June Weekend - 4

Helen MacEwan writes -

Coming back to reality (and the office) after a weekend in Haworth, I think I know something of what the Brontë siblings must have felt on returning to their teaching duties after a holiday at the Parsonage, exchanging literary enthusiasms on moorland walks!

It is of course not just the organised events, good as they are, that make the Brontë Society's June AGM weekends so memorable and bring members back year after year. It is the combination of the setting - Haworth and the rolling moors around, with long summer days to walk on them - and the opportunity to meet lots of other members. It may not be the best weekend of the year for communing in solitude with the spirits of Charlotte or Emily, but no-one who welcomes the chance to talk over Brontë passions with like-minded enthusiasts on café terraces in Main Street, in the lounge bar of the Old White Lion or while striding over the moors, should miss the June AGM.

Brontë Society members are such a varied lot, coming from such a range of ages, nationalities, occupations and backgrounds. Some grew up in the area, others run overseas branches of the Society at the other side of the world, in America or Australia. Some were brought to the Parsonage by creative projects requiring research (I met a choreographer who has created a ballet about the Brontës and a playwright who's written a play about them). Each member has his or her specific interest or story to tell. There's the lady who has a Brontë room in her house, and the member who's amassed a collection of around 500 Brontë-related books over the years. I spoke to couples who had met through the Society and people who'd formed some of their best friendships with other members.

The 2007 AGM weekend followed the usual pattern. By Friday evening the Haworth Bed and Breakfasts were bursting at the seams. The meat of the weekend was on Saturday, with a morning lecture, a garden tea party, the AGM itself, and a discussion on "Brontë lives" by the biographers Juliet Barker, Lyndall Gordon, Rebecca Fraser and Edward Chitham (biographer of Anne). Barker, Gordon and Fraser told the audience why they had believed that new lives of the Brontës were necessary. They had all wanted to demolish myths and stereotypes created by previous biographers, starting with Mrs Gaskell. Juliet Barker, who had approached her subjects as a historian rather than an English literature expert and chosen to write about the whole family instead of an individual member of it, had in particular set out to correct the stereotypes of Patrick, Branwell and of course Haworth itself.

The programme on Sunday was lighter: readings in the morning and an afternoon walk on the moors, followed by a film. Interestingly for Selina Busch and myself, as representatives of the Brussels group, the readings this year included a substantial Belgian component: one of Emily's Belgian essays and William Crimsworth's first impressions of Belgium in The Professor.

The 2008 AGM will be held over the weekend of 7 - 8 June.

Below, tea at Ashmount -

June Weekend 2

Selina Busch writes:

For those who weren’t there, here are my recollections of the Brontë Society AGM I attended last weekend.

I had been looking forward to it so very much, not having been there last year; I have attended several AGM events in previous years and come to know and love so many friendly people. It was mainly because of the people I wanted to go back to Haworth, and to my beloved England.

When the bus from Keighley slowly approached the Haworth valley, and I saw the village appear on the horizon, I knew I would soon be at my favourite place; my ‘home from home’.

I felt terribly excited and happy to be back again, having last seen it two years ago; but at the same time, it was all so familiar, it seemed I had seen the pleasant rolling hills and walked the cobbled Main Street only the day before…

Friday kicked off at 2.00 pm with an interesting and entertaining talk by Victoria Glendinning, called Writers and their Houses. She discussed how the research of biographers and the curiosity of us readers makes us want to know all about the private lives, including the homes, of our favourite writers. Since the unromantic reality frequently fails to satisfy our curiosity and preconceptions, we hope to get closer to the creative origin of the fictional world of the writer by visiting their homes, now often turned into museums or owned by the National Trust. She dwelt in particular on the special atmosphere of the Brontë Parsonage, how small it is, and on Haworth.

In the evening, the AGM weekend saw its first Book Auction. A private collection, by Brontë society member Arthur B. Walker who died last year, was being auctioned and anyone who was interested could bid for books. My M. Heger, Brian Speak, with whom I did readings from Villette when he came over to Brussels in April, bought a lot of items; he told me he collects Brontë books. I only bought two, but I’m very pleased with my purchases. (Emily Brontë, by Winifred Gerin and The Brontës and their Background: Romance and Reality, by Tom Winnifrith)

The following day saw the usual Saturday programme of a lecture, church service, tea at Ashmount and the AGM. The lecture this year was given by Scottish professor Douglas Gifford, and was called: Border cousins: James Hogg and Emily Brontë.

