New exhibition celebrates life of Branwell Brontë.

A new exhibition about Branwell Brontë has opened at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth to celebrate his bicentenary. It is curated by the poet Simon Armitage and explores Branwell's history through a series of writings, drawings and possessions. At the heart of the exhibition is a letter which Branwell wrote to the poet William Wordsworth. The letter was written in January 1837 when he was 19-years-old. He enclosed one of his own poems with the letter, expressing the hopes and dreams of a young romantic, intent on building 'mansions in the sky'. Wordsworth did not reply. itv/new-exhibition-celebrates-life-of-branwell-bronte

I received a nice reaction.

I received this nice reaction from Anushka Nair

I always love to meet people who are as much interested

in the Bronte Sisters as I am

Anushka, I wish you a lot of succes and pleasure with your weblog

I know how much knowledge and fun it will give to you

And I am certainly going to follow it!

Anushka Nair

This is amazing. I have been keeping myself updated on this blog for years - I learned a lot about the Bronte sisters here. I haven't had the chance to say how fascinating all of this is. And it's really, really hard to find any fanbase or community dedicated to the Bronte sisters, especially one that focuses on the minute details of their life!

I've started a web-blog on the Bronte sisters, too. My blog also focuses on the Bronte fan community, in addition to the the Bronte family's lives. It is at whatsupwithbrontemania.wordpress.com. I would love if you could check it out, as I'm just starting! My guiding question for this blog is - what drives the strange obsession with these Victorian-era-Yorkshire-countryside trio of authors?

This is a wonderful blog. Keep writing!! :)

‘Take courage, Charlotte, take courage’.

Anne Brontë’s final words to her sister Charlotte were ‘Take courage, Charlotte, take courage’, and they have proved to be inspirational not only to her sister, but to people across the world over a century and a half later. Read all on this beautiful article of Nick Holland: annebronte/take-courage-the-final-words-of-anne-bronte/

Flowers for Anne's birthday.

The Brontë Society

Flowers for Anne's birthday

Thank you very much to the person who sends them every year -

they are much loved

Branwell called and chaired a meeting of the inhabitants of the township in the school room to petition Parliament to repeal the Poor Law Amendment Acts of 1834

Kimberly Eve is 

a writer and Independent scholar of Victorian studies

In this article she is writing about Branwell Bronte

With his father’s support, on 22 February, 1837, Branwell called and chaired a meeting of the inhabitants of the township in the school room to petition Parliament to repeal the Poor Law Amendment Acts of 1834 whose measures were just beginning to be put into practice in Yorkshire. Charles Dickens Oliver Twist comes to mind. The Act ended outdoor relief, which had been administered locally by the parish vestry and had supplemented the incomes of the poor during periods of unemployment for need. Poor Law unions, administered centrally by commissioners in London, were formed by parishes and those who through old age, infirmity or unemployment were no longer able to support themselves could only obtain assistance by residing in the workhouse. Sadly, this also meant separation of the sexes: separating husbands and wives, parents and children which angered everyone. Patrick and Branwell addressed the assembled crowds, ‘upon that occasion neither speakers nor hearers had met to promote the interest of party, but to plead the cause of the poor.’ Branwell read and moved the petition, which was carried unanimously and sent to one of the local members of Parliament and the Archbishop of Canterbury for presentation to the Houses of Commons and Lords respectively. News coverage included The Times making Patrick Bronte a bit more popular than he liked.

 It is fair to say that the life of Branwell Bronte was a turbulent one; known for his drinking and career failings in the railway and somewhat as an author. He was never as successful as his famous sisters. In childhood, Branwell shined as the golden boy for his poetry and writing but in adulthood he was overshadowed and surpassed by his sisters. He struggled to publish his own works as an adult, even with the help of his sisters; it just never came to fruition. He mainly translated others works for publication or had the odd poem published in a yearly magazine. The only way Branwell’s poems would be published was amongst the poems of his sisters. However, Branwell longed to have editions and volumes of his poetry and writing published as his sisters would soon enjoy.

