“Since 1857, when Elizabeth Gaskell published her famous Life of Charlotte Brontë, hardly a year has gone by without some form of biographical material on the Brontës appearing

“Since 1857, when Elizabeth Gaskell published her famous Life of Charlotte Brontë, hardly a year has gone by without some form of biographical material on the Brontës appearing—from articles in newspapers to full-length lives, from images on tea towels to plays, films, and novelizations,” wrote Lucasta Miller in The Brontë Myth, her 2001 history of Brontëmania. This year the Brontë literary-industrial complex celebrates the bicentennial of Charlotte’s birth, and British and American publishers have been especially busy. In the U.S., there is a new Charlotte Brontë biography by Claire Harman; a Brontë-themed literary detective novel; a novelistic riff on Jane Eyre whose heroine is a serial killer; a collection of short stories inspired by that novel’s famous line*, “Reader, I married him”; and a fan-fiction-style “autobiography” of Nelly Dean, the servant-narrator of Wuthering Heights. Last year’s highlights included a young-adult novelization of Emily’s adolescence and a book of insightful essays called The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects, which uses items belonging to Charlotte, Emily, and Anne as wormholes to the 19th century and the lost texture of their existence. Don’t ask me to list the monographs.

As we open Jane Eyre once more we cannot stifle the suspicion that we shall find her world of imagination as antiquated, mid-Victorian, and out of date as the parsonage on the moor, a place only to be visited by the curious, only preserved by the pious. So we open Jane Eyre; and in two pages every doubt is swept clean from our minds. Read the article: theatlantic

Why are Japanese women still bewitched by the Brontes?

Japan

seem to be besotted with the three Bronte sisters: Charlotte, Emily and Anne. It’s a fascination that goes beyond reading and imagining. A disproportionately high number of Japanese women visit the Bronte’s home village of Haworth in the north of England each year, a pilgrimage that has recently been turned into the subject of a novel by Man Booker Prize-shortlisted author Mick Jackson, “Yuki Chan in Bronte Country.”

Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre” may have bewitched generations of Japanese readers, but Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” (rendered as “Arashigaoka” in Japanese) arguably stands as the most influential novel in Japan written by a non-Japanese woman. It inspired a 1988 Japanese film adaptation, which replaces the wild Yorkshire moors with a rocky Japanese volcano, but has also had a profound influence on some of the country’s most important 20th-century women writers, such as Yuko Tsushima and Taeko Kono.
Read all the article: japantimes
Photo: fukuoka

Neighbours of the Brontes.

Read all of this interesting article of Nick Holland on: Anne Bronte

Looking further around Haworth we find hundreds of other names, some of them familiar to Brontë fans and some ghosts from the past: John Feather, manufacturer; William Garnett, innkeeper; James Hudson, shoe maker; Thomas Parker, overlooker of power loom; Joseph Mosley, clock maker; Zilla Wright, worsted maker; Ellis Hird, wool comber; John Winterbottom, Baptist minister; Tabitha Aykroyd (staying with her sister Susanna Wood and listed as ‘independent’, and incidentally one of three unrelated ‘Tabitha Aykroyd’s living in Haworth at that time); William Wood, joiner and cabinet maker (and also the nephew of Tabby and the coffin maker who commented on how thin Emily Brontë’s coffin was); Enoch Thomas, innkeeper of the King’s Arms (friend of Branwell, and also at one time innkeeper of the Black Bull); Mary Whitaker, pauper. These are people who would have come into contact with the Brontës regularly, whether at the church or whilst walking through the streets, but of course they would little have guessed at their hidden talents, and could never imagine how they would put their village on the map for ever.

The shops that we see on Haworth Main Street today were at the time mainly housing, although there were stores such as Barraclough’s ironmongers and Hartley’s grocery. When looking through the census the thing that strikes us is how many of the residents are employed in the wool industry, either as worsted makers, combers, weavers or bobbin makers. These people lived mainly in an area called Piccadilly, or the Pick, and it rapidly became an unhealthy slum with large families living in one room that was always kept warm to aid the wool combing process. The tightly packed houses of the 1840s  that made up the Pick are gone now and have been replaced by modern housing and a new health centre. Even so, you can see where it stood by looking through the archway that lies across from the Black Bull Inn known as gauger’s croft.

John Feather

boards.ancestry/John Feather.  John was a worsted manufacturer in Keighley and employed at least 20 workers.

William Garnett

oldwhitelionhotel William Garnett bought the White Lion in the 1820s and ran it for about twenty years. He died in 1859 after a long retirement and is buried in St. Michael’s churchyard nearby

Greenwood

Effectively the family of Joseph Greenwood (1786–1856), second son of James Greenwood Sr of Bridgehouse, who acquired, or perhaps was given, Springhead Mill when quite young. Though he did not remain in the cotton trade long, letting the mill from 1822 onwards, he remained a strong force in Haworth until the early 1850s, and one that usually worked contrary to the interests of his own brothers. He became an Anglican, a church land trustee, and a Tory, and was thus a natural supporter of Patrick Brontë on most, but not all, issues (he supported Richard Butterfield’s petition to annul elections to the local Board of Health, a move that was a grievous set-back to the cause of sanitary reform). Patrick went to great lengths in the mid-1830s to have him made a magistrate, eventually succeeding in June 1836. The basis of Joseph Greenwood’s local power was land and presumably rent from his mill, which was let to the Merralls. In 1853 he and his sons went bankrupt, and he moved to Utley, near Keighley. Branwell mentioned the elder son disrespectfully in a letter to John Brown in 1840, calling William Greenwood “Prince William at Springhead” (described as “fat”) and ridiculing his “godly” friend Parson Winterbottom, minister of the West Lane (not the Hall Green of the other Greenwoods) Baptist Church at that time, suggesting William may have reverted to a branch of the family’s old faith.  blackwellreference