James Hogg made his reputation in 1824 with his popular novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (a gothic novel about religious mania with a psychopathic hero). Gifford explored the thesis that Emily, who would surely have read his work, took inspiration from characters of folklore, such as the ‘Brownie’, for the creation of Heathcliff.

This year is the 150th anniversary of Mrs. Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë, and during the annual service in the Parish Church, we were treated to an excellent address by Patsy Stoneman about the enormous impact of this ‘novel-like’ biography, and some readings of the book by Jean Bull. Afterwards we had a pleasant afternoon tea at Ashmount, made even more agreeable by the lovely weather we had been blessed with all weekend, and the setting of the beautiful garden. Time passed by very quickly, as it always does on this busy day, and we had to rush off to the AGM, which started at 4.30. It was, on the whole, business as usual, but some eyebrows were raised with regard to the Society's continuing financial deficit and the new development plans, with seemed to cause concern to some members.

I had been looking forward all day to the evening programme, which I anticipated would be the highlight of the weekend. At 7.30 we were gathering in the West Lane Baptist church once again (all the comfy chairs were quickly occupied!) for a panel discussion chaired by Justine Picardie, featuring some big names in the Brontë biography world: Lyndall Gordon, Edward Chitham, Rebecca Fraser and Juliet Barker, no less, were all present at the table.

These great biographers, whose works I have read, discussed their first recollection of reading Mrs. Gaskell’s Life. We heard what new grounds, left untouched by Mrs. Gaskell, they wanted to explore, and what impact this important biography had and continues to have on subsequent biographers. The question time after the discussion ended with the very good question “What would have happened if Mrs Gaskell had NOT written the Life, and who did the panel think might have written the first biography of Charlotte Brontë?” They all had their own interesting and daring ideas, which set us thinking in our turn. The whole evening had been full of exhilarating and thought-provoking ideas and views. As far as I was concerned the talk could have been allowed to go on even longer. Open forum discussions have proved to be very popular in recent years, and this was no exception. There can’t be enough of this kind of events, where individual members have the opportunity to voice their own thoughts about the Brontës.

Afterwards, I somewhat nervously approach Juliet Barker, introduced myself and told her about our new Brussels group. She said it sounded like a very good idea. I suggested she look at our website and the report on our group in the BS Annual Report....

Readings also are one of my favourite events, as the original work still speaks volumes, and on Sunday morning Angela Crow hosted readings from the Brontës, read by Ian and Catherine Emberson, Robert Barnard, Helen Newman, Richard Wilcocks and Alexandra Lesley, who helped to transport us to another world.

Sadly, this was the last event I was able to attend; I was unable to join the others on one of the walks organised in the afternoon since I had to catch my plane back to the Netherlands.

It had been a whirlwind of emotions for me, full of discussions, readings, talking to friends, listening to people, looking, exploring, thinking…

Pure exhaustion, once back home, seemed like a very fair price to pay after such a brilliant weekend!

* more on the June Weekend soon...

James Hogg (The Ettrick Shepherd) below -

June weekend - Sunday Walks

A Walk to Oxenhope and Marshlands

Margaret Berry writes:

Three weeks ago, sunshine and blue skies (!!!) greeted Brontë Society members for the AGM weekend Sunday walk  to Oxenhope.  I have walked the route many times, and it has the happiest connections to the courtship and wedding of Charlotte Brontë and Arthur Bell Nicholls.  We walked up a narrow walled path to Sowdens, the home for twenty years of  the Rev W Grimshaw, and saw the  ancient barn used by John and Charles Wesley to preach.  We had to search for the commemorative plaque, which was covered in rambling roses.

Our group followed the path across the medieval  field systems, to Old Oxenhope Farm,  the route Rev Joseph Grant and Arthur Bell Nicholls walked on his June wedding morning.  There was much discussion and conjecture about their arriving at church with boots and cassocks  covered in wet mud.  

The long views across the valley are quite spectacular on a sunny day,  and compensate for the nettles and boggy ground. 

                                                    

We paused to look at Marshlands, the home of Rev Grant, and its neighbour, the Old Grammar School, attended  briefly by Branwell  Brontë to study Greek. The buildings are substantially the same as they were one hundred and fifty years ago.

A steep field led down from Bent’s house,  to the Oxenhope railway line - the  whole area was used in the iconic film The Railway Children.   Our group followed the valley path to the medieval pack horse bridge, pausing to watch two trains on the Worth Valley line. Then it was back to Haworth.

The AGM weekend entertained many more new visitors from Brussels, and we all had the opportunity to talk to them on the walk, and hope to see them  again next year.

