The truth about the Brontes’ beloved aunt

Bronte Society member Nick Holland examines the life of Elizabeth Branwell, who became a second mother to the famous siblings. The book, Aunt Branwell And The Bronte Legacy, looks at how the woman possibly has money and influence helped Charlotte, Emily and Anne write and publish their books. The book, published recently by Pen and Sword Books, is said to reveal Aunt Branwell's true character, far removed from the stern disciplinarian of legend.

Nick Holland shows how Elizabeth influenced the lives and works of the Brontes, before and after her death. He traces the surviving descendants of the Branwells, the closest living relatives to the Brontes today. 

Elizabeth Branwell was born in Penzance in 1770, a member of a large and influential Cornish family of merchants and property owners. In 1821 her life changed forever when her sister Maria fell dangerously ill. Leaving her comfortable life behind, she made the long journey north to a remote moorland village in Yorkshire to nurse her sister. After the death of Maria, Elizabeth assumed the role of second mother to her nephew and nieces, never seeing Cornwall again.

A spokesman for Pen and Sword said: “In this first-ever biography of Elizabeth Branwell, we see at last the huge impact she had on Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte, as well as on her nephew Branwell Bronte who spiralled out of control away from her calming influence. 

Read all: keighleynews/the-truth-about-the-brontes-beloved-aunt

Winifred Gerin's biography, Charlotte Bronte: Evolution of a Genius.

In december last year I received by post a parcel from Philadelphia, USA

Inside the parcel this biography of Charlotte Bronte by Winifred Gerin

Anne Lloyd sent it to me

Anne and me got to know each other through this blog

She told me, she started to be interested in the Bronte Sisters because of this biography

My love of the Bronte Sisters started after reading Jane Eyre when I was a girl

Years later I was reading the biographies of The Brontes of 

Juliet Barker and of Rebecca Fraser

Both biographies I loved

I learned a lot about the Brontes

Anne told me that this biography of Winifred Gerin is the best

I am reading it on the moment and I am impressed

I learn to understand things even better

What I find very interesting is that W G

interweaves the books Charlotte wrote

with the events that took place in the life of Charlotte

Winifred Gerin's biography

Charlotte Bronte:

Evolution of a Genius

Winifred Gerin's biography, Charlotte Bronte: Evolution of a Genius, was published in 1967. She used a variety of sources in writing the biography including Bronte's juvenile writings (preserved in manuscript only), and Bronte's letters. Gerin researched the personalities and backgrounds of Bronte's known acquaintances and visited sights from Bronte's life (from Thorton, to Cowan Bridge, to the home in Ireland where she stayed on her honeymoon) (Gerin xv). Gerin received information on Charlotte Bronte's experience in Belgium first hand from the Heger family. All of this was published for the first time in her biography. 

Gerin focused on Bronte's "evolution towards fulfillment" (xv). Gerin viewed Bronte’s grief as an essential part of her character. Gerin revealed the passion that Bronte had felt for M. Heger, which was something Gaskell had not done. Gerin also saw the importance of Bronte's childhood writings and felt that they traced Bronte's development as a writer. She felt that they were the "key to her mature productions" and spent a great deal of time analyzing them (xv). 

Gerin's biography recognized how the events in Bronte's life shaped her character. She recognized that Bronte's love for M. Heger was an important factor in her life and included it in her book. She was as concerned as Gaskell with defending Bronte, rather with presenting facts, and thus she did not omit things or modify them as Gaskell did. One hundred years later, women are viewed differently. What was once considered coarse, is no longer so. Gerin was able to present Bronte's life as it was. 
Read on: 123helpme/view.
wiki/Winifred Gerin

Take Courage: Anne Brontë and the Art of Life.

If you’ve read Samantha Ellis’s charming bibliomemoir How to be a Heroine – a heartwarming trip down memory lane as she looks back over the literary ladies that have shaped her life – you might be surprised to discover it’s Anne Brontë, the oft-overlooked 'third Beatle' of England’s most famous literary siblings, who’s the subject of her second book, Take Courage: Anne Brontë and the Art of Life.

