Elizabeth Gaskell's Manchester home to get £2.5m restoration

Heritage Lottery Fund grant will help restore villa where Cranford and North & South were written back to its Victorian splendour.
The Manchester home of Elizabeth Gaskell, the Victorian novelist and short story writer, is to be restored thanks to a Heritage Lottery Fund grant of £1.85m. The house, which dates from the 1830s, had stood empty for several years and was on English Heritage's register of buildings at risk.

Although little original furniture belonging to the Gaskells remains, the Gaskell Society has carried out extensive research into what the family owned, and will be filling the house with appropriate Victorian pieces, and authentic wallpaper and decorations. As well as being open to the public, the building will also be used for concerts, and available for corporate hospitality to help pay for the running costs.

The house was occupied by the Gaskell family from 1850 until the death of Meta Gaskell, Elizabeth's second daughter, in 1913.

 

 

In 1850, in a letter to her friend Eliza Fox, Elizabeth Gaskell wrote:

We've got a house. Yes! We really have. And if I had neither conscience nor prudence I should be delighted, for it certainly is a beauty... You must come and see us in it, dearest Tottie, and make me see 'the wrong the better cause' and that it is right to spend so much ourselves on so purely a selfish thing as a house is, while so many are wanting.

The house's seven bedrooms may have explained the relatively high rent of £150 a year – at the time her husband William Gaskell's income as a priest was £300 a year. Elizabeth joked that the expense of the house would bankrupt them:

My dear! It's £150 a year, and I dare say we shall be ruined; and I've already asked after the ventilation of the new Borough Gaol. . guardian/elizabeth-gaskell-manchester-house-restored

Valentine Day

 

I wrote to the facebook page of the Bronte Parsonage museum and asked about photographes of the new decorated Museum. The answer is: ""We're having some new pix shot shortly, then they'll be going up"". I really am surprised that there is not a big marketing campaign, with beautiful photo- and video material of the new situation. The re-opening was such a good moment to show ""the world"" what is going on.  

Because I don't have new material  I use a photograph of the old situation. I was looking for some Valentine material and came across this page:

 

Above is the room in Haworth Parsonage where the Bronte sisters lived and wrote. Friend of Charlotte Bronte and fellow novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, described the room as “…the perfection of warmth, snugness and comfort, crimson predominating in the furniture.” With Valentine’s Day fast approaching I could think nothing more appropriate than to take inspiration from the room where Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Villette and other love stories were penned, cozy and crimson by the fire.

 

Look on this page for more CRIMSON colours, the colour Charlotte loved so much: Decorwrite.

 

The beautiful story of William Weightman and his Valentine Card.

In Feb 1840, about six months after his arrival, Ellen Nussey came to the Parsonage for a three weeks stay. Neither she, nor the Brontë girls had ever received a Valentine card; so it caused quite a stir on the morning of February 14th. when they each received one. Of course, the culprit was the scheming Weightman. In his usual mode of conduct, he had made a bold attempt to add a little sparkle to the girls' lives, and in a vain attempt to disguise his handiwork, had walked the ten miles to Bradford to post them.

He had written verses in each of the Valentines; however, only the titles of three of them are known, but these give a general idea of their content:

 

'Fair Ellen, Fair Ellen', 'Away fond Love' and 'Soul divine'

 

The girls were not to be fooled by the Bradford post-mark, and soon realised that the chirpy curate was the guilty party.

mick-armitage/weightmn

 

'I have stings of Conscience, visitings of remorse, glimpses of holy

There's an article in the 'Antiques Trade Gazette' dated Feb 3 which describes the six letters recently discovered tipped into a first edition of Elizabeth Gaskell's 'Life of Charlotte Bronte' as 'the best Bronte lot of the year'. The same ...lot we were hugely privileged to be able to win at auction, with help from the National Heritage Memorial Fund.
Written to her friend Ellen Nussey during a time of terrible stress in Charlotte's life while utterly miserable and working at Roe Head School, they describe how she tried so hard to find a little comfort in her life by turning to God, of inexpressible things which formerly I used to be a stranger to - it may all die away and I may be in utter midnight but I implore a merciful Redeemer that if this be the real dawn of the Gospel it may still brighten to perfect day.'
We are delighted to report the letters are now on display in the the corner case of Charlotte's room. If you can, come and see them! facebook/Bronte-Parsonage-Museum

The Quartier Isabelle in 1843

 

Video and picture.

http://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/features/video-inside-the-restored-bronte-museum-1-5401823

Blue

twitter.com/BronteParsonage

Clothes and accessories

 

Still no pictures of the newly decorated Parsonage. But I found this picture of the old situation.

