Costume changes

Nice post on Abigails ateliers  about the costume changes of a lady born around the turn of the 19 th century and living until the 1880s (which for this class was possible as long a she survived childbirth and avoided cholera.This was a time of huge change in dress and saw two of the most extreme fashions , the crinoline and the bustle.

Pensionnat Heger

Aunt Branwell's £50 a year was very much her own private money, so when, in 1841, Charlotte ventured to ask if Aunt Branwell might support Emily, Anne and herself in a venture to open their own school, Charlotte was pleasantly surprised when her aunt offered her £150. This venture never got off the ground, but Aunt Branwell was again forthcoming with funds the following year when Charlotte and Emily went to extend their education at the Pensionnat Heger in Brussels.

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There are obvious differences between the Charlotte's and Emily's experiences in Brussels. Charlotte was intrigued by the city, fell in love and after a brief return to Haworth came back to Brussels as a teacher at the Pensionnat Heger. Back in England, she based the plot for two of her four novels on events in Brussels, whilst elements of the other two were apparently inspired by her time in the city. Emily on the other hand left as soon as she had chance and never seems to refer to time spent away from Yorkshire in her work.

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At the Pensionnat Heger they studied French, German, music, singing, writing, arithmetic, and drawing. Charlotte wrote of Emily that she “works like a horse” (letter to EN May 1842) and “is making rapid progress in French, German, Music and Drawing — Monsieur & Madame Heger [who ran the school] begin to recognize the valuable points of her character under her singularities.” (letter to EN July 1842).

http://brontesisterslinks.tripod.com/Brussels.pdf
the brussels bronte group.

The Garden of the Pensionnat Heger

 

The central lane in the middle of the garden

The school was on the Rue d'Isabelle in a quarter close to the central park and near the grandeur of Rue Royale with its stately 18th century houses. The Rue d’Isabelle and the Isabelle quarter had an ancient past, remnants of which could still be seen.

Even though the school building itself was no more extraordinary than the other schools in the neighbourhood, there was an unexpected treasure, tucked away behind the house; a delightful big garden with a line of ancient fruit trees. This garden was to provide Charlotte with a haven of peace right in the centre of the city. It is described in full detail in her novel Villette, and one can imagine her relishing every opportunity to escape from the pressures of school life to the bower (berceau) and the allée défendue.

 

The 'Allée Défendue'

Independently of romantic rubbish, however, that old garden had its charms. On summer mornings I used to rise early to enjoy them alone; on summer evenings, to linger solitary, to keep tryste with the rising moon, or taste one kiss of the evening breeze, or fancy rather than feel the freshness of dew descending. The turf was verdant, the gravelled walks were white; sun-bright nasturtiums clustered beautiful about the roots of the doddered orchard giants. There was a large berceau, above which spread the shade of an acacia; there was a smaller, more sequestered bower, nestled in the vines which ran all along a high and grey wall, and gathered their tendrils in a knot of beauty, and hung their clusters in loving profusion about the favoured spot where jasmine and ivy met and married them.

Villette, Charlotte Bronte

 

The garden

About this time--in the ripest glow of summer--Madame Beck's house became as merry a place as a school could well be. All day long the broad folding-doors and the two-leaved casements stood wide open: settled sunshine seemed naturalized in the atmosphere; clouds were far off, sailing away beyond sea, resting, no doubt, round islands such as England--that dear land of mists--but withdrawn wholly from the drier continent. We lived far more in the garden than under a roof: classes were held, and meals partaken of, in the "grand berceau."

Villette Charlotte Bronte

 

Behind the trees, the 'Berceau'

 

http://brontesisterslinks.tripod.com/Brussels.pdf

Villette

Juliet Barker has called Villette Charlotte Bronte's "most autobiographical novel," based on Bronte's experiences in Brussels in 1842-43. After two stints as a governess, Charlotte embarked on a journey with her sister Emily to Brussels with the plan of receiving training in running a school and opening up their own establishment in England.

 The journey took Charlotte to London for the first time before arriving in Brussels, where she and Emily would teach at the Pensionnat of Madame and M. Constantin Heger, whom Charlotte described as "choleric and irritable as to temperament," though a very wise and religious teacher of French language and literature.

The school of 80-100 young girls was situated in a large old mansion in the Rue d'Isabelle. Though the Brontes knew little French and kept mostly to themselves, they enjoyed teaching much better than the time spent as governesses. Their stay in Brussels, however, was interrupted after the death of an aunt, upon which they returned to England. Though Charlotte returned to Brussels after nearly three months, Emily refused to leave home again. Charlotte did not enjoy her return to Brussels without Emily, having no one with which to socialize. She left Brussels again within a year.

