Sunday 21 April 2024
Eskişehir, Türkiye
You advise me, too, not to stray far from the ground of experience, as I become weak when I enter the region of fiction.
You say:
“Real experience is perennially interesting, and to all men“.
I feel that this also is true, but, dear Sir, is not the real experience of each individual very limited?
And, if a writer dwells upon that solely or principally, is he not in danger of repeating himself, and also of becoming an egotist?
Then, too, imagination is a strong, restless faculty, which claims to be heard and exercised:
Are we to be quite deaf to her cry, and insensate to her struggles?
When she shows us bright pictures, are we never to look at them, and try to reproduce them?
And when she is eloquent, and speaks rapidly and urgently in our ear, are we not to write to her dictation?
(Charlotte Brontë)
Above: English writer Charlotte Brontë (1816 – 1855)
Do you remember the first book that had an impact on you?
Perhaps it was one that was read to you or the first one you were able to read yourself.
Or was there a book later in your childhood that had an influence you did not discern at the time?
Many noted authors have said they were deeply moved by what they read as youngsters.
In some cases it was one particular book that made them want to be writers and to which they still return for inspiration years later.
Even once a writer is established, a classic author may serve as their mentor.
“When I am stuck with a sentence that isn’t fully born, it isn’t there yet, I sometimes think:
How would Dickens go at this sentence?
Above: English writer Charles Dickens (1812 – 1870)
How would Bellow or Nabokov go at this sentence?
Above: Canadian-born American writer Saul Bellow (1915 – 2005)
What you hope to emerge with is how you would go at that sentence, but you get a little shove in the back by thinking about writers you admire.”
(Martin Amis)
Above: English writer Martin Amis (1949 – 2023)
In a letter to Oprah Winfrey published in the magazine O, Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, referred to her love of books when she was young:
Above: US television celebrity Oprah Winfrey
“Now, 75 years in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books.“
(Harper Lee)
Above: Harper Lee (1926 – 2016)
Ray Bradbury advises:
“You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfume and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads.“
Above: American writer Ray Bradbury (1920 – 2012)
“Hanging near my desk is a collection of postcard portraits of nine of my writing heroes: Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson, Dickens, Stevenson, Conrad, Wilde, Bertrand Russell, Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene.
Above: English writer William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616)
Above: English writer Samuel Johnson (1709 – 1784)
Above: Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson (1850 – 1894)
Above: Polish-born British writer Joseph Conrad (né Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski) (1857 – 1924)
Above: Irish writer Oscar Wilde (1854 – 1900)
Above: Welsh philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872 – 1970)
Above: English writer W. Somerset Maugham (1874 – 1965)
Above: English writer Graham Greene (1904 – 1991)
I got the postcards at the National Portrait Gallery and had them framed.
Above: National Portrait Gallery, London, England
Having them watch as I write makes it very easy to stay humble, but most of the time it is more inspirational than daunting to have them looking down on me with what I interpret as benvolent gazes“
(Jurgen Wolff)
“When I was a child, I had a piano teacher who used to encourage her uninspired students with a system of rewards.
A memorized Clementi sonata or a complicated theory workbook earned a certain number of stars that added up to the grand prize:
Above: Italian composer Aldo Clementi (1925 – 2011)
A small unpainted plaster bust of a famous composer:
Bach, Beethoven, Mozart.
Above: German composer Johann Sebastian Bach (1685 – 1750)
Above: German composer Ludwig van Beethoven (1770 – 1827)
Above: Austrian composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756 – 1791)
The idea, I suppose, was that we were meant to line up the statues on the piano as sort of an altar to which we would offer up our finger exercises in the faint hope of winning these dead men!s approval.
I was fascinated by their powdered wigs and their stern – or in the case of Chopin, dreamy – expressions.
Above: Polish composer Frédéric Chopin (1810 – 1849)
Unfortunately for my piano teacher and me, I didn’t much care about winning the dead composers’ good opinions, perhaps because I already knew that I never would.
I had my own private pantheon made up not of composers but of writers P. L. Travers, Astrid Lindgren, E. Nesbit, the idols of my childhood.
Above: Australian-born British writer Pamela Lyndon “P. L.” Travers (née Helen Lyndon Goff) (1899 – 1996)
Above: Swedish writer Astrid Lindgren (1907 – 2002)
Above: English writer E. Nesbit (née Edith Bland) (1858 – 1924)
Theirs was the approval I longed for, the company I longed to join as they floated above me, giving me something to think about during those dreary piano practice sessions.
