Many sites are celebrating the announcement that Bradford will be UK City of Culture 2025. The Yorkshire Post lists 'Six reasons Bradford deserved to win' and one of them is
The Bronte sistersThe three sisters, Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte, are famous poets and novelists who were born in Haworth, which is situated in the City of Bradford district. They originally published their poems and books under male pseudonyms: Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell.Their novels were an immediate success for their passion and originality, with Charlotte’s Jane Eyre taking off first, while Emily’s Wuthering Heights and Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall were considered masterpieces of literature.A writer’s house museum, Bronte Parsonage Museum, was built between 1778 and 1779 and maintained by the Bronte Society in honour of the Bronte sisters. It is located in the home previously occupied by the Bronte family in Haworth, where the sisters spent their childhood and wrote their famous books.The parsonage is a Grade I listed building on the National Heritage List for England. (Liana Jacob)
From The Guardian:
But Bradford has a great deal going for it. Its cultural history is rich: JB Priestley, the author of the evergreen play An Inspector Calls, was a son of the city. His English Journey tracked a deeply divided, Depression-afflicted nation, and was part of a cultural tide that brought the Labour party to power in 1945. In Andrea Dunbar, who died in 1990 at the unthinkably early age of 29, Bradford birthed a major playwright who articulated with precision the texture of working-class life under the Thatcher government; her plays The Arbor and Rita, Sue and Bob Too stand as masterpieces. Her life in turn was documented by the film-maker Clio Barnard (born in nearby Otley), another of whose remarkable films, The Selfish Giant, is set in the city. In David Hockney, Bradford has a global artistic titan. Ten miles to the west lies Haworth, home of the Brontë sisters.
A column from The Mirror:
I live near the ruins of the house that inspired Emily Brontë to write the classic Wuthering Heights. Before the pandemic, our picturesque village would be besieged by thousands of tourists from all around the world, eager to visit the Bronte Parsonage and Bronte Waterfall.And it isn’t just Haworth which is outstanding and attracts visitors. (Anila Baig)
Still locally, The Yorkshire Post features Bradford's remarkable Undercliffe Cemetery.
Among the more notable names are a maid of the Bronte sisters, one of Sir Titus Salt's sisters, a Labour MP, a Chief Druid, a soldier killed in battle against the Zulus in South Africa, the driver and conductor of a runaway tram who were killed when it smashed into a pub in Idle in 1925, and the Bankarts, the merchant family who built the Little Germany commercial district. Trustees call it 'a history of Bradford in stone'. (Grace Newton)
The maid is none other than Nancy Garrs.
The American Scholar reviews I Used to Live Here Once: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys by Miranda Seymour.
Rhys conceived Wide Sargasso Sea, in part, as a rebuttal to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre—to its demeaning depiction of the island-born Mrs. Rochester as deranged. Ironically, Rhys had played that role herself often enough: in her drunken altercations with various neighbors, she fought like a hellcat, scratching and biting and sometimes landing in jail or a mental institution. She wrestled often with the demon of English respectability and usually lost. At the end of her life, no longer able to look after herself, she was installed by friends in a pink boudoir in their London home; after an initial idyll, she became so unpleasant that those friends took to calling her Johnny Rotten. Madwoman in the attic, indeed.Beyond Rhys’s quarrel with Brontë, Wide Sargasso Sea is fundamentally about cultural incomprehension: all the ways in which the European mind is threatened by that other, island way of being. (Madison Smartt Bell)
The Brooklyn Rail reviews the novel The Path of Thorns by A.G. Slatter.
As Slatter has said herself, the novel pulls themes from Jane Eyre and Frankenstein while pushing back against the idea that men are the center of stories and that women’s narratives must always end with marriage and/or suffering. Certainly, there is suffering in great quantities for the women in The Path of Thorns, as is common in Slatter’s work: women suffer at the hands of other women, men, or because their world does not value them, their bodies, or their knowledge. (Yvonne C. Garrett)
Il Giornale (Italy) interviews Cristina Marconi about her anthology of famous love letters Come dirti addio. Cento lettere d'amore da Saffo a García Lorca.
Alcune sono grandi lettere d'amore.«C'è quella di Nadja a Osip Mandel'stam: lui non c'è più, e il suo è un atto estremo di conservazione. Per me però la lettera più bella è quella di Charlotte Brontë a Constantin Héger».Il futuro «professore»?«Mi uccide. Mette la sua anima interamente su carta, rinunciando a qualunque vezzo, in modo potentissimo. È una lettera di grande solitudine e grande disperazione, nella quale, però, si intravede tutta la sua ricchezza». [...]Le più belle?«La mia terna è: Brontë, Albertine, Flaubert». (Eleonora Barbieri) (Translation)
InfoLibre (Spain) mentions that Spanish writer Carmen Martín Gaite won a prize for her translation of Jane Eyre into Spanish.