Read all: kimberlyevemusings

library.leeds/collections/branwell bronte

Ever wondered what happens #behindthescenes while we're closed?

Brontë Parsonage     

#BehindTheScenes day 4. Mr #Bronte's silk neckerchief is inspected for any signs of change in condition. #Haworth

Brontë Parsonage     

Day 3 #BehindtheScenes: the Bronte family clock has gone to visit the horologist #Haworth #stopalltheclocks

Brontë Parsonage ‏     

Charlotte's dress being carefully removed from display #BehindtheScenes #Haworth

Brontë Parsonage     

Ever wondered what happens #behindthescenes while we're closed? We put the house to bed. Here's the dining room - shrouded in tissue.

Author and broadcaster Peggy Hewitt said she could not recognise the real Brontë family members from their fictional versions in To Walk Invisible.

A BRONTËLAND icon has blasted the BBC’s Christmas movie about the Brontës. Author and broadcaster Peggy Hewitt said she could not recognise the real Brontë family members from their fictional versions in To Walk Invisible.

She blasted screenwriter Sally Wainwright’s efforts – much praised by Brontë enthusiasts and local councillors – to portray the Brontë story as gritty reality rather than chocolate box nostalgia.
Peggy Hewitt wrote These Lonely Mountains, widely regarded as the definitive book about the Haworth moors and their links to the Brontës, in the 1980s.

She went on to become a successful TV, radio and children’s book writer, and These Lonely Mountains was republished in 2004 and last year as Brontë Country: Lives and Landscape.
A life member of the Brontë Society, Peggy currently lives close to her family in Scotland but says her “heart and soul” belong to the Brontë moors.  Like millions of viewers Peggy sat down to watch To Walk Invisible, filmed last summer at Haworth locations, during the Christmas break.

She said “When Sally Wainwright described the Brontës as the 'ultimate dysfunctional family' it was clear what we were in for, but even so To Walk Invisible was a shock.”

ADVERTENTIE

inRead invented by Teads

Peggy was also displeased with Charlotte’s portrayal in the film as a woman with a “constant pinched mean look”. She said: “I wondered how Ellen Nussey, a welcome streak of life in this film, could have formed a close relationship with this apparently dried-old woman. “Emily was a free spirit, but why did she have to look like a corpse? The true genius of the family, her rapport with Branwell came a bit late in the film. “And what about that moment on the moors when Emily was reading her sublime points to Anne? It could have been very moving, but background mood music was far too loud.” Peggy accepted the Brontë family did suffer, with no mother and coping with their brother’s problems, but added: “Branwell was vastly overplayed.

“No doubt they had their ups and downs, as families do, but this bound them together, not sundered them, as appeared in the film. “The Brontës were, against all odds, a brave family, a functional family, and the real story is as fascinating as any of their books.” Peggy also blasted the “mild and ineffectual” screen version of the writers’ father, the Rev Patrick Brontë, who she claimed was a fiery Irishman, Cambridge graduate, forward-looking social reformer and keen supporter of his children.
keighleynews

Take Courage: Anne Brontë and the Art of Life.

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

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

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

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

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

Two new biographies of Anne Bronte.

New 2017 books are presented in The Irish Independent:

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

Lucasta Miller reviews the biography in The Sunday Times:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nick Holland also has an interesting weblog about Anne. annebronte

Happy New Year.

First impressions: To walk invisible.

I was looking forwards to see "To walk Invisible". The new BBC adaptation of the life of the Bronte Sisters. Tonight it was the time.

bbc.co.uk

First impressions

• Beautiful clothes. Did they wear such beautiful clothes?
• In my imagination Emily is completely different from the actrice playing Emily.
• Charlotte and Anne I found well chosen.
• The house. Great to see all the rooms, to walk with the sisters through it.
• Flossie and Keeper. Love it.
• Big part giving to the situation of Branwell. To my taste a little to much.