Charlotte was not a woman that had many suitors during her lifetime. Still, she apparently was attracted to M. Heger and he to her, as their correspondence after her final departure reveals. Barker places Charlotte's attraction as a motive for her return to England. Nevertheless, Heger was instrumental in harnessing Charlotte's writing style. Having an obsessive eye for detail, Heger condemned to a flow of words without a clear objective. He forced Charlotte to disclipline her runaway imagination.

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Charlotte Brontë’s father played a major part in the ending of this novel. His influence on her and their inadequate relationship led to the controversial events in Villette. Charlotte intended to make the ending of Villette unhappy because of the events of her own life; although her father disagreed with this. After she finished Villette, “her father, to whom she had read some passages, was partly responsible for its enigmatic finale. He could not bear a sad ending, and in the first version M. Paul had died in the shipwreck.” (Fraser 426). With the influence of Brontë’s father, Paul Emmanuel’s fate left uncertain.
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Contemporary Reactions to Villette

• "That's a plaguy book that Villette. How clever it is--and how I don't like the heroine." William Thackeray
• There is something almost preternatural in its power." George Eliot
• "All the female characters, in all their thoughts and lives, are full of one thing, or are regarded by the reader in the light of one thought--love." Harriet Martineau
• Bronte is "nothing but hunger, rebellion, and rage, and therefore that is all she can, in fact put into her book." Matthew Arnold

Victorian Circle.
rue-disabelle

All this time I've been trying to be Cathy when I should have been trying to be Jane

Girls, pick your bedtime reading with careSaints and rebels, mavericks and misfits... these are the role models of literature. But Samantha Ellis asks whether she learned the right lessons from their passionate and tortured lives.

Last summer I was on the Yorkshire moors, making the pilgrimage to Top Withens and arguing (over the wuthering) with my best friend about whether we'd rather be Jane Eyre or Cathy Earnshaw. Like Kate Bush, I chose wild, free, passionate Cathy over stoic, virtuous Jane. But my friend found Cathy silly, a snob who betrays Heathcliff for Edgar and makes them all unhappy, while Jane makes her own way. As we reached the top, I had a moment of realisation:

All this time I've been trying to be Cathy when I should have been trying to be Jane

So I decided to reread the books I'd read as a girl, the books that shaped my ideas of how to be a woman, to see if I'd always chosen the wrong role models. To see what I'd learned from the books, to see where they'd misled me.

Back in London I stacked them up. They were scarred from use – battered, tear-stained, mascara-smeared, their jackets scuffed, spines cracked, margins scrawled in; some had flowers pressed between the pages, some bulged from being dropped in the bath. As to the contents: I was excited about meeting my heroines again, but what if they'd changed for me? What if I didn't like them any more? What if I ended up feeling they'd ruined my life?

After all, Gone With the Wind was directly responsible for me feeding my sandwiches to the ducks for years in the hope of getting Scarlett's 17-inch waist. The Little Mermaid gave me some very skewed ideas about love (she exchanges her voice for legs to get a man). The Secret Garden made me value imagination so highly that I had nightmares. And using Cassandra Mortmain as my internet dating name did nothing for my love life except flummoxing some men who hadn't read I Capture the Castle and were hoping for a posh blonde.

I read these books to dream up adventures I might actually have, lives I might live. My mother had already had a storybook life – a childhood in Baghdad, persecution, prison, a failed escape across the mountains of Kurdistan, a real escape to London and a whirlwind romance with my father. And all this by the time she was 22. No wonder she wanted me to have a boring life.

Her idea of my happy ending was a wedding, which might be all right as long as I could marry a prince – a challenge because there are no Jewish princes. But Esther had done it, and in my cream-and-gold Esther dress and tiara maybe I could, too. Of course when you reread the biblical story of Esther, who becomes queen of Persia and saves the Jews, it's Vashti the dissident queen who makes the more interesting role model. I'd thought she was a villain, but she's not; she's incredibly brave. The king asks her to dance for his drunk friends in her jewels (possibly, say scholars, in just her jewels), and she says no, knowing she'll be executed for her refusal. Meanwhile Esther mainly fasts and faints.