Better known Charlotte and Emily were both integral to the journey recounted in How to be a Heroine, Ellis’s entire enterprise inspired by an argument with her best friend regarding the respective allure of passionate headstrong Cathy Earnshaw versus dependable independent Jane Eyre. The stories told in both Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre are held aloft as grand romances, inspiring a host of adaptations, sequels and prequels from fan fiction through to Jean Rhys’s revisionist masterpiece, Wide Sargasso Sea. Similar approbation for Anne’s novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), would be tricky since it lays bare the underbelly of the romance fantasy, taking a leading lady “who starts out like other Brontë heroines, charmed by a sexy dangerous man,” Ellis explains, “but she sees the light and leaves him.” As Ellis points out, this depiction of female agency was radical for its time. While readers today will no doubt find the story hugely "refreshing," it wasn’t exactly what people either expected or wanted in the mid 1800s.

This novel (Anne’s second and final work) is central to Ellis’s project though, her modus operandi being to “see Anne through the stories she told, not the stories told about her,” especially since when it comes to the latter, there are two significant stumbling blocks. Firstly, nowhere near as much is known about the baby Brontë as compared to her more famous sisters; and secondly, what is available has been filtered through Charlotte, who suppressed the publication of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall after Anne’s death (by then she was the only surviving sibling). Hence the image of the “virginal Victorian spinster, sweet and stoic, selfless and sexless, achieving very little before wasting away at twenty-nine” has held sway. Not least over Ellis herself. Until, that is, the day she was shown Anne’s last letter, written only five weeks before her death. Despite the writer’s failing health, Ellis is captivated by the “hope and spirit” she sees on the page.

As such, Take Courage is as much an account of Ellis’s own discovery of Anne's work as it is that of her subject’s life, and herein lies the book's unique appeal. Ellis – who is, it should be noted, as intelligent and perceptive a reader as she is an evocative storyteller – truly writes from the heart, which isn’t to say she hasn’t done her research. She has. But if you’re looking for a run-of-the-mill scholarly biography heavy with footnotes, this isn’t what Take Courage is. Instead it’s a deeply sympathetic and interesting re-evaluation of a woman ahead of her time who has much to teach us all about living courageously. independent/books/reviews/take-courage-anne-bronte

• More about:
• Take Courage: Anne Brontë and the Art of Life
• Samantha Ellis

Two new biographies of Anne Bronte.

New 2017 books are presented in The Irish Independent:

This month also sees the publication of a long-overdue appraisal of the third Brontë sister, Anne. Take Courage (Chatto), by How To be a Heroine author Samantha Ellis, is being released on January 12, ahead of Anne's birthday on January 17. (Hilary A. White)

Lucasta Miller reviews the biography in The Sunday Times:

Anne is the Cinderella of the Brontë sisters, the youngest, least recognised and, by all accounts, the prettiest. Charlotte’s Jane Eyre and Emily’s Wuthering Heights subsequently became Hollywood classics. After Anne died, her novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was publicly dismissed by Charlotte as an “entire mistake”.
Anne’s book was, however, far more radical than anything her more famous sisters ever wrote. In its coruscating portrait of an abusive marriage it bypassed the romanticism of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights to “get” feminism in a way that Charlotte and Emily never did. Although generally considered as the quiet and docile one, Anne was, in fact, the secret firebrand of the family.
The effort to reclaim her has been going on for some time. Winifred Gérin’s biography of Anne was published in 1959. However, the dominance of the two elder sisters means that there remains a need to bring her out of the shadows. In Take Courage, Samantha Ellis has risen to the challenge. (...)
Take Courage is almost as much about Ellis’s vicarious relationship with her subject as it is about Anne Brontë. If scholarly footnotes are your thing, it isn’t for you. But if you want to share in a biographer’s emotional journey, you will find insights aplenty here. The account of Anne’s death from TB at the age of 29 is truly moving. bronteblog

Don't forget there is another Anne Bronte's biography released in 2016 by Nick Holland.

