The garden has never looked better than it has this year. It was a dry summer, so we did lots of watering to keep the plants comfortable; the leaf cover from the graveyard trees is so dense in summer that even when we have rain it doesn't always get through. The roses have been stunning. They love the sun, as do many other beautiful plants in the garden. The challenge is more in the shady beds so in the last couple of years we have put more work and more of our budget into improving them. We have bought quite a number of pots and containers which enables us to move plants to fill gaps as needed. Our policy now for the garden is to make it more environmentally friendly - if you see seed heads left on or overflowing foliage, don’t think we’re being lazy, we’ll be leaving these for food and shelter for the wildlife and we are also thinking about how to bring water to the garden without using mains.
It’s a new era; we have the will and the skill of our gardeners, so we intend to do our bit for the planet.
One period that Charlotte Brontë found particularly trying in her life was her time as a teacher at Roe Head school in the hills above Mirfield in the West Riding of Yorkshire (that’s a drawing of it, by Anne Brontë at the head of this post). Charlotte had attended the school as a pupil from 1831 until 1832; it was a very happy time for her, and she made lifelong friends in Ellen Nussey and Mary Taylor. In 1835 Charlotte returned to Roe Head in the role of teacher, but she found this to be a very different experience. Read more: anebronte.org/2022/charlotte-brontes-roe-head-letter-of-october-1836/n
Beautiful photographes on the Facebook page of Dave Zdanowicz.
Haworth at about 4:30am this morning. Rained just as I got there!
Nick Holland from the Anne Bronte Blog paid his first visit of 2022 to the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth. Their latest exhibition is entitled ‘Defying Expectations’ and it takes a particular look at clothing and accessories used by the Brontë sisters, as well as showcasing some old favourite items from the museum’s extensive collections, and some items which are less frequently seen. Despite it’s title this exhibition very much lived up to my high expectations, so in today’s post I bring you five treasures from this year’s parsonage collection! Read all the story here: Anne Bronte
Nick Holland: The one on the right with the shiny silk inserts, is the very shawl that Charlotte Brontë wore on her wedding day in 1854.
Luxurious Dress
Nick Holland: Perhaps the greatest item of all, among many great items, in this year’s exhibition is this dress. Charlotte’s Room, as the museum hails it, always contains a Brontë dress within a carefully sealed glass case. They are always very moving, but this year the dress is particularly spectacular – and it really does defy general expectations around Charlotte Brontë’s apparel.
We often think of Charlotte Brontë as rather dowdy, and she may have been so by necessity throughout much of her life. The Brontës were not wealthy, and had to repair, improvise and recycle much of their clothing. By the end of Charlotte’s life, however, things had changed dramatically for her. The royalties she earned from her writing were far greater than anything she could have hoped to earn from careers as a teacher or governess, and the legacy she left in 1855 was worth more than a million pounds in today’s money.
This dress dates from this period of Charlotte’s life. It was one where she often had to mix in high society, difficult as that must have been for someone as shy as she was, and she dressed accordingly. This striped silk dress was one of three found holed up behind a wall during renovations at the parsonage in 1936. It has been a cause of speculation for some time, but the museum has finally proven that it did belong to Charlotte meaning that it can finally go on display. With floral adornments it’s an item of real beauty, and evidence of the elevation in status and wealth that Charlotte’s literary genius finally brought her. Also displayed her are an ornate fan, and a pair of black stockings worn by Charlotte Brontë.
Hair Brooch and Bracelet
On Facebook (Nick Holland | Facebook) I read: Sad to hear of the death of brilliant, versatile, groundbreaking artist Dame Paula Rego. A book of her 2002 artworks inspired by Jane Eyre is one of the favourite Bronte items I've ever been given.
I feel sad to hear this. I admired Paula Rego's illustrations as well.
Brontë and Paula Rego share an imaginative ardour that abolishes the veil between what takes place in fact and in fantasy. As storytellers, they really are kith and kin: Rego reproduces the psychological drama in the book through distortions of scale, cruel expressiveness of gesture, and disturbingly stark contrasts of light and welling shadows. The long, lugubrious, moralising face of Mr. Brocklehurst in The Inspection looms as large as the little girl’s whole upper body and twice its bulk: Jane standing on the stool, held by Bessie, becomes a tiny, breakable poppet.
In Paula Rego’s work, in her ‘artist’s dreamland’, the peculiar and the elfish twist and turn with a similar rebellious vitality. And they do so for reasons that Jane Eyre’s did, mirroring Charlotte Brontë’s, over a hundred and fifty years ago. Rego has explored, in a myriad different sequences of pictures, the conditions of her own upbringing in Portugal, her formation as a girl and a woman, and the oscillation between stifling social expectations and liberating female stratagems.
At one point Jane Eyre protests,
Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their own efforts, as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellowcreatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags.
Read all: tate/paula-rego
Anne Bronte was not only a talented writer but also a skilled rock collector interested in geology, researchers have revealed.
The youngest Bronte sister built up a collection of specimens before her death aged 29 in 1849.
It was thought she collected them for their aesthetic value, but research shared by Sally Jaspars has shown she was an informed geology fan.
Ms Jaspers is studying Bronte as part of a PhD at the University of Aberdeen.
She said: "Her interest in geology is mentioned in her literary works - indeed in The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall she references the science and a book by Sir Humphry Davy directly."
Experts from the University of Leeds and a specialist spectroscopy company were also involved, and they found she had carnelians and agates which she collected in Scarborough, where she worked as a governess.
She also had flowstone and a rare kind of red obsidian, which originated outside of the UK.
The Belgian capital barely acknowledges its link with the two most famous Brontë sisters, Charlotte and Emily. A plaque commemorates their stay here in 1842-43, at a girls’ boarding school called the Pensionnat Heger, which stood on the site now occupied by Bozar, the Centre for Fine Arts. However, it is placed high up near Bozar’s entrance: most concertgoers pouring through the doors are oblivious of it, as are most tourists.
It is a pity the city is so silent about its Brontë link. Visitors are unlikely to have heard about the connection before they come. Mention the Brontës and how many people picture the sisters strolling on the boulevards in Brussels?
Yet they did – and so do some of their fictional characters. Although it is not hard to see why the connection can be missed. Charlotte wrote two novels set in Brussels and based on her time in the city: her first, The Professor, which was not published until 1857, two years after her death; and her fourth and last, Villette (1853). But neither were bestsellers like Jane Eyre. Many literary pundits rate Villette as her most interesting book, but, sadly, no feature film has ever been made about its heroine Lucy Snowe, a sharply observant expat experiencing loneliness and frustration as a teacher at a pensionnat.
Margaret Gaskell, known as Meta, was born two and a half years after Marianne. In her diary for December 1837, Here the story of her life.