Although I hadn't yet learned about saying no to the patriarchy, I was too shy and awkward to be a princess, and I ditched the plan of becoming one altogether when I read LM Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables. I read the Anne books so many times that I felt as at home in turn-of-the-century Prince Edward Island as in 1980s suburban north London. Like a lot of my heroines, Anne was a misfit, a maverick, a clumsy girl. And because she wanted to be a writer, I decided I would be one, too. She was the first of my writer-heroines, and my favourite, but I also liked Little Women's Jo March, with her "scribbling suit" and her hat to wipe her leaky pen on, and Frost in May's Nanda – not just a writer but a fury. Her battle to be herself inspired me to fight to be myself.

It was confusing being caught between two cultures. At home my grandma was telling me the cautionary tale of her mother being taken out of school at 14 because reading was spoiling her eyes (and men don't make passes at girls who wear glasses). Meanwhile in school drama classes I was acting out suffragette Emily Davison being trampled by a horse. My friends were reading Jackie Collins and Judy Blume, but Jane Austen felt more relevant to my life. And I liked Pride and Prejudice's Lizzy Bennet best because she was strong and funny and wouldn't marry Mr Darcy until he grew up. "Do not consider me now as an elegant female, but as a rational creature speaking the truth from her heart," she says in true protofeminist fashion. Rereading Austen as an adult, I love her irony and her gutsy, vanity-puncturing humour; compared to Little Women, Pride and Prejudice is practically amoral.

As I grew older my heroines got more restless, more angry. Armed with Scarlett O'Hara's ruthlessness and the conviction, gleaned from Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls, that leaving home was the first step to liberation, I convinced my parents to let me go away to university. It had to be Cambridge, because that's where Sylvia Plath had gone. As a stroppy, intense teenager I was obsessed with her poetry, which seemed to be all about exquisite suffering. It turns out to be tangled and dauntless and funny and life-affirming, but I didn't know that then. I wrote endless poems about being unhappy. I wasn't unhappy (and later, when I was, I didn't want to write about it) but I thought that was what poets did. In her Journals Plath charts honestly her struggle to become a woman writer; there are also wonderful descriptions of Cambridge. I expected to go to wild parties, read the Greeks and meet my very own Ted Hughes, with whom I'd live a life of "Books & Babies & Beef Stews".

By the time I got there I was already in love with a man who wanted me to follow him into Orthodox Judaism. When I couldn't, we broke up and I turned to Salinger's Franny and Zooey for consolation. From Franny I learned that prayer can take many forms, that grace is everywhere. Her brothers tell her she can "be God's actress" if she wants to, and they promise to "rent tuxedos and rhinestone hats and solemnly come round to the stage door with bouquets of snapdragons". A couple of other students asked me to write a play with them. Because of Franny, I said yes.

A few weeks later I began to reel. I'd trail off mid-sentence as the ground fell away, and I was lost. Ever the romantic, I thought this was heartbreak. But then I started falling, flailing and having spasms, and a neurologist diagnosed seizures. What Katy Did is a very different book to read when you've had seizures for 18 years; this time when Katy started banging on about "the School of Pain", I threw Susan Coolidge's book at the wall. I was confused. I'd remembered Katy Carr as a rebel, not a saint. I'd thought I was guilty and neurotic because of growing up Iraqi-Jewish, and that the books had rescued me. It turns out a lot of them are rammed with selflessness and self-sacrifice. It's not just Katy – although I blame her for the fact that I wasn't more usefully angry about my seizures early on. I blame Herman Wouk's Marjorie Morningstar for making me think theatre isn't a proper job, even though now I find its ending so jarring (Marjorie abandons her acting aspirations and her lover to bury herself in suburbia) that I think this might be her author's fault instead.

And Hans Christian Andersen's got a lot to answer for; The Little Mermaid made intense, messy, painful love seem the only kind there is. I wish I hadn't loved Scarlett O'Hara so much – I might have realised unrequited love is just deeply boring. The same goes for Anne in Valley of the Dolls, who only gets her man after a lot of ugly scheming. Now, having read my 1970s feminists, I think any heroine who spends a whole novel in unrequited love with someone should be disqualified from being a role model for girls. And the amount of guilt these heroines felt about writing! I was so appalled by much of What Katy Did that I almost missed the bit where her writing gets burned. Jo March's writing gets burned, too, and Nanda's first book gets cast into hellfire. Thank goodness for Anne of Green Gables; I still think its message that altruism and hard work eventually get rewarded is, if not true, then at least a good way to live.

But as a girl I fell into the books and got lost in them; I would no more have questioned the heroines than I would have questioned my best friend. And I miss reading that way; it's much less fun to read as a more dispassionate adult. But it's also good to have a bit of distance from some of the heroines. As I put the books back on the shelf, it crossed my mind to get rid of some of the ones I'd changed my mind about. But I didn't; after all, I loved them once.

