Was Charlotte Brontë a Blurter?

 

Was Charlotte Brontë a Blurter? The evidence from Shirley 

contributed by Krista Ovist

Illustration for Shirley by
Thomas Heath Robinson (1869 - 1954)

In Chapter 12 of Shirley (1849), Charlotte Brontë stages an intellectual yet intimate conversation between her two heroines, Shirley Keeldar and Caroline Helstone.  Towards the close of this conversation it transpires that Caroline, who cherishes what she believes to be an unrequited love for Robert Moore, once asked him for a lock of his hair.  In telling Shirley about this incident, Caroline reveals that every time she remembers it she suffers an attack of renewed humiliation.  ‘It was my doing,’ she self-accuses, 

one of those silly deeds it distresses the heart and sets the face on fire to think of; one of those small but sharp recollections that return, lacerating your self-respect like tiny penknives, and forcing from your lips, as you sit alone, sudden, insane-sounding interjections.

If you’re not subject to such ‘insane-sounding interjections’ yourself, you might easily breeze past these lines without pause for thought.  But if you’re prone to this kind of private verbal seizure, your inner ears perk up.  Your pulse quickens with self-recognition.  You stop reading mid-page and assume a rapt gaze as the colossal, self-mollifying thought wallops you: Charlotte Brontë was a blurter too.  How else could she have described so precisely what this bizarre behaviour is like?

For most of my adult life, I’ve been a secret blurter.  It happens when I’m engaged in some solitary mindless activity: filling the bath, blow-drying my hair, washing the dishes, folding the laundry.  Absurd words or phrases pop out of my mouth, many of them unprintable, others just dumb:

‘I want Rabbits!’  Do I?  I wonder what for.

‘Rabbits, rabbits, rabbits!’

‘Rabbity bunnies!’

‘I love you!’

‘I hate you!’

‘I’m so tired!’

‘Go away!’

‘Go the f**king H*ll away!’

‘Shut up! shut up! shut up!’

Mornings, in the kitchen, while ironing a shirt for my husband (who’s safely out of ear-shot in the shower), I glance at the clock on the cooker and announce ‘It’s eight-o-five.’

Sometimes it’s just a silly sound, like a low-frequency vital sign: ‘Boopity-boo’.

I figured out long ago that the vocalization, whatever comes out, is meant to shout down a rising recollection of something that makes me uncomfortable.  But most of the time these automatic iterations arrive ahead of any conscious thought; they swat the air before any memory has a chance to get there.  They are a symptom of anxiety and are exacerbated by social interaction.  Any social life I engage in – a transaction in a shop, a coffee hour after Sunday worship, even a meeting of the venerable and benevolent Brontë Society, London and South East Group – can trigger a spasm of nonsensical blathering as aftermath.

For the most part, I’ve rarely given my little secret much thought.  Then, a few years ago, I noticed a decided spike in the frequency of my blurts and one or two sudden innovations in my blurt repertoire.  So I went online and tried to find out what this curious verbal tic is.  Does it have a name?  Does it progress to weirder things?  How goofy am I?

To my surprise, I found no clear references to this phenomenon in any of the many mental health webpages through which I sifted.  There’s something called Tourettic Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.  That’s when obsessive intrusive thoughts give rise to involuntary movements, noises, or utterances, as with Tourette Syndrome.  But, like Caroline, I blurt only when I know I’m alone or at least fairly secluded.  The words and phrases that escape me aren’t premeditated, but they’re not exactly involuntary either.  I seem to be able to control the impulse without thinking about it and know unconsciously when it’s safe to vociferate.

And there’s something called a ‘cringe attack’.  That seems close, as it’s a wave of mortification brought on by reliving an embarrassing moment.  But absurd verbal irruptions don’t appear to be diagnostic of such paroxysms.

I also learned about studies of so-called ‘involuntary autobiographical memories’ (or IAMs), but none of the researchers who write about these ‘mind pops’ seems interested in the wacky words they sometimes prompt.