Over the intervening years, the membership of my literary ğantheon has changed, but I have never lost the idea of Tolstoy or George Eliot nodding or frowning over my work, turning thumbs up or down.”
(Francine Prose)
Above: Russian writer Leo Tolstoy (1828 – 1910)
I have read writers who talk about the sensation of writing for an audience made up partly of the dead.
In her memoir, Hope Against Hope, Nadezhda Mandelstam describes how her husband, Osip, and his friend and fellow poet, Anna Akhmatova participated in a sort of otherworldly communion with their predecessors:
Above: Russian writer Nadezhda Mandelstam (née Khazina) (1899 – 1980)
Above: Russian poet Osip Mandelstam (1891 – 1938)
Above: Russian poet Anna Andreyevna Gorenko (aka Anna Akhmatova) (1889 – 1966)
“Both M. and Akhmatova had the astonishing ability of somehow bridging time and space when they read the work of dead poets.
By its very nature, each reading is usually anchronistic, but with them it meant entering into personal relations with the poet in question:
It was a kind of conversation with someone long since departed.
From the way he greeted his fellow poets of antiquity in the Inferno, M. suspected Dante also had this quality.
Above: Italian writer Dante Alighieri (1265 – 1321)
In his article “On the Nature of Words” he mentions Bergson’s search for links between things of the same kind that are separated only by time – in the same way, he thought, one can look for allies across the barriers of both time and space.
Above: French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859 – 1941)
This would probably have been understood by Keats, who wanted to meet all of his friends, living and dead, in a tavern.
Above: English poet John Keats (1795 – 1821)
Akhmatova, in resurrecting figures from the past, was always interested in the way they lived and their relations with others.
I remember how she made Shelley come alive for me – this was, as it were, her first experience of this kind.
Above: English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 – 1822)
Next began her communion with Pushkin.
Above: Russian writer Alexander Pushkin (1799 – 1837)
With the thoroughness of a detective or a jealous woman, she ferreted out everything about the people around him, probing their psychological motives and turning every woman he had ever so much as smiled at inside out like a glove.“
(Nadezhda Mandelstam)
So who are the writers with whom we might want to have this out-of-time communion?
The Brontës, Dickens, Turgenev, Virginia Woolf – the list is long enough to support a lifetime of solid reading.
Above: The Brontë sisters – Anne (1820 – 1849), Emily (1818 – 1848) and Charlotte (1816 – 1855)
Above: Russian writer Ivan Turgenev (1818 – 1883)
Above: English writer Virginia Woolf (née Stephen) (1882 – 1941)
You can assume that if a writer’s work has survived for centuries, there are reasons why this is so.
Part of a reader’s job is to find out why certain writers endure.
This may require some rewiring, unhooking the connection that makes you think you have to have an opinion about the book and reconnecting that wire to whatever terminal lets you see reading as something that might move or delight you.
With so much reading ahead of you, the temptation might be to speed up, but in fact it is essential to slow down and read every word.
Because one important thing that can be learned by reading slowly is the seemingly obvious but oddly underappreciated fact that language is the medium we use in much the same way a composer uses notes, the way a painter uses paint.
Words are the raw material out of which literature is crafted.
Every page was once a blank page, just as every word that appears on it now was not always there, but instead reflects the final result of countless large and small deliberations.
All the elements of good writing depend on the writer’s skill in choosing one word instead of another.
What grabs and keeps our interest has everything to do with these choices.
Compel yourself to slow down and stop at every word.
Ask yourself what sort of information each word – each word choice – is conveying.
Smile an everlasting smile
A smile can bring you near to me
Don’t ever let me find you down
‘Cause that would bring a tear to me
This world has lost its glory
Let’s start a brand new story now, my love
Right now, there’ll be no other time
And I can show you how, my love
Talk in everlasting words
And dedicate them all to me
And I will give you all my life
I’m here if you should call to me
You think that I don’t even mean
A single word I say
It’s only words and words are all I have
To take your heart away
You think that I don’t even mean
A single word I say
It’s only words and words are all I have
To take your heart away
It’s only words and words are all I have
To take your heart away
It’s only words and words are all I have
To take your heart away
“The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading in order to write:
A man will turn over half a library to make one book.”
