown Man. (Bob Welch)

Stanford News features on of its students who 'wrote an honors thesis titled, "Grains of Truth in the Wildest Fable: Literary Illustrations, Pictorial Representation, and the Project of Fantasy in Jane Eyre"'. Perry Brass writes in The Huffington Post about living at Villa Charlotte Brontë in New York during Hurricane Irene in August 2011. Augreduvent posts about Jane Eyre in French while Alice Chimera writes about Wuthering Heights in Italian. Independent Ethos reviews Wuthering Heights 2011. Into the Orchard discusses Wide Sargasso Sea. Lukor.net reviews Tina Connolly's Ironskin and Read Alert posts about Alison Croggon's Black Spring. AngelaMartin650 and Literally comment on tweeting like Mrs Fairfax and Mrs Reed, respectively. Elisabetta Bagli writes in Italian about attending a recent talk on the Brontës.