I read in radiotimes

Meanwhile, the subject of the drama as a whole is a little unfocused – to some extent it’s chronicling the downfall of Branwell as he succumbs to self-pity and drunkenness (after a doomed affair with an older woman at his tutoring job), but it’s also concerned with the sisters’ literary success and attempts to get published. Doubtlessly the two threads were inextricably linked in real life, but somehow in this case the two halves to the story feel a little disjointed, the sisters’ great literary triumph lacking some of the emotional intensity of their scenes with Branwell and thus feeling a little flat.

I agree.

• Beautiful walks on the moors.
• I loved the meeting between Anne, Charlotte and George Smith and William Smith Williams. I always love this part of their story and it is beautiful filmed.
• I wonder, if you don't know much of the Bronte Sisters and you see the movie, will you understand them better? Will you understand what they mean for literature?

I am going to look again

But these are my first impressions

Merry Christmas to all my readers.

Christmas Eve

Max Nicoll ‏     

Christmas Eve in Haworth

Music On Christmas Morning - Poem by Anne Bronte

Music I love--but never strain
Could kindle raptures so divine,
So grief assuage, so conquer pain,
And rouse this pensive heart of mine--
As that we hear on Christmas morn,
Upon the wintry breezes borne.

Though Darkness still her empire keep,
And hours must pass, ere morning break;
From troubled dreams, or slumbers deep,
That music KINDLY bids us wake:
It calls us, with an angel's voice,
To wake, and worship, and rejoice;

To greet with joy the glorious morn,
Which angels welcomed long ago,
When our redeeming Lord was born,
To bring the light of Heaven below;
The Powers of Darkness to dispel,
And rescue Earth from Death and Hell.

While listening to that sacred strain,
My raptured spirit soars on high;
I seem to hear those songs again
Resounding through the open sky,
That kindled such divine delight,
In those who watched their flocks by night.

With them I celebrate His birth--
Glory to God, in highest Heaven,
Good-will to men, and peace on earth,
To us a Saviour-king is given;
Our God is come to claim His own,
And Satan's power is overthrown!

A sinless God, for sinful men,
Descends to suffer and to bleed;
Hell MUST renounce its empire then;
The price is paid, the world is freed,
And Satan's self must now confess
That Christ has earned a RIGHT to bless:

Now holy Peace may smile from heaven,
And heavenly Truth from earth shall spring:
The captive's galling bonds are riven,
For our Redeemer is our king;
And He that gave his blood for men
Will lead us home to God again.

kleurrijkbrontesisters  The Bronte Sisters and their Christmas holidays.

kleurrijkbrontesisters/christmas-holidays-of-year-1842

I think Charlotte would have been a champion tweeter.

What would the Brontës be like today - queens of social media, perhaps?

“Emily would have detested social media,” says Chloe. “She wouldn’t have adapted.

“I think Charlotte would have been a champion tweeter. Although I have a romantic attachment to Emily and her wildness, you have to admire Charlotte Brontë for her pragmatism, her foresight and determination to bring their voices to the world.” Read more: huffingtonpost

The 200th birthday of Branwell next year.

In an attempt to “get to know Branwell”, Simon Armitage, the Huddersfield-born poet and playwright, has been appointed as a creative partner to the Brontë Parsonage Museum and will help to spend a £97,702 Arts Council grant to celebrate the 200th birthday of Branwell next year, and that of Emily the year after.

The Parsonage Museum’s exhibition, curated by Armitage, is called Mansions in the Sky. It opens in February and will feature Branwell’s writings, drawings and possessions. thetimes

The Happy Cottagers - Poem by Patrick Branwell Bronte

The linnets sweetly sang
On every fragrant thorn,
Whilst from the tangled wood
The blackbirds hailed the morn;
And through the dew
Ran here and there,
But half afraid,
The startled hare.

Read all: poemhunter