Reader, I married him

Isobel Stirk writes:

I should imagine, judging by the favourable response to an entertaining evening held in the old school room in Haworth, many copies of Jane Eyre will be purchased from booksellers and dusty books, with that title, will be retrieved from the dark recesses of libraries and book cases in the very near future.

Tracy Chevalier (pictured), whose second novel was Girl with a Pearl Earring, and who has curated the exhibition Charlotte Great and Small, exhibiting at the Parsonage Museum this year, explained how a book, which was being launched that very evening, came about. Working closely with the museum she had wanted to produce something special to commemorate the bicentennial of Charlotte Brontë’s birth and so she decided to ask writers from all over the world to contribute to a book which would be based on something ‘Charlotte’.

At first it was envisaged that an object associated or belonging to the author would be the theme but in the end the well -known words from near the end of Charlotte’s Jane Eyre seemed the ideal choice. Before the large audience made their way to the Parsonage for refreshment, the place where Patrick Brontë learnt with some apprehension that his eldest daughter had written a novel, they heard two writers reading their own stories from the new book.

Helen Dunmore (pictured), who was educated at the University of York and is a poet, novelist and children’s writer, based her story on Grace Poole’s reaction to the arrival, at Thornfield Hall, of a governess:

The door nearest me opened, and a servant came out, a woman of between thirty and forty; a set, square-made figure, red-haired, and with a hard, plain face: any apparition less romantic or ghostly could scarcely be conceived. ‘Too much noise, Grace,’ said Mrs Fairfax. ‘Remember directions!’- Jane Eyre Chapter 11. 

Dunmore’s story emphasised that there were perhaps many more secrets for Jane Eyre to uncover other than just the existence of the inhabitant of the locked attic room- Bertha Rochester. Mrs Poole, who takes an instant dislike to Jane, for reasons that would soon become very clear, calls her ‘the pale one’ and likens her to a snowdrop and shows the extent of her dislike by saying if she saw a snowdrop she would not hesitate to crush it into the ground. Perhaps readers may have some sympathy with the dour, porter- drinking Grace, whose life is spent in that attic room caring for ‘her lady’, as another secret is revealed. Grace Poole is the mother of Jane’s charge, Adele- her daughter having been taken away soon after birth by the father- Edward Rochester. It will be left to the imagination of readers whether Grace Poole survived the fire which was started by ‘her lady’ and whether she ever knew that ‘the pale one’ could eventually utter, with complete honesty, the words- ‘Reader, I married him.’

Audrey Niffenegger (pictured), an American writer, artist and academic whose debut novel was The Time Traveler's Wife, read her story which is set during World War 2 and which tells how the orphan Jane arrives from London in a jeep at a Northern orphanage. At this austere place where her hair is cut off, where rats roam in dormitories and breakfast consists of burnt porridge. Jane meets Helen who becomes her friend. Helen, a very intelligent girl, is treated most unfairly by the teachers and after telling Jane how she had been sent away to a pharmaceutical company, supposedly to take part in experiments to find a cure for the common cold, becomes very ill. Soon afterwards Jane is devastated to be told that her friend has died. Spending the rest of her childhood at the orphanage Jane is lucky that, unlike many others of her fellow residents at the orphanage who sink into a life of prostitution, drug and alcohol addiction, she finds a post looking after a child at a large country house.

When the girl, Adele, outgrows her care, Jane returns to her native London and, whilst paying a trip down memory lane to the bombed out area of her earlier years, is astounded to bump into her old friend Helen- but a Helen whose features are now ravaged by smallpox- the smallpox with which she had been infected at the laboratory when she was a child. Apparently the antidote given to her then, did not work and it was because of fear of contagion that the teachers had treated Helen so badly.

………… my face against Helen Burns’ shoulder, my arms around her neck, I was asleep, and Helen was- dead- Jane Eyre Chapter 9

However the modern day Jane would have a chance to sleep with her arms around Helen’s neck again for there was to be a happy ending for the pair as they were reunited and then set up home together. Much later, as the law changed, they could say with complete honesty: "Reader, we did marry."

