Biographers from 1900 Part II ( Under construction)

I am reading the Bronte Myth of Lucaste Miller

In the years after Elisabeth Gaskell from 1900 till........

• Release of the Hegers papers.
• Vanaf 1920 Psychobiography
• Influence of Freud (Hidden working of the unconscious mind) and Lytton Stracey ( uncovering of the revealing unedifying motives behing revered façades).
• Why Charlotte attracted such an un usual prevalence of psychoanalytic interpretation? Her rich symbolic of her novels and the legacy of  Gaskell' s "" Life"".
• It became fashionable to redefine the Victorian virtue of self denial as a sick symptom of masochisme.
• Psychobiographers: Subtilety and complexity were often sacrificed for the sake of fitting. It detach the subject from the social, cultural and literary influences.
• Hollywood transformed Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights in to the greatest love stories ever told.
• Suffragettes, before the First World War, claimed Charlotte Bronte as a pioneer.
• Later feminism: Charlotte, a parable of victimhood oppressed by the men in her life, het father, her brother, her husband and her teacher
• 1980-1990 For the first time since Gaskell biographers stop routinely seeing Charlotte  as a victim.

1912    May Sinclair     The Three Sisters

• Had an enormous influence on perceptions of Emily
• Charlotte sublimate desires by redirecting them in to a spirituel channel. Charlotte became spiritual superiority.
• Reaction against the caricature of Charlotte as a frustrated spinster ( a seks-starved hysteric).
• She believed in the concept of the ideal women artist.

1914    Frederica Mac Donald     gutenberg/files/The secret of Charlotte Bronte

1919    Esther Alice Chadwick   In the Footsteps of the Brontës

• A few years after Esther Alice Chadwick (fl. 1882-1928) - who wrote under the name Mrs Ellis H. Chadwick - had read a copy of Elizabeth Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë, she moved to a house near the Haworth vicarage where the Brontë family had lived. As a result, Chadwick was able to speak to many people who had known the family, and in 1914 she published this extensive biography of the family.
• Emily, the innocent recipient of mystical experiences which came direct from God.
• Emily could not have created Heatcliff without the inspiration  of real-time romance. This biographer came up with Constantin Heger!!!!!

 1920 Lucille Dooley

   Psycho analysis of Charlotte Bronte. As a type of woman of genius

• Charlotte had a father fixation. Electra complex.
• Lucile Dooley was the first commentator to suggest that Charlotte' s death was caused by "psychogenic reactions" linked to her father fixation. Charlotte could not become a mother without a destroying conflict.
• The unconscious artist. Charlotte'snovels hadrisen whole and unalterable from ""the Unconscious"".
• Dooley subtler than many other psychobiographers.

 

1927 Isabel C. Clarke  Haworth parsonage. A picture of the Bronte family

• William Weightman awoke the passion to create Heatcliff
•  Emily must have been a Roman Catholic
•  Comparing Emily to catholic mystics

1928 Romer Wilson  The Life and Private history of Emily Jane Bronte.

• Romer is a Yorkshirewoman
• She boasted that she paid especial and respectful attention to primary sources.

 1929 Rosamond Charlotte  

• Wanted to explode the foolish fashion of canonising Charlotte Bronte.
• If Charlotte's life was sad, it was her own fawlt
• The key to Charlotte's problem "surpressed personality"
• Lack of interest in the literary evidents of Charlotte's writings.
• Charlotte is prim, priggish and a prude
• Rosamond invented the idea Charlotte liked green and Emily purple

1932  E.F.Benson

 

• Calling Charlotte ruthless, bitter, ungracious and black censoriousness of others is the root of much of her unhappiness.
• Charlotte' s hardness contrasts Emily' s superior generous nature. 
• Charlotte forfeited Emily' s love.
• Charlotte remained detached from her works.
• Not to gain a deeper understanding of het literary imaginazing but to judge het personal life. 
• He put Charlotte as bitch on the map.
• Emily Bronte lesbian.