The most helpful accounts I found came, not from medical authorities or clinical descriptions, but from ordinary users of online Q&A sites and social anxiety support groups.  The best thread began with a question originally posted on 22 July 2008 at healthandfitness.com and picked up by the general information hub ask.metafilter.com.*  A brave soul using the moniker ‘Alabaster’ wrote this now classic (to me) confessional query, under the heading ‘Compelled to blurt...’:

            What’s with my weird compulsion?

As far as I am aware, I am a mentally healthy, well-adjusted, and sane person with no disorders.  But I have a strange, fairly innocuous quirk which seems beyond my control and I’m curious about it...

 

When I think of/remember something embarrassing from my life, I compulsively make some kind of noise.  It seems to happen unconsciously, before my censor can catch it and stop myself (it even happens when I am in a quiet or inappropriate place).

 

It’s not especially loud, in fact it’s often under my breath.  The sound is usually just a quiet grunt, or a word/syllable or two.  If I remember an embarrassing conversation, I tend to blurt out a random word of the conversation (as in, I’m replaying the dialogue in my head but then, all of a sudden, one of the words pops out of my mouth).  If it happens while I’m reading, I tend to blurt out one or two of the words that happen to be under my eyes at the moment.

It usually only happens when I’m remembering something palpably embarrassing or humiliating from my life – not for mild everyday kind of stuff.  (Again, I had a fairly happy childhood and have nothing particularly traumatic in my past – I don’t think my embarrassing memories are any worse than the average Joe’s.)

 

So what is this, do I have some kind of low-grade Tourette’s syndrome?  Is there a name for this phenomenon?  Does it happen to others, or is it unique to me?

It is in honour of Alabaster that I call this phenomenon ‘blurting’; Alabaster named it first.  A hundred and thirty people responded to Alabaster, all elated to find that they were not alone and eager to relate their experiences and share their ‘wince words’, as one contributor (yclept ‘yclipse’) happily put it.  People’s repertoires were astonishingly similar to one another’s and to mine: predictably, there were the expletives, but also the strange declarations of undying love and/or hate, often directed at long forgotten ex-partners, but just as often offered up to no one in particular.  Here is a florilegium of my favourites: 

I do this too.  I say basically random words.  It was “Harley Davidson” for a long time, and “hula hoop” for a long time.  I'm mostly able to suppress it when there are people around, but not always.  (Posted by ‘lastobelus’)

Yep, I do this.  My word is “twelve.”  Or sometimes “Imagine twelve.”  But I only do it on my own.  I can stop myself.  (Posted by ‘creeky’)

For me it’s an exasperated “Ahh! Kill me!” followed by a slight giggle. (Posted by ‘tkolar’)

Mine are “givemeagun!”… and “ineedaknife”….  Lately, though, it’s been “Nobody!”  I know that this last one used to mean something, but I can’t even remember what.  (Posted by ‘Ian A.T.’)

…earlier this year, everything I said in those moments had something to do with eyeballs.  As in, “oh my eyeball!”  Or “blowing up your eyeballs now.”  (Posted by ‘Coatlicue’)

 

Oh, wow.  I do this too all the time, especially in the past 5 years or so.  One phrase that seems to be stuck in my head is “I want to go home.”  I have no idea where it came from and I often say it... you know... at home.  This thread makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.  (Posted by ‘brundlefly’)

 

I am reading this with my jaw dropped in awe.  I laughed, I cried, I became aware.  Blurting is what I do mostly.  Sometimes I’ll shake the memory out or clench my hand.  But sometimes a word will just pop into my head and “chinchilla” is floating out there.  WTF??  I’m laughing so hard right now.  (Posted by ‘eddiebaby’) 

One contribution was especially relevant to the question here investigated – viz. was Charlotte Brontë a blurter?  A literary-minded poster known by the sobriquet ‘arcanecrowbar’ wrote:

An aside about this – a few years ago I was reading Dickens’ Bleak House for the first time.  Somewhere in that novel (sorry I have no way of finding the passage!) Dickens follows a minor character around for a while and gives an exact description of this phenomenon – the guy has a memory of an acutely embarrassing event and gets out of it by mumbling some nonsense phrase to himself.