The Irish Connection

There were some interesting insights in a recent article by Gerard O'Regan in the Irish Independent. The focus is on the Irish connection. Here is a short extract:

The couple spent their honeymoon in Ireland, with her new husband showing her around Dublin, including Trinity College, where he had been a student. They then travelled to Banagher, Co Offaly, to meet members of his family, continuing on to Kilkee, Tralee and Killarney. Charlotte admitted she was enthralled when she saw the majesty of the Atlantic Ocean for the first time, but some old prejudices remained.

"I heard a great deal about Irish negligence,'' she wrote in one of her letters back home.

"I own that until I came to Kilkee I saw little of it. Here at our inn - the splendidly designated West End Hotel - there is a good deal to carp at - if we were in a carping humour - but we laugh instead of grumbling - for outdoors there is so much to compensate for any indoor shortcomings.''

Read the whole article

Storie di Genie e di Fate by Charlotte Brontë

From the publisher:

STORIE DI GENI E DI FATE by Charlotte Brontë

Edited and translated into Italian by Maddalena De Leo

English-Italian parallel text

The ArgoLibro publishing company presents,  translated into Italian for the first time, the following tales: An Adventure, The Pursuit of Happiness and The Adventures of Ernest Alembert, written by Charlotte Brontë when she was a teenager. The translator, Professor Maddalena De Leo, took care of every detail of the publication, which has parallel English and Italian text. We are at the beginning of a special five-year period for the Brontë family, for various occasions, including in 2016 the bicentenary of the birth of Charlotte, born on 21 April 1816 in Thornton, even if she lived in Haworth in Yorkshire. Maddalena De Leo is a scholar particularly suitable for the care of this publication. A member of the Brontë Society since 1975, she is the representative of the Italian Section as well as editorial consultant for Italy for the literary magazine Brontë Studies.

Leafing through this book, we will enjoy the fascinating world constructed in the imagination of Charlotte, Emily, Anne and their brother Branwell, with the Young Men as protagonists, that’s to say the twelve soldiers given away a few years earlier by their father. It is definitely amazing, as pointed out by the same curator, that the mind of a fourteen year old could have imagined adventures so complex and rich in detail.

"Why exactly do the Brontë sisters... continue to fascinate us?"

The title is from an interesting article by Sarah Hughes in yesterday's Guardian/Observer which brings together information on "a slew of events that highlight the sisters' appeal to all ages". It mentions the  Charlotte Great and Small exhibition at the Parsonage, refers very briefly to Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath (see the extract below) , and anticipates the two hour drama To Walk Invisible by Sally (Happy Valley) Wainwright which will focus on the Brontës' lives between 1845 and 1848. This will be on UK television in the autumn.
 
Click here to find it.


Certainly it’s true that there’s something almost mythical about the Brontë creation story, the idea of these three isolated young women writing so desperately that the words were almost flung on to the page. Ted Hughes called them the “three weird sisters”, intentionally summoning Macbeth’s blasted heath to Haworth parsonage. To his wife Sylvia Plath, who paid homage in a poem named Wuthering Heights, they “wrote … in a house redolent with ghosts”.

Official launch - Charlotte Great and Small

Well over a hundred people were at the official launch of the exhibition in the Parsonage on Friday 5 March. It was a real gathering of the clan! Old friends and acquaintances were reunited and everyone had a good time: a great start for Charlotte's centenary year.

Members of staff spoke about how pleasant and easy it was to work with exhibition curator Tracy Chevalier. Here are two of them with her - Arts Officers Lauren Livesey and Jenna Holmes.

Tracy Chevalier had a rapt audience when she told the story of the exhibition from the moment she had first arrived at the Parsonage to investigate possibilities.

After a short speech of appreciation, Lauren presented Tracy with this bunch of flowers. 

 
Article by Tracy Chevalier in the Guardian here.


Photos by Richard Wilcocks

Charlotte Great and Small

Find out about the exhibition curated by Tracy Chevalier (from February) here -
https://www.bronte.org.uk/whats-on/225/charlotte-great-and-small/232

For a taste, see this short video on Charlotte's bed -

"This small bed is my response to the daily lives Charlotte, Emily, Anne and Branwell Brontë led in the Parsonage. The siblings – especially the sisters – shared much of their domestic space, working together in the kitchen, writing in the dining room, sleeping in the same bedrooms and sometimes beds. The quotes embroidered on the bed and bed clothes are taken from their letters, diary entries, poems and novels. You can see more of this project at my website: tamarstone.com/TheBronteBed.html"  (Tamar Stone)