Anne Brontë, the youngest and most enigmatic of the Brontë sisters, remains a bestselling author nearly two centuries after her death. The brilliance of her two novels – Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall – and her poetry belies the quiet, yet courageous girl who often lived in the shadows of her more celebrated sisters. Yet her writing was the most revolutionary of all the Brontës, pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable.

This revealing new biography opens Anne’s most private life to a new audience and shows the true nature of her relationship with her sister Charlotte.

'Holland has enormous affection for Anne Brontë, and his excellent book is filled with passion and pathos. Its triumph is that Anne is given voice and is no longer swamped by her siblings.' - Roger Lewis, The Mail On Sunday

'Holland's way of telling about Anne Brontë's final illness and last days is particularly touching while avoiding the easy slide into parable territory. This new biography proves that Anne Brontë's afterlife is just like her life: not about quantity but about quality.' - Brontë Blog Book Review 

Nick Holland also has an interesting weblog about Anne. annebronte

New Anne Brontë Biography – In Search Of Anne Brontë

 

Nick Holland: Today marks the launch of a new Anne Brontë biography – ‘In Search Of Anne Brontë’. As a huge fan of Anne Brontë and her sisters, I love not only to read their books but also to read about their lives. The series of biographies by Winifred Gérin have always been a particular delight to me, but her biography of Anne is now over half a century old. That’s why I felt it was time for a fresh look at Anne’s life – and why I wrote the biography which is published in the UK today by The History Press.

Charlotte Bronte, did she use opium? Or do we see the creation of a new Bronte Myth?

Charlotte Brontë kept this journal while working as a teacher at Roe Head school in West Yorkshire. The pages shown here were written in August 1836. In the journal she records both imaginary happenings in Angria and the banalities of her everyday life as a teacher:

What I imagined grew morbidly vivid,...All this day I have been in a dream, half miserable and half ecstatic: miserable because I could not follow it out uninterruptedly; ecstatic because it shewed almost in the vivid light of reality the ongoings of the infernal world. ...Then came on me, rushing impetuously, all the mighty phantasm that we had conjured from nothing to a system strong as some religious creed. I felt as if I could have written gloriously - I longed to write. The spirit of all Verdopolis, of all the mountainous North, of all the woodland West, of all the river-watered East came crowding into my mind. If I had had time to indulge it, I felt that the vague sensations of that moment would have settled down into some narrative better at least than any thing I ever produced before. But just then a dolt came up with a lesson. I thought I should have vomited.

- See more at:bl.uk/collection-items/charlotte-brontes-journal

Claire Harman in her new biography is suggesting Charlotte Bronte was using laudanum/ opium during the time she was a teacher at Roe Head. What does her suggest this:

• Branwell and Charlotte were both reading Confessions of an English Opium Eater by Thomas de Quincy. The young Brontes were fascinated by the book. 
• Branwell later told a friend that he had experimented with opium eating after reading de Quincy. Claire Harman thinks it is unlikely, given the opportunity, Charlotte would not have joined him in some testing of the magical drug.
• Phantasms as Charlotte discribes in her Roe Head diary are like the phantoms that was commonly used to describe opium -induced reveries.
• Claire Harman uses a foot-note: Christina Alexander brought readers' attention to something Charlotte wrote 3 years after the priod in Roe Head "Now Thownshend, so suffering, how far did I err when I had recourse to the sovereign specific which a siple narcotic drug offered me"
• Opiates, laudanum drops were a common tranquilliser in the Brontes time, easily available over de druggist counter. 

There is one person who ever asked Charlotte Bronte if she was using opium during the time she was writing Vilette and that is Elizabeth Gaskell.

“I asked whether she had ever taken opium, as the description given of its effects in Villette was so exactly like what I had experienced, – vivid and exaggerated presence of objects, of which the outlines were indistinct, or lost in golden mist, &c.  She replied, that she had never, to her knowledge, taken a grain of it in any shape, but that she had followed the process she always adopted when she had to describe anything which she had not fallen within her own experience; she had thought intently on it for many and many a night before falling asleep, – wondering what it was like or how it would be, – till at length, sometimes after the progress of her story had been arrested at this point for weeks, she wakened up in the morning with all clear before her, as if she had in reality gone through the experience, and then could describe it, word for word, as it had happened.”.