A Walk with Ian Dewhirst


IMS writes:

 It was with the anticipation of a very interesting afternoon that members met with local historian and retired librarian Ian Dewhirst for a ‘walking/talking’ tour of the local graveyards. With his inimitable style Ian took the group to various graves in the old churchyard where they were regaled with fascinating stories. One memorial stone showed that Elizabeth Hartley had hoped to escape the harsh realities of life in nineteenth century Haworth for a new life in Australia - only to perish with two hundred and seventy other souls on the ship ‘London’. Isaac Constantin emigrated to Canada and became an ordained minister but not before he had established himself as a local poet in Haworth – one of his published poems stretched to one hundred and ninety seven pages!

The Haworth of the past was not exempt from scandal and intrigue for Ian related - round their grave - the story of the Sagar family. Mr Sagar was master of the local workhouse and his wife, who was said to procure girls to visit the couple’s bedroom, was his assistant. Mr Sagar went on trial in York for his wife’s murder by poisoning but he was perhaps saved from the gallows by the local physician, Dr Milligan, who gave evidence three times at the trial - each time his story was different - and Mr Sagar was acquitted.

Haworth’s church graveyard is certainly interesting and certainly very crowded so it is not surprising that Benjamin Herschel Babbage - the inspector who conducted an enquiry and later published a comprehensive and damning report on Haworth’s water supply and sanitation arrangements -  recommended the closure of that graveyard. It was an informative afternoon poking about amidst those ancient graves which showed that life in byegone Haworth was very hard, with whole families dying within months of one another and parents having to cope with the loss of one child after another.

In the Methodist graveyard and the new cemetery the group were brought more up to date as they were shown graves of people who could be called celebrities of a more modern day Haworth - ‘Harry the Hat’ and the balloonist Lily Cove.

Brontë Society June weekend 2022?

 A number of people have been in touch, particularly members from North America, wondering whether there will be a meet-up in Haworth in the second week of June (Friday 10th/Saturday 11th). The June weekend was usually described as 'AGM weekend', but this year the AGM will be held in the autumn, as it was in 2021. There are no official events planned, but according to information in recent emails to this blog, some members will be meeting unofficially. It appears that Zoom contact, useful during the pandemic, can not substitute for in-the-flesh contact. Please get in touch if you have definite plans. 

Brontë Society June Weekend 2018

This article is reproduced with the permission of the Brussels Brontë Blog

Helen MacEwan writes:

Several members of the Brussels Brontë Group attended the Brontë Society’s 2018 weekend of events in Haworth, this year celebrating Emily Brontë’s bicentenary. Our group included Guy and Evy Desloovere-Van de Voorde with their 8-month-old son Arthur Branwell – his first visit to the village of the family that inspired his name!

Ann Dinsdale's presentation

After an invitation to join Brontë Society trustees for chat, tea and cake in a restaurant in Main St, the weekend’s events kicked off with a presentation on the Brontë Parsonage Museum, now 90 years old. Ann Dinsdale, Principal Curator, and Jane Sellars, a former Director, talked us through highlights in the Museum’s history. Ann Dinsdale is the author of numerous books including At Home with the Brontës: The History of Haworth Parsonage & Its Occupants and The Brontës at Haworth.

All Things Gothic

After dinner we were regaled by ‘an evening of all things Gothic’, a highly dramatic and hilarious one-woman entertainment by the amazing Lucy Adlington of the History Wardrobe, who commented on – and in some cases modelled – the costumes on show. Her romp through the Gothic in literature was interlarded with readings from the Brontës’ novels and other works such as Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. She is the author of several books on costume history.

Lucy Adlington, The Gothic Lady

The Eccentricities of ‘Woman’s Fantasy’

Saturday, the day of the Society’s AGM, is always packed with events. The first of these was a lecture on The Eccentricities of ‘Woman’s Fantasy’… and Heathcliff by Carol Dyhouse, a social history professor from the University of Sussex. Among other questions she looked at why Heathcliff is so often seen as a romantic hero and how far, if at all, this can be attributed to the novel itself as opposed to reinventions in screen versions of the book.

