Are we going to ‘The Brontës’?

My love of the Brontë Family – I have written this for my Dad, as it was he who sparked my interest many years ago. From: Write on Ejaleigh

It’s my birthday and wedding anniversary next week and I’ll be making my way to Haworth where I shall be staying at the Old Registry and visiting for the umpteenth time, the Brontë Parsonage Museum. My husband says that my face always lights up when we get our first glimpse of the Parsonage and that he has never seen me so happy as I am when I am there. I’m currently rereading Wuthering Heights as this year is the bicentenary of Emily’s birth. There’s been a bit of controversy in the Brontë Society too over the appointment of a literary partner. However, this has led to more interest than ever in the Brontë Family. But where did my love for the Brontë family begin and how has it remained so passionate for the past forty-odd years?

In the early 1960s, my Dad was taken on a school trip to Haworth and to the Brontë Parsonage Museum. He tells me that in those days the Brontë Industry had yet to take off and Haworth was very much as it was during the Brontë era. My Dad, a practical man, who had failed his 11+ and had to go to a secondary modern school, was transfixed by what he saw at the Parsonage. He found the story of how three sisters, living in such a remote location, became famous novelists, fascinating and it is true to say that he instantly resolved to discover more about them and read their works

Fast forward to the early 1970s, and when my Dad passed his driving test, he decided to take my Mother, my brother and I, to visit the same location where he had been inspired to discover more about the Brontë Family. I can vividly recall my first visit to the Parsonage, although I must have been only about three years of age. My parents later told me that, as we went around the Parsonage, I was able to tell them the contents of each room and what they signified, even though I had never been there before. My Mother took this as a spiritual sign that I had been ‘on this earth before’. My Father was more pragmatic and suggested that I was probably savvier than they had realised and had looked up the place in his AA Treasures of Britain book and managed to read some of it.  I really have no idea where it came from but all I knew was that going there always felt like I was going somewhere I loved and where I felt happy. You can read into that whatever you like. In those days, it was possible to see the Bonnell collection on display of many of the Brontë juvenilia. These tiny books transfixed me, and I decided that I was going to make my own tiny books at home. Yet much like my Dad, it had been the tragic nature of their lives that had really touched me.

I remember keeping my special entrance ticket and my Mother also bought me a Charlotte Brontë bookmark which had a poem on it;

Life, believe, is not a dream
So dark as sages say;
Oft a little morning rain
Foretells a pleasant day.
Sometimes there are clouds of gloom,
But these are transient all;
If the shower will make the roses bloom,
O why lament its fall?

I learnt this poem off by heart and as soon as I could read fluently, my Mum had bought me abridged versions of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. She also brought me library books concerning their lives to pour over. One I continued to renew, was Brian Wilkes, The Brontës and my absolute favourite Margot Peters Unquiet Soul, both published in 1975. In the Notes section of Unquiet Soul, I was fascinated by some brief genealogical details concerning the Irish and Cornish relatives of the Brontë family. I wondered if I could perhaps find out if there were any living relatives or if, as I really hoped, I could discover that I was related to the Brontës, hence my unexplained obsession with them?

My parents encouraged my obsession and I was regularly rewarded with membership of the Brontë Society despite my relatively young age. They arranged for me to visit Haworth annually and we would stay at the Black Bull Hotel, which in those days was run by a very welcoming couple who allowed me to sit on Branwell’s chair. I even attended Society events and a kind lady took me to the AGM meeting where I sat soaking up the atmosphere, believing that I was incredibly honoured and special to be allowed to participate, even though I had no idea what they were talking about. The Parsonage also allowed me, a very precocious but shy girl of eight, into their library to do my genealogical research. I showed them what I had produced, and they were so kind in offering me additional avenues to research. Somewhere in my Dad’s loft, I think there is still a very detailed Brontë family tree.

Then Kate Bush came along. With her supposed ballet training and love of the Brontës, she was always going to be a heroine of mine. I wrote to her and was ecstatic when I received a signed poster, which remained on my bedroom wall for many years. The first album my parents bought me was The Kick Inside and I would listen to Wuthering Heights repeatedly, dancing to it like some demented banshee.

As the years passed, my love never waned. We would still make our pilgrimage and as I was older, we would always incorporate a long walk across the moors to the Brontë Falls and Top Withens. For years I kept an empty aspirin bottle on my dressing table that contained the water from the falls as though it was some magical elixir.

I’m sure that part of the reason I chose to study French literature at Hull University was because of my Brontë obsession. In fact, during my year abroad, I would regularly visit Brussels and retrace the steps of the Brontës with my worn copy of Villette; my favourite Brontë novel. I went into a Catholic Church, lit many candles and pretended to confess my sins. I even had the notion that I should fall in love with a Frenchman to truly identify with Charlotte and Lucy Snowe. Yet it never happened.

