'People take the Brontës to their hearts and have their own relationship with them'

Today marks the 170th anniversary of the publication of Shirley.

The Telegraph and Argus reviews the Bradford concert of The Unthanks.

Last night the band - Tyneside sisters Rachel and Becky Unthank and Yorkshire pianist/composer Adrian McNally - performed the song cycle at St George’s Hall, and spoke of their work at the Parsonage Museum.
“Being in the Parsonage and in those rooms, the great trees in the churchyard, the crows, those amazing moors...you can’t help but be taken up with the atmosphere,” said Rachel. “We all felt it was a privilege but quite daunting because people take the Brontes to their hearts and have their own relationship with them. When we chose the poems we looked at themes common to folk music - embracing landscape, death and the dark parts of human nature. It felt like familiar territory.”
Adrian said it was a “real privilege” to play Emily’s cabinet piano. He revealed that while working in Haworth the band stayed at Ponden Hall, a house visited by the Brontes and often associated with Thrushcross Grange in Wuthering Heights, which has a replica of Emily’s piano. “They kindly offered to lend it to us for the tour, but our van’s not big enough,” he smiled.
While at the Parsonage, the band recorded sounds - wind howling off the moors, a chiming clock, footsteps, doors opening and the cawing of crows - which accompanied their impressive song cycle concert, encompassing 10 of Emily’s poems, including Shall Earth No More Inspire Thee. (Emma Clayton)

NWI reviews The Joffrey Ballet's take on Jane Eyre with Cathy Marston's choreography.

Starring as Jane is Amanda Assucena with Greig Matthews in the role of Rochester. Assucena and Matthews portray their characters with great passion, magnetic dancing and skilled acting.
The troupe's dancing, overall in this piece, is superb. The individual characters do a fine job interacting with one another while the group of male dancers termed the D-Men in this piece perform dynamic choreography that keeps the audience engaged everytime they're on stage.
Besides the lead characters of Jane and Rochester, other dancing roles in the spotlight are Yumi Kanazawa as Young Jane; Edson Barbosa as St. John Rivers; Gayeon Jung and Olivia Tang-Mifsud as Diana and Mary Rivers; Christine Rocas in the roles of Bessie the maid and Bertha Mason; April Daly as Mrs. Reed; Brooke Linford as Helen Burns; Lucia Connolly as Mrs. Fairfax; Jeraldine Mendoza as Blanche Ingram; and others. (Eloise Marie Valadez)

The Times reviews The Pulse Glass by Gillian Tindall:

Similarly, in The Pulse Glass no detail appears to be too small, no trinket too ordinary. Taking up her themes of “memory, loss and the arbitrary survival of a few objects”, Tindall writes about how, after the railways crisscrossed Britain, moss grew over the stones on one coaching route between Yorkshire and Lancashire (the route Jane Eyre was sent along, no less), after it fell out of fashion. (Emma Hogan)

Also in The Times, an interview with Shirley Hughes:

The book I’m ashamed I haven’t readI love some of Jane Austen, but for some reason I could not finish Sense and Sensibility. There are times when that exquisitely enclosed world becomes a little airless and you long for the wider sweep of Charlotte Brontë. 

The Guardian poses all sort of bookish questions to author Candice Carty-Williams.

The book I’m most ashamed not to have readI.  know I should probably list all the classics I haven’t read over the years, but if I’d been meant to read them then I would have. And if I haven’t, it’s because they weren’t speaking to me. I did read Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights when I was at school though. Banger.

Bookish questions for writer Sara Sheridan too in The Herald.

Favourite book you read as child. I was obsessed with Wuthering Heights. I longed for my very own dark, dodgy Heathcliff and couldn’t sleep because I was so afraid after reading the scene where the ghost of Cathy knocks at the window. The reading of your childhood stays with you forever, I think. You don’t know stories yet so it’s all fresh. (Marianne Taylor)

Echo Live (Ireland) features an exhibition in Cork.

[Artist Kirsten Murray]’s exhibition, entitled Incantation, features women such as Margaret Atwood (jointly awarded this year’s Booker Prize with Bernardine Evaristo), Jean Rhys (author of The Wide Sargasso Sea), American singer/songwriter Stevie Nicks, eco-activist Greta Thunberg, Palestinian activist Ahed Tamimi and Bridget Cleary who was killed by her husband in 1895 and is popularly described as ‘the last witch burned in Ireland’. (Colette Sheridan)

Libreriamo (Italy) has selected 5 books to read with a cup of tea, such as

Cime tempestose – Emily Brontë
Questo classico della letteratura inglese, racconta la storia di un amore distruttivo, quello di Heathcliff per la sorellastra Catherine, che si svolge su un’alta e ventosa collina dello Yorkshire, in una tenuta chiamata appunto “Cime tempestose”. A narrare la vicenda è il signor Lockwood, che quarant’anni più tardi si ritrova a passare la notte nella tenuta e che, incuriosito dalla presenza di strani personaggi, chiede spiegazioni all’anziana governante. Il racconto della donna comincia dal giorno in cui il proprietario di “Cime tempestose”, porta a casa un orfano: Heathcliff. Il ragazzo si lega profondamente a Catherine, figlia del signor Earnshaw, ma le differenze sociali finiscono con il separarli, anche se la loro amicizia si è ormai trasformata in amore. (Translation)

ABC 13 jokes about how MIB player Bryce Harper will watch a game:

This sounds like another trick question! You want me to say something snarky here about Harper, like how he'll be so depressed he won't even be watching the game, but instead curled up in a dark room reading "Wuthering Heights." A gold-leafed copy of "Wuthering Heights," in a very nice room, while wearing a Gucci silk robe. With maybe a small TV in the corner turned to the baseball game with the sound on mute. (Schoenfield)

Invisible Pink Dragon discusses Jane Eyre from a K-drama (Korean drama) point of view. The Sisters' Room features the Brontë-related work of artist Su Blackwell.