Carol Dyhouse

Brontë Society Annual General Meeting

From the Gothic heroes of the Brontës’ novels and women’s fantasies to a sermon in the church where their father preached: the Brontë Society weekend certainly offers variety and a range of experiences. On Saturday morning – another tradition of the weekend – was a church service, led by the current Rector of Haworth, dedicated to the Brontës in the (rebuilt) church of St Michaels & All Angels. After lunch it was time for the Society’s AGM. The Society currently has around 1,800 members and employs over 40 staff at the Museum, which has just made a successful bid for significant Arts Council Funding as a National Portfolio Organisation. Possible future projects were discussed, for example the idea of turning a Victorian underground reservoir in Haworth into a centre for women’s writing. The perennial question of when the Museum is to build toilets for visitors also came up – when doesn’t it! At present visitors have to use the ones in the car park, threatened with closure.

The day wound up with a quiz hosted by Lucy Mangan, journalist and co-presenter of the BBC documentary Being the Brontës (March 2016). The competitors included museum staff and Society members.

Private View

Sunday was also a busy day. As usual, the museum opened at 9 a.m. for a private viewing by members. A highlight, continuing from last year which was Branwell Brontë’s bicentenary, is the recreation of Branwell’s bedroom, curated by creative partner Simon Armitage in collaboration with museum staff and the production team of the film To Walk Invisible. The installation, supposed to present the room as it might have been in the late 1830s when Branwell had ambitions to be an artist, features an unmade bed and artworks and other objects scattered in disorder.

The morning programme consisted of Brontë Treasures (a private viewing in the Parsonage library of treasures in the Museum collection) and a talk by me on Charlotte Brontë’s legacy in Belgium, the subject of my new book Through Belgian Eyes. Thus our group and its work were well represented at Haworth this year.

Screening of Wuthering Heights (1992 version)

After lunch more energetic members joined a guided walk across the moors to Ponden Kirk, the rocky outcrop close to Top Withens supposedly the inspiration for Penistone Crag in Wuthering Heights. For those who didn’t feel up to this 9-mile walk there was a screening of the 1992 version of the novel with Ralph Fiennes and Juliet Binoche. A dinner and quiz rounded off the day.

Emily (Chloe Pirrie) at Ponden Kirk - still from the TV film To Walk Invisible

Jack Sharp - inspiration for Heathcliff?

The closing event was an excursion to Halifax on the Monday. After a tour of the Piece Hall, there was a visit to Halifax Minster and the former Holy Trinity Church to view sculptures by Branwell Brontë’s great friend Joseph Leyland. David Glover, President of Halifax Antiquarian Society, gave us a talk on Leyland’s life. Over a splendid tea at Holdsworth House Hotel, he gave another talk on Law Hill School near Halifax, the story of Jack Sharp, a member of a local family who may have inspired the character of Heathcliff, and High Sunderland Hall, a building often cited as a possible inspiration for Wuthering Heights.

I hope that many Brussels Group members will join me for the Brontë Society weekend in Haworth next year (8-9 June) to enjoy a rich programme of events and spend time not just in Haworth but in local places with Brontë connections. 

Gearing up for the big weekend

From Director Andrew Macarthy:

The Brontë Parsonage Museum is gearing up for a busy week of activities in the forthcoming half-term holiday which will culminate with the Brontë Society’s AGM Weekend.

On Bank Holiday Monday the Parsonage  will be inviting children to find out more about the toys that the Brontës might have played with as children and try their hand at making some old fashioned action toys of their own. The ‘Toytastic’ activity is free with the normal admission charge to the museum and is running on a drop-in basis with children welcome to join in the fun and make a toy anytime between 10.30am to 4.00pm.

On Wednesday 2 June short talks and guided walks focusing on the Brontës and the fascinating history of Haworth will be taking place throughout the day. Again these will be free for both adults and children.

Friday 4 June is a ‘kids go free’ day at the museum, with children up to the age of 16 able to come into the museum completely free of charge. Friday also sees a new exhibition of paintings open at the museum. The art works are based on Brontë dresses and have been produced by artist Victoria Brookland who will be talking about her work at the West Lane Baptist Centre at 3.30pm - admission £5 or free to day ticket holders to the museum.

On Saturday 5 June, local children’s author, Robert Swindells will read from and talk about his Branwell Brontë inspired book, Follow a Shadow (10.00am at the West Lane Baptist Centre) and the Brontë scholar Lyndall Gordon will lecture on the influence of the Brontës on the nineteenth-century American poet Emily Dickinson (11.00am, also at the Baptist Centre).  Later that evening, two influential literary scholars, Lucasta Miller and Elaine Showalter, will be in Haworth to discuss the influence of the Brontës on womens’ writing generally. The event, which also takes place at the Baptist Centre at 8.00pm, is a rare opportunity to hear the US based critic Showalter. Tickets are £10.