Winifred Gérin: Biographer of the Brontës

Review by Richard Wilcocks:

This recent biography of a biographer, and if Winifred Gérin’s work on Elizabeth Gaskell is included, biography of a biographer of a biographer, is meticulously researched, perceptive and really surprising. Based on her many letters and an unpublished memoir, it has some of the qualities of a spy thriller, because Winifred Gérin’s life was much more than that of a dedicated library-dweller. Until I read Helen MacEwan’s revelations about her, I knew her simply as the author of Charlotte Brontë The Evolution of Genius, about which the Times reviewer of the time (1967) wrote “…her book holds the reader as closely as a novel.”  The same could be said about this one. Winifred Gérin had strong connections with Brussels, which certainly triggered the author’s initial interest in her (she lives and works there today), managed to escape from the advancing German armies and the Vichy French during the Second World War, got involved with secret war work with her Belgian husband when she reached England, wrote poetry and plays, then moved to Haworth to find her real vocation and to fall in and out with the Brontë Society.

The first chapter with its account of her childhood in a cultured family (the Bournes) in London’s Norwood is as fascinating as all the others: a love of literature (Dickens in particular) and the theatre was encouraged, with stories and dramas from history, especially those involving monarchs. She became infatuated with the Stuarts and Marie Antoinette, heard Jane Eyre read to her by her mother Katherine at the age of seven, acted out historical or allegedly historical events, like King Charles II hiding in an oak tree, with her siblings, and lost a beloved brother to diphtheria. The parallels with the young Brontës are drawn out by the author. She attended concerts at the Royal Albert Hall, becoming spellbound by the stars of the day, like the violinist Fritz Kreisler and the pianist Vladimir von Pachmann, “who wore his white hair to his shoulders like Liszt and would keep up a running commentary for the audience as he played.”  There was so much intellectual stimulation that there was little need for governesses, mostly German Fräuleins who were regarded by young Winifred as “nuisances”.

She was deeply affected by a joyous stay in Paris, which much later was to give her an understanding of the continental, Catholic world of Brussels, “just as her subsequent romance with a Belgian gave her a special interest in the spell cast on Charlotte by her Brussels teacher Constantin Heger.” MacEwan builds plenty of foreshadowing into her construction. As in a novel, the reader gets a taste of what is to come, often at the end of a chapter.

Winifred and Eugène in 1932

Eugène Gérin was a well-known cellist, brilliant by all accounts, met by Winifred in Plombières-les-Bains, a pretty spa town in Eastern France, described in concert publicity as a “violoncelliste poète”. They matched each other well, and she became close to his family before they both had to move on to escape the invaders in 1939. After a series of stressful journeys, often on slow, packed trains, accompanied by a cello and a pet cat in a basket (!), they reached Nice, which was in the southern section of a divided France sapped of hope and controlled by collaborators. The account of their time in a rented flat there, when they were able to offer what help they could to a few of the large number of Jewish refugees in the area before managing to make it across the Pyrenees to Franco’s Spain and then neutral Portugal, is really quite gripping, reminding me of Marcel Ophüls’s famous documentary film Le Chagrin et la Pitié (The Sorrow and the Pity). In England, Eugène assumed a Walloon accent for propaganda broadcasts to the French-speaking parts of occupied Belgium. The detailed references in the book are many: I was moved to find out more about the death of the film actor Leslie Howard, who was in a plane on its way from Portugal to England shot down by a German fighter over the Bay of Biscay in 1943.

Eugène’s death from a pulmonary embolism at the age of 49 in 1945 devastated Winifred, who tried to come to terms with the loss by writing. In Full Circle, an unpublished poem with a distinctly Wordworthian feeling, she recalls how she once had a foretaste of what it might be like to lose him. He was ahead of her on a winding mountain track, moving out of sight occasionally, turning back now and then to smile at her, a smile which now seemed to be an adieu:

As though in premonition of the end

I first had intimation of the time

That was to come, as though the tranquil air

Had cried out with my loss, and with you there

I’d seen the same path empty I must climb.