(Samuel Johnson)
Above: The Library of Congress, Washington DC
Today marks the anniversary of the births of Charlotte Brontë, John Muir, Alistair MacLean, John Mortimer, Ahmed Arif and Hilda Hilst.
Charlotte’s name has endured beyond both time and geography.
Above: Portrait of Charlotte Brontë, Brontë Parsonage Museum, Haworth, West Yorkshire, England
Muir matters to America and Scotland, but who beyond these borders knows Muir’s name or legacy?
Above: Scottish-born American naturalist John Muir (1838 – 1914)
MacLean and Mortimer are remanded to second-hand bookstore shelves of the perpetually forgettable.
Had their bodies of work not been shown in movie theatres or on television screens, few would recognize their names.
Above: Scottish writer Alistair MacLean (1922 – 1987)
Above: English barrister / writer John Mortimer (1923 – 2009)
Arif and Hilst are known in Türkiye and Brazil respectively, but save for Wikipedian serendipity neither I nor most of those who read these words have heard of them.
Above: Turkish poet Ahmed Arif (1923 – 1991)
Above: Brazilian writer Hilda Hilst (1930 – 2004)
So what magic has preserved Charlotte and has forgotten the works of so many others?
Above: Portrait of Charlotte Brontë
Perhaps Charlotte herself has the answer:
If you like poetry, let it be first-rate:
Milton, Shakespeare, Thomson, Goldsmith, Pope (if you will, though I don’t admire him), Scott, Byron, Campbell, Wordsworth and Southey.
Above: English poet John Milton (1608 – 1674)
Above: Scottish poet James Thomson (1700 – 1748)
Above: Irish writer Oliver Goldsmith (1728 – 1774)
Above: English writer Alexander Pope (1688 – 1744)
Above: Scottish writer Walter Scott (1771 – 1832)
Above: English poet Lord Byron (1788 – 1824)
Above: Scottish poet Thomas Campbell (1777 – 1844)
Above: English poet William Wordsworth (1770 – 1850)
Above: English poet Robert Southey (1774 – 1843)
Now don’t be startled at the names of Shakespeare and Byron.
Both these were great men and their works are like themselves.
You will know how to choose the good and avoid the evil.
The finest passages are always the purest, the bad are invariably revolting, you will never wish to read them over twice.
(Charlotte Brontë)
We know how tongue-tied people become when asked to say what they liked about a novel.
That they enjoyed it is perfectly clear to them, but they cannot give much of an account of their enjoyment or tell what the book contained that caused them pleasure.
This might indicate that people can read without being good critics.
A critical reading of anything depends upon the fullness of one’s apprehension.
Those who cannot say what they like about a novel or any imaginative literature probably have not read it below its most obvious surfaces.
Imaginative literature primarily pleases rather than teaches.
It is much easier to be pleased than taught, but much harder to know why one is pleased.
Beauty is harder to analyze than truth.
Expository books, like my colloboration with my foster cousin and oldest friend on Highway One, try to convey knowledge – knowledge about experiences that the reader has had or could have.
Imaginative literature, like the novel The Donkey Trail which I am also working on, tries to communicate the experience itself – one that the reader can have or share only by reading – and if they succeed, they give the reader something to be enjoyed.
Because of their diverse intentions, the two sorts of work appeal differently to the intellect and the imagination.
We experience things through the exercise of our senses and imagination.
To know anything we must use our powers of judgment and reasoning, which are intellectual.
Fiction appeals primarily to the imagination.
Don’t try to resist the effect that a work of imaginative literature has on you.
We must act in such a way, when reading a story that we let it act on us.
We must allow it to move us.
We must let it do whatever work it wants to do on us.
We must somehow make ourselves open to it.
We owe much to expository literature that has shaped the real world in which we live, but we could not live in this world if we were not able, from time to time, to get away from it.
I don’t mean literature as an escape from reality but rather I mean an exploration of a deeper reality.
This is the reality of our inner life, of our own unique vision of the world.
To discover this reality makes us happy.
The experience is deeply satisfying to some part of ourselves we do not ordinarily touch.
The imaginative writer tries to maximize the latent ambiguity of words, in order thereby to gain all the richness and force that is inherent in their multiple meanings.
Imaginative literature relies as much upon what is implied as upon what is said.
We learn from experience – the experience that we have in the course of our daily lives.