 

One of the things why I love Charlotte Bronte is because of this answer. It is giving such a good expression of creativity. I love: Specially she wakened up in the morning with all clear before her, as if she had in reality gone through the experience, and then could describe it, word for word, as it had happened.”. I am interested in the process of creativity, I am a painter myself. And I found many testimonies of creative people like painters, writers who are telling exactly the same. And I have experienced it myself.

Elizabeth Gaskell is ending with: I cannot account for this psychologically: I only am sure that it was so, because she said so. Claire Harman is asking: Maybe Charlotte being evasive, making a rather specious distinction about the size of a dose and if so, why?

To my surprise in a review in  the theguardian  the question mark is gone. When Gaskell had asked Brontë about fact and fiction in the novels, she got some unexpected answers. Brontë was evasive about whether she had based the opium trance in Villette on personal experience (in an age when opium was readily available and often used.

It starts to become a truth. Is this the way in the past Bronte myths were created? I wonder is it enough for a biographer to use a question mark, without having a real prove? What is the real prove Claire Harman has? Did she forget that the Brontes from their childhood on were full of imagination?
Is it so incredible to think that Charlotte made her work on her own power of creating? Charlotte was a teenage girl when she was working as a teacher at Roe Head. Is it so strange she had strong visions and feelings? I had them when I was a teenager and I certainly did not use opium.

Biographer of the Brontës gets her own biography

A leading biographer of the Brontës herself comes under the spotlight in a new book. Helen McEwan has written a biography of Winifred Gérin, whose own four volumes were for many years the standard biographies of the family members. Winifred first visited Haworth in her 50s and was so impressed that she went on to write separate biographies of Charlotte, Emily, Anne and Branwell. After a life spent trying poetry and playwriting, she achieved renown for her biographies, written between 1959 and 1971. She died in 1981. The life of Winifred has been explored by Helen MacEwan, a long-time Brontë scholar and founder of the Belgian branch of the Brontë Society.
A Brussels resident for the past 11 years, she decided to write about Winifred after discovering their shared links with the Belgian city. Helen said Winifred was “bowled over” by Haworth during her 1954 visit and felt people could not understand the Brontë family without becoming immersed in a their environment. Helen said: “Very romantically, on that first visit Winifred met her second husband, John Lock, also a Brontë enthusiast. “They both decided to move from London to Haworth and devote themselves to writing biographies of the Brontës.
Read more on: keighleynews

Winifred Gérin, biographer of the Brontës

To celebrate the Brontë bicentenaries, Helen MacEwan has written a new book exploring the life of one of their most important biographers. On 21 November at Waterstones Piccadilly, she will be launching Winifred Gérin, biographer of the Brontës (publication date 15 November). Having written about the Brontës in Brussels, Helen first became interested in Gérin’s life story because of her Belgian links and her special interest in Charlotte Brontë’s Brussels period.

Winifred Gérin (1901-81) is known as the biographer who moved to Haworth to write the lives of all four Brontë siblings, literally treading in their footsteps as she researched them. But her ten years in Haworth were just part of a romantic, eventful and sometimes tragic life.

Marriage to a Belgian cellist, Eugène Gérin, took her to Paris and then, in 1939, to Brussels where the couple worked for the British Embassy. Following the German invasion of 1940 they had various hair-raising adventures in France, finally escaping to Britain where they worked for Political Intelligence. After Eugène Gérin’s death in 1945, Winifred sought consolation in writing poetry and plays until discovering both her literary vocation and second love on a fateful first visit to Haworth. 

Gérin went on to write biographies of Elizabeth Gaskell, Anne Thackeray Ritchie and Horatia Nelson. She also wrote plays about Jane Austen, Fanny Burney and Charlotte Brontë. This book is based on her letters and her unpublished memoir. bronteparsonage

Mr. Heger's most personal and thoughtful gift yet...........

On the 200th anniversary of Charlotte Brontë's birth, Penguin is publishing the definitive biography of this extraordinary novelist, by acclaimed literary biographer Claire Harman.

