Weblogs and the Brontes

"Every leaf speaks bliss to me, fluttering from the autumn tree."
 

-Emily Bronte

Alchemy baking

The moors we walked that day were blustery, windy, rainy and cold. It was perfect. Few others braved the elements, but we were determined to reach our destination .

The ruins of Top Withens came into sight and I bounded ahead, anxious for a few minutes alone with the place. As I approached, a fierce wind blew through, rattling the one wooden door still in place and startling a baby sheep and her family, which went running away.

Literary legacies

I'm wearying to escape into that glorious world, and to be always there; not seeing it    dimly through tears, and yearning for it through the walls of an aching heart; but really with it, and in it.

Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

Bohemian twilight

Emily Bronte had a dog named Keeper. 

A romantic name for a canine companion pet to one of the best writers in the English language - very fitting. I imagine him to be her keeper while she roamed those moors beyond the safety of her parsonage home.

Bookish kind

"Here all the faults of Jane Eyre (by Charlotte Brontë) are magnified a thousand fold, and the only consolation which we have in reflecting upon it is that it will never be generally read."
~ James Lorimer, North British Review, 1847

"...wild, confused, disjointed and improbable ... the people who make up the drama, which is tragic enough in its consequences, are savages ruder than those who lived before the days of Homer."
~The Examiner, 1847

 

It's a shame that the authors of these dismissive remarks never knew the success the Brontës' novels have had in the intervening years. Nor that their overwhelming longevity speaks to the universal themes that course through both books. "Love conquers all," would be putting a romance novel spin on them, but really, when it comes right down to it, these two books set the bar very high few "romance" writers since have attained.

Sun Flower Ranch

A documentary on the Brontë sisters

On 13 October 2012 Dr Lyndall Gordon (St Hilda’s College, Oxford; author of several biographies including of Virginia Woolf and Emily Dickinson) gave a talk called The Hidden Face of Charlotte Brontë in which she explored some of the insights she gained in writing her biography Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life.

Lyndall Gordon told  that in a few days’ time she was to be filmed in the British Museum, talking about the Heger letters, for a documentary on the Brontë sisters to be shown as part of ITV’s Perspective series.  Read all  brussels bronte

300 images taken inside the 3 Graces masonic lodge, Haworth.

One of a set of 300 images taken inside the 3 Graces masonic lodge, Haworth. This is the lodge where Branwell Bronte was a member and it was a masonic member who originally reported that it was infact Branwell who penned Wuthering Heights (at least in part) and heavily influenced Jane Eyre. Local band Huu Juu (ahem :-) )are planning an electro rock opera based on the story of Branwell, the freemasons and a bit of magical hokery pokery. Should be ready early 2013. There's some research and a taster of the story here.

http://www.ferndeanmanor.co.uk/history.html

Cross Roads Inn

William Dearden

[1808-1889]

Around 1842, he challenged Branwell Brontë to a poetry-writing contest which was to be held at the Cross Roads Inn between Haworth and Keighley, and judged by his associate, J. B. Leyland. Dearden recorded the event in a poem entitled  ""A Retrospect"".

history.rootsweb"

A Retrospect

The moon again was on the wane when I
Met at Cross Roads my Brontë challenger,
To speed to Shinar on our hippogriffs,
And break a lance in a poetic tilt,
In armour such as sons of Tubal-cain
Wrought for the "mighty men which were of old,
Men of renown," before the Deluge came.
Our censor, Leyland, with his meerschaum lit,
And goblet crowned, assumed the judgment-thrown,
And bade each combatant, with arms in rest,
Display the legend on his shield impressed,
For which he would "do battel" as true knight.
Brontë's read "Azrael or Destruction's Eve";
And mine the "Demon Queen." "The challenger,
Sir Patrick of the Thunder-bruit, begin
The onslaught!" cried the umpire. Brontë drew
(To sink the metaphor) from out his hat
A manuscript, which, when his eyes beheld,
He stood aghast; and turning rapidly
The quivering leaves, he said; "O friends, I've made
A strange mistake! This is a novel on which,
Some time ago, I tried my 'prentice hand,
And which, in my hot haste, I must have snatched
Instead of 'Azrael' from my private drawer."
"A ruse! A ruse! Pat!" Leyland thundered through
A cloud of smoke, as from a cannon's mouth;
"Thy spider-muse, if but the truth were known,
Has not from his own meagre bowels spun
A single line of his poetic web."

Read on:history.rootsweb

At Crossroads, between Haworth and Keighley. Branwell and William Dearden met here to have literary contests. Here Branwell, it was claimed, read from the manuscript of Wuthering Heights , giving rise to the belief that he was the novel’s author. This claim resurfaces regularly, but has never been given credence by any Brontë expert. 

blackwell reference

valendale/pubs

The Cross Roads Inn has the dubious honour of being the place where the 'was Wuthering Heights actually written by Branwell Brontë' question was born. Lucasta Miller, in The Brontë Myth (ch. 8), explains it very concisely:

Under the headline 'Who wrote Wuthering Heights?' Dearden described a meeting which had taken place in the summer of 1842 between himself, Branwell and their sculptor friend Joseph Leyland at the Cross Roads Inn between Haworth and Keighley. A month earlier, the two poets had each agreed to produce a verse composition set in the mythical time before the Deluge. But when Branwell arrived at the appointed pub to show off his handiwork, he found that he had accidentally picked up the wrong manuscript. What he read out was not the antediluvian poem 'Azrael or the Eve of Destruction' he had written in answer to Dearden's challenge, but a fragment whose scene and characters 'so far as then developed' were, according to Dearden, 'the same as those in Wuthering Heights, which Charlotte Bronté [sic] confidently asserts was the production of her sister Emily'. bronteblog/wuthering-heights-at-cross-roads-inn

On this day in 1860

"The village of Haworth is so situate that one part of its single steep street is quite inaccessible to anything like a vehicle. At the time when Grimshaw came there, the country was wilder, and the inhabitants far more savage in their habits than at Todmorden. The scenery is peculiarly beautiful, quite as picturesque as the Lower Alps. The country was very lonely; a man might travel on horseback for a whole day and scarcely see a house or a human being. Round Haworth there is an unenclosed moor, with stones reared at intervals of several miles to mark the place of the road when it is covered with snow. There were a few worsted mills at which the people of the district worked (for Yorkshire is always famous for its woollens), and there were hand-looms in some of the cottages, but cotton-mills were not then dreamt of."
Extract from The Bradford Observer Thursday Oct 18th 1860 Haworth-village

Bronte Parsonage Museum to receive major make over after historical work

The Bronte Parsonage Museum is to be redecorated so that it looks more like the famous sisters’ home than ever before. Decorators will draw on the research of specialists into what the building’s interiors looked like in the mid-19th century. The “decorative archaeology” was carried out last winter while the museum underwent its annual two-month closure. After the museum closes at the end of this autumn the restoration work will begin, ready for reopening in February. The museum, run by the Bronte Society, said it wanted to offer visitors a “more authentic Bronte experience”. The “new” look will be followed next March by an exhibition in the museum entitled Heaven Is a Home: the Story of the Brontes’ Parsonage. The museum promises an “exciting” programme of special events throughout 2013 to celebrate the redecoration. Keighley News

Weblogs and the Brontes

Bunny Mummy

 

On my honor I will try

Peagreen kitty

 

Picture of Maria Branwell

Victorian gothic/the-true-story-of-the-lowood-institution

 

mike howelleng

Drawing from Charlotte Bronte of Anne Bronte 

""Believe not those who say

The upward path is smooth,

Lest thou shouldst stumble in the way

And faint before the truth…""