I have to say I’ve ransacked Bleak House without finding any character I’d spot for a proper blurter.  Mr Guppy is certainly a painfully awkward soul, and Mr Jarndyce has his ‘growlery’ where he goes when he’s in a foul mood, and Dickens depicts the latter lapsing into sotto voce commentaries intelligible only to himself, but neither character is ever observed, in an unguarded moment alone, in the grip of a really good blurt fit.  Be that as it may (and I may have overlooked what arcanecrowbar had in mind), the important point is this: whereas it’s easy to imagine that Dickens, a noted social animal, wrote about human eccentricities based on close observation of others, it’s almost impossible to resist the inference that Charlotte Brontë gave Caroline Helstone this idiosyncrasy based on her own personal experience.  As with everything she knew about intimately, she worked it into her fiction.

This is my bold thesis, then: Caroline’s discourse in Chapter 12 of Shirley constitutes compelling warrant for concluding that Charlotte Brontë was a blurter.

But why end the wild speculation there?  This passage plants other fancies in my brain.  Dare we take the next step and conjecture that Charlotte Brontë once asked Constantine Heger for a lock of his hair and that, forever after, the recollection of this show of hopeless devotion sent her into throes of explosive blurts?  I think so.

We know that Charlotte, even though she found the courage to brave the wider world, was never comfortable outside her closest circle of family and friends.  Like most people with social anxiety, she probably imagined that she had behaved foolishly or said something stupid after nearly every human contact, and she probably blurted over the least encounter.  But her comportment over Heger must have afforded her a generous store of blurt-worthy memories.  Never mind what she may have said to him directly; if I had written some of those abject letters she sent him, I for one would blurt for all I’m worth every time the post hit the floor.

If it is extracting too much from this passage to suppose that the specific detail of having asked an object of romantic feeling for a lock of hair was drawn from life, then I submit that this detail is the fictionalization of some similar Heger-related indiscretion.  Such indiscretions, this passage tells us, tormented Charlotte Brontë and goaded her to outbursts that appalled her but probably also gave her fits of private giggles she shared with no one – no one, that is, except for readers likewise afflicted who find in Caroline’s words the confessions of a fellow-blurter.

So, what, I wonder, were Charlotte Brontë’s favourite wince words?

‘Stumps!’?

‘Sneaky!’?

‘Imagine twelve!’? (Well, she did.)

‘I love Wellington!’?

Perhaps her blurts are legible in that strange exclamation – ‘Stuff! Phd!’ – in the Roe Head Journal entry beginning ‘I’m just going to write because I cannot help it’.

Or maybe her blurts were in French.

‘Je t’aime!’?

‘Je te deteste!’?

‘J'ai besoin d'un couteau!’?

‘Nous faisons exploser vos globes oculaires maintenant!’?

Some things we’ll just never know.

Illustration for Shirley by C.E. Brock (1870 - 1938)

Listen!... I think she's about to blurt.  

*As of 15 May 2021 this thread could still be accessed at https://ask.metafilter.com/97265/Compelled-to-Blurt. 

Lies and the Brontës: The Quest for the Jenkins Family by Monica Kendall

 Helen MacEwan writes:

A new book shines the spotlight on the couple who recommended the Pensionnat Heger to the Brontës and found Charlotte and Emily difficult guests at Sunday lunches in their home in Brussels.

Until their great-great-granddaughter Monica Kendall determined to throw light on them, Evan and Eliza Jenkins were fairly shadowy figures in the Brontës’ story. The few references to them in Brontë biographies leave a vague impression of a couple who were pillars of the British community in Brussels, no doubt, and well-meaning in their standing invitation to Charlotte and Emily to Sunday lunch at their home, but … didn’t the sisters find them rather dull? Biographers seem to hint at this, even though the information hitherto given on Mr and Mrs Jenkins is too sparse for any clear picture of them to emerge. 