Reading around the books, through writers' biographies, diaries and letters, I tried to work out why some writers forced their heroines to give up and why some were brave enough to try to make their characters' dreams come true. And I wanted to know how the writers' own stories ended, what really happened, which stories they didn't tell. Take Charlotte and Emily Brontë: Charlotte fell in love, got her heart broken, exorcised her demons by writing them out, and married wisely. Emily never got to fall in love – imagine what she might have written if she had. Maybe it would be more interesting to have to choose between Charlotte and Emily than Jane Eyre and Cathy Earnshaw.

I might be older but I'm not wiser; it's still Emily. Not least because I read a telling little story about Charlotte's husband berating the women of Haworth for impiously hanging out their washing in the churchyard, and that makes me think he must have been a bit of a prig. Knowing more about the writers made me realise why so many of them left their heroines on the brink. Because interesting lives are difficult.

If I were writing myself as a heroine, I'd end the summer I graduated. I'd taken my play to the Edinburgh Fringe. The play was bad but it had heart. There were no rhinestone hats and no snapdragons, but it was thrilling. On the overnight coach back to London we scorned sleep, swigging a paperback-sized bottle of whisky, eating a block of Dairy Milk and talking about the future. I was finally growing out of the role models, finally becoming me. And I felt sure I was going to have an interesting life. Because interesting lives are difficult. As my mother knew.

Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

Margaret Mitchell's Civil War saga is set at the same time as Little Women, but Scarlett O'Hara is a very different proposition. She sacrifices herself, too, but while Jo March sold her hair, when Scarlett married Frank she sold herself. I loved her courage, her optimism (I took on her mantra "Tomorrow is another day!" as my own) and her style; her curtain dress was much better than the curtain dresses in The Sound of Music. I was exhilarated by her ruthlessness. But this time round I felt sad that she doesn't know herself until the last page. It was hard to read 800 pages of her being blind to her own heart when all that time she could have been snogging Rhett.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

For years, Emily Brontë's novel was my template for raging, tempestuous love (the only kind). Cathy, the headstrong heroine, refuses to become ladylike and runs wild on the moors with brooding hero Heathcliff. Their love is so strong that even death fails to part them! But now, the idea of Cathy dying of a broken heart and haunting Heathcliff (trying to, as Kate Bush put it, grab his soul) seems less appealing, especially because it all comes from her betraying Heathcliff for puny, sallow Edgar.

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

I cried right through re-reading Alcott's story of four sisters growing up during the American Civil War. But I didn't like it. I used to love Jo the rebel, the writer. I was gutted to find she's a goody-goody. And the book is so moralistic; Jo gets slammed for writing a few racy stories to support her family but apparently it's fine, another time they're stuck for cash, for her to sell her hair. And at the end she gives up writing to marry a boring old German professor! It's all very troubling. And dishonest, because Alcott stayed a spinster and wrote smutty potboilers to the end. But then why make Little Women so preachy? I think Alcott felt guilty about her choices and loaded that guilt on to Jo.

Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann

I remembered Jacqueline Susann's book as a gossipy, glamorous ode to female friendship. I liked Anne best because she escapes her prim, boring home town for showbiz New York. Turns out she's a Waspy ice queen whose big ambition is to be a secretary. I wish I'd gone for Neely as my heroine instead. She's bad but in such a witty way (the scene where she flushes her rival's wig down a toilet is hilarious) and she's got ambition. And, unlike the other women in the book, she's not deluded. "Guys will leave you," she says, "your looks will go, your kids will grow up and leave you, and everything you thought was great will go sour; all you can really count on is your talent." It's bleak, but bleaker still is that Susann gave her talent - writing - to a male character, the hideous "hero" Lyon Burke.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jun/05/childhood-reading

Claire Bloom reading from a selection of letters by Emily, Anne and Charlotte Brontë

Listen to a young Claire Bloom reading from a selection of letters by Emily, Anne and Charlotte Brontë in "The Brontë Sisters," a 1957 program submitted for consideration to the Peabody Awards.

All three Brontë sisters were accomplished writers: Charlotte is best known for Jane Eyre, Emily for Wuthering Heights and Anne for The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Their well-known, tragic story is told mostly through letters from 1841, 1845, 1848 and 1849 -- either to each other or to other recipients. Francis Steegmuller provides narrative cohesiveness.

This reading was part of a WNYC Program called WNYC Annual Book Festival, which ran for five years from 1953 to 1957.

