Emily’s study.

Pencil drawing by Emily Brontë, 1842

Emily’s study of music on the continent changed her taste. She became fonder of piano arrangements of symphonies. On the contents page in one of her music books, with listings such as Bach, Boccherini, Clementi, Corelli, Haydn and Mozart, she concentrates on pieces from Beethoven, Glück and Handel. She also transcribed three of Beethoven’s symphonies, all marked. They show Emily’s daring and dramatic taste for composers who shared her passionate and powerful spirit. Her fondness for Beethoven, like Byron a hero of the Romantic era, might well explain her eagerness to learn German, which brought her into contact with the great German literature of the same period. Under the guidance of one of the best music professors in Brussels she made great strides with her piano-playing and was given the post of music teacher in the Pensionnat.

The initial plan was to stay in Brussels for only six months, but the Hegers suggested they stay on longer and offered them teaching posts in exchange for free board and education. Charlotte wrote in a letter: "…I consider it doubtful whether I shall come home in September or not. Madame Heger has made a proposal for both me and Emily to stay another half-year, offering to dismiss her English master, and take me as English teacher; also to employ Emily some part of each day in teaching music to a certain number of the pupils. For these services we are to be allowed to continue our studies in French and German, and to have board, &c., without paying for it; no salaries, however, are offered. The proposal is kind, and in a great selfish city like Brussels, and a great selfish school, containing nearly ninety pupils (boarders and day pupils included), implies a degree of interest which demands gratitude in return. I am inclined to accept it. What think you? I don't deny I sometimes wish to be in England, or that I have brief attacks of home sickness; but, on the whole, I have borne a very valiant heart so far; and I have been happy in Brussels, because I have always been fully occupied with the employments that I like. Emily is making rapid progress in French, German, music, and drawing. Monsieur and Madame Heger begin to recognise the valuable parts of her character, under her singularities.” the Brussels Bronte group

Weblogs and the Brontes

Charlotte Brontë’s fleshy female characters are often portrayed as requiring discipline and self-control. Corpulence is equated with mental inferiority inVillette as the Belgian pupils are depicted as lacking the requisite discipline for intellectual pursuits. Lucy Snowe describes the dining habits of one of her students whose:

quantity of household bread, butter, and stewed fruit, she would habitually consume at “second dejeuner” was a real world’s wonder – to be exceeded only by the fact of her actually pocketing slices she could not eat.[1]  

Bronte Horoine
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G.H. Lewes, above, known best today mostly for being the lover of George Elliot, was an influential  journalist, author and literary critic of the mid 19th century. He  incurred Charlotte Bronte’s wrath by intimating, after the publication of Jane Eyre, that she might profit by writing less melodramatically, and gave her Jane Austen as an exemplar and inspiration. 

Charlotte wrote: 
"If I ever do write another book, I think I will have nothing of what you call “melodrama”; I think so, but I am not sure. I think too I will endeavour to follow the counsel which shines out of Miss Austen’s “mild eyes”; “to finish more and be more subdued”; but neither am I sure of that. When authors write best, or at least, when they wrote most fluently, an influence seems to waken in them which becomes their master, which will have its own way, putting  out of view all behests but its own, dictating words, and insisting on their being used, whether vehement or measured in their nature; new moulding characters, giving unthought- of turns to incidents, rejecting carefully elaborated old ideas, and suddenly creating and adopting new ones. Is this not so? And should we try to counteract this influence? Can we indeed counteract it?…

Why do you like Miss Austen so very much? I am puzzled on that point. What induced you to say you would rather  have written “Pride and Prejudice” or “Tom Jones’” than any of the Waverly Novels? I had not seen “Pride and Prejudice” till I read that sentence of yours, and then I got the book and studied it. And what did I find? An accurate daguerrotyped portrait of a common-place face; a carefully-fenced, highly cultivated garden with near borders and delicate flowers- but no glance of a bright vivid physiognomy- no open country- no fresh air- no blue hill- no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen in they elegant but confined houses.These observations will probably irritate you, but I shall run the risk.

Now I can understand admiration fo George Sand- for though I never saw any of her works which I admired throughout(…yet she has a grasp of mind which if I cannot fully comprehend I very deeply respect; she is sagacious and profound; MIss Austen is only shrewd and observant. Am I wrong – or were you hasty in what you said?

 Austen Only
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Chapter 1 

Of late years an abundant shower of curates has fallen upon the north of England: they lie very thick on the hills; every parish has one or more of them; they are young enough to be very active, and ought to be doing a great deal of good. But not of late years are we about to speak; we are going back to the beginning of this century: late years—present years are dusty, sunburnt, hot, arid; we will evade the noon, forget it in siesta, pass the midday in slumber, and dream of dawn. 

Moore placed his hand on his cousin's shoulder, stooped, and left a kiss on her forehead..
Gutenberg

Delaisse writes: I'm so excited - reading Shirley by Charlotte Bronte, and there's a passage that describes the moors where I live, right where I live! The moors I've mentioned many many times on this blog! I have to share the passage with you right now (even though I was in bed and about to go asleep!). It's from the twelfth chapter, titled "Shirley and Caroline" 

- Shirley said she liked the green sweep of the common turf, and, better still, the heath on its ridges, for the heath reminded her of moors: she had seen the moors when she was travelling on the borders near Scotland. She remembered particularly a district traversed one long afternoon, on a sultry but sunless day in summer: they journeyed from noon till sunset, over what seemed a boundless waste of deep heath, and nothing had they seen but wild sheep: nothing heard but the cries of wild birds.

'I know how the heath would look on such a day,' said Caroline; 'purple black: a deep shade of the sky-tint, and that would be livid.'

'Yes, quite livid, with brassy edges to the clouds, and here and there a white gleam, more ghastly than the lurid tinge, which, as you looked at it, you momentarily expected would kindle into blinding lightening.'

'Did it thunder?'

'It muttered distant peals, but the storm did not break till evening, after we had reached our inn: that inn being an isolated house at the foot of a range of mountains.'

'Did you watch the clouds come down over the mountains?'

'I did: I stood at the window an hour watching them. The hills seemed rolled in a sullen mist, and when the rain fell in whitening sheets, suddenly they were blotted from the prospect: they were washed from the world.'

Family fun day at Bronte School Rooms

This Saturday sees a family fun day from 10am at Bronte School Rooms, Church Street, and the following Saturday offers a Mad Hatter’s tea party in Central Park, Haworth, with picnics, storytelling, fancy dress and music.

For more information visit the festival website at Haworth festival-blog   Keighley news