 

 

And yet their importance in the Brontës’ Brussels adventure is clear from the letter in which Charlotte first broached the project to her Aunt Branwell. Referring to her Yorkshire friend Martha Taylor, who was studying at the Château de Koekelberg school in Brussels, Charlotte writes:

‘If I wrote to her [i.e. Martha], she, with the assistance of Mrs. Jenkins, the wife of the British Consul, would be able to secure me a cheap, decent residence and respectable protection.’

Evan Jenkins was in fact the chaplain to the British embassy, not the consul. Curiously, this initial confusion on Charlotte’s part, relatively minor in itself, was just the first of the inaccuracies in the accounts handed down on the Jenkins family – the ‘lies’ of Monica Kendall’s book title.

One circumstance about which there seems to be no doubt is that it was Eliza Jenkins who recommended the Pensionnat Heger to the Brontës. Mrs Gaskell, who met her on a visit to Brussels to research her Life of Charlotte Brontë, tells us that the Pensionnat was recommended to Eliza by an Englishwoman at the Belgian royal court, whose granddaughter was a pupil at the school. Eliza, tasked to find a suitable school for Charlotte and Emily by Evan’s clergyman brother in Yorkshire, an ex-colleague of Patrick Brontë’s, had enquired in vain until this recommendation clinched the choice of Brussels just as the Brontës were considering a school in Lille instead. Thus, Monica Kendall claims, ‘If it had not been for Mrs Jenkins, Charlotte would never have gone to Brussels, never met M. Heger. There would be no Villette, no Jane Eyre’.

However vague our previous information on the Jenkinses, the few anecdotes we have of their contacts with Charlotte and Emily throw a vivid light on the sisters themselves. We have Eliza Jenkins’ account of the Brontës as the visitors from hell at Sunday lunches in the Jenkins household, as reported in Gaskell’s Life:

Mrs. Jenkins told me that she used to ask them to spend Sundays and holidays with her, until she found that they felt more pain than pleasure from such visits. Emily hardly ever uttered more than a monosyllable. Charlotte was sometimes excited sufficiently to speak eloquently and well – on certain subjects; but before her tongue was thus loosened, she had a habit of gradually wheeling round on her chair, so as almost to conceal her face from the person to whom she was speaking.

A subsequent biographer, Mrs Chadwick, author of In the Footsteps of the Brontës, also tells a story about the sisters’ taciturnity:

‘The two sons of Mrs. Jenkins John and Edward who were sent to the pensionnat to escort the Brontës when they were invited to their home, declare that they were most shy and awkward, and scarcely exchanged a word with them during the journey’.

This and subsequent versions of the ‘escorting’ story, which isn’t in Gaskell’s Life, appear to have evolved through a process of Chinese whispers. An example is the inclusion of Kendall’s great-grandfather John Jenkins, only seven years old at the time, too young surely for escorting duties. Chadwick’s account, published in 1914, suggests that she had it straight from the mouths of Edward and John, and indeed that they were still living at the time of writing. Winifred Gérin, relaying the story, seems to indicate that Chadwick got it directly from Mrs Jenkins. A few dates provided by Kendall show this to be impossible. Mrs Chadwick was born in 1861; she could not possibly have spoken to Eliza Jenkins (died 1864) or Edward (died 1873) and is unlikely to have visited Brussels in time to speak to John, who died in 1894. The true source of the tale was in fact a Brussels resident who had it from Edward Jenkins.

It’s one of several hand-me-down stories repeated by biographers which Kendall, a book editor used to querying and checking every detail, scrutinises and subjects to ‘the trial of common sense’, facts and logical deduction. But her quest for Evan and Eliza Jenkins grew out of more that a scholarly wish to correct ‘fabrications’ and ‘sloppy copying’. Lies and the Brontës is also driven by her sense that the Jenkinses have been ‘largely ignored’ and even disparaged by Brontë biographers.

Have they simply been assumed to be too boring to be investigated? Gaskell hints at this in her Life when she suggests that Charlotte found the Wheelwrights, a family she made friends with in Brussels, more congenial than the Jenkinses:

There was another English family where Charlotte soon became a welcome guest, and where, I suspect, she felt herself more at her ease than … at Mrs. Jenkins’.

