Brontë’s letters to Constantin Heger

 

 

collection-items/letters-from-charlotte-bront-to-prof-constantin-heger

 

In beginning her exploration of Brontë’s letters to Constantin Heger, Kauffman suggests that the letters reveal Charlotte Brontë’s transformation ‘from Heger’s correspondent into the novelist of Jane Eyre’ (Kauffman 1986: 160). Kauffman intends to connect the rhetorical strategies of the letters and of Jane Eyre to map ‘the metamorphosis of the rhetoric of passion from an authentic to a fictional discourse’ (p. 160).

To start with, Kauffman maps out the narrative of Brontë’s and Heger’s encounter including:

• Charlotte’s and Emily’s trip to Brussels in 1842 to learn languages;

• their return to England at the death of their aunt;

• Charlotte Brontë’s return to Brussels alone in 1843;

• and her final return to England in 1844.

Brontë began writing to Heger after her return and there is evidence to suggest that there were more letters than survive today. In the letters that do remain, Kauffman notes a variety of characteristics that fit the ‘amorous epistolary discourse’ on which her study focuses. These include:

• ‘the denial of the reality of separation’;

• ‘the desire for contact’;

• ‘despair at the master’s silence’;

• and ‘resigned desolation’ (p. 161).

In initial letters, Brontë is ‘submissive’ and puts ‘emphasis on having been given the authority to write’ (p. 161). However, when Heger write back with a firm, stern tone providing instruction as to how she must write, Brontë rebels and does the opposite; ‘she becomes more outspoken, more indignant, less submissive’ (p. 161-162). Kauffman notes that ‘[l]ike all amorous epistolary discourses, Charlotte’s letters are demands, pleas, threats, and confrontations, filled with the same marks of internal tension, contradiction, self-division, and torment’ (p. 163).

Like Mary Jacobus in ‘The Buried Letter’, Kauffman notes that the figure of student-governess-teacher is an ambiguous one in nineteenth-century British society. She describes Brontë as ‘simultaneously a family intimate and a family employee; the boundaries between belonging to and being excluded from the family are constantly shifting ones’ (p. 163). In Jane Eyre, Blanche Ingram tries to humiliate the governess-heroine and in her letters, Brontë expresses anguish at her humiliation in being a governess. In her letters to Heger, Brontë seems unsure as to whether to situate herself as governess or pupil as she tries to reconcile Heger’s warmth in past encounters and the coldness of his silence. Gaskell and others have tried to suggest that the romance between Heger and Brontë was imagined, but Kauffman provides much evidence that suggests that Heger exploited teacher-pupil relationships on a regular basis with his charismatic personality. Brontë’s letters are always a work of persuasion for him to break his silence and write to her again, which he never does. Silence is of course an obsession of Brontë’s novels too: ‘[i]h her letters, poems and novels Charlotte continued all her life to portray the intense misery of loneliness, exile and unrequited love’ (p. 170).

Kauffman, L. 1986, Discourses of Desire: Gender, Genre and Epistolary Fictions, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

The Letters of Charlotte Bronte

Vol 1: 1829-1847
Edited by Margaret Smith

"I cannot be formal in a letter,'' Charlotte Bronte apologised to an impossibly conventional ex-suitor, Henry Nussey. "If I write at all, I must write as I think.'' At that time, in 1841, a governess to the White family in Rawdon, Yorkshire, she confides her discontent with indulged children to this dull clergyman who, she knew, understood her not at all. It is this incaution, this need to explain herself against the odds, that makes her a great writer of letters. She seems to invite condemnation ("I am dwelling too much on my own concerns and feelings... I repent having written it'') so that a literal reader would find it easy to vilify or pity her, but none of her states of mind are exactly what they seem. It was improper for a clergyman's daughter in the 19th century to murmur against her lot, but she does so with a swelling commitment to another life which reveals a characteristic and unexpected strength: "my home is humble and unattractive to strangers but to me it contains what I shall find nowhere else in the world - [the] profound, and intense affection which brothers and sisters feel for each other when their minds are cast in the same mould''.

Behind these words lies a writer's life which Charlotte shared with her sisters, Emily and Anne, and brother, Branwell, and which was to issue in the phenomenally successful Jane Eyre in 1847. The date marks a logical end to this, the first of three projected volumes of letters. What do the letters tell us of the transformation of an apparently subdued governess to the novelist who could declare in a letter to her publishers on 4 January 1848: "It would take a great deal to crush me''?

