Inspiration with roses

The letters of Charlotte Bronte

To the dancing shifts of the letters, Margaret Smith, an exemplary editor, provides all the biographical grounding you could want. There is hardly a reference she does not explain, hardly a fictional echo she does not pick up. 'Cf Villette ch 6,' she writes nonchalantly, 'cf Shirley ch 23'. So Caroline Helstone and Lucy Snowe and Jane Eyre are always with us, not in the heavy-handed way that biographers use them, but like a loose net laid over the letters. We can see how they picked up words and images and dreams, netting the silver fishes of Charlotte's lived experience.

But what is not said bears heavily on this volume, which takes us up to 1847 and the publication of Jane Eyre. Apart from the fact that so many letters were destroyed or lost or censored, there is a world going on underneath them, in which Charlotte was writing her chronicles of Angria, composing poems and sketches and, finally, novels.

Because she kept that world completely hidden from her main correspondent, her school friend Ellen Nussey, we become keenly aware of the disjunction between her social and inner life. So, when she takes her father to Manchester for a cataract operation, she writes to Ellen: 'You ask if I have any enjoyment here in truth I can't say I have', although it was during those weeks that she began to write Jane Eyre, drafting its intense opening chapters in little notebooks.

Even if much of Charlotte's heart is left out of these letters, what we find instead is a lucid development of style and tone as she creates the peculiar voice that rooted Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe so securely in reality. The almost-invisible governess with her biting tongue, her solitude and her anger begins to express herself in barbs directed at her employers and pupils: 'I will only ask you to imagine the miseries of a reserved wretch like me - thrown at once into the midst of a large Family - proud as peacocks and wealthy as Jews,' she writes to Ellen Nussey from her first situation, spikily characterising her employer thus: 'Mrs Sidgwick is generally considered an agreeable woman - so she is I daresay in general Society - her health is sound - her animal spirits are good - consequently she is cheerful in company - but O Ellen does this compensate for the absence of every fine feeling of every gentle - and delicate sentiment?'
Read more: biography.charlottebronte

The Letters of Charlotte Bronte, Volume One, 1829-1847

The Letters of Charlotte Bronte, Volume One, 1829-1847.
The correspondence in this volume spans the period from 1829, when Charlotte wrote her first letter to her father at the age of thirteen, to 1847, when she had just finished the Preface to the second edition of Jane Eyre. A sentence in this first, youthful letter--"On account of bad weather we have not been out much, but notwithstanding we have spent our time very pleasantly, between reading, working, and learning our lessons ..." (105)--seems to prefigure, in a positive key, the famously ominous opening of Bronte's first novel: "There was no possibility of taking a walk that day" (1); and Smith notes such similarities between the letters and the fiction on a number of occasions. These instances confirm Bronte's own subtle acknowledgment, repeatedly amplified by critics, that she used her past as a resource for her novels. What is especially striking about the letters in this volume, however, is the clarity with which we see how self-conscious and determined Charlotte was about the distance she wanted to maintain between life and art. While she used her inner life as a resource for her writing, she insisted from adolescence forward on maintaining a sharp division between this inner life, which she shared only with her siblings, and her practical and external world. We see this division best in her relationship to her close lifelong friend, Ellen Nussey, whom she met at the infamous Clergy Daughters' school and to whom the majority of the letters in this volume were written. While there is no doubt that Bronte loved Ellen dearly and intimately, she never shared with her the imaginative life she participated in with her brother and sisters and strove to maintain in solitude when necessity took her away from home. These early letters help us to understand that Elizabeth Gaskell's famous (and often maligned) statement that "Henceforward Charlotte Bronte's existence becomes divided into two parallel currents--her life as Currer Bell, the author, and her life as Charlotte Bronte, the woman" (2) had its source not solely or simply in Gaskell's wish to emphasize to her public Bronte's womanliness, but in Bronte's own early and consistent practice of dividing her life along these very lines--out of modesty or artistic self-protection, or some combination of the two.

Haworth Main Street - 81 - 87 - c. 1880 - History Pictures

Haworth Main Street - 81 - 87 - c. 1880 - History Pictures

Haworth-village nature-diary/pictures of August

• The beautiful skies the Sisters were so fond of
• The blossoming moors
• Sunsets, so beautiful

Recent Dissertations (III)

Recent Dissertations (III)

An Ethnographic Approach to Literature: Reading Wildfell Hall in the L1 and L2 Classroom
Malgesini, Frank. Dissertation: Dissertation (Ph.D.)--University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, 2010.

Milking Milton : Charlotte Brontë's re-narration of Paradise lost in The professor andJane Eyre
Author(s): Crouse, Brent.
Year: 2010
Dissertation: Honours Thesis--University of New Brunswick in Saint John, Faculty of English

The Non-Specificity of Location in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights
Voroselo, Brian P.
Degree
Master of Arts in English, Cleveland State University, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, 2010.

Confidant and critic : the conflicting roles of the reader in Charlotte Brontë's Villette
Author: Holahan, Alisa 1987- Publication: 2010
Dissertation: Senior honors thesis (B.A.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2010.

On this day in 1861

Sutcliffe Sowden clergyman and friend of the Brontes tragically died, he had fallen into the canal at Hebden Bridge and drowned. He was only 44.
Nicholls travelled to Hebden Bridge from Haworth in order to conduct his friend's funeral service.
The report in the Halifax Guardian indicated just how well thought of Sowden had been: "The funeral took place on Tuesday afternoon. Many of the principal shops were closed, the procession numbered upwards of 300 persons."

bronteblog/sutcliffe-sowden-and-bront-family

st james hebden bridge the-bronte-connection

THE MATERNAL RELATIVES OF THE BRONTËS

By J. Hambley Rowe, M.B., F.S.G.,
Chairman of the Council, Brontë Society.

While much has been written and more conjectured regarding the ancestry of the Brontës on the paternal side, their maternal forbears have been uniformly neglected. This seems the more inexplicable as it is generally considered that the distaff influences are the more important in the moulding of capabilities and temperament. In point of intrinsic interest, also, the history of the mother's family is quite as attractive as that of the father's.
Maria Branwell, who, at Guiseley, on December 29th, 1812, became the wife of the Reverend Patrick Brontë, was the daughter of Thomas Branwell and Ann Carne, his wife, both natives of Penance. The Branwells resided in that neighbourhood for two centuries before Thomas Branwell's day, and their name, under the various guises of Bramwell, Bramble and Bromwell, is to be found in the registers of the parishes adjoining Penzance.
The earliest mention of this name that I can trace in Cornwall occurs in the Parish of Sancreed in 1605. A former incumbent of the adjoining parish of Paul, John Trernearne, saw his church in the hands of the Spaniards in 1595, when four of their warships made a raid on the Cornish coast. From him was descended Jane Tremearne, who, on July 2nd, 1705, married Martyn Bremble, presumably the son of John Bromwell, whose marriage to Constance is recorded on March 13th, 1657-8, at Madron.
 Read more: genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry Branwell