Ugly-crying with joy

BBC has an article on Bradford as UK City of Culture 2025.

Then there's the Brontë sisters (Charlotte, Emily and Anne), whose literary masterpieces include novels like Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Born in Bradford, their later home in the idyllic moorland village of Haworth just outside the city makes for a memorable literary pilgrimage. 

On my recent visit to Bradford, it became clear that city officials are keen to use this year's spotlight to move beyond its boom-and-bust past. "We hope the City of Culture programme will change people's perceptions," said Visit Bradford tourism officer Lisa Brankin, as we chatted in what might just be Britain's most beautiful bookshop: a branch of Waterstones filling the city's soaring Victorian Gothic former Wool Exchange. (Norman Miller)

Funny that the Wool Exchange is mentioned because there is a letter to The Telegraph and Argus about a street fight witnessed from there.

From the first floor venue that is the Wool Exchange cafe, I was one of many people who had a bird’s eye view of an impromptu live performance which was boisterously played-out at the busy pedestrian junction of Piece Hall Yard and Hustlergate.

It involved fisticuffs liberally employed to great effect; repeated instances of blood-curdling body-booting; and much use of the sort of language (clearly audible through Waterstones open doors) that you would not wish your maiden aunt to hear.

It being also the Bradford Literature Festival, and wishing to be liberal in my interpretation of the scene, I pondered on the relevancy of the youths’ actions. Had their academic discourse about the literary value of the famous Brontë novels simply become a trifle overheated in the sun? (John C Jackson, Burley-in-Wharfedale)

BBC Writers announces the names of the writers who took part in this year's Voices group and one of them is

Nicole Joseph

Nicole Joseph is a Bradford-based Writer and Theatre-Maker, she writes women-led stories interested in the sublime, exploring marginalised characters and places, where often, she genre-bends and the ordinary meets the extraordinary, thematically and atmospherically. [...]

Nicole wrote the Crucible Theatre's Young Company Production, URGENT! A TIMELY PLAY, which showed in their Playhouse and was awarded an Arts Council England Developing Your Creative Practice grant to level up her writing craft and career (2024). She recently completed a micro-commissioned extract of a modernised theatre adaptation of Anne Bronte’s THE TENANT OF WILDFELL HALL for the Bronte Parsonage Museum, workshopped by Ilkley Playhouse and Rise and Howl (2025). Nicole seeks an agent as she transitions into television writing and expands on her theatre work.

Adobo Magazine recommends reading Jane Eyre on a rainy day.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

This immersive and captivating book about a willful governess has captured the imagination of generations of readers. It also happens to end and begin with rain (the last lines of which might make you ugly-cry with joy)

If you are a fan of this book, consider picking it up again on a rainy day. 

The Brontë Sisters UK talks about reading Wuthering Heights in a hot climate like an Italian summer.