So, too, we can learn from the vicarious or artistically created experiences that fiction produces in our imagination.
Imaginative books teach by creating experiences from which we can learn.
In order to learn, we have to do our own thinking about experience.
This is how the screen and stage fail.
“I have twice seen Macready act – once in Macbeth and once in Othello.
I astounded a dinner party by honestly saying I did not like him.
It is the fashion to rave about his splendid acting.
Anything more false and artificial, less genuinely impressive than his whole style, I could scarcely have imagined.
The fact is, the stage system altogether is hollow nonsense.
They act farces well enough.
The actors comprehend their parts and do them justice.
They comprehend nothing about tragedy or Shakespeare, and it is a failure.
I said so, and by so saying produced a blank silence, a mute consternation.“
(Charlotte Brontë)
Above: English stage actor William Charles Macready (1793 – 1873)
Literature is akin to the cud that a cow chews thoroughly.
Ruminated, savoured, digested slowly and pondered upon.
We may lose ourselves in the drama on screen or stage before our eyes, but we find ourselves in the literature we read.
Become acquainted with the characters.
Join them in the imaginary world wherein they dwell.
Consent to the laws of their society.
Breathe its air, taste its food, travel its highways.
Above: “Modern Book Printing” sculpture, Walk of Ideas, Berlin, Germany, depicting a stack of books on which are inscribed the names of great German writers
Plot is the soul of a story.
It is its life.
Be sensitive to its very beat.
Don’t criticize imaginative writing until you fully appreciate what the author has tried to make you experience.
The beauty of any work of art is related to the pleasure it gives us when we know it well.
Before you express your likes and dislikes, first make an honest effort to appreciate the work.
What makes a piece of literature great is that, unlike Life, the power of the story endures.
Above: Library of the Palais Bourbon, Paris, France
Charlotte Brontë (21 April 1816 – 1855) was an English novelist and poet, the eldest of the three Brontë sisters who survived into adulthood and whose novels became classics of English literature.
She is best known for her novel Jane Eyre, which she published under the gender neutral pen name Currer Bell.
Jane Eyre went on to become a success in publication, and is widely held in high regard in the gothic fiction genre of literature.
We wove a web in childhood,
A web of sunny air;
We dug a spring in infancy
Of water pure and fair;
We sowed in youth a mustard seed,
We cut an almond rod;
We are now grown up to riper age—
Are they withered in the sod?
(Charlotte Brontë)
But why is Jane Eyre held in such high esteem?
Why has it endured?
“There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.”
(Charlotte Brontë, opening line of Jane Eyre)
Charlotte Brontë was born on 21 April 1816 in Market Street, Thornton (in a house now known as the Brontë Birthplace), west of Bradford in the West Riding of Yorkshire, the third of the six children of Maria (née Branwell) and Patrick Brontë (formerly surnamed Brunty), an Irish Anglican clergyman.
Above: Brontë Birthplace, Market Street, Thornton, West Yorkshire, England
She enlisted in school at Roe Head, Mirfield, in January 1831, aged 14 years.
She left the year after to teach her sisters, Emily and Anne, at home, returning in 1835 as a governess.
Above: Roe Head School, Mirfield, West Yorkshire, England
In 1839, she undertook the role of governess for the Sidgwick family, but left after a few months to return to Haworth, where the sisters opened a school but failed to attract pupils.
Instead, they turned to writing and they each first published in 1846 under the pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell.
Above: Brontë Parsonage, Haworth, West Yorkshire, England
Although her first novel, The Professor, was rejected by publishers, her second novel, Jane Eyre, was published in 1847.
The sisters admitted to their Bell pseudonyms in 1848, and by the following year were celebrated in London literary circles.
Charlotte Brontë was the last to die of all her siblings.
She became pregnant shortly after her wedding in June 1854 but died on 31 March 1855, almost certainly from hyperemesis gravidarum, a complication of pregnancy which causes excessive nausea and vomiting.
“My feet they are sore, and my limbs they are weary;
Long is the way, and the mountains are wild;
Soon will the twilight close moonless and dreary
Over the path of the poor orphan child.
Why did they send me so far and so lonely,
Up where the moors spread and grey rocks are piled?
Men are hard-hearted, and kind angels only
Watch o’er the steps of a poor orphan child.
Yet distant and soft the night breeze is blowing,
Clouds there are none, and clear stars beam mild,
God, in His mercy, protection is showing,
Comfort and hope to the poor orphan child.