The Sunday lunch story doesn’t just show up the Brontës in a bad light; it gives the impression that they didn’t find the Jenkinses worth talking to.

At the start of her research, Kendall, too, was afraid lest she should find her forebears dull and hardly worth investigating. Had they been cultured and interesting, their link with the Brontës would surely have been cherished – yet Kendall stumbled on it by chance. She knew that generations of the family had lived in Brussels, as testified by great-aunts’ albums. She also knew that the Brontës had been in Brussels. But nobody in the family had told her about the connection between the two, and she hadn’t read Gaskell’s Life or Villette. It wasn’t until 2013 – curiously, just as she happened to be copy-editing a monograph that included a chapter on Villette – that a cousin alerted her to an article about the site of the Jenkinses’ house in the Brussels municipality of Ixelles, posted by the Brussels Brontë Group.

The Brontë sisters had known her ancestors! The realisation was the starting point of the quest which resulted seven years later in this amazing book. A quest that took her to Brussels to visit the graves of Evan and Eliza and their sons Edward and John of the escorting story, who eventually succeeded Evan as chaplain; to Wales where Evan Jenkins was born the son of a poor tenant farmer, like Patrick Brontë; to Scotland and the Netherlands on the tracks of Eliza Jenkins née Jay, born in Rotterdam into a family of Scottish merchant traders; to Yorkshire on the trail of Evan’s brother David, Patrick’s colleague at Dewsbury and Hartshead in pre-Haworth days. It was David Jenkins who linked up the Brontës with Evan and Eliza.

The research trail is fascinating in itself. For anyone interested in family history, the notes alone tell an eloquent tale of riches unearthed in archives from Lambeth Palace to Leuven. But Kendall’s pursuit of the Jenkinses was emotional as much as scholarly. By the Jenkins graves, she felt ‘the impossible yearning to be part of a family that might be happier than my own’ akin to the longing of Richard Holmes, when writing his life of Shelley, to be part of the magic circle of Shelley’s family. In Footsteps Holmes describes feeling like a tramp knocking at the kitchen window, hoping to be invited in for supper. In Kendall’s case the family she was researching was, of course, her own. By their graves at the beginning of her adventure she wondered not just whether she would like them, but whether they would approve of her. Would Evan and Eliza prove to be the kind of people she’d want to join for Sunday lunch?

She leaves no stone unturned in finding out, and the book certainly redresses the lack of information hitherto available on the family. We are told so much, not just about the Jenkinses but those whose lives touched theirs, that at times I had a feeling of information overload, particularly in the first part of the book before Evan’s and Eliza’s paths converge in Brussels. (Eliza’s father started a school there where Evan, as well as officiating as chaplain at the Chapelle Royale, taught before starting one of his own, which was carried on by subsequent generations.)

 

Monica Kendall is standing outside the Chapelle Royale in Brussels where her great-great-grandfather Evan Jenkins was the chaplain.

Happily, the rewards of the book far outweigh any feelings of embarras de richesses and interest is maintained by the lively writing as well as the erudition. Lies and the Brontës is packed with information, anecdotes and above all personalities. A ‘spider’s web of connections’ between apparently disparate lives constantly comes up with surprises, including many famous names.

That there are so many names of writers, apart from the Brontës, is one of the book’s attractions. This despite the fact that the Jenkins family seems to have had little interest in literature, one possible reason for their silence about the Brontës – another may just have been a wish to avoid the attention of curiosity hunters. (Whatever the reason, until Kendall came along no other member of the clan had had anything to say about references to the family in Brontë biographies.) As if in compensation, in Lies and the Brontës Kendall writes of her sense of a ‘thrumming wire’ connecting some of the most celebrated writers of the age through the family story.