On Sunday 6 June renowned graphologist Diane Simpson will discuss her fascinating research into the Brontës’ handwriting and what it reveals about Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne. This event takes place at the Baptist Centre at 3.00pm and tickets are £7.

Throughout the week, from 31 May to Friday 4 June, 2 for 1 vouchers will be available at various shops and tea rooms in Haworth enabling two people to enter the museum for the price of one.

There are lots of other events taking place over the weekend which are open to members of the Brontë Society. For information on how to join the Society or any of the events listed please contact Peter Morrison 01535 640195/ peter.morrison@bronte.org.uk  or Andrew McCarthy 01535 640194

June AGM weekend - Excursion to Levens Hall and Silverdale

IMS writes:
After a warm and sunny weekend, full of interesting events, where friendships were renewed and new ones made, members travelled up the A65 - the destination Levens Hall near Kendal. The very understanding coach driver incurred the wrath of an impatient motorist –lights flashing, horn beeping- as he slowed down to enable his passengers to catch a glimpse of the Reverend Carus Wilson’s school building in Cowan Bridge, which the four eldest Brontë girls attended in 1824/5.

Passing over the busy M6 we soon arrived at the Hall- the building of which is divided into three periods. A Pele tower was built firstly in the thirteenth century, the second period was in the sixteenth century when the mediaeval structure was turned into a gentleman’s residence. The last period in the seventeenth century was when the South wing and brew house were added and the house exquisitely furnished. The rooms, resplendent with Elizabethan plasterwork and panelling, contained treasures such as beautiful Charles II gilded brass candle sconces and a George I burr walnut long case clock. There was furniture dating from the William and Mary period to an early nineteenth century. In each room pictures by painters of note, such as Rubens and Peter de Wint, and drawings by Edward Burne Jones, adorned the walls.

Moving around the house it became obvious that there were perhaps some tentative connections with the Brontës. It was thought that Colonel James Grahme - who married, in 1675, Dorothy Howard, one of the maids of honour to Catherine of Braganza and a daughter of the Levens Hall family -  had been born at Norton Conyers. The Graham family still live there today and Charlotte visited when she was governess to the Sidgwick family.

At the hall there is a charcoal drawing and a watercolour by George Richmond, the very same painter who painted Charlotte’s portrait in 1850. It is well known that Charlotte had been thrilled to see, in the flesh, her hero the Duke of Wellington in the Chapel Royal when she was taken there by George Smith. Wellington’s favourite niece, Lady Mary Wellesley, married Sir Charles Bagot of Levens and there were many items relating to Wellington given by him to Mary and in one of the bedrooms is his campaign bed. Many houses of this ilk attract the media and are used for films and television programmes and Levens is no different -  film versions of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Mrs Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters were made at the hall in the nineteen nineties.

Visitors can wander outside through herb gardens and pleached lime tunnels lead to a pond and fountain and in a quiet corner there are headstones where beloved family pets with the names of Tarka, Sheba and Jock are buried. Dominating all these features are the yew trees at various stages of their development into fantastic topiary shapes- the great umbrella dwarfing everything else and apparently requiring the use of scaffolding for trimming.

The next step of the Monday excursion was down narrow country lanes which led to Lindeth Tower in Silverdale and which afforded a wonderful view of Morecambe Bay looking across to Grange over Sands. Mrs Gaskell first visited Grange in 1836 and with her growing family made an annual migration to the seaside and stayed in the Tower House- which was built in 1842.  The Gaskells and other Manchester families who often stayed in Silverdale would, before 1846, travel by train only as far as Lancaster. After that date it would have been possible to get by train to Carnforth- the station made famous by the emotional film Brief Encounter.  A carriage ride would then bring them to Silverdale which, with its sense of isolation and peace, Mrs Gaskell is said to have enjoyed. In 1858 she wrote, “One is never disappointed in coming back to Silverdale”.

It was my first visit to the area and I was not disappointed!

The Story of the Withins Farms

Top Withins - 1920s 

Friday 10 June was the first day of what used to be called either 'AGM Weekend' or 'June Weekend' but which has now been renamed 'Summer Festival'. At 3pm first Steve Woods, then Peter Brears gave their illustrated talk 'The Real Wuthering Heights: The Story of the Withins Farms', which was a bigger and better version of a talk given on the same subject three years ago. It began with a brief reference to the letter from publishers Smith, Elder & Co to Ellen Nussey, who was being asked for clues about locations. They wanted to know what the Brontë Sisters had in mind because they were producing the first illustrated edition of the collected works, and Volume Five (1873) of this was Wuthering Heights along with Agnes Grey. As Ellen Nussey's reply has been lost, we do not know much for sure, but the book included an illustration of Top Withins by E M Wimperis which she seems to have suggested to him, so there is some evidence that it was one of the places in Emily's imagination - along with others.