Though modest quiet was expected of ladies, Charlotte could not contain the upsurge of language any more than she could deny her thought. Some of her most formative letters - letters in which we hear for the first time her complex authorial voice - were written to men who would not grant what she wished. When Charlotte sent the Poet Laureate, Robert Southey, some of her poems, he told her in 1837 that "Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life''. She replied with apparent propriety which completely reassured Southey, but her letter reverberates with veiled sarcasm which the editor of this volume does not hear: "In the evenings, I confess, I do think, but I never trouble any one else with my thoughts... I trust I shall never more feel ambitious to see my name in print; if the wish should rise, I'll look at Southey's letter, and suppress it.'' The brilliant verbal glide of her abjection to Southey was her first public performance of a role she made her own - hiding undaunted creative fire under a mask of perfect docility.

When Charlotte refused Henry Nussey in 1839, her letter explained in a patient and kindly tone that she was not the right wife for him, and prescribed instead a similar caricature of meek womanhood: "Her character should not be too marked, ardent and original - her temper should be mild...'' Again, the editor misses the scorn, and suggests that this tepid and passionless construct lies behind the marriage of Jane Eyre (yes, Jane Eyre who unites with her husband as bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh.) Curiously, in the same letter, there is also a strong element of candour where Charlotte actually owns to being "satirical'' to the very man whose taste she's sending up.

It is telling to compare this layered letter with Charlotte's more direct explanation of her "natural home-character'' in a letter to Nussey's sister, Ellen. If she ever married, she must have an "intense attachment''. Nor could she "sit all day long making a grave face before my husband - I would laugh...'' To Ellen and to her other lifelong friend, Mary Taylor, she wrote in a bracing, unguarded, often humorous way. After her death, Mary, an outspoken feminist, destroyed all but one of Charlotte's letters as dangers to her reputation. Ellen preserved several hundred because she understood their future importance. Wishing to publish them and at the same time protect the docile image Charlotte herself had promoted, Ellen went through decades of anxiety. Her indecisiveness and growing bitterness made her an easy target for predators such as the arch-hypocrite, T J Wise, who bullied her into surrendering her letters. He promised that this treasure would go to the nation; instead, he sold off many letters (along with other Bronteana) to the highest bidders around the world. The history of the Bronte letters is a story as bizarre in its way as that of Jane Eyre.

The most famous letters in this volume are the four Charlotte wrote in French in 1844-45 to her beloved teacher in Brussels, M. Heger. The fact that Madame Heger pieced three of these letters together from torn fragments she found in her husband's bin suggests that Madame did not consider this tie negligible. There has been much speculation whether these surviving letters were adulterous or innocent. This is a misunderstanding of Charlotte's capacity for an indefinable form of love that thrived on Monsieur's recognition of her potential as a writer, his capacity to know her as she perceived herself to be. If we think of these letters in view of the great novels to come, they may be seen as the source of a new model of manhood: a hero who will engage with a hidden "other'' in a woman; who does not exclude it as alien. This future fictional enlargement on M. Heger gains its imaginative licence from distance - the correspondent's invisibility as reader. In this sense, what Charlotte undertook was not quite a real correspondence which reflects the correspondent; it was more an invented correspondence, close to an imaginative act and supplemented, probably, by many letters which Charlotte composed (in her mind or even on paper) but did not send. This ingredient of invention may explain Monsieur's increasing reluctance to reply. And although this was painful to Charlotte as a pupil, it was to her advantage as a rising writer to have to imagine passion, not enact it, for this freed her to imagine from a woman's point of view.
It has taken 140 years since Charlotte Bronte's death for a proper edition of her letters to be published. Readers must be grateful to Margaret Smith for the recovery of accurate texts - as accurate as they can be at this point in time, given their wanderings, dismemberments and mutilations. One letter was discovered to be in five fragments in five different libraries. The restoration of the texts themselves is a triumph of meticulous labour. Yet the clouding of Charlotte Bronte is not quite over. For between the reader and the letters is a laborious biographical introduction. Instead of trusting the letters to speak for themselves, the editor pre-empts Charlotte's witty, blistering, multi-shaded voice with a flattened account. We are told of religious anxiety in the late 1830s and "torments'' over M. Heger in the next phase, but we are not told about Charlotte Bronte's imaginative power to turn the losses of her life to gain. So, why undertake this edition? Her aim, the editor declares, is "to enhance'' our understanding of a woman who wrote novels. So are the letters only a set of useful commentaries rather than works of art? Margaret Smith comes to a strangely lame conclusion for a person with the privilege of editing one of the greatest letter- writers in the English language.

Letter from Charlotte back to the parsonage.

