a painting of Branwell Bronte
In the Bronte Parsonage Museum are some of Branwells spectacularly bad paintings - one with some angel type figures in a heavenly scene.
Brontë letter detailing interest in ‘Governess-life’ to go under the hammer
The three-page letter, which is expected to fetch between £10,000 and £15,000 when it is auctioned at Bonhams book, maps, manuscripts and historical photographs sale in London on June 12.
The recipient of the letter, a Miss Holmes, lived for a while with the family of William Makepeace Thackeray and greatly irritated the author of Vanity Fair with her constant attempts to convert him to Catholicism.
Writing to Miss Holmes, who had sent her an – unidentified – book to read, Charlotte said: “I own I prefer the study of the human being – to that of the human being’s requirements.”
She also comments on the life of a governess – her own former occupation and that of the heroine of her best known novel Jane Eyre – saying: “I must feel a degree of interest in the details of a Governess-life.
“That life has on me the hold of actual experience; to all who live it – I cannot but incline with a certain sympathy; and any kind feeling they express for me – comes pleasantly and meets with grateful acceptance.”
zondag 6 mei 2012
Jeff Kelly: Imagine then my shock while in 1999 touring their home, now a museum, and seeing an actual lock of Emily’s hair!
Jeff Kelly's Brontëiteness confession.
Like many before me, I became obsessed with the Brontës, especially Emily, who became, truly, an infatuation. As I read Wuthering Heights, I found myself thinking of what she may have been thinking while she wrote down the lines. What she was wearing while she wrote them down. I imagined her in her small room, writing her musical poems as the night wind “waved her hair.”I wash searching on the internet to find a photograph of the hair of Emily Bronte, but I could'nt.
I learned that Charlotte later edited her manuscript poems for publication, which I found extremely annoying; how could one hope to go in and “fix” such beautiful language? (In setting her poems, I have only ever used the original manuscript versions.)
I wondered what she looked like in real life, when she smiled or cried. How her skin smelled, her hair felt. I wanted to get in a time machine and go back there. I imagined what it might have been like, walking along a dirt road and suddenly coming upon Emily and Charlotte, two anonymous girls in their little carriage, on a day trip to Leeds.
The strange thing is, I slowly started to realize that there were thousands of others just like me. Obsessed.
Imagine then my shock while in 1999 touring their home, now a museum, and seeing an actual lock of Emily’s hair! (It had been cut off to save, in the tradition of the time, shortly after her death.)
I kept going back to that room, that glass case and looking again and again. She was real, not some mythical thing I had dreamed up. I was hesitant to finally leave. bronteblog/beneath-far-gondals-foreign-sky
I found Emily Brontë's burnt comb, said to have been used just before she died of consumption on December 19 1848.
And I found a sample of Mrs. Maria Brontë's hair (dated 1824).