The talk was the result of years of careful study, and covered Top, Middle and Lower Withins, three farms which made up about a hundred acres, much of it rough pasture and much of it probably never used - too rough perhaps. Most farms in the area were dairy, producing milk, butter and a little cheese. Two hundred years ago this would have been consumed by the many weavers and spinners in the area - and because it was not much of a living, the farmers and their families would have done plenty of carding and spinning themselves. There were some sheep, and about half a dozen cows at each farm.

It would have been an isolated life, with long walks down to Stanbury or Haworth, unpleasant and hazardous in bad weather, especially in heavy snow, and especially for any children on their way to school and back in the later years of the nineteenth century. The ruined Lower Withins was finally demolished in the 1930s ("There were plenty of Brontë enthusiasts taking away souvenirs") and Top Withins was fixed into its present state fairly recently, though it seems to have been still quite substantial in the 1920s.

June AGM weekend, Friday

The weather was unbelievably warm and windless. All the events should be held out in the open - possibly in the meadow behind the Parsonage - or so it was often said, humorously. All of the delegates were full to the brim with good humour. Here's a slideshow of just a few of them:

Yorkshire Day at the Parsonage

The next event organised by the Friends of the Brontë Parsonage will be held on Sunday 29 July, the day that Haworth is celebrating Yorkshire Day. The Friends will be serving tea and home-made cakes in the small field next to the Parsonage from 10.30a.m. until 4.00p.m. There will also be a second-hand book stall, a plant stall and a craft stall selling items made by Museum staff.

So far this year the Friends have held a Ceilidh to celebrate Patrick Brontë's birthday and the Irish connection, sold tea and scones over two days at the Haworth 1940s event (the Parsonage remained open throughout the war years) and held a raffle at the Bronte Society AGM weekend in June.

In addition they have also served refreshments at various evenings organised as part of the Museum's Education Programme. It has been a busy six months and in this short space of time the Friends have raised over £1,000 for Museum projects, so please come along and support them.

Pat Berry

Dyddgu Pritchard Owens

Sally McDonald writes:

Mrs Dyddgu Pritchard Owens passed away on 12 August.

 

Dyddgu was a truly popular and well known figure in the Society who was at every AGM weekend I can remember until this year, and her absence this year was noticeable. She won friends with her cheery nature and passion for the Brontes and Haworth.  The Society offers deepest sympathies to Dyddgu's family.

Opening soon - 'Villette' in Leeds

Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, re-imagined by Linda Marshall-Griffiths, opens in the Courtyard Theatre at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds on Saturday 24 September 2016. A review will appear here soon afterwards, hopefully. This is from the Playhouse's publicity:

"Lucy Snowe, alone and abandoned, boards a boat in search of purpose. 

"Arriving at an archaeological site digging for the remains of the elusive Lady of Villette, she works alongside the beautiful Gin, the prying Beck, the charming Dr John and the remote Professor Paul, though Lucy remains an outsider.

"Absorbed in her work to find a cure for the next pandemic to secure humanity’s future, can she open herself up to the possibility of love and put the bones of the past behind her?

"On the 200th anniversary of Charlotte Brontë’s birth, West Yorkshire Playhouse celebrates her unique genius with a daring new adaptation by a fellow Yorkshire writer, Linda Marshall-Griffiths. With echoes of the illness and loss that wracked Brontë’s own life, both novel and play explore the redemptive power of love and the uncertainty of holding on to it."

On the following Thursday (29 September) at 6.30pm, also at the West Yorkshire Playhouse (Other Space), there will be a discussion in the style of a debate - Jane Eyre versus Villette. A similar event took place in Haworth during the AGM weekend in June, some readers of this blog will recall. This time, speakers for Jane Eyre will be Blake Morrison  and Sarah Perry, and speakers for Villette will be Sally Vickers and Ruth Robbins.

For full details of the Brontë Season at the WYP, go to its website here.

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Why does Heathcliff have only one name?

Richard Wilcocks writes:
A really impressive panel was lined up for us on the Saturday evening (9 June) of the AGM weekend – from left to right in the photograph, Terry Eagleton (Distinguished Professor of English Literature, Lancaster University), novelist and essayist Caryl Phillips (Professor at Yale University),  chair John McLeod (Professor at Leeds University) and our President Bonnie Greer. They were there to pass comment on a thirty-minute documentary with the title A Regular Black – The Hidden Wuthering Heights, which was shown after an introduction by its director, Adam Low.