The hammer has descended, and the letter from Charlotte Brontë to William Smith Williams, dated October 18, 1848 – is now on its way from the auction room in New York to the Parsonage. Written just after the death of Branwell and at a time when Emily was displaying distressing symptoms of Tuberculosis (she died three months later), the letter is highly significant, even though there are no references to these things.

click here to read more
_____________________________________

A letter written by Charlotte Brontë as she grieved over the death of her brother Branwell and fretted about the health of her younger sister Emily is on its way back to Haworth.
The Brontë Parsonage Museum outbid other collectors to get the letter for $55,000 (£39,000) at an auction in New York.
It will join a treasure trove of artifacts acquired by the museum in Haworth over the past six months.
This latest item was written by the author of Jane Eyre, on October 18, 1848, shortly after Branwell died. It was sent to William Smith William, the reader at her publisher Smith Elder and Co.
Ann Dinsdale, the museum’s collections manager, said: “This was a very sad period of her life. Branwell had just died and Emily was showing symptoms of the TB which would kill her three months later.
“The letter doesn’t refer to these things, but it talks about her being ill. I think her deep unhappiness was manifested in this ill health.”

Mr William became a friend to Charlotte having spotted her potential as a writer when she sent her first novel The Professor to the publishing house. It was not accepted but he encouraged her to write Jane Eyre, which the company published.
Mrs Dinsdale said staff followed the auction online and were very excited when they realised the hammer had gone down on their bid.
Once the letter arrives back in Haworth, it will join the other recently bought artifacts including a poetry manuscript written by Charlotte as a 13-year-old and Emily’s artist’s box.

The Bluebell, gedicht van Emily Bronte

The Bluebell is the sweetest flower

That waves in summer air

Its blossoms have the mightiest power

To soothe my spirit's care

There is a spell in purple heath

Too wildly, sadly dear

The violet has a fragrant breath

But fragrance will not cheer

The trees are bare, the sun is cold

And seldom, seldom seen

The heavens have lost their zone of gold

And earth her robe of green

And ice upon the glancing stream

Has cast its sombre shade

And distant hills and valleys seem

In frozen mist arrayed

The Bluebell cannot charm me now

The heath has lost its bloom

The violets in the glen below

They yield no sweet perfume

But, though I mourn the sweet Bluebell

'Tis better far away

I know how fast my tears would swell

To see it smile to-day

For, oh! when chill the sunbeams fall

Adown that dreary sky

And gild yon dank and darkened wall

With transient brilliancy

How do I weep, how do I pine

For the time of flowers to come

And turn me from that fading shine

To mourn the fields of home!

Brieven van Charlotte Bronte

Mooie website gevonden

Bovenstaande foto's staan hier op

brieven van Charlotte Bronte

klik hier

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.

Emily's piano

 

The evening event was a magical occasion: the opportunity to hear a concert using Emily's tall "cabinet" piano, restored thanks to a donation from an American member, the first time it has been heard since the Brontës' times. Emily was a keen player, and of course studied the piano here in Brussels as well as teaching it to young pupils at the Pensionnat Heger. The restored piano is now back in Patrick's study and as it was a fine evening we could listen either in the Parsonage (in the hall or sitting on the stairs) or in the front garden at the top of the village, adjoining the churchyard, with the moors beyond.

lees verder brussels bronte blog

A rare and important letter written by Charlotte Bronte

A rare and important letter written by Charlotte Bronte in between the deaths of her brother and a sister is expected to fetch up to $100,000 at an auction in New York later this month.
The letter, dated October 18, 1848, is to her publisher William Smith Williams, of Smith, Elder & Co, and will be up for auction on June 17 at Sotheby’s in New York, with a reserve of $70,000 to $100,000 (£50,000 to £71,000).

lees verder Bradford Telegraph and Argus


"My book—alas! is laid aside for the present; both head and hand seem to have lost their cunning; imagination is pale, stagnant, mute—this incapacity chagrins me; sometimes I have a feeling of cankering care on the subject—but I combat it as well as I can—it does no good.

"... Do not talk about being on a level with 'Currer Bell', or regard him as 'an awful person'; if you saw him now, sitting muffled at the fireside, shrinking before the east wind (which for some days has been blowing wild and keen over our cold hills)—and incapable of lifting a pen for any less formidible task than that of writing ... to an indulgent friend—you would be sorry not to deem yourself greatly his superior ....