The poetry was followed by plays, including one – My Dear Master: The Love Story of Charlotte Brontë – which was a turning point in her life, leading her to Haworth. She put a significant focus on the struggle between Charlotte and Madame Zoë Heger, playing up the clash of cultures as well as that of rivals, but all the same her efforts were apparently hampered by a liking for over-long speeches and a lack of dramatic action. After moving to Haworth she met a kindred spirit in the much younger John Lock, whom she married, and with whom she collaborated (1956) on A Souvenir Guide to Haworth, home of the Brontës. She wrote a foreword in which she exercised her great talent for descriptive writing, evoking the beauty of the moors. As for so many others, a love of the their wild beauty was essential to fully understand the Brontës. She used to lie on her back in the heather on sunny days gazing up at the sky, just as Emily (and Cathy) did. MacEwan remarks: “Its style was far more rhapsodic and emotional than that of previous Haworth guide books.”

The Brontë Society at the time of the Locks was ‘a body noted for its unity and decorum’ according to Fred Taylor, the Keighley Borough Librarian, dominated by mill-owner and solicitor Donald Hopewell, its president for forty years, with Sir Linton Andrews, editor of the Yorkshire Post, as its Chairman. This unity was about to be lost in a ferocious dispute about the biggest changes to the Parsonage Museum since the construction of the wing added by Rev. Wade in the 1870s. There was a proposal to build an extension at the back to free up exhibition space in the original Parsonage rooms, to make them look less austere, more like Mrs Gaskell’s account of the interior in 1858 after Charlotte’s refurbishment. John and Winifred were in the ‘dead against’ faction, describing the changes as making the Parsonage look like a brightly-painted doll’s house. The acrimonious dispute, which sent the Society into convulsions for several years, led to the resignations of the Locks along with many others.

Winifred then began the most significantly productive period of her life, devoting long hours to research, with biographies of Ann, Charlotte, Emily and Branwell as well as Elizabeth Gaskell, The Young Fanny Burney, Horatia Nelson and Anne Thackeray Ritchie. John Lock in 1965 finally produced Man of Sorrow: Life, Letters and Times of the Reverend PatrickBronte, 1777-1861, which was long in the making. One problem for a biographer treating the Brontës separately is a need to repeat swathes of detail which applies to all of them, avoided by later operators like Juliet Barker, who treated them together in the same fat volume: the Gérin biography of Emily is slim, however.

One of Gérin’s ‘faults’ from a severely academic point of view was her occasional lack of neutrality, the way she sometimes ‘got too involved’, offering her personal point of view over-frequently, and letting her emotions slip in spite of an admirably scholarly attitude. One of the most memorable passages in her work on Branwell is about when he supposedly wandered the streets of London, suffering a crisis of self-confidence, after he was supposed to have signed on at the Royal Academy. This was a leap taken from his own writing on a character he created – Charles Wentworth – whose nerve failed on encountering a great metropolis. She made similar extrapolations from other Brontë writing, over-playing the autobiographical card perhaps. Juliet Barker found no real evidence that Branwell’s trip had ever taken place. Gérin worked on Branwell at the same time as Daphne du Maurier, who got out The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë just before her (in 1960), and which is now much better known. MacEwan compares the two: “Du Maurier is succinct where Winifred is prolix. Du Maurier focuses on Branwell’s inner rather than outer world; Winifred is concerned with the details of both.”

“Winifred always wrote about people with whom she felt an emotional connection and affinity,” states McEwan in her preface. The same applies to Helen MacEwan: Winifred Gérin is brought very close to the readers of this book.

Winifred Gérin Biographer of the Brontës by Helen MacEwan

Sussex Academic Press 2016-01-04

ISBN 978-1-84519-743-8

Paperback

Brontë200 - this year

Major exhibitions, displays and events at the National Portrait Gallery in London and the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth will mark the bicentenary of the birth of Charlotte Brontë in the coming year. Richard Moss's preview for Culture 24 contains selections of some of these - for example:

The Brontë Society and the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth have invited the novelist Tracy Chevalier to be a “creative partner” for the bicentenary year, to explore creative ways of responding to the Brontë legacy. The acclaimed writer, whose works include Girl with a Pearl Earring, has developed an exhibition called I Shall Go Off Like a Bombshell which, through objects and quotations “explores the contrast between Charlotte’s constricted life and her huge ambition”. 

The whole article, with illustrations, can be viewed here. A new website will soon be online (http://bronte200.org/) devoted to the bicentenary.