Over the years I have discovered many other cultural passions, but nothing has ever come close to my obsession with the Brontës.  One of the benefits of our digital age is that I can discuss all things Brontë with other lovers via social media. There is a very supportive and welcoming group on Facebook. The Brontë Parsonage Museum is now far more involved than it ever was. There are regular events and some great opportunities such as participating in workshops led by Simon Armitage and Sally Wainwright.

My brother died unexpectedly in 2013 and he was always nagging me to do a PhD. I did start to produce my own study / book of the Brontë relic forgers TJWise and Clement Shorter. As part of my initial studies into this, I went to the Brotherton library and held an actual letter written by Charlotte Brontë. The Brotherton is an incredible Aladdin’s cave for Brontë lovers. They even have some of their collection online.  I then somehow ended going down the road of fiction writing instead. I’m sure that I will go back to that one day, when work commitments allow.

Last year on my birthday, my husband arranged an incredible surprise for me. I’d always wanted a reproduction Charlotte Bronte ring from the shop. However, it is very expensive as it needs to be custom made. We went into the shop and whilst I was there, my husband called me over. Then in front of me, he produced my own Charlotte ring. I ended up in tears, as did most of the shop staff!

So, next week I’m really looking forward once again to going, as we always called it in our family, to the Brontës.  I’ll go around the Parsonage at least twice, spend time, and quite a bit of money in the shop, visit the Church, walk down the cobbled Main Street and then sit just soaking up the atmosphere. I can’t always make it onto the moors now as I have a very bad back. But I’ll definitely give it a try.

Sometimes, there’s no place I would rather be.

I am going to make my own party with regard to Emily Bronte's 200 th birthday.

From 30-07-2018 I will dedicate a blog to Emily every week. I will read the two books on the photo and tell you everything I like about it. I own these books for a long time and they gave me a lot of pleasure. I love the books of biographer Willifred Gerin and I learned a lot about the poetry of Emily in "The Art of Emily Bronte". I start on 30-07,  the day of birth of Emily.

Something Terrific: Emily Brontë’s 200 Years.

Very interesting article. Read all on: sydneyreviewofbooks
in the article also a very beautiful photograph of the Haworth Churchyard. Photo: Simon Warner

1818. In that year the illustrious novelist Walter Scott discovered a box of lost Crown Jewels hidden in Edinburgh Castle and was rewarded with the title of baronet. Percy Bysshe Shelley pseudonymously published his sonnet ‘Ozymandias’ and Mary Shelley anonymously published her novel Frankenstein, which was influenced, her husband notes in the Preface, by the physician Erasmus Darwin’s experiments. Frankenstein was reviewed that year by Walter Scott. Wars of independence and colonialism were being fought around the globe. Karl Marx was born in Germany and would one day be a great reader of English literature. He was deeply affected by P. B. Shelley’s radicalism, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones was his favourite novel, he considered Scott’s Old Mortality a masterpiece, and by the early 1850s he was lauding Wuthering Heights for its condemnation of the middle classes. In 1818 Darwin’s grandson Charles was nine years old, a directionless boy (his father thought) who consumed Byron, loved books, and would go on to ‘read and reread until they could be read no more’ the novels of Scott, Jane Austen and Mrs Gaskell. He read Jane Eyre; we can assume he’d also read Wuthering Heights and would have recognised the author of this story of ferocious generational struggle as a kindred spirit. It’s not known if Emily Brontë ever saw a copy of The Voyage of the Beagle (1839), which foretold On the Origin of Species (1859); I like to think she did. And if not that book, then perhaps other works of scientific discovery, Georg Forster’s classic A Voyage Round the World (1777), or George Anson’s Voyage Around the World in the Years 1740-1744 (1748), as it’s known there was a copy in the library at nearby Ponden Hall to which the Brontës had access, or indeed anything by or about the Arctic explorer Sir William Edward Parry, whom Emily chose as one of her earliest heroes in the games she played with her siblings. Her Gondal poems were set in fantasy lands in the North and South Pacific, conceiving for the southern island bright Eden skies, palm trees alongside cedars and beeches, and ‘tropic prairies bright with flowers’.  The Brontë Parsonage Museum has a family copy of Goldsmith’s Modern and Ancient Geography, with Gondal place names added to the index, most likely by Emily. In her own imagination she was well travelled. Her French teacher thought that she possessed the disciplined mind and superior will of a great navigator.

Sam Baker journeyed north to uncover the wild and unconventional life of the Wuthering Heights,

Ahead of Emily Brontë's bicentenary Sam Baker journeyed north to uncover the wild and unconventional life of the Wuthering Heights author.

Postbox tribute to mark Brontë anniversary.