54 years later, Ms. Bloom was interviewed on The Leonard Lopate Show. Listen to her interview here.
wnyc.archives/2011/may/23/bronte-sisters/

A weaver of imaginary tales

Daphne du Maurier was influenced mainly by women writers who were of the same opinions. She pays a huge tribute to Emily Bronte and acknowledges a big debt to all the Bronte sisters and Katherine Mansfield.

read more in the dailystar

The Irish roots of the Bronte sisters

The Irish roots of the Bronte sisters

BANBRIDGE, Northern Ireland—To most travellers who love Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre and the other novels of the Bronte sisters, the Bronte Parsonage Museum in the west Yorkshire village of Haworth is the mecca. But the story didn’t start there. It began in Ireland, in rural County Down, and now fans can visit what is called the Bronte Homeland.
It’s an auto tour, clearly signposted with brown shingles, along a 16-kilometre circuit south and east of Banbridge and in the shadow of the famous Mountains of Mourne. This is where Patrick Brunty (the name change came later) taught school (and romanced one of his students!) and preached his first sermon after he was ordained in 1807. “Patrick was a very talented man in his own right. The girls got the talent from the father; it was in the genes,” says Jason Diamond of Banbridge District Council, who helps publicize the tour. “Here’s a man who came from a two-room stone cottage in Ireland and he produced not one but three of the greatest authors in the canon of famous literature.”

Emily and her Dog, Keeper

I found these interesting websites about Emily Bronte:

Emily Bronte - Did the Writer of Wuthering Heights Have Asperger's Syndrome?

Emily Bronte - the Female Victorian Writer Who Wrote Wuthering Heights

http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/novel_19c/wuthering/diary_papers#letters

 

 

 

Emily's sketch of Keeper

Emily and her Dog, Keeper

The gift came with a warning. Keeper was capable of love and loyalty to a select few but vicious toward others. When Keeper fought another large dog, the local men stood around to watch the spectacle. Emily dove into the fight. She grabbed Keeper by the neck and dashed pepper into the faces of the furious beasts.

Haworth was a clean and orderly home. Tabby, the elderly servant made sure of that. When Keeper decided to take his naps on the counterpane of one of the beds, Tabby demanded that Emily intervene. The mastiff was warned.
Found again on the bed, Keeper took a stand. Emily hauled the reluctant dog off the bed. If you've ever seen a bull mastiff, that was a feat in itself. The insulted, infuriated dog turned on his mistress. He growled menacingly as she dragged him down the stairs. But Keeper met with worse fury than he probably imagined. Emily clenched her fists and pummelled the angry dog into submission.
Nursing Keeper's swollen eye, Emily let him know there were no hard feelings. The ever obedient animal followed her everywhere. Emily often sat on a rug and used Keeper as a back rest. She sketched pictures of him. And her attachment to Keeper was illustrated in Charlotte's portrayal of Shirley in the book of the same name about a character based on Emily.
info and pictures of bull mastiefs

Charlotte Brontë's Teenage "Catalogue of Books"

huffington post./charlotte-brontes-teenage-papers:

Charlotte Brontë was only 10 years old when she penned her earliest known work, and she was barely a teenager when she began writing in earnest -- at her own count she had written over 20 complete works by the time she was 14.

One list, which she has headed Catalogue of my Books with the periods of their completion up to August 3, 1830, gives 22 titles, including A Book of Rhymes, which, now lost, apparently contained 10 poems. She has made a few errors and omitted the titles of at least eight manuscripts, though -- so the actual count of what this young, prolific writer had composed by 1830 is closer to thirty works. Penned in a tiny but still legible hand, Brontë has written the list on a sheet of paper that measures just over four inches -- about the length of a golf pencil. [...]

Her miniscule handwriting is very precise, and she has confidently dated the third title, Leisure Hours, a Tale; and two fragments, to July 6, 1829. But Brontë was working from memory when she compiled the Catalogue, and the manuscript of Leisure Hours actually dates to June 29, 1830, nearly a year after her remembered date and only a few months before she wrote this list. Perhaps she merely recalled writing it in the summer, or simply misprinted the year. And how could this 14-year-old girl have known that we would be pouring over her Catalogue, which at the time she could only have imagined would be seen by her family, or which she perhaps wrote out only for her own use, over 180 years later?

The thought of some future scholars scrutinizing her juvenilia might have seemed even more unimaginable after she received a letter in 1837 from poet laureate Robert Southey (the twenty-one year old had written to him for advice about her poems), where he tells her that:

Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life: & it ought not to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure she will have for it, even as an accomplishment & a recreation. To those duties you have not yet been called, & when you are you will be less eager for celebrity.

