Brontë sisters’ childhood home.

The young Brontë sisters lived at 72-74 Market Street in the U.K. village of Thornton from 1815 to 1820. 

curbedbronte-sisters-birthplace-house-cafe-thornton

Emily Bronte as an oddball?

The Guardian reviews the book Emily Brontë Reappraised by Claire O’Callaghan. 

"Two hundred years after her birth Emily Brontë is still remembered as an oddball, a people-hater and the weirdest of three weird sisters"

I myself never thought of Emily Bronte as an oddball and the weirdest of three weird sisters. So I don't really need a book that rehabilitates the reputation of Emily Bronte. I am curieus what the #metoo movement is going to make of Heathcliff. I think this book about Emily Bronte fits into the spirit of the times. Read The Bronte Myth- Lucasta Miller/.theguardian and you understand what I mean. 

Two hundred years after her birth Emily Brontë is still remembered as an oddball, a people-hater and the weirdest of three weird sisters. But a book published this week aims to rehabilitate the reputation of the author of Wuthering Heights, one of the greatest novels ever written: she may have been shy and reserved but she was not strange and should be seen as a woman ahead of her time, the academic Claire O’Callaghan argues. O’Callaghan said Brontë’s reputation was entirely carved out by others, a lot of it based on the writings of Charlotte, who was responding to criticism of her sisters Emily and Anne. “She adopted the strategy of appealing for pity by presenting her sisters as a bit weird and a bit strange, people who did not really know what they were doing,” said O’Callaghan. Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte embellished the stories even further. “Those founding images have been extended and reworked and dramatised and amplified, they have become mythic up until the present really.” O’Callaghan said Emily had been portrayed in many ways, usually negative. Sometimes she was “a staid, old-fashioned, people-hating spinster who roamed about the Yorkshire moors alone with her dog” or “a painfully shy and socially awkward girl-woman who was sick whenever she left home” or “she’s a stubborn and defiant woman who willingly withheld assorted physical and mental ailments, or an ethereal soul too fragile to endure the real world”.

She said the myths were damaging. “They perpetuate this idea she was weird and different and strange and other in a way that is quite hostile.” O’Callaghan said it was true Emily was shy, or reserved, and craved solitude and enjoyed getting out the house walking on the moors with her dog Keeper, a large mastiff. But this did not make her odd.

“Today when we think about character traits and personality traits we take a different approach to things, we try to accommodate and understand differences or social awkwardness or anxieties or just different ways of being. We try not to stigmatise people.”

O’Callaghan’s book also explores how Emily might fit in today, arguing she would be more at home in a more accepting, tolerant, feminist society.

Brontë’s only novel was Wuthering Heights, the violent and passionate story of the relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff.

O’Callaghan said the novel was still seen as a love story and that too needs re-examining. “I think it is about a lot more and I think that love story is quite a damaging one … I think it can be read as a cautionary tale against damaging romance and violent romance.”

Heathcliff is clearly a horrible man “yet he is often read as the archetypal anti-hero. I really question that word hero. He is just vile from the outset.”

In the era of Time’s Up and #MeToo, O’Callaghan, a lecturer in English at Loughborough University, said it was a good time to re-evaluate. “Maybe the time’s up on Heathcliff … we need to take off the romantic blinkers and we need to look at him more critically.” (Mark Brown)

Aspects of the Brussels of the Brontës: The Passage de la Bibliothèque, the Panoramic View of the City and the Pensionnat.

Interesting article of Eric Ruijssenaars about the history of rue d’Isabelle in Brussels. Read all: brusselsbronteaspects-of-brussels-of-brontes-passage

“In the rue d’Isabelle several buildings will be demolished, and part of the terrain will be used to enlargen the steps in a straight line. It will also be made less steep.” On either side of the steps two new buildings would be erected, as high as the steps. On either side of the steps, from the statue down to the Isabella Street, there would come gas lights.

It is of course important to remember here that this is the place where, in Villette, Lucy Snowe on the night of her arrival in the city, first came close to the Pensionnat. But she didn’t see the steps, and got frightened by two scary men. It is an indication that in 1842 it still may not have been a very safe place, when darkness had fallen.

This plan shows what Charlotte had in mind when she wrote about Lucy Snowe’s walk, to get her to the Pensionnat. It’s a great little piece of writing about the Quarter, full of suspense too.

August, September 1842

On 27 August 1842 l’Indépendant wrote that workers had begun to “demolish the upper part of the two buildings.” The Journal de Bruxelles  wrote on 11 September that they were actually demolishing the entire buildings. By the time the sisters left it was an empty space again. The old pictures of the Belliard Steps which we know are therefore clearly not the way Charlotte and Emily saw them in 1842. 

The Pensionnat

The 11 September article also mentioned that “one assures us that the roof of a building situated on the other side of the rue d’Isabelle, will be transformed into a platform; the public can’t but approve of such a work, which opens up a much better view of the landscape, of the city below.” That building must have been the Héger Pensionnat. It will have been part of the works that took place more or less while Charlotte wasn’t there. When she came back at the end of January 1843 she found the building had been enlarged (according to Mrs. Gaskell).

Elizabeth Brontë – More Than A Footnote

Read all: annebronte/elizabeth-bronte-more-than-a-footnote

I was once asked in a pub quiz: ‘Who is the least famous Brontë sister?’ Of course I had to swallow my anger at the injustice of it all and write down Anne Brontë, as I knew that was the answer they were looking for – but it isn’t correct. Less well known is Maria Brontë, the tragic genius of the family, but the least known of all the Brontë sisters is the second sister: Elizabeth Brontë. Isn’t it time that we recognised her as a flesh and blood human, and not just a footnote?

• This is one clue that Elizabeth had different priorities to her siblings. While they loved to play and read and invent stories, Elizabeth liked order and tidiness, and the more practical things in life. This is also confirmed by her admission entry in the records of the Clergy Daughter’s School at Cowan Bridge.
• Elizabeth went to the school in the company of her eldest sister Maria on the 1^st July, 1823 and in the following months she would also be joined there by Charlotte and Emily (thankfully for Anne Brontë in the light of what we now know about the school, she was too young to attend). They were all assessed as to their academic abilities upon arrival, and it is also noted what they were to be schooled for, i.e. what occupation they were expected to attain in later life. Maria, Charlotte and Emily Brontë are all listed as future governesses, but Elizabeth is recorded as being schooled to be a housekeeper. We know that she was not given French, music or drawing lessons, as her sisters at the school were. Her accomplishments are summed up as: ‘Reads little. Writes pretty well. Ciphers none. Works very badly. Knows nothing of grammar, history, geography or accomplishments.’
  
• Nancy Garrs, family servant, recalls how the young Elizabeth would lead her younger sisters by the hand on their walks across the moors, and that she was ‘very thoughtful’ in her treatment of them