 

This beautifully-produced, landmark biography is essential reading for every fan of the Brontë family's writing, from Jane Eyre to Wuthering Heights. It is a uniquely intimate and complex insight into one of Britain's best loved writers. penguin.co.uk

  

I am a little bit surprised. A definite biography?

 

It is a nice idea to publish a new biography on the 200th anniversary of Charlotte Brontë's birth, but "" definitive biography ""? After the excellent biographies of Juliet Barker and Rebecca Fraser?  Is it possible to write better biographies then these? I wonder, is there something new in this biography we didn't hear of?

 

New to me is what I am reading in an article of Claire Harman in the telegraph.co.uk:

 

One Friday afternoon, 11 days before the end of term, Heger came into the classroom where Charlotte was teaching and handed her a small object wrapped carefully in a piece of thin writing paper. She opened it as soon as he left. Inside the zigzag wrapping was a small piece of pale wood, too thin to be anything other than crating. It was a piece of Napoleon’s coffin, or, rather, since Napoleon was famously coffined in tin within mahogany within lead, possibly a piece of the outer casings in which the great man’s remains had been brought back to France three years earlier, under the command of his son, the Prince de Joinville, whose former secretary, Joachim-Joseph Lebel, was Heger’s friend and principal of the Athénée. Out of the fog of disregard, Heger had reached out to her with his most personal and thoughtful gift yet, a relic at once to be revered for its connections and regarded with a touch of pleasant mutual cynicism, a continuation of their conversation about the emperor and his British nemesis, and a reminder of her triumphant essay on the subject; a small gift which could be slipped into her hand without fuss, which Madame Heger would never notice, and which, above all, was a token of her abiding place in his thoughts. While the girls were still busy, Charlotte wrote on the spread-out wrapper the exact coordinates of place and time of this precious new possession: “August 4th 1843 – Brussels – Belgium/ 1 o’clock pm/ Monsieur Heger has just been into the 1st Class/ and given me this relic – he bought it from/ his intimate friend M. Lebel.”

 

On the website of the Bronte Parsonage Museum I find this information

Object number	BS20a
Title	fragment from one of Naoleon's coffins
Description	small strip of wood that formed part of one of Napoleon's coffins; inscribed in ink in French; fair; complete; 106mm l x 21mm w x0.5 mm d;
Material	wood, ink
Dimensions	coffin fragment 106  mm coffin fragment 21  mm coffin fragment 0.5  mm bronte.adlibsoft

 

And on facebook/CharlotteBronteFans/

From the Treasure Trove: Napoleon's coffin.
The Brontes had been fascinated by both Wellington and Napoleon. On 4th August 1843, Charlotte's tutor M. Heger presented her with this fragment from Napoleon's coffin. Here, it is pictured with a note written by Charlotte, authenticating the item.

August 4th 1843 - Brussels - Belgium
1 o'clock pm...
Monsieur Heger has just been into the 1st class and given me this relic - he bought it from his intimate friend Mr Lebel.
C Bronte
Mr Lebel was the Secretary of the prince Achille Murat - The Prince de Joinville son of Louis Philippe brought over the remains of Bonaparte from St Helena.

 

I am going to search on the internet. Can I find more descriptions about this present Mr Heger has given to Charlotte Bronte? Because it seems very romantic the way it is written here. But as I always understood the romance came from one site, the site of Charlotte.

•  So I am curious why Mr. Heger gave Charlotte this present
• Did Mr. Heger had reached out to her with his most personal and thoughtful gift yet, a relic at once to be revered for its connections and regarded with a touch of pleasant mutual cynicism, a continuation of their conversation about the emperor and his British nemesis, and a reminder of her triumphant essay on the subject; a small gift which could be slipped into her hand without fuss, which Madame Heger would never notice, and which, above all, was a token of her abiding place in his thoughts.

 

Bronte biographers part I (till 1900) I am still busy with this blog, so it can change.