Brontë later explained that she and her sisters "had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice" -- an unsurprising view for the age, and one which must have been particularly driven home by the poet laureate's letter. But in 1837 Southey did not expressly tell her to stop writing, and she was still as prolific (maybe even compulsive?) a writer as she had been as a teen. Her writing became her means of support, but she clearly wrote for more than that and the volume of her work from such a young age suggests to me that she was driven by that inexplicable itch to put pen to paper. In any case, we are lucky that she did not take heed to Southey's hints, and ten years later the ever-determined Brontë published Jane Eyre, albeit under the ambiguously gendered pen name Currer Bell.

June 2, 2011 Emily Brontes Piano brought to life

On abigails ateliers  I read: Just heard that this weekend Emily Brontes piano will be heard again, there are to be several performances at the Bronte Parsonage museum on Sunday (June 5th), this is only the second time it has been heard in public since the Brontes day. It will be played in situ so that visitors will hear the music as part of their visit, there is no extra charge other than the normal parsonage admission fee.
Pianist will be Maya Irgalina from the Royal college of Music.The music has been chosen from the Brontes music books and includes Beethoven and Handel.

Maria Bronte

When Maria was six years old, she was characterised as "grave, thoughtful, and quiet, to a degree far beyond her years".

Soon after their mother's death in 1821, Maria and her sisters grew up largely with one another, staying away from society. Maria read the newspaper and revealed her findings to her sisters,

Maria was said to have been a precocious child. According to her father, when he asked 10-year-old Maria "what...the best mode of spending time [was]", she answered, "By laying it out in preparation for a happy eternity.  He later said that he could speak with Maria on any popular topic of the day as fluently as with an adult, and regretfully recalled her "powerfully intellectual mind".

A printer from Thornton also remembered Maria correcting the proofs of one of Mr. Brontë's long poems.
According to Charlotte, she was rather serious and silent than otherwise, and Mrs. Gaskell described her as "delicate, unusually clever and thoughtful for her age, gentle, and untidy".

photos cowan bridge

On 1 July 1824, Maria, 10, and Elizabeth, joined the Cowan Bridge School with Charlotte and Emily following soon after in September. The food provided by the school was generally poorly cooked and unhealthy, and the cook was reported to be "careless, dirty, and wasteful". Both Maria and Elizabeth had just recovered from measles and whooping cough, and despite hunger, they often did not eat. The school register read: Maria Brontë, aged 10 ... reads tolerably. Writes pretty well. Ciphers a little. Works badly. Very little of geography or history. Has made some progress in reading French, but knows nothing of the language grammatically. Miss Andrews, a teacher there, admitted that Maria had a "fine imagination and extra-ordinary talents
In spring 1825, a typhoid epidemic swept through the school, causing the departure of almost a sixth of the students, between February and June 1825. By the winter of 1824, Maria's health was already deteriorating due to consumption. On 14 February 1825, Maria was withdrawn from the school., She lived at Haworth for three months before dying at the age of 11.

Patrick attributed Maria's death to a divine aspect: "She exhibited during her illness many symptoms of a heart under Divine influence. Died of decline".

According to Elizabeth Gaskell, Maria inspired the pious character Helen Burns in Jane Eyre, and a teacher on whom Miss Scatcherd was modeled subjected Charlotte's "gentle patient dying sister [Maria]" to "worrying and cruelty".

One of these fellow-pupils of Charlotte and Maria Bronte's, among other statements even worse, gives me the following:--The dormitory in which Maria slept was a long room, holding a row of narrow little beds on each side, occupied by the pupils; and at the end of this dormitory there was a small bed-chamber opening out of it, appropriated to the use of Miss Scatcherd. Maria's bed stood nearest to the door of this room. One morning, after she had become so seriously unwell as to have had a blister applied to her side (the sore from which was not perfectly healed), when the getting-up bell was heard, poor Maria moaned out that she was so ill, so very ill, she wished she might stop in bed; and some of the girls urged her to do so, and said they would explain it all to Miss Temple, the superintendent. But Miss Scatcherd was close at hand, and her anger would have to be faced before Miss Temple's kind thoughtfulness could interfere; so the sick child began to dress, shivering with cold, as, without leaving her bed, she slowly put on her black worsted stockings over her thin white legs (my informant spoke as if she saw it yet, and her whole face flashed out undying indignation). Just then Miss Scatcherd issued from her room, and, without asking for a word of explanation from the sick and frightened girl, she took her by the arm, on the side to which the blister had been applied, and by one vigorous movement whirled her out into the middle of the floor, abusing her all the time for dirty and untidy habits. There she left her. My informant says, Maria hardly spoke, except to beg some of the more indignant girls to be calm; but, in slow, trembling movements, with many a pause, she went down stairs at last--and was punished for being late.

