'Her own marvellous, darkly brave and tricksy self'

The Yorkshire Post looks at how and why local as well as international campaigners are opposing he wind farm in Brontë country.

Brontë enthusiasts from around the world are rallying to defeat plans for nine wind turbines on West Yorkshire moorland.
More than 100 letters of objection, many from members of the Brontë Society literary group, have been sent to Calderdale Council over a proposal to replace 23 turbines at Ovenden Moor with much taller structures up to 115m (377ft) to the blade tip.
Objections have been received from society members in China, the United States, Canada, Australia and Sweden.
The scheme is due to go before planners next Tuesday, with a planning report recommending that it be approved.
It concludes the development “will cause some temporary and permanent damage to the environment” but this has to be weighed against the need to provide renewable energy to help meet targets.
The Brontë Society’s Christine Went said: “It seems appalling that anyone could recommend imposing something on this scale on a heritage landscape.”
Objectors claim that the higher structures will blight the landscape and potentially damage tourism, much of it generated by the area’s Brontë connections.
Residents are also angry that there are no plans to remove the below-ground concrete bases of the old turbines. [...]
A spokesman for the developer, E.ON, said: “Ovenden Moor has been supplying renewable energy for over 18 years, since then wind- power technology has moved on and its now possible to produce twice as much power with half as many turbines.
“We hope the wind farm will have a positive effect on the local area and plan to offer a Community Benefit Fund to support local community projects if the new wind farm development goes ahead.”
The spokeswoman added: “We have carefully designed the new wind farm layout to limit the impact it has on the local area, despite the larger height of the proposed turbines.”
She said a “decommissioning plan” for the old structures would be agreed with the council but did not form part of the current application.

C21Media and others are publishing the following press release:

Chello Central Europe has licensed more than 150 hours of content from BBC Worldwide (BBCWW) for its Film Mania and Film Café movie channels.
The package, agreed between Chello’s Budapest-based operation and the BBC’s commercial arm, covers drama series like Death In Paradise, The Deep, Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice.

Writing for BBC News, James Friel admits that his favourite literary character is Lucy Snowe:

My favourite character in literature is the difficult, unclubbable Lucy Snowe from Charlotte Brontë's Villette. At the conclusion of her slippery and singular tale, she manages in her lone voice to define herself as wife, widow and spinster all at once and so none of these at all but - simply, complicatedly - her own marvellous, darkly brave and tricksy self.

A letter from a Guardian reader sees a horse as a potential Heathcliff:

Prince Abdulla's stellar stallion and the winner at Ascot – deserves a better denouement than to be put to stud "within a quarter of an hour of [his final] race", and as such doomed to suffer (in John Milton's words) "a dull and servile copulation" of marital husbandry, crowded into a seraglio of filles de joie (26 October). He should just say neigh to the prince: animals should not be commodities. For, like Caligula's Incitatus (Sir Speedy), he could be made a togaed senator – perhaps a new Republican senator from Kentucky. He could don breeches and make his cinematic debut (in the footsteps of the waggish Mister Ed) as Heathcliff in an all-equine production of Withering [sic] Heights.
But better yet, he could find his calling as a therapy companion (assuming he is a gregarious chap). At any rate I hope his ultimate fate will not be that of Roy Rogers's Trigger: apotheosis via taxidermy.
R M Fransson
Denver, Colorado, US

Annik Chainey posts in French about Jane, le renard et moi. Fukuoka Now reviews the Japanese stage version of Jane Eyre the Musical. Nästan för lycklig briefly comments in Swedish on having read the actual novel and Happy Catholic's Bookshelf features a 'faith-based book club' which will be reading Jane Eyre come January. Pisany inaczej... writes in Polish about The Professor.