Byron and Trollope, to take just two examples. The school started by Eliza’s father was taken over by a clergyman called William Drury who’s a constant presence in the book and was a larger-than-life presence in the British community in Brussels. Drury had been at Harrow with Byron and wasn’t averse to basking in reflected glory as ‘Byron’s playmate’. His school in Brussels was the very one at which the 19-year-old Trollope did a stint as an assistant teacher when his family fled to Belgium to escape their creditors. Rather like the Brontës, Trollope took a job as a teacher to help pay for language classes:

I must … learn German and French … and in order that it might be accomplished without expense, I undertook the duties of a classical usher to a school then kept by William Drury at Brussels. Mr. Drury had been one of the masters at Harrow when I went there at seven years old, and is now, after an interval of fifty-three years, even yet officiating as clergyman at that place. To Brussels I went, and my heart still sinks within me as I reflect that any one should have intrusted to me the tuition of thirty boys …

Trollope lasted just six weeks in the job before being rescued by the offer of a post office clerkship.

Another literary link on that thrumming wire thrills us when a British resident called E. Taylor, a member of the committee that offered Evan the chaplaincy of the Chapelle Royale, turns out to be Edward Taylor of Bifrons in Kent, a man on whom Jane Austen told her sister she had ‘doated’ as a teenager, praising his ‘beautiful dark eyes’. Like so many expats who ended up in Brussels, his presence there seems to have had something to do with money difficulties; he had given up his Kent country house. Apart from the Austen connection, it’s exciting to learn he had a brother in England who was employed in high places … but I don’t want to include too many spoilers.

 

Edward Taylor, the man whose 'beautiful brown eyes' were admired by Jane Austen and on whom she 'doated' as a teenager.

  

Literary links apart, there are the connections with royal courts. A year or two before Prince Albert’s marriage to Victoria, he and his brother Ernst turn up in Brussels for a study stay; their English teacher is (who else!) Evan’s colleague William Drury. Where Evan himself was concerned, Eliza sometimes worried that her husband lacked ambition. ‘My spouse is very backwards in going forwards’ she writes in a letter about the imminent arrival of Leopold of Saxe-Coburg to take up the Belgian throne; she’s fretting about whether the King will opt to attend Evan’s chapel or one of the other Protestant ones in town. Her ambition must have been gratified when in 1835 Evan, a man born in poverty who, like Patrick Brontë, was a sizar at Cambridge, was appointed chaplain to Leopold I. It’s a thrill to find Evan, on a visit to London, carrying letters from King Leopold to Victoria and Albert. How appropriate for a man whose life is the connecting point for so many others in the book to be employed as a messenger.

Like Constantin Heger, for whom teaching Charlotte Brontë was just one episode in a full life, Evan was a very busy man. He and his descendants were at the heart of the British community in the Belgian capital. With schools and churches to run and build (Kendall’s great-grandfather built an Anglican church in Ixelles) the Jenkins dynasty’s failure to mention the Brontës in family annals no longer seems so surprising.

Kendall has tirelessly tracked down sources for the Brussels background, digging in little-known memoirs, including witness accounts of the 1830 Belgian revolution. The recollections of Charles MacKay, for example. He was the future father of the novelist Marie Corelli, attended Eliza’s father’s school in Brussels and was in the city when the first stirrings of the revolution broke out.

She is equally tireless in digging out facts and sources in the part of the book that deals with the Brontës’ time in Belgium in 1842-43. In this section she seems to have been guided by Flaubert’s opinion that ‘When you write the biography of a friend, you must do it as if you were taking revenge for him’, admitting that ‘It’s partly true that other than curiosity there has been an element of revenge in my research and writing’. Brontë biographers both dead and living are savaged for inaccuracies (‘lies’) – not just those involving the Jenkinses.

Did the Brontës, like Lucy Snowe in Villette, really travel to Brussels in 1842 not by train but by coach, as claimed by Mrs Chadwick, Gérin and subsequent biographers? Did Mr Jenkins, as also claimed by Chadwick, really accompany Patrick Brontë and the two sisters to the Pensionnat Heger to effect the introductions to Mme Heger? Did Mme Heger really accompany Charlotte to Ostend when she left the Pensionnat for good in January 1844, as claimed by some? Indeed, is it certain or even likely that Charlotte travelled back to England from Ostend? Frequently-told stories about Charlotte and Emily’s Belgian stay are examined and refuted.