I am reading the Bronte Myth of Lucaste Miller

In the years after Elisabeth Gaskell till  1900

• Rumours about the relationship between Charlotte Bronte and Constantin Heger.
• Biographers and writers believed or attached these rumours.
• Biographers believed that everythng Charlotte wrote is from her life
• Working class education started.
• Cheap editions of the novels flooded the market
• English literature began to take root as an academic subject.
• Concept ideal women artist. A new spiritality. Charlotte's subdued social manner is spiritual superiority.
• Emily appeared as child of the moors.
• No careful examination of the evidence, but devotion to the subjects
• The question came up: Who did write Wuthering Heights? Branwell or Emily Bronte or together?
• Women wanted  role models who symbolized female freedom from social conventions.

BIOGRAPHERS  ( and writers)

 

1867 William Dearden "Who wrote Wuthering Heights"?

 

Under the headline 'Who wrote Wuthering Heights?' Dearden described a meeting which had taken place in the summer of 1842 between himself, Branwell and their sculptor friend Joseph Leyland at the Cross Roads Inn between Haworth and Keighley. A month earlier, the two poets had each agreed to produce a verse composition set in the mythical time before the Deluge. But when Branwell arrived at the appointed pub to show off his handiwork, he found that he had accidentally picked up the wrong manuscript. What he read out was not the antediluvian poem 'Azrael or the Eve of Destruction' he had written in answer to Dearden's challenge, but a fragment whose scene and characters 'so far as then developed' were, according to Dearden, 'the same as those in Wuthering Heights, which Charlotte Bronté [sic] confidently asserts was the production of her sister Emily'. bronteblog/wuthering-heights-at-cross-roads-inn
kleurrijkbrontesisters/william-dearden

 

 

 

1883 Laura Carter Holloway An hour with Charlotte Bronte  

 

 

1877   Thomas Wemyss Reid- Charlotte Brontë: A monograph e-book charlottebronte 

Had been given access by Ellen Nussey to correspondence

 of Charlotte's which Mrs. Gaskell had not seen

He hinted that Charlotte ""had tasted strange joys"" at the Pensonnat Heger

 

1883 Gutenberg/ EMILY BRONTË/ Mary Robinson (click the link to read the book)

The Life of Emily Brontë

Mary Robinson wrote to Ellen Nussey asking for help with material.

She wanted  to humanize Emily, a free spirit, child of the moors.

She wanted to give a "Death blow"" once and for all to the theory that Branwell Bronte had written Wuthering Heights

-----------

How could a simple young woman, a clergyman's daughter, have created the brutal and passionate Heathcliff? The first biography of Emily was by A. Mary F. Robinson, Emily Brontë (1883, reprinted 1978) Mary Robinson, thought she had found the answer. Emily herself was not a bad person; no, she was a bright, charming girl. It was her older brother Branwell, who had put such evil thoughts into her head. Emily was, in Robinson's biography, an innocent victim of his depravity—so close to Branwell that she had no choice but to pour her agonized soul and his agonized sufferings into a strange book. (Miller, 238-241) maidsbrmyths

 

Clement King Shorter

 

 

Was the first to suggest that Charlotte had probably destroyed Emily' s and Anne' s  letters and literary effects.

 

1899  Marion Harland Charlotte Bronte at home

 

Believed Charlotte could not be emotially attached to Heger.

  

1911 gutenberg/ Malham Dembleby/The key tot the Bronte's work

There is nothing in Charlotte' s novels that is not a direct copy from life.

He believed Charlotte Bronte wrote also Wuthering Heights 

We had very early cherished the dream of one day becoming authors.

This dream, never relinquished even when distance divided and absorbing tasks occupied us, now suddenly acquired strength and consistency: it took the character of a resolve. We agreed to arrange a small selection of our poems, and, if possible, get them printed. Averse to personal publicity, we veiled our own names under those of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell; the ambiguous choice being dictated by a sort of conscientious scruple at assuming Christian names positively masculine, while we did not like to declare ourselves women, because—without at that time suspecting our mode of writing and thinking was not what is called "feminine"—we had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice; we had noticed how critics sometimes use for their chastisement the weapon of personality, and for their reward, a flattery, which is not true praise.

Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell, 1850
(as reproduced in Wuthering Heights, Norton edition, page 308)

edu//lesson01

Rebecca Fraser and Jane Sellars

(l-r) Bronte scholar Rebecca Fraser, with Chairman of the Trustees of the Bronte Society Sally MacDonald and Professor Ann Sumner.

 

 'The Art of the Brontes' author Jane Sellars. facebook 

The Briarfield Chronicles discusses at length Juliet Barker's The Brontës. 

Bronteblog

Treat this book as an exceptionally well informed -- indeed, encyclopedic -- authority. But do not for a moment think that this is the Brontë Bible, or the last word on the subject.

 For my birthday in august

I received these wonderful books

 from college's and friends

I love to read  it, it is so interesting

On internet I was reading part of it

But now I own it myself

i really am happy because of this

On the internet I also read about Juliet Barkers biography of the Brontes

I own this book already

I received it from the Bronte Blog

when in december 2011 I was winning

their contest.

 

'Yet another biography of the Brontës requires an apology, or at least an explanation," Juliet Barker writes in her introduction. Actually, the explanation is quite simple: The previous biographers were wrong, and Barker is right.
 

Brontë biography, in Barker's view, is a perpetuation of error. Read her 150 or so pages of notes, and you will see that she lines up her predecessors only to mow them down. They simply haven't done their homework -- such as reading the local papers and using the most authoritative texts of the novels. Instead, they repeat one another's errors. And they accept too much of the story as Elizabeth Gaskell, the first Brontë biographer, invented it: a grim parsonage presided over by a dour father, a wastrel son, and long-suffering daughters isolated from civilization, but somehow able to tap into their own creative reserves and produce world-famous novels.
 

But wait! Haven't I heard this before? Ah, yes, in Lucasta Miller's recent "The Brontë Myth." But wait! There's also Angus Mason Mackay's "The Brontës: Fact and Fiction," first published in 1897. Even Gaskell revised and corrected many of her initial impressions. For that is what biography is: gradual correction of error and accumulation of insight built on the work of others. Even Barker relies on Gaskell's narrative in some instances. Yet in Barker's view, biographers are like Mr. Lockwood in Wuthering Heights -- thrown into a situation that quite overmasters them.

Of course, Juliet Barker is one of the supreme authorities on the Brontës. And it is fascinating to watch her correct and add to the record. But too often she is an absolutist. Thus she doubts that Anne's poetry is autobiographical because Emily was writing similar lines at the same time. Why does it have to be either/or? Why does Barker continually ask questions that are really putdowns of previous biographers? No doubt, there has been bad work done on the Brontës, and that needs to be shown up. But the result is that Barker herself sometimes narrows rather than expands our sense of who these complex figures were.

Treat this book as an exceptionally well informed -- indeed, encyclopedic -- authority. But do not for a moment think that this is the Brontë Bible, or the last word on the subject.

Carl Rollyson is co-author, with Lisa Paddock, of "The Brontës: A to Z." Startribune

Biography of Charlotte Brontë

Read: Poetry foundation Charlotte BronteBrontë's poems after her return to Roe Head reflect her longing for home and for Angria as well as her anxious need to reconcile her desire to write with the necessity of continuing to teach to earn a living. The most famous of these poems, sometimes anthologized as "Retrospection," begins poignantly:      We wove a web in childhood

A web of sunny air

We dug a spring in infancy

Of water pure and fair

We sowed in youth a mustard seed

We cut an almond rod

We are now grown up to riper age

Are they withered in the sod. . . .
The poem continues for 177 more lines, developing into vividly realized scenes featuring the Duke of Zamorna. The poem then breaks into a retrospective prose narrative that is rudely interrupted by "a voice that dissipated all the charm" as a student "thrust her little rough black head into [her teacher's] face" to demand, "Miss Brontë what are you thinking about?"--a striking example of the incompatibility of Brontë's inner, imaginative life with her actual experience while at Roe Head. 