Are you a Charlotte (of any age) who was born on 21 April? Want to share in the celebrations? If so, email seekingcharlotte@bronte.org.uk . You could also help to track down other eligible Charlottes by using #seekingcharlotte

Jane Eyre Christmas Card

 
There's still a little time to pay an online visit to the Parsonage shop before Christmas - how about a Jane Eyre card for your favourite fellow aficionado? Or would you prefer something to do with Wuthering Heights? A 2016 calendar? Visit the shop here.

Ferndean Manor under threat

Wycoller Hall

'Ferndean Manor', home of Mr. Rochester in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre is under dire threat - as is the picturesque and inspirational Brontë Way, which starts at Ferndean Manor and leads to the Parsonage Museum, Haworth. 

Called Wycoller Hall in real life, Ferndean Manor is the centrepiece of the gorgeously romantic Wycoller hamlet clustered around a stream at the heart of Wycoller Country Park. Its moody scenery and residents inspired the Brontës.

Lancashire County Council, which cares for the ruined Hall, the Brontë Way and the surrounding countryside is planning to completely close down the management, maintenance and ranger service. Visitors will no longer be able to see the great aisled barn or use the countryside activity centre. The visitor toilets will close and the privately run cafe and shop are unlikely to survive. Wycoller hamlet is Lancashire's prettiest visitor destination with thousands of visitors served by dozens of volunteers - who want to do more to promote the place. It is managed by countryside ranger with a modest budget. Any cost savings from closing it down will be negligible and the volunteers scattered.

Click here to sign the petition

Christmas in Haworth

Happy Christmas to all readers of this blog! And thanks to ace photographer Mark Davis for this one, taken last week at the Haworth Torchlight Parade!

Robin Walker's Bicentenary composition: “Letter to Brussels”

Pamela Nash writes: 

Robin Walker

In Charlotte Brontë's Villette, the protagonist Lucy Snowe wrestled with the grief of unattainable love and "dreamed strangely of disturbed earth, and of hair, still golden and living, obtruded through coffin chinks." A family record passed down to the composer Robin Walker echoes the imagery: his great-great-grandfather, in attending Charlotte's funeral, recalled seeing a violet-coloured (hair?) ribbon hanging out of her coffin*.  A potent yet simple detail which provides for us a rarefied token of a tragic end, and whilst the Villette comparison lends a further frisson to the pathos of her death, the real tragedy perhaps lies in the paradox between the unrequited love in the pages of the author's work and that played out in her own life; while Lucy Snowe managed to repress the tyranny of desire - the “bottled storm” - Charlotte Brontë herself could not, as her letters to Constantin Heger reveal.

Nothwithstanding his ancestral connection, Robin Walker finds a powerful artistic affinity with Charlotte through these letters to Heger, and in commemoration of her bicentenary, he has composed a song setting of two of the letters for soprano and piano.  Having also produced a song-cycle of five of Emily Brontë's poems (premiered in 2014), he continues to draw inspiration and solace from the work of both sisters, arising partly out of a sense of “fellow feeling” and partly out of the absolute contemporary relevance of their work to him as a composer.  He identifies particularly with the emotional evaluation within their writing - the processing of experience through feeling - and, like the Brontës, his own compositional processes are founded in an instinctual response to both discipline and passion.   

It is the meeting of these elements which forms the equilibrium in the new song: although structurally a conflation of the two Heger letters, the wording is completely preserved and the approach to crafting the music reflective of the letters' own expressive shape: “introduction - desperate statement - then, calm.”   Robin's response to the texts was nothing short of visceral: “I felt the force, the beating heart; that completely understandable rage at unrequited love for a man who gave her a unique taste of power and affection.”  What interested him most however - and what he dramatised in the song - was the conflict within Charlotte's “inner life”: behind all her expostulating was a desperate need to escape the stifling constraints of Protestantism and the patriarchy of her father.  “She is externalising her own drama, with the purpose of relieving herself; through writing the letters, Charlotte overcomes her state of mind - from a state of uncertainty and turbulence to one of stability and sanity, but with literary restraint and structural control.  That containment and rationalising of the emotional response is the same process that we as composers have to undergo in order to make it recognisable as emotion to others: the transmutation of what it is to be alive, into an artefact.” 

W:  www.robinwalker.org

  

* See Betty Emmaline Walker, The Green Lanes: A Westmorland Childhood (York, 1998), pp. 49-50