Filmed on location in Yorkshire, Lancaster and Liverpool, it ‘examines the ambiguities of Emily Brontë’s classic novel and uncovers a shameful chapter in the hidden history of Black Britain.’ The story is located in Dentdale, home to the slave-trading Sill family, whose own history bears a strange resemblance to that of the fictional Earnshaws. The Sills were mentioned on this blog in a review of Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights in November last year. The documentary features commentary by Caryl Phillips, historians Iain McCalman and Cassandra Pybus, and local historians Melinda Elder and Kim Lyon. Kim Lyon was in at the beginning of the research process back in the 1970s, and is responsible for much of the work on the adoption of an orphan boy called Richard Sutton, who was described as a ‘foundling’ when brought to Dentdale by Edmund Sill. Rather than bringing him up with the Sills’ three sons and one daughter, however, he was kept with the slaves used by the Sills instead of regular servants. Many questions are raised , many speculations sent flying by the thirty minutes of video, not least amongst  them the one about the naming of Heathcliff. Why is he given just one name, like a slave? Why is he not Heathcliff Earnshaw?

Terry Eagleton reminded us that Heathcliff is a fictional character, a ‘collection of black marks on a page’. Heathcliff is ‘nowhere’ before the beginning of the story, just as Hamlet is nowhere before the play starts.  That’s the nature of literature.  “Literature gives us the green light to speculate,” said Caryl Phillips, and Bonnie Greer agreed, describing Emily Brontë as “the greatest novelist in the English language” who provides us with “a poetic dimension we are still trying to unravel.” She told us that she was writing a screenplay based on the speculation that Emily Brontë actually met Frederick Douglass in Leeds in 1847.

“One isn’t bound to appreciate Wuthering Heights through the prism of slavery,” said Caryl Phillips. “These speculations lead us to some kind of a meditation on this great British enterprise, the Slave Trade, a meditation which began in 2007  when we marked the bicentenary of its abolition.” Liverpool, we should remember, was the biggest and busiest slaving port in Europe. Bonnie Greer said that her perception of Liverpool had changed drastically since the time she first visited, when it had been the city of the Beatles, and mentioned the William Wyler movie version of Wuthering Heights, in which the irony was in the fact that it was Cathy - Merle Oberon - who was of mixed race, a secret she kept until the day she died.

Terry Eagleton explained his case that Heathcliff is of Irish origin, a waif speaking Gaelic, one of the huge numbers passing through, or stranded in, Liverpool at the time of the Famine on their way to America: “He is an insider-outsider, a crucial figure in the English novel from Tom Jones to Harry Potter, a character brought into a domestic situation who becomes a joker in the pack, a disrupting influence… let’s examine Patrick Brontë, the foreigner who became more English than the English… and let’s not forget that Heathcliff is also a shit of the first water, relentless and pitiless.”

Caryl Phillips found Eagleton’s proposal on Heathcliff’s Irish origins to be persuasive. We should not forget Liverpool’s strong Irish connections, and the contemporary prejudice against Irish people. “Well, if we knew these things for sure, the novel would lose its attraction. We can pour into it what we need and what we want,” said Bonnie Greer.

Questions from the audience showed that most of the audience was open to the proposals made in the documentary. One member contrasted Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley to Wuthering Heights, pointing out that it was “very much more factually-based”, and another member revealed herself to be a descendant of Richard Sutton: “He was not like that at all,” she said. “Kim Lyon got it all wrong!”

June AGM weekend - Oakwell Hall

‘”The old latticed windows, the stone porch, the walls, the roof, the chimney-stacks, were rich in crayon touches and sepia lights and shades.”

On Tuesday drizzle took the place of sunshine as we disembarked from our coach at Oakwell Hall. The hall was used in 1921 as the location for the silent version of Shirley and is a building which has survived from the late 16^th and 17^th centuries and was almost certainly built in the Elizabethan age by John Batt whose initials appear on the porch. Charlotte Brontë knew one of the Cockill girls who with her two sisters and mother, Hannah, occupied Oakwell from 1830-1865 and ran it as a girls’ boarding school

Charlotte must have been very familiar with the hall because in Shirley, ‘Fieldhead’, the home of the eponymous heroine incorporates many things that can still be seen in the house today:

‘”The brown panelled parlour was furnished in an old style, and with real old furniture. On each side of the high mantelpiece stood two antique chairs of oak.”