A special postbox paying tribute to author Emily Brontë has been put up in Yorkshire to celebrate the bicentenary of her birth. The novelist was born on July 30, 1818 in the village of Thornton on the outskirts of Bradford.

And with the help of students from Thornton Primary School, Royal Mail unveiled the postbox in Market Street in the village yesterday. It features quotes from some of the author’s most famous works, including Wuthering Heights and her poetry. Mark Street, head of campaigns at Royal Mail, said: “As one of the guardians of the written word, we relish the opportunity to celebrate the life and times of Britain’s most treasured writers. “The incredible impact that Emily Brontë’s work has had on our culture is undeniable, and we are delighted to honour her work in this way.”

Rebecca Yorke, head of communications at The Brontë Society, said: “It’s perfect that Royal Mail has chosen to commemorate the bicentenary of Emily Brontë in this way.

“Correspondence played an important part in the lives of Emily and her sisters. 

“Their letters have made a significant contribution to what we know about them. “Emily spent most of her life at the Parsonage in Haworth, but we’re delighted that Thornton, where Emily was born, is also taking part in the bicentenary celebrations. We hope residents and visitors alike will enjoy the commemorative postbox.” 

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thetelegraphandargus

Cults, Misfits, and a Hot Mess: Is Emily “the Other Brontë?”

A few days ago I began writing this piece about Emily Brontë’s status as the so-called “other Brontë”, intending to post it in time for her 200th birthday on 30th July. However, the day after I began drafting the piece, an article entitled “The strange cult of Emily Brontë and the ‘hot mess’ of Wuthering Heights” written by Kathryn Hughes for The Guardian appeared and addressed the same issue, but rather than asking questions, the article made massive and derogatory assumptions about everything from Emily herself to Wuthering Heights, Brontë fans, and female academics in addition to a very strange comparison between Brontë and American poet Sylvia Plath. Even several days later, I’m not really sure what the point of Hughes’ article was other than to attack a beloved author in the run up to the celebration of her bicentenary.
Read all: brontebabeblog

29th June: A Life Changing Date For Charlotte Brontë.

June the 29^th was a momentous day for Charlotte Brontë at both ends of her life – and for two very different reasons. In 1816 it was the day that she was baptised, whilst in 1854, sadly just a year before her untimely death, it was the day she married.

The wedding took place at eight o’clock in the morning on 29^th June 1854.

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brontesisters/Mr. Nicolls in love with Charlotte Bronte 

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Lyricism of Emily’s work, landscape, and adaptations, and panel sessions.

The Brontë Society’s 2018 conference will celebrate the life and work of Emily Brontë in her bicentenary year. Variously described as visionary, determinedly private, and singular, Emily is the most enigmatic of the Brontë siblings, and this conference affords us opportunities to delve deeper into the complexities of her personality and her limited but extremely influential literary output. 

We’re delighted to announce three keynote speakers: Professor Stevie Davies, novelist, literary critic, biographer and historian, who has published four books on Emily Brontë; Professor John Bowen, Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of York, and contributor to BBC2's Being the Brontes, and most recently Radio 4’s In Our Time, discussing Wuthering Heights; and Dr Hila Shachar, a member of the Centre for Adaptations at De Montfort University, whose research focuses on the adaptation of literary works and cultural afterlives. 

The keynotes will address, respectively, the lyricism of Emily’s work, landscape, and adaptations, and panel sessions will engage with a broad range of topics. Full programme details will be released in March.
 
The location for this year’s conference is spectacular York, a city steeped in ancient history, and renowned for its exquisite architecture, quaint cobbled streets, and iconic York Minster.
The conference venue is the elegant 4-star York Marriott Hotel, located just outside the city centre, with views over the historic York Racecourse.bronte-200/emily-bronte-a-peculiar-music 

Toy lion played with Emily and her siblings as childresn.

Source: facebook/photo/harryhartley

facebookElizabethGaskellsHouse/roses 

Brontë sisters’ childhood home.

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

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Emily Bronte as an oddball?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

August, September 1842

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

The Pensionnat

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

Elizabeth Brontë – More Than A Footnote

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

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

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

Charlotte would “sit alone in the parlour with just the sound of the clock ticking".

Photograph from  facebook/ Harry Hartley

For many years the Barracloughs were a very important and well-known family of clock-makers, and Emily Brontë even used the name Mosley Barraclough in Wuthering Heights.  John Barraclough (1773-1835) lived in this house and, when the lead weights in the upstairs window were replaced during renovation, his signature, found on the back of the wooden cover piece, can be seen in the downstairs bar along with the original front door key.

There is a John Barraclough clock in the Parsonage belonging to Patrick Brontë and Ellen Nussey, Charlotte’s great friend, wrote how, after the death of her siblings, Charlotte would “sit alone in the parlour with just the sound of the clock ticking.”

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