Enjoy Christmas in Haworth this year.

Bronte story to be published for first time.

.keighleynewsbronte-story-to-be-published-for-first-time

Looking for Emily Brontë in the “Wild Workshop” of “Wuthering Heights”.

The image of Emily Brontë on the cover of Robert Barnard’s contribution to The British Library Writers’ Lives series is a retouched detail from the portrait of the three Brontë sisters, Anne, Emily, and Charlotte, painted by their brother Branwell. Two years ago at the Morgan Library’s Charlotte Brontë bicentennial, I stood in front of the original painting (circa 1834), with its folds, creases, and marks of wear. The contrast between the spectral Emily I saw then and this radiant girl is eerie. There’s color in the cheeks and brow and lips and the light of thought in the eyes. What had seemed a neutral expression now appears appealingly impertinent. It’s incredible to think this fresh-faced human being aglow with attitude was born 200 years ago, July 30, 1818, and died at 30 in 1848, a year after the publication of her only novel, which came into the world with its author concealed behind the pen name Ellis Bell. Wuthering Heights has been synonymous with mystery ever since.
Read all: towntopics/looking-for-emily-brontë-in-the-wild-workshop-of-wuthering-heights/

Inside the Parsonage - Charlotte's Room.

This was the main bedroom, used by different members of the family over the years, depending on who happened to be at home at any particular time. In the nineteenth century it was more common for people to share rooms and beds than it is today. The room was enlarged at the expense of the little room over the hall in 1850.

 Initially this was Patrick and Maria's room. Maria Brontë died here on 15 September 1821 at the age of thirty-eight. During her painful illness (probably uterine cancer) Mrs Brontë seldom complained, and Elizabeth Gaskell described how she would beg her nurse to 'raise her from the bed to let her see her clean the grate, "because she did it as it was done in Cornwall".'  After Mrs Brontë's death Aunt Branwell moved into this room, and Patrick Brontë occupied the room opposite. At this time Anne was still a baby, and she slept here with her aunt during much of her early childhood. When Aunt Branwell died in 1842 Emily returned from Brussels and remained at the Parsonage acting as housekeeper. Charlotte returned permanently from Brussels in early 1844 and may have taken over the room then. Anne left Thorp Green in June 1845 and probably shared with either Charlotte or Emily from this point onwards. After the deaths of her sisters Charlotte occupied this room, moving out occasionally if guests such as Elizabeth Gaskell came to stay. When Charlotte married she and her husband Arthur Bell Nicholls shared the room. Charlotte died here on 31 March 1855 at the age of thirty-eight. Elizabeth Gaskell described how the gravely ill Charlotte overheard her husband praying beside her: 'Oh!' she whispered forth, 'I am not going to die, am I? He will not separate us, we have been so happy.' bronte.org.uk/museum-and-library

How the stigma of contagion keeps alive Romantic notions of how the Brontës died.

The way we think about tuberculosis has changed dramatically since Robert Koch discovered the tubercle bacillus in 1882. As Katherine Byrne has explained in Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination, before Koch’s discovery “consumption” had often been thought of as a “mysterious, ethereal wasting disease”. It became “an identifiable bacterial infection” by the end of the 19th century, and this was also when the term “tuberculosis” started to replace “consumption”.

By the mid-20th century, the tuberculosis sufferer was no longer thought of as delicate or exceptional. Now that the infection could be clearly seen in X-rays, and treated with often brutal surgery, the tubercular body seemed much less Romantic. TB was a public health problem, and those who contracted it often faced isolation and social stigma.

Yet in this same period, biographies about the Brontës described their deaths from rather personal, individual illness, as though the discoveries made about the disease in the intervening century had never happened. The “consumption” from which the siblings died in these accounts often seems to have little in common with the disease which was by then commonly known as tuberculosis. 

Read all: theconversation

The Brontë Sisters in Auckland Discover Auckland Libraries rare heritage items.

Auckland is a long way from the wild moors of Yorkshire where Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë lived and wrote, but their first published work is part of the Heritage Collections at Auckland Libraries.

Currently, on display at Tāmaki Pātaka Kōrero - Central City Library is an extremely rare copy of the only collaborative work by the Brontë sisters – Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell (Pseudonyms for Charlotte, Emily and Anne respectively).

A collection of poems by all three sisters; the book was their first published work, released in 1846 before the production of the renowned novels that they’re remembered for today.

Only one thousand copies of Poems were printed, and as the Brontë sisters' fame grew, the rare books became highly valuable and sought-after items.

The copy now sitting in our Auckland library once belonged to Auckland lawyer and art patron Edmond Mackechnie, and was donated to Auckland Libraries by his widow in November 1902. It sits alongside Shirley, Charlotte’s second novel published in 1849.

Jane Wild, Manager of Auckland Libraries’ Heritage Collections is excited by the books on display. “Poems is a compelling example of the scope and value of our heritage collections,” she says.