"Thought and Conscience are, or ought to be, free, and at any rate, if your views were universally adopted there would be no persecution, no bigotry. But never try to proselytise—the world is not yet fit to receive what you and Emerson say: Man, as he now is, can no more do without creeds and forms in religion, than he can do without laws and rules of social intercourse. You and Emerson judge others by yourselves; all mankind are not like you, any more than every Israelite was like Nathaniel.

"'Is there a human being' you ask, 'so depraved that an act of kindness will not touch—nay, a word melt him?' There are hundreds of human beings who trample on acts of kindness, and mock at words of affection. I know this though I have seen but little of the world. I suppose I have something harsher in my nature than you have—something which every now and then tells me dreary secrets about my race, and I cannot believe the voice of the optimist, charm he never so wisely—on the other hand, I feel forced to listen when a Thackeray speaks: I know Truth is delivering her oracle by his lips ....

"The study of motives is a strange one; not to be pursued too far by one fallible human being in reference to his fellows. Do not condemn me as uncharitable. I have no wish to urge my convictions on you ...."

A remarkable letter, dating from the darkest, most difficult period of Charlotte Brontë's short life.

Concern over car parking near Anne Bronte's grave

Bijschrift toevoegen

A MAN has set up a Facebook group after concerns were raised about cars parking close to Anne Bronte's grave in a former Scarborough churchyard.

David Selby, who is a regular visitor to the town, says he was shocked to see cars parked so close to the gravestones at the top end of the old graveyard next to St Mary's Church.

Lees verder in the Scarlborough Evening News

The Bronte Sisters

Sterfdag Anne Bronte

Anne had nog maar net haar zus Emily verloren aan tuberculose, toen dezelfde ziekte ook bij haar werd geconstateerd. In tegenstelling tot haar zus Emily wilde Anne wel behandeld worden. In mei 1849 vertrok ze met haar zus Charlotte naar de kust, naar Scarborough, om aan te sterken.

Op 28 mei 1849

161 jaar geleden

 overleed ze

Anne is als enige Brontë niet begraven in het familiegraf in Haworth, maar in St Mary’s Churchyard in Scarborough.

Pets of the Brontes

Flossy

The early pets are mainly known to us through pictures, and through Emily and Anne’s diary papers. They include Grasper (described in AOTB as an Irish terrier); Rainbow, Diamond, Snowflake (species unknown), and a pheasant called Jasper – possibly these were all wild birds who were fed regularly. Later the family acquired Keeper, the most famous and characterful of the Brontë pets (his fictional equivalent, Tartar in Shirley, is described in ch. 11 as “of a breed between mastiff and bull-dog”); Nero (often called Hero), a hawk, lost while Emily and Charlotte were in Brussels; Black Tom and Tiger (d. 1844), both cats; two geese, Victoria and Adelaide; and a cage bird, Little Dick, mentioned in Anne’s diary paper for 1845. Last of the major pets was Flossy, brought by Anne from Thorp Green in 1843 and painted by both her and Emily. Flossy sired a puppy, given to Ellen Nussey. In his last years Patrick acquired dogs called Cato and Plato. Charlotte’s comparative indifference to animals is evidenced by the lack of references to them in her early letters. In her last lonely years she was touched by the dogs’ display of affection, especially on her returns home.See also Flossy; Flossy Junior; Hero; Grasper; Keeper, Plato; Rainbow; Snowflake; Tiger; Tom; Victoria

Anne Bronte and Scarborough

Anne had already been suffering from what was believed to be a cold for the previous few weeks. Over Christmas, her symptoms intensified, and in early January, her father, Patrick sent for a Leeds physician 'who was an expert in consumptive cases'. On January 5th Dr. Teale examined Anne at the Parsonage. He diagnosed her condition as consumption, and intimated that it was quite advanced leaving little hope of a recovery. Unlike Emily, Anne took all the recommended medicines, and responded to all the advice she was given. Her health fluctuated as the months passed, but she progressively grew thinner and weaker. On 1 May, Charlotte wrote to Ellen Nussey, to report on Anne's condition:

""She is very much emaciated, far more so than when you were with us;
her arms are no thicker than a little child's. The least exertion brings a shortness of breath.
She goes out a little every day, but we creep rather than walk. . .'