1936   Virginia Moore   The Life and Eager Death of Emily Bronte

 

• She wrote Glendale poems instead of Gondal Poems
• Masculinity of Emily's prose
• Heathcliff is a self-portrait
• She had difficulty reading old handwriting.
• She misread the title of a poem "Love's Farewell" as ''Louis Parensell" and went on to invent alover of that name

1941 Fannie Ratchford

 

• The Brontes web of Childhood
• First in -depht study of the juvenilia
• Pioneering work

1948   John Maynard   Charlotte Bronte and sexuality

• Sexual desire was rooted in her reading Byron' s Don Juan and Shakespeare' s comedies and through het intuition and introspection. 

1953 Muriel Spark

• Emily' s poems and novel, not anything that happened in het external life, formed the principal facts of her biography.
• Emily is a self-created being centered in the universe of her own imagination.
• Gondal and Wuthering Heights became so central to Emily' s life that she ceased to distinguish between the realand the imaginary.
• Emily believed she was at liberty to will or not to will death from a fatal disease. She suffered
• from delusions about the power of her own genius, dramatizing her own dying.

1960 Millicent Collard. Wuthering Height- the Relevation, a Psychical Study of Emily Bronte.

• What was it that Emily Bronte was hiding from the World? A strong psychic nature, contact with the death, second sight.
• This book seem like a lone eccentric, but it reflects the process of mystification, established during the interwar period.

1967  Winifred Gerin. Lived on the edge of Haworth moor. The evolution of genius

• Combinated passion and erudition in her books
• The first who used footnotes, documented her sources
• Her main aim to trace the evoling process by which Charlotte became a novelist
• Visitations deserted Emily
• Emily close to Branwell

1969   John Hewish    A Critical and Biographical Study

• Skepticism. Did Emily bake the bread or is a story Gaskell made up?
• Law Hill "problem". Excactly how many month did Emily spend teaching at Law Hill?

1976    Helene Moglen The Self Conceived 

• Charlotte was doomed because, as a woman, she could not be Zamorna.
• Nicolls is an authority figure, though it internalizes Charlotte' s needs to be dominated.

1976   Margot Peters Unquit Soul.

Life and Art, both an eloquent protest over the cruel and frustrating limitations imposed upon women,

Life could not be other than  a battle between conformity and rebellion.

 

 

 

 

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar The_Madwoman_in_the_Attic 

 

 

• Bertha Mason is Jane Eyre's doppelganger, able to express what Jane cannot
• The Red Room: the figure in red represent the passionate rage of Jane 

 

 
 

 

 

1988 Rebecca Fraser

 

Placed Charlotte in the context of nineteenth rather then twentieth century wrinting of gender

Interested in recognizing those aspects of Charlotte''s personality which enabled her to become an ambitious artist.

1994  Stevie Davies


• Emily' s poetry embedded in a whole web of other literary sources analogues
• German Philosophy
• Gives a vived picture of the relationschip between biographer and biographee
• Emily may have has a lesbian  consciousness, but cannot prove it.

Old picture of the Black Bull

bronte/life-at-the-time-of-the-brontes

What happened to......

The diary papers

These diary papers were discovered, still enclosed in the small box, by Charlotte's husband, the Reverend Arthur Bell Nicholls, in 1895 - many years after the entire Brontë family had died. He sent them to a Brontë biographer¹⁴⁴ with a note which read:

'The four small scraps of Emily and Anne's MSS I found in the small box I send you. They are sad reading, poor girls!'

mick-armitage/anne/diaries

Mr Brontë had died in 1861, at which point the Parsonage contents had been sold off and moved out. Many items had gone with Charlotte's husband Arthur Bell Nicholls to his new home in Ireland; others had been given to friends and servants as keepsakes. The sisters' manuscripts, letters and personal belongings began to appear in salerooms, and many fetched high prices on the American market.

• Arthur Bell Nicholls had taken part of the collection to Ireland with him when the Brontë household was broken up in 1861 and he had guarded it, selling nothing for over thirty years.
• After Mr. Brontë’s death Mr. Nicholls removed it to Ireland.  Being of opinion that the only accurate portrait was that of Emily, he cut this out and destroyed the remainder.  The portrait of Emily was given to Martha Brown, the servant, on one of her visits to Mr. Nicholls, and I have not been able to trace it. There are two portraits of Branwell in existence, both of them in the possession of Mr. Nicholls.  One of them is a medallion by his friend Leyland, the other the silhouette which accompanies this chapter.  They both suggest, mainly on account of the clothing, a man of more mature years than Branwell actually attained to. gutenberg
• Over the years that followed, most of the Brontës’ early poems and stories were first published (under Shorter’s assumed copyright) by either Shorter or Wise, but none of the manuscripts ever saw the inside of the South Kensington Museum. Wise vandalized Nicholls’ collection and sold it, scattering it across the globe. kleurrijkbrontesisters/what-happened-after-death-of-charlotte 
• Under the terms of Bonnell’s will his widow, Helen, retained some eighty items of Brontë memorabilia but the rest of his collection, some 336 items, were despatched in 1929 to the newly acquired Parsonage Museum — 336 items that would be the firm foundation on which other donors of Brontë memorabilia would thereafter have the confidence to build. His bequest included the manuscripts of fifteen of Emily’s poems, her French devoirs, and the desk on which she wrote Wuthering Heights.

Bonnell.pdf

•  There were fifty of Charlotte’s manuscripts, including The Story of Willie Ellin, Angrian poems, and her French devoirs; nine of Anne’s poems and twenty by Branwell, and over a hundred of Charlotte’s letters. There were thirty-four drawings and watercolours; Mr Brontë’s Homer and his Horace, both prizes from St John’s ‘for having always kept in the first class’
•  Martha Brown treasured a large collection of Brontë memorabilia that she was happy to display, but reluctant to sell. On her death however, this collection was divided between her sisters and it gradually dispersed

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It contains numerous  relics of the Bronte family. Altogether there are some three hundred exhibits, and a number of letters and manuscripts written by Charlotte and Branwell Bronte.

• There is a copy and translation of the letter written by M. Heger to Mr. Bronte in  1842 (someone had evidently copied it and given it to Ellen Nussey, as it was purchased at the Nussey Sale),
• and one from Mrs. Gaskell to Martha Brown.
• A specimen of almost every article of dress worn by Charlotte Bronte,  including her boots and house shoes, as well as many relics of other members of the family.
• There is Ellen Nussey's copy of the privately printed book made up of the letters from Charlotte Bronte to her, which Mr. Horsfall Turner compiled,
• and there are also some early editions of the Bronte novels and poems, which have been presented to the Society. In addition are many sketches made by Charlotte, Branwell, and Emily Bronte;
• even the old leather trunks used by the family have a place there, as well as a saddle bag used by old Mr. Bronte.
• Thackeray's statuette. In the footsteps of the Bronte's

1925 The Twelve Adventurers and Other Stories, a collection of Charlotte’s juvenilia, published posthumously.
1931-38 The nineteen volumes of The Shakespeare Head Bronte–the most complete edition of the works of Charlotte, Emily, Anne, and Branwell–published.
1933 Legends of Angria, a collection of Charlotte Bronte’s juvenilia, published posthumously.
1971 Five Novelettes, a collection of Charlotte Bronte’s juvenilia, published posthumously. aupello.blogs

The Dining Room
The books on the shelves are of the period, while those owned by the Brontës themselves are stored securely elsewhere

The Kitchen
After Patrick Brontë's death in 1861, the Parsonage became the home of the Revd. John Wade, who made several alterations to the house, the kitchen being the room most effected by the changes. A back kitchen, where the washing and heavier household work was carried out in the Brontës' time, was demolished to make way for a large kitchen extension, which blocked the mullioned window which had formerly looked out towards the moors. The range was removed, and the old kitchen became a passage way to Wade's new dining room in the large gabled wing, which was also built at this time. Today the kitchen houses displays of furniture and utensils which belonged to the Brontë family, and a kitchen range of the correct period has been added in an attempt to recreate the room's original appearance.

Mr Nicholls Study
Three wallpaper samples were found in Charlotte's writing desk. A fourth sample, held in the New York Public Library, is accompanied by a note, authenticated by Elizabeth Gaskell, which describes it as being a 'Slip of the paper with which Charlotte Brontë papered her future husband's study, before they were married.'

Several relics have been preserved, including this wooden board with the Lord's Prayer painted upon it.

The Servant`s Room
Originally this room was entered by means of an outside stone staircase. The original doorway has been partly uncovered. Also visible is part of a mullioned window which was probably blocked up in the Brontës' time, during alterations to the house.  bronte