Every house with a long history has a ghost story to tell and Oakwell is no different. We were told of unknown figures appearing, of shelves being unscrewed from walls and of the bloody footprint which never disappeared- until the floor was taken up- despite the vigorous efforts of scrubbing brushes and soap and water! Anyone moving from room to room could have been forgiven for thinking that they had been transported back in time for the hall frequently entertains school children, and on that day groups of children, dressed in  Elizabethan style, were happily occupied in interesting looking activities.

They were making lavender bags, writing with quills and one eager little boy told me, as he was concentrating on winding wool round four sticks, that he was making some kind of lucky charm. We saw in the kitchen that the children had prepared vegetables which were in a suspended iron pot over the fire and which they would partake of later from wooden plates.

It was an interesting morning and in these times of cutbacks and talk of closures it is hoped others in years to come will have the same opportunities to enjoy Oakwell Hall. What really made the day for me was to see how deeply the school children were involved in the educational activities there.

Branwell on Friday

The forgotten Brontë sibling will get his time in the spotlight on Friday with a performance of award-winning play The Brontë Boy in the Baptist Centre.

Former Bradford Telegraph & Argus journalist Michael Yates wrote the play about Branwell Brontë three years ago, and a performance will form part of the coming AGM weekend. The play starts at 7.30pm at the Baptist Centre. Tickets for the performance plus a cheese, wine and paté supper are available from bronte.org. uk.


Read Chris Went's review here.

Angela Crow-Woods

 Richard Wilcocks writes:

Angela Crow-Woods, who died on 24 February at the age of 86, was until recent years a seemingly tireless member of the Brontë Society who organised events, performed, contributed articles and was known as an expert on Maria Branwell, the mother of the Brontës. Her book on the subject, Miss Branwell’s Companion was published in 2007 and was translated into Italian in the same year.

As 'Doreen Lostock'

Her professional name was simply Angela Crow. Her career on stage began when she played truant from school to play the part of Jane Eyre in a touring production, and when she was still a student at RADA, she won the Gilbert award for comedy, the Tree award for Drama and the Emile Littler award for Outstanding Talent. She was the lead in many theatre productions, and played Lily Smalls (the maid of the Beynons) in an early stage production of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood at the New Theatre in London and later at the open air theatre in Regent's Park for the Robert Atkins Company. High-profile television work which lasted for sixty years or so followed. This included Hancock’s Half Hour, Last of the Summer Wine, Grange Hill, Heartbeat and The Royal. She was Doreen Lostock in the early sixties in Coronation Street.

She often contributed as an organiser and a performer at the Brontë Society’s traditional June weekends, often described as ‘AGM weekends’. These were attended by delegates from all over the world. To give examples, in June, 2007, Angela organised and compered a popular session of readings from the Brontës. This was mentioned in the blog report from Brussels delegate Selina Busch:

https://bronteparsonage.blogspot.com/2007/06/june-weekend-2.html 

In the same year, Angela was in Milan to meet Italian friends and to launch her book. Franca Gollini Tiezzi wrote about it here:

 

https://bronteparsonage.blogspot.com/2007/06/bront-event-in-milan.html

As part of the 2008 June weekend, Angela organised a day of events in Thornton (where she lived) which included readings from Charlotte Brontë’s letters by herself and Professor Robert Barnard:

https://bronteparsonage.blogspot.com/2008/06/june-weekend-thornton.html 

In 2011, the Brontë Society organised an excursion to Lothersdale, primarily to take a look at the outside of Stonegappe, the mansion which once belonged to the Sidgwick family, where Charlotte Brontë was an unhappy governess in the summer of 1839. The main part of the excursion was in the church at Kildwick, where I joined Angela in a dramatic ‘recollection’ of the events of that year. Chris Went contributed this account: 

https://bronteparsonage.blogspot.com/2011/06/memorable-excursion.html

In September 2014, Angela was responsible for another event in Thornton, this time centred on Emily’s Café, which is in the Brontë birthplace. Poet Simon Zonenblick showed a preview of his video about Branwell Brontë:

https://bronteparsonage.blogspot.com/2014/09/branwell-at-luddendenfoot.html

And Charlotte Brontë’s birthday was celebrated at the 2016 Mirfield Arts Festival thanks to Angela:

https://bronteparsonage.blogspot.com/2016/09/charlottes-birthday-at-mirfield-arts.html

These are just a few of many examples which show the energy of a member who was a personal friend to many, and an inspiration for the entire membership.