Much of interest is added to our knowledge of the Brussels background. We share what Kendall calls ‘the frisson of “only connect”’ when she identifies a schoolfellow of the Taylor girls at the Château de Koekelberg, mentioned in a letter that has often been cited, as a member of the Jenkins family. In addition, she gives new information about the school’s headmistress, Catherine Phelps. Intelligent speculations are offered on ways in which Villette may have drawn on Charlotte’s observations of the Jenkins household, with possible models suggested for the teenage Graham Bretton, the mature Dr John Bretton, and the character of Mr Home.

Lies and the Brontës casts the net wide and encompasses much more than Evan and Eliza’s story, but they are at its heart and the book is a testament that Kendall’s quest was worth the years of labour. The Jenkinses may not have been literary-minded or interested in the Brontës’ novels, but they and their circle do deserve to be better known. By the time I finished the book I, like Kendall, would have liked to be present at Sunday lunch at the Jenkinses’ house in Ixelles, listening to the gossip about the expat British community of which the Brontë sisters were briefly a part, as the fiacres described in Villette rattled over the stony streets outside.

This book review first appeared on the Brussels Brontë Blog.

Red House in Gomersal to become a hotel

Some readers of this blog will remember the campaign of nine years ago to save the Grade 2 listed nineteenth-century Red House Museum from either neglect or conversion to something other than what it should be. It is pictured here when it was still open to the public. The building and its grounds are forever connected with Charlotte Brontë, who named it 'Briarmains' in her 1849 novel Shirley. The museum was, until it was finally closed in 2016 by Kirklees Council to save money, full of artefacts and exhibitions connected with Gomersal's radical feminist and author Mary Taylor, Charlotte's friend. It will now be completely refurbished and turned into a five-star, high-end luxury holiday home for commercial letting, and a venue for weddings.

The campaign group Red House Heritage Group 'welcomes the investment' but is also 'open-minded about the council's new approach'.You can read a full report at 

https://www.examinerlive.co.uk/news/west-yorkshire-news/heritage-campaigners-give-cautious-welcome-20331456

Your comments are welcome.

Anne Brontë and 'The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society'

Maddalena De Leo writes:

Mary Ann Shaffer together with her granddaughter Annie Barrows is the author of an epistolary novel with the elaborate title The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. Published with immediate and universal success in 2008, shortly before Shaffer's death, it deals with an interesting exchange of letters that took place after the mid-1940s between a writer and some people residing on the island of Guernsey and their progressive and sincere friendship but above all it is a faithful and touching account of the precarious conditions in which the inhabitants of that Channel Island had to live during and after the Second World War.

The peculiarity of the novel, also present in the beautiful film that was made from it in 2018, is the recurring reference to the Brontë sisters and their works, with particular regard to Anne and her personality. Already from the first pages of the book we learn that Juliet Ashton, the protagonist, has edited and published a hypothetical biography of Anne because she is considered by her to be as clever as Charlotte and Emily for ability and imagination, despite the fact that when the action takes place the third Brontë was almost completely unknown. Even if this book is unsuccessful, the young writer continues to propose it in her round of presentations. One of Juliet's island correspondents afterwards lingers to talk about the 'oddities' of the Brontës’ father and their depraved brother, immensely appreciating the work of Emily and Jane Eyre that she knows almost by heart, while towards the end it is the same Juliet to speculate that Anne may have had a possibly irascible and grumpy temperament so much different from what is commonly thought.

In the film, on the other hand, the reference to the Brontës and Anne is proposed in a different way: the protagonist (played by actress Lily James) finds herself talking about her biography on the same evening of her arrival in Guernsey, vehemently supporting the avant-garde ideas of Anne in the Tenant of Wildfell Hall. She quickly succeeds in enlightening the minds of the listeners who instead knew only what Jane Eyre claims when she declares to Rochester that she is free and equal to him.

A very interesting clue, therefore, which makes both this book and the film of the same complicated title particularly welcome to all Brontë lovers.