Ev’n should I fall o’er the broken bridge passing,
Or stray in the marshes, by false lights beguiled,
Still will my Father, with promise and blessing,
Take to His bosom the poor orphan child.
There is a thought that for strength should avail me,
Though both of shelter and kindred despoiled;
Heaven is a home, and a rest will not fail me;
God is a friend to the poor orphan child.”
(Charlotte Brontë)
Charlotte Brontë was born on 21 April 1816 in Market Street, Thornton (in a house now known as the Brontë Birthplace), west of Bradford in the West Riding of Yorkshire, the third of the six children of Maria (née Branwell) and Patrick Brontë (formerly surnamed Brunty), an Irish Anglican clergyman.
Above: Sapworth Lane, Thornton
In 1820 her family moved a few miles to the village of Haworth, on the edge of the moors, where her father had been appointed perpetual curate of St Michael and All Angels Church.
Above: Market Street, Haworth
Maria died of cancer on 15 September 1821, leaving five daughters, Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte, Emily and Anne, and a son, Branwell, to be taken care of by her sister, Elizabeth Branwell.
In August 1824, Patrick sent Charlotte, Emily, Maria, and Elizabeth to the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge in Lancashire.
Charlotte maintained that the school’s poor conditions permanently affected her health and physical development, and hastened the deaths of Maria (born 1814) and Elizabeth (born 1815), who both died of tuberculosis in May (Maria) and June (Elizabeth) 1825.
After the deaths of his older daughters, Patrick removed Charlotte and Emily from the school.
Above: The building of the former school, Cowan Bridge, Lancashire, England
Charlotte used the school as the basis for Lowood School in Jane Eyre, which is similarly affected by tuberculosis that is exacerbated by the poor conditions.
At home in Haworth Parsonage, Brontë acted as “the motherly friend and guardian of her younger sisters“.
Above: Interior, Brontë Parsonage Museum
“And then my mind made its first earnest effort to comprehend what had been infused into it concerning Heaven and Hell:
And for the first it recoiled baffled.
And for the first time glancing behind, on each side, and before it, it saw all round an unfathomed gulf:
It felt the one point where it stood — the present.
All the rest was formless cloud and vacant depth:
And it shuddered at the thought of tottering, and plunging amid that chaos.“
(Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre)
Brontë wrote her first known poem at the age of 13 in 1829.
She was to go on to write more than 200 poems in the course of her life.
“It seemed as if my tongue pronounced words without my will consenting to their utterance:
Something spoke out of me over which I had no control.“
(Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre)
Many of her poems were “published” in their homemade magazine Branwell’s Blackwood’s Magazine, and concerned the fictional world of Glass Town.
She and her surviving siblings – Branwell, Emily and Anne – created this shared world, and began chronicling the lives and struggles of the inhabitants of their imaginary kingdom in 1827.
Charlotte, in private letters, called Glass Town “her ‘world below’, a private escape where she could act out her desires and multiple identities“.
Charlotte’s “predilection for romantic settings, passionate relationships, and high society is at odds with Branwell’s obsession with battles and politics and her young sisters’ homely North Country realism, none the less at this stage there is still a sense of the writings as a family enterprise“.
However, from 1831 onwards, Emily and Anne ‘seceded‘ from the Glass Town Confederacy to create a ‘spin-off‘ called Gondal, which included many of their poems.
After 1831, Charlotte and Branwell concentrated on an evolution of the Glass Town Confederacy called Angria.
Christine Alexander, a Brontë juvenilia historian, wrote:
“Both Charlotte and Branwell ensured the consistency of their imaginary world.
When Branwell exuberantly kills off important characters in his manuscripts, Charlotte comes to the rescue and, in effect, resurrects them for the next stories.
When Branwell becomes bored with his inventions, such as the Glass Town magazine he edits, Charlotte takes over his initiative and keeps the publication going for several more years.”
The sagas the siblings created were episodic and elaborate.
They exist in incomplete manuscripts, some of which have been published as juvenilia.
They provided them with an obsessive interest during childhood and early adolescence, which prepared them for literary vocations in adulthood.
Above: A hand-drawn map of the imaginary country, the Glass Town Federation, from Branwell and Charlotte Brontë’s notebooks
“School rules, school duties, school habits and notions, and voices, and faces, and phