June Weekend - excursion to Plymouth Grove

 

Isobel Stirk writes:

Our journey on the Brontë Society’s excursion to Manchester was certainly pleasant. It took us through some beautiful Lancashire countryside with the brooding Pendle Hill lurking in the background and soon our driver was skilfully negotiating the busy traffic of Manchester and we arrived at our destination- Plymouth Grove.

The house boasts a delightful tea room and we were offered tea or coffee and delicious cakes. We were told that when Charlotte was in residence there she asked, one evening, to be served only black tea as green tea made her very restless. Mrs Gaskell was in somewhat of a dilemma as the only tea they had was a mixture of both. She did not inform Charlotte of this but when asked next morning if she had slept well Charlotte answered very much in the affirmative. After partaking of this mouth- watering repast it was time to move on from this house which had been restored so well and sensitively- with not a touch of pink in sight! bronteparsonage/june-weekend-excursion-to-plymouth-grove

Smallpox around the Haworth area

 

William seems to have lived his whole life in the area around Old Snap, and died in 1823, and was buried at Haworth Churchyard, as the following parish record shows, written by the hand of Rev’d Patrick Bronte. 

Interesting article. Read all on: bancroftsfromyorkshire

Flowers in the Parsonage Museum

 

 

 

facebook/Firenza Flowers

The Hotel Cluysenaar

The Hotel Cluysenaar, on Rue Royale, which later became the Astoria Hotel, is more than likely the original model for the Hotel Crécy in Villette. This is how Charlotte describes it (Vashti chapter): “It was an hotel in the foreign sense: a collection of dwelling-houses, not an inn - a vast, lofty pile, with a huge arch to its street-door, leading through a vaulted covered way, into a square all built round”.

In Villette, Charlotte describes how Lucy goes up a “wide, handsome public staircase” to the second floor of the Hotel Crécy where she is admitted to “a suite of very handsome apartments” (Vashti chapter).

The Wheelwright family, friends of the Brontë sisters, took up residence at the hotel when they moved over from England to Brussels. Dr. Thomas Wheelwright, his wife and five young daughters, arrived in the city in July 1842, leaving in August 1843. One of the Wheelwright daughters, Laetitia, was to become Charlotte’s lifelong friend. 

J.J. Green in his 1916 article wrote that “at their residence in a flat at the big Hotel Cluysenaar, the Wheelwright children delighted in the big staircases, running up one and down the other” (p. 224). Mr. Green had some problems with the spelling of the hotel's name. Occasionally it gets ‘Clusyenaar’ and at one point it reads ‘Olusyenaar’. A ‘kluizenaar’, in modern Dutch spelling, means a hermit, a recluse. As a surname, in older variants, it is not uncommon in the Low Countries. thebrusselsbrontegroup

photo inside the hotel:  flickr.com/photos
A lot of beautiful photo's: charlottemathieson/charlotte-brontes-brussels/

Brontë Brussels Past Historians: Joseph Joshua Green.

An important article about the Wheelwright family, named 'The Brontë-Wheelwright friendship', was written by Joseph Joshua Green. It was published in 1916 in the somewhat obscure Friends' Quarterly Examiner (in two instalments). Thus very few people have actually read the article, while only small parts have been quoted in most biographies. Thanks to internet we can now present it to you. Click here to access the article (it has to be opened page by page).

His article begins with some interesting genealogical details. He then describes the Brontë- Wheelwright friendship and the mementoes of it which remained in his family's possession at the time of writing. It makes fascinating reading. Even though he reports how valuable Brussels material was thrown into the fire and destroyed (pp.119 and 237), there are tantalising visions of what might still exist, and which did exist when the article was written. There are "two large albums with mementoes of their travels, both in Germany and Belgium"(p.121), and also "a large coloured plan of the Protestant Burial Ground at Brussels showing the place of her [Julia's] interment" (p.221). Green also mentions the possession of "a tiny bouquet of dried flowers from the pensionnat garden" (p.226).