More ideas for reading:
BIBLIOGRAPHIES:

• Thomas J. Wise, A Bibliography of the Writings in Prose and Verse of the Members of the Brontë Family(London: Clay, 1917).
• Jami Parkison, "Charlotte Brontë: A Bibliography of 19th Century Criticism," Bulletin of Bibliography, 35 (1978): 73-83.
• G. Anthony Yablon and John R. Turner, A Brontë Bibliography(London: Hodgkins, 1978; Westport, Conn.: Meckler, 1978).
• Anne Passel, Charlotte and Emily Brontë: An Annotated Bibliography(New York: Garland, 1979).
• Christine Alexander, A Bibliography of the Manuscripts of Charlotte Brontë(Westport, Conn.: Meckler, for The Brontë Society, 1982).
• Rebecca W. Crump, Charlotte and Emily Brontë: A Reference Guide, (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982-1986).

BIOGRAPHIES:

• Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë, third edition, revised, 2 volumes (London: Smith, Elder, 1857).
• Clement Shorter, The Brontës: Life and Letters, 2 volumes (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1908).
• Thomas James Wise and John Alexander Symington, eds., The Brontës: Their Lives, Friendships, and Correspondence, The Shakespeare Head Brontë, 4 volumes (Oxford: Blackwell, 1932).
• Winifred Gérin, Charlotte Brontë: The Evolution of Genius(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967).
• Margot Peters, Unquiet Soul: A Biography of Charlotte Brontë(New York: Doubleday, 1975).
• Rebecca Fraser, Charlotte Brontë(London: Methuen, 1988).
• Lyndall Gordon, Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life(London: Chatto & Windus, 1994; New York: Norton, 1995).
• Juliet Barker, The Brontës (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994).

REFERENCES:

• Christine Alexander, The Early Writings of Charlotte Brontë(Oxford: Blackwell, 1983).
• Miriam Allott, The Brontës: The Critical Heritage(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974).
• Carol Bock, "Gender and Poetic Tradition: The Shaping of Charlotte Brontë's Literary Career," Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, 7 (1988): 49-67.
• Sue Lonoff, "Charlotte Brontë's Belgian Essays: The Discourse of Empowerment," Victorian Studies, 32 (1989): 387-409.
• Virginia Woolf, "'Jane Eyre' and 'Wuthering Heights,'" in her The Common Reader, first series (London: Hogarth Press, 1925), pp. 196-204.

Chadwick's In the Footsteps of the Brontës republished

Chadwick's In the Footsteps of the Brontës republished

One of the classic Brontë biographies: Ellis H. Chadwick's In the Footsteps of the Brontës (first published on 1914) has been republished:

In the Footsteps of the Brontës
Mrs Ellis H. Chadwick
Paperback
Series: Cambridge Library Collection - Literary Studies
ISBN:9781108034166
Publication date:October 2011
604pages
40 b/w illus.
Dimensions: 216 x 140 mm
Weight: 0.76kg

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. Beginning with the Irish ancestry of the three famous sisters, Charlotte (1816–55), Emily (1818–48) and Anne (1820–49), she traces their short but eventful lives. Chadwick examines their early years and the influence of their father, Patrick, his work in the ministry and the family's time at Haworth. Later chapters are devoted to the sisters' education and their literary output, seeking to understand their extraordinary creativity amid the difficult circumstances of their life.

Bronteblog/chadwicks-in-footsteps-of-brontes/     -----  e-book/in footsteps of brontes

Rebecca Fraser

Op dit moment lees ik

 met veel plezier

 het boek Charlotte Bronte

 van Rebecca Fraser

Ik dacht dat ik bijna alles wel wist

maar in dit boek

komen dingen naar voren die mij

onbekend waren

zoals

het adres

waar Charlotte haar brieven aan Monseigneur Heber naar toe stuurde

en was Branwell een blackmailer?

 

Rebecca Fraser has worked as a researcher, publisher's editor and journalist, and has written for many publications including Tatler, Vogue, The Times and the Spectator. She has also illustrated two children's books, King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table and Robin Hood. She is married and has three daughters. Her first book, a biography of Charlotte Brontë-, was very well received, and she has recently become President of the Brontë- Society.