Read all: aucklandcouncil.govt.nz

The Bronte parsonage garden in september.

And these bright flowers I love so well,

Verbena, rose and sweet bluebell,
Must droop and die away;
Those thick green leaves, with all their shade
And rustling music, they must fade
And every one decay.
         Anne Brontë

What a wonderful summer we have had: there is lots of new growth in the garden, all our new planting is thriving and the roses have been exceptional.

Here we are at the end of September torn in two directions: (A) should we be cutting back and putting the garden to bed for the winter? Or, (B), should we just keep on enjoying the late summer flowers, of which there are plenty?

Well, as usual, we have come to a compromise: the shady bed next to the graveyard is looking tired and in need of work so perhaps some new and more inspired planting there.  As next year we shall be commemorating Patrick Brontë and Haworth and also the bicentenary of his curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls, who served Patrick and Haworth for sixteen years, the new planting will honour these two men whom we hold in such high esteem.  This last few years we have had so many bicentenaries to celebrate and, in our way, Geoff and I have redesigned three of the smaller flower beds in memory of Charlotte, Branwell and Emily so, continuing this theme, we will have Patrick Brontë and Mr Nicholls in mind as we give this shady bed a new look.

Already we have cut back and cleared the most invasive plants and we will refresh the soil in readiness for the new plants we shall be introducing over the next couple of weeks.  Having done that, the other more colourful beds will be cut back as and when the time is right.  This autumn we are also planning to build up our bulb stock with view to having a colourful and showy garden in the spring.

I shall be having an operation on my hand in October which means I shall be unable to garden over the next few months.  Thankfully, these will be the winter months when we, in any case, tiptoe away and leave the garden to its rest.

Please don’t forget to look after the birds this winter; they bring us so much joy it is heart-breaking to think of them suffering in the harsh winter weather. Have a happy and healthy winter, and don’t forget to call in on the garden at any time. bronteseptember-in-the-parsonage-garden

On the last Friday of the month, our curatorial team host exclusive Brontë Treasures sessions, sharing some of our most special items up close in the research library with pre-booked guests. These sessions are the perfect gift for the Brontë fan in your life (or treat for yourself!) and we've just uploaded the slots for the first half of 2019. Head to our website to find out more. facebook/BronteParsonageMuseum

Beautiful Haworth

Such a beautiful picture on facebook

Thank you Catherine York

Brontë was no romantic child of nature but a pragmatic, self-interested Tory. Why is she still adored for her ‘screeching melodrama’ of a novel?

i-love-weblog-abigails-ateliers

Great article. Read all: theguardian/emily-bronte-strange-cult-wuthering-heights-romantic-novel
Far from writing “from the impulse of nature” and “the dictates of intuition” as Charlotte would have it, Emily Brontë was a richly resourced and highly self-conscious literary artist. In particular she was steeped in second-wave Romanticism, which she knew from her father’s fine collection of work by Shelley, Scott and Byron. Another, complementary, set of references came from the mystery and horror of German Romantic literature, which she read in the original. For while the little Wheelwrights were crying their eyes out, Emily was busy poring over her German grammar and reading spooky gothic tales by the likes of ETA Hoffmann. If Wuthering Heights struck contemporary critics as unrecognisably strange, it was only because then, as now, people had very short literary memories. In an age when Gaskell was gearing up to write her Condition of England novels, with their close attention to economic and social injustice in the industrial north, Brontë’s attachment to older gothic models (Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is an obvious one to set alongside Hoffmann) came over as strikingly odd. It wasn’t that Wuthering Heights was shockingly avant garde so much as wilfully retro, just like the deeply unfashionable clothes that Emily insisted on wearing in Belgium, despite the derisive sniggers of her more sophisticated classmates.

Despite there being two servants to look after the modestly sized parsonage and one modestly sized parson, Emily made a case for needing to be onsite as an extra housekeeper. And to offset her lack of income, she became an expert financial investor, studying newspapers to ensure that the family’s modest savings were placed in the best-performing railway stocks. She was cannily alert, too, to the way that the literary market worked. When the Brontës’ first book, a joint collection of poetry, sold only a handful of copies, she was quick to turn to the much more profitable genre of fiction, in the same way that Plath self-consciously set out to write a “potboiler” of a novel – The Bell Jar – as a break from the slow and thankless business of trying to sell her verse.

In the place of Emily Brontë the wuthery maiden of the moors, we need to put Emily Brontë the ruthlessly self-defined artist. I happen to hate that art – no many how many popularity polls it wins, and no matter how many literary critics point out how cleverly it is crafted, nothing will convince me that Wuthering Heights is anything but a hot mess. But the fact that it exists at all, written in such unpromising circumstances by a woman who was convinced of her right to produce it, has a certain magnificence. Emily Brontë is the patron saint of difficult women. For that alone, she is to be admired, if only grudgingly and from a safe distance.