A very young Elisabeth Taylor as Helen Burns

• Lowood School's headmaster and treasurer is Mr. Brocklehurst, a grim and pious man who runs the institution as cheaply as possible. When Jane first encounters him the fleeting impression she gets at first glance is that of "a black pillar!" (I, 4, p.31). Mr. Brocklehurst has an original in the Reverend William Carus-Wilson (1791-1859), the founder of The Clergy Daughters' School. Carus-Wilson was a Calvinist Evangelist, ordained in 1816. He was also the son of a prosperous landowner. Revelations concerning Carus-Wilson's running of the school caused much controversy in later years.
  The kindly superintendent Miss Temple who Jane develops a close friendship with has a real life counterpart in Ann Evans, who was the superintendent at Cowan Bridge school. Charlotte's favourable depiction of Miss Temple is considered a 'just tribute' to Ann Evans's character.
  
  Another Lowood staff member who was modeled on an actual person is Miss Scatcherd, the History and Grammar teacher who mercilessly bullies Jane's friend Helen Burns. Miss Scatcherd is apparently based on a Miss Andrews, who taught at Cowan Bridge school when the Bronte sisters attended, and Charlotte's portrayal of her is quite the opposite to that of Ann Evans. In fact, along with John Reed, Miss Scatcherd is arguably the most unpleasant character in the novel. In her Life of Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell alludes to the harsh behaviour of Miss Andrews, cruelties echoed in the Lowood section of Jane Eyre, such as when Helen is birched by Miss Scatcherd for having dirty fingernails, despite being unable to wash them due to the water being frozen that morning. Jane-Eyre---Charlotte-Brontes-Inspirations-for-Lowood-School&id=5778074
•  Rebecca Fraser also quotes in her biography on Charlotte Brontë (Vintage, 2003, p. 41), that the original Miss Scatcherd was also the writer (by the name A.H.) of one of the letters that the supporters of Carus-Wilson published around 1857 to discredit the way Charlotte Brontë had portrayed Cowan Bridge as Lowood School in Jane Eyre.
• More info: Brett Harrison, 'The real "Miss Temple'' ' BST 85 (1975)
• blackwell reference
• Susan (Susanna) Harben, born 16 June 1785. Christened 27 June 1785 at St Thomas in the Cliffs, Lewes. Died February 1848, "dear old aunt Sue" who did not marry and became matron of the Clergy Daughter's School at Kirkby, Lonsdale. This was the school Charlotte Bronte was sent to and, according to "Notes on the families of Chamberlain and Harben", Matron Harben was apparently the model for the Matron in "Jane Eyre". The picture to the right of Susan Harben is from "Notes on the families of Chamberlain and Harben".
  http://www.austenfamily.org/harben_main.html

• CB remembered Miss [Ann] Evans with gratitude and regard and pictured her as "Miss Temple" in Jane Eyre. Like Miss Temple, Miss Evans left school to be married on 6 July 1826 at Tunstall Church (...) Miss Evans was succeeded as superintendent of the school by Miss -or Mrs.- Harben, a close friend of Carus Wilson. The courtesy title of "Mrs." was given her of the tragic circumstance of her bridegroom having died in church on her wedding day. Mrs. Harben remained at school until 1843.
• This was the charge, too, that lay at the heart of Elizabeth Gaskell's epistolary feud with Rev Carus Wilson 20 years later. In 1857, Gaskell's biography of her late friend Charlotte Brontë suggested that Lowood, the nightmare school described in the early chapters of Jane Eyre, was a direct transcription of Cowan Bridge, the establishment attended by the Brontë sisters in the 1820s. Gaskell had since visited the place and found it dirty, serving up sour milk in which dust, dirt and goodness knows what floated. It was this "want of cleanliness", implied Gaskell, which had been responsible for the deaths of the two eldest Brontë girls.
  With a howl of indignation, the family of the school's founder, Rev Wilson, conducted a vicious letter campaign against Mrs Gaskell in which she was accused of being a fantasist. Battle lines were drawn, and a teary Mrs Gaskell marshalled her troops, including Charlotte Brontë's clerical widower, into responding on her behalf.  -Guardian-UK-news-

.wikipedia.