By this time Anne had decided to make a return visit to Scarborough in the hope that the change of location and fresh sea air might initiate a recovery, and give her a chance to live: indeed, the doctors of the time had said that a

'change of air or removal to a better climate would hardly ever
fail of success in consumptive cases if the remedy were taken in time',

Dr. Teale had particularly approved of Anne's choice of Scarborough. Charlotte initially gave much opposition to the plan, fearing the journey would be too stressful for her ailing sister. However, Anne eventually convinced Charlotte that it was her last hope, and on Thursday, 24 May 1849, the two set off, accompanied by their friend Ellen Nussey, for Scarborough. En-route, the three spent a day and a night in York, where, escorting Anne around in a wheel chair, they did some shopping, and at Anne's request, visited the colossal York Minster. Anne had developed a strong affinity for the Minster from her visits there with the Robinsons when she worked at Thorp Green. Ellen later recorded that as Anne gazed up at the magnificent structure, she said:
 
"If finite power can do this, what is the . . . ?"

when emotion stayed her speech, and her companions quickly moved her to a less exciting scene.
The small party arrived at Scarborough on the Friday afternoon. Anne was now very weak and frail, but she appeared somewhat revived on being back in the place she so much loved. She gained great pleasure in pointing out the delights of the resort to Charlotte and Ellen. The party had booked rooms in Wood's Lodgings - the establishment where Anne had stayed with the Robinsons some five to nine years earlier. The morning after her arrival, she attended the nearby Indoor Sea-water Baths, and at her own insistence, was left to bathe there alone. However, on her return, she collapsed with exhaustion outside her lodgings. Not to alarm Charlotte and Ellen, Anne did not inform them of this incident until some considerable time later. In the afternoon, she drove herself in a donkey cart on the South Sands, and when Ellen arrived to meet her, she found Anne giving the donkey-boy a lecture on treating the animal well.

'She was ever fond of dumb things, and would give up her own comfort for them'

reported Ellen later.
On the Sunday afternoon, Anne enthusiastically chaperoned Charlotte and Ellen along the Spa Bridge, and the three enjoyed the spectacular open view of the bay from there. Later, overcome with exhaustion, she sat on a seat near the beach and urged her companions to walk on further. It was later this evening that she realised there was no hope left, and that she did not have long to live. She begun discussing, with Charlotte, the propriety of returning to Haworth. Not that she wanted to return for her own sake, she said, but she did not want to leave her companions with the problems, and distress of having to return her lifeless remains home. She spent the rest of the evening sat by her lodgings room window - looking out over the bay, and watching

 

'the most glorious sunset ever witnessed'

The night passed without incident, but the following morning she was so weak that Ellen had to carry her, like a baby, down the stairs for breakfast, which, for Anne, was a bowl of boiled milk that had been especially prepared for her.

The three spent the rest of the morning in their lounge; Anne sat in her easy chair by the window, looking out over the bay once more; the weather was glorious and the sea as 'calm as glass': she looked 'so serene and reliant', reported Ellen.

'Nothing occurred to incite alarm until about 11 a.m. when Anne announced that she felt a change: she believed she did not have long to live.'

A doctor was called, and Anne asked him

'how long he thought she might live - not to fear speaking the truth, for she was not afraid to die'.

The doctor admitted

'that the angel of death had already arrived and that life was ebbing fast.

She thanked him for his truthfulness . .

http://www.annebronte.scarborough.co.uk/

 

Wheelwright family

an English doctor, his wife and daughters, who made the acquaintance of Charlotte and Emily in Brussels in 1842. The reasons for their sojourn there are unclear, though perhaps the large family of daughters (five) and the cost of educating them is the answer. It was the girls’ presence among the small contingent of English pupils at the Pensionnat Heger that began the relationship. Their parents Thomas (1786–1861) and Elizabeth (d. 1882) were clearly regarded affectionately by Charlotte, but they were not individualized in her letters. They were subsumed into the generalized happy, energetic, slightly philistine air exuded by the younger members of the family. The three youngest girls, Frances (1831–1913), Sarah Ann (1834–1900), and Julia (1835–42) are remembered for having been taught piano by Emily Brontë in recreation time, so that she did not lose any of her lessons. These were sessions from which the young girls sometimes emerged in tears. Julia died in Brussels, and it may be that the “primitive and wholly inadequate” (Frances’s words) sanitation at the Pensionnat was to blame (CBL, v. 1, p. 301). Emily (1829–88), as well as being a strong Christian, was a fine pianist, but this was not due to Emily Brontë, for she never taught her.The pupil at the Pensionnat who was closest to Charlotte was naturally the eldest, Laetitia Elizabeth (1828–1911), who seems to have resumed contact ...

Interessante link

Ik vind zonet

een heel interessante link

naar informatie over the Brontes....

http://www.blackwellreference.com/public/search?query=bronte


http://web.search.cornell.edu/search?output=xml_no_dtd&client=default_frontend&proxystylesheet=default_frontend&q=bronte%20sisters