Clothes and accessories worn by Charlotte Bronte on display in her old bedroom at the Bronte Parsonage Museum  /Bronte+Museum+Former+Home+Famed+Bronte+Sisters/

 

“I had green eyes, reader.”

What makes a gothic fairy tale about a plain governess so raw and exhilarating?

FAVOURITE TRICK Addressing us individually, as in “Reader, I married him.” It puts us on intimate terms, but also allows for some sly asides. When Mr Rochester, besotted, compliments Jane on her “radiant hazel eyes”, she deadpans, “I had green eyes, reader.”
Read more: charlotte-brontes-silent-revolt

"There is no life higher than the grasstops": A Walk to Withens

SylviaPlathSDrawings

From: sylviaplathinfo/there-is-no-life-higher-than-grasstops

The following is a guest blog post by Gail Crowther on visiting Haworth and Top Withens, Yorks, England. Thank you Gail!

Haworth and Top Withens feature in a number of Plath's poems, letters and journal entries along with pieces of published and unpublished prose. Most of her writing stresses the lonely and blustering nature of the place – blackened gravestones paving the ground in front of the Brontë Parsonage, withered trees, open moors of heather and sheep, a tumble-down building clinging to the moor side at Top Withens. In an account of a Withens walk published in The Christian Science Monitor on 6 June 1959 (12), Plath describes there being "as many ways to get to Withens as there are compass points" (12). Yet she had just tried two approaches – one from the town of Haworth and another across the moors from Heptonstall. Last weekend, I walked to Withens from Haworth. No dour skies or lonely howling winds accompanied us as we trecked from town to moor, but rather a blistering sun and a warm wind that took the edge off the May heat-wave. I have been to Withens twice before, both in much sterner weather more fitting for the supposed inspiration of Wuthering Heights. It is always an odd experience as I feel myself following the traces of two women writers years apart – Plath following Emily Brontë and me following Plath following Emily Brontë. Much is unchanged – the beginning of the moor spreads away from Haworth behind Penistone Hill gradually becoming browner and increasingly bare. The "grandmotherly" sheep still graze amongst grass and heather. Staring into their eyes is still like "being mailed into space." READ MORE ON THE BLOG

Emily Bronte's chemise, Anne's songbook

 

One of Emily Bronte's chemises
 

In my search to pictures of the newly decorated Parsonage

I came across the name of Sarah May Laycock
Library and Collections Officer of the Parsonage Museum
When I ""googled"" her I saw these pictures
thetelegraphandargus/.bronte_museum_opens_new_show/

 

 Library and collections officer Sarah Laycock holds Anne Bronte’s songbook from the Bronte Relics exhibition

thetelegraphandargus/Brontes-rarities_go_on_show-

Mr Brontë's Study has been distempered in plain white, because no evidence could be found that it was ever papered

 

Ann Dinsdale, acting director of the Bronte Society, in Patrick Bronte's study at the Parsonage Museum

Old situation

 

This is the only picture I can find of the new situation till now

I keep on searching

I am a little suprised that the walls are painted white because I always believed the walls were dove coloured.

 

Ellen Nussey, visiting Haworth for the first time some twenty years earlier, also found the Parsonage scrupulously clean but considerably more austere.

'There was not much carpet any where except in the Sitting room, and on the centre of the study floor. The hall floor and stairs were done with sand stone, always beautifully clean as everything about the house was, the walls were not papered but coloured in a pretty dove-coloured tint, hair-seated chairs and mahogany tables, book-shelves in the Study but not many of these elsewhere. Scant and bare indeed many will say, yet it was not a scantness that made itself felt . . .'