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Maria made the best of it in silence. Like all the members of her family she was endowed with unlimited power of resignation, and never did a complaint escape her lips; but she had an incurable disease. To add to her sufferings she was a prey to the malevolence of one of the teachers, who suspected her wrongly of affecting a mournful air to gain the compassion of her comrades. Maria died ten months after her arrival at Cowan Bridge and Elizabeth a few weeks later. Both sisters had succumbed to tuberculosis.

Charlotte and Emily returned to Haworth towards the end of 1825.
They, were two timid and studious little girls, happy only at home. Charlotte was the gayer and played and talked willingly when she felt at ease. Emily, almost never spoke, but she had so attentive and serious an air that it was difficult to forget her presence. They found at home their brother Branwell, already admired for a very precocious artistic sense, and Anne, who, in her gentleness and her gravity, must have reminded them of the sister Maria whom they had lost.
charlotte-bronte
Years later Mary Taylor told:

Charlotte used to speak of her two elder sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, who died at Cowan Bridge. I used to believe them to have been wonders of talent and kindness. She told me, early one morning, that she had just been dreaming; she had been told that she was wanted in the drawing-room, and it was Maria and Elizabeth. I was eager for her to go on, and when she said there was no more, I said, 'but go on! Make it out! I know you can.' She said she would not; she wished she had not dreamed, for it did not go on nicely; they were changed; they had forgotten what they used to care for. They were very fashionably dressed, and began criticising the room, etc.

01-0- 1825 The Bronte sisters left the Clergy Daughters School at Cowan Bridge

 

This punishment is described by Charlotte in Jane Eyre where reports by Mrs Gaskell, confirm this ill treatment. Furthermore, to Mr Williams, reader at Smith, Elder & Co, who congratulated her for the narrative vigour of her description, Charlotte, unusually vehemently, insisted that it was true, and that furthermore she had deliberately avoided telling everything so as not to be accused of exaggeration.

Indeed, it is difficult to think that Charlotte, having persistently repeated for twenty years the stories about the bad treatment inflicted on her sisters could have exaggerated or invented them. For example, the description given by an unidentified witness to Mrs Gaskell, of the little Maria who, very ill and having just received a suction cup placed on her right side by the doctor, rose suddenly on seeing Miss Andrews enter the room, and began to get dressed. Before she could slip into some clothing however, the mistress pulled her violently into the centre of the room, scolding her for negligence, and disorder, and punished her for being late, upon which Maria descended from the dormitory although she could hardly stand up. According to Mrs Gaskell, the witness spoke as if she saw it yet, and her whole face flashed out undying indignation.

http://www.readbookonline.net/read/9802/23864/

kleurrijk bronte sisters clergy-daughters-school-

Bancrofts from Yorkshire

On the weblog Bancrofts from Yorkshire you will find interesting information about Haworth. You can see a beautiful picture of George Bancroft who was born in 1860. One year before Parick Bronte, the father of the bronte Sisters died.  Jar, the owner of Bancrofts from Yorkshire  is telling over the interesting assortment of papers, letter and photographs he received.

A rather non-descript exercise book in the collection hold a nice secret....amongst dozens of recipes is one for Maria's  Wedding Cake, or "Bride Cake", as it was know then, the receipe you can see on his weblog.

Plea to get the bells to ring out

Bell-ringers are appealing for new members to help them keep ringing the changes.

The Haworth Guild of Bell Ringers has recently rung the first full peal of bells heard in the village since 1950. It was performed by a band of six ringers headed by captain Simon Burnett on the bells which were installed in 1846 at the time the Rev Patrick Brontë, father of the three famous Brontë sisters, was in charge of the church.

The peal took two hours and 46 minutes and involved 5,040 individual strikes to ring the “Plain Bob Minor”. “We felt elated and mentally exhausted,” said Mr Burnett, a retired Bradford Grammar School teacher whose wife, Sue, is also in the team. “We have a team of ten people but we need more so that we have enough strength in depth to allow us to go on and ring another peal,” he said The band rang the peal at St Michael and All Angels to celebrate the wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton.

“Undertaking a peal of this kind is quite an achievement for any bell-ringer as it requires total concentration for the whole of the time. Also there are not many towers around with a band of ringers capable of undertaking such a peal,” added Mr Burnett, who has been captain for 20 years. The peal marked the 19th since the first, which was rung in 1848, shortly after the six bells had been installed and paid for by subscription. Among the people who subscribed was Mr Brontë and his name is inscribed on one of the bells. The Rev Peter Mayo-Smith, the rector of Haworth Parish Church, said: “It was an amazing achievement and we hope that the people of Haworth thought that the sounding of the church bells in such a spectacular fashion enhanced their enjoyment of the royal wedding day.”
keighley news