Green wrote his article in the middle of the First World War, a few years after Frances, the last of the Wheelwright sisters had died. This year 1916 more or less saw the end of an important period of Brussels Brontë research, and the beginning of a very long barren period, with only the exception of Edgar de Knevett's 1923 article. Read all the article: brusselsbronte

Wondering about Charlotte

Deborah Lutz, author of The Brontë Cabinet, wonders in Out whether Charlotte Brontë was gay.

When Jane Eyre was published in 1847, it quickly took its place as one of literature’s most famous love stories—straight love stories, of course, with the plain governess Jane falling for the mysteriously tormented, butch Rochester. Yet the intimacy between women in some of her lesser-known novels, especially Shirley, gives pause. And then there is the cross-dressing — Rochester as an old gypsy woman, Lucy Snowe in Villette as a young dandy flirting with a pretty woman. Shirley fancies herself an “esquire” because her parents “gave me a man’s name; I hold a man’s position.” “It is enough to inspire me with a touch of manhood... I feel quite gentlemanlike.” Her governess worries about her disdain for needlework and her habit of whistling because people will feel that she “affected masculine manners.” Evidence mounts in Charlotte Brontë’s letters to her best friend Ellen Nussey. When Vita Sackville-West read them in 1926, she had no doubt as to “what Charlotte’s tendencies really were.” She found them “love letters pure and simple.” Sackville-West (Virginia Woolf’s lover at the time) found Brontë’s courting language, the sort a Victorian man used to woo women, sapphic. In one letter, Brontë proposed to Ellen that they set up house together permanently, admitting in a postscript: “I am afraid of caring too much for you.” Nussey remembered Brontë stroking her head, exclaiming, “If I had but been a man, thou wouldst have been the very ticket for me as a wife.” (Read more)bronteblog

Parsonage garden in full bloom.

Bronte Parsonage Museum The Parsonage garden is looking glorious for ‪#‎britishflowersweek

 

 

 

 

The Brontës and Waterloo: 10 Things I Learned

=Elizabeth Hopkinson blogs :

I've just got back from Brontë Parsonage, Haworth (not far from where I live) where I went to see a special exhibition on "The Brontës, War and Waterloo."  It was absolutely fascinating.  If you're in the area, go and see it! For those who live further afield, here are 10 things I learned from it:
Read more on: hiddengroveextra

“While this may be a very famous table, this is an awful lot of money for a piece of furniture" (verbatim)

This recent article in The Telegraph & Argus about the recent events at the Brontë Society quotes John Huxley, Haworth, Cross Roads and Stanbury Parish Council chairman Councillor saying some very, very silly things:

“The society has become very remote and a little bit metropolitan literati," he warned.
“I don’t have any opinion about what is happening within the society, but it hasn’t been edifying to see it imploding. “As a council we'd like to be involved in trying to maximise the Brontë legacy in collaboration with the society. “But on one occasion when we called a meeting to discuss the tourist offering and invited the Brontë Society, they didn't show up." He said one example of the society’s “remoteness” was its purchase of the Brontë sisters’ writing table, using a grant of £580,000 from the National Heritage Memorial Fund. He said this came at a time when the village had lost its fire station and was facing threats to its Treetops Children Centre and its Butt Lane community centre.
He said: “While this may be a very famous table, this is an awful lot of money for a piece of furniture."

There are so many things wrong with the words of Mr Huxley that it is hard to begin with something. Is this populist-demagogic approach to the role of the Parsonage what is to be expected from a Parish Council Chairman? Is he really so naive to think that the money given by the National Heritage Memorial  Fund could have been used for anything else but buying... National Heritage? And we are trying to remain calm about the 'metropolitan literati' bit as if that could be considered a sort of insult... The metropolitan literati are the reason behind the very existence of the Brontë tourism for God's sake!

bronteblog

 

Old Haworth

Jack Hargreaves‎Haworth and the Brontes

 

Belle Isle Haworth.
 

 

 

Bridgehouse Lane Haworth.