        

A Brontë Quizbook

 

New Jane Eyre adaptation on YouTube

Julie Butters writes

I'm pleased to announce a new adaptation of Jane Eyre, a Zoom production by Flock Theatre of New London, Connecticut, in the United States. The film will be available for free streaming on YouTube starting 6 November at 12pm GMT. It will continue to be available after the initial streaming, to be accessed at any time. It lasts for just under two hours.

Find it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yYxWYQOlIw

The trailer is at https://youtu.be/e0eook-_7lA

and production stills are available at:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1NexB25dy6dXKw5uPOaTPlApt_-6FrnjG?usp=sharing

Best wishes,

Julie Butters

Adapter of Jane Eyre

Actress playing Jane

juliebutterswriter@gmail.com

www.linkedin.com/in/juliebutters

Julie Butters as Jane:

Gateshead:

Thornfield:

Blog readers' opinions are welcome.

First review is here: http://janeeyre.net/Plays-available-online.html

Brontë Places & Poems - book review

Marina Saegerman writes:

A fascinating dive into the Brontë world!

In these weird Corona times when travelling is not advisable/not recommended/not desired or not possible, I came across this book by Geoff and Christine Taylor.

The book, which is lavishly illustrated with photographs, was a labour of love. Its authors have lived near Haworth for almost forty years and the book grew out of their trips to Brontë places in the U.K., Ireland and Belgium, with Chris, a keen amateur photographer and artist, taking the photographs. There are many photos of Brussels.

The beautiful front cover brings you straight to Top Withins and the Haworth moors, and on the back cover it says: 'The Brontë children lived tragically short lives but they have left a wonderful legacy not only with their novels and poems but in the descriptions of the places they lived, loved and experienced.' The book invites you to discover these locations and perhaps, if Corona allows for it, visit these locations yourself.

It is not a book that you just READ, it is book that you fully EXPERIENCE. It allows you to travel from  your own home to Belgium, to London, to Ireland, to Haworth, to Scotland, to Cornwall, to Wales and to so many more Brontë-related places all in one day, if you wish. In a year when there is no AGM in Haworth, no annual holidays to Ireland (our normal holiday destination), no Anne Brontë bicentenary conference in Scarborough, and even no events of our Brussels Brontë Group in Brussels, this book was for me a wonderful  revelation and a splendid way to travel around Brontë-related places.

It is a journey in images and poetry with explanatory texts from the authors. It is a perfect way to travel in Corona times and be near the Brontës without setting a foot outside. The journey is made chronologically and starts in Cornwall (with Maria and Elizabeth Branwell) and in County Down, Northern Ireland (with Rev. Patrick Brontë) and travels through time to visit all other places that are  associated in some way with the Brontë family. The beautiful photographs are accompanied by explanatory texts and Brontë poems. You do not have to follow the chronological route, if you do not want to. You can start anywhere in the book, go back and forth as much as you like and discover, or revisit, Brontë places.

I have gone through this book many times now in all sorts of directions, revisiting the places that I have seen already (and enjoyed seeing again) and discovering places that I have wanted  to visit for ages, but had not succeeded in doing up to now.

It is the perfect substitute for travelling to Brontë places when you cannot travel yourself. I enjoyed it tremendously, and I will continue to enjoy it! It is a real treasure of a book. To be recommended…..

July 2020

 Buy it here

British Library asks nation's children to write miniature books in lockdown

Children locked up with you? Try this!

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/12/british-library-asks-nations-children-to-write-miniature-books-in-lockdown

Brontë Quizzes - Keeping the Flame Alive

Keeping the Flame Alive

In order to help Brontë people everywhere while away the hours during the present Crisis, when we are frustratingly 'confined to barracks', I have written a set of twelve Bronte Quizzes, each of thirty marks, which are being posted fortnightly on Bronte Blog. He has called the series 'Keeping the Flame Alive', which is of course the title of Val Wiseman's classic Bronte-themed CD, and seems rather appropriate right now!

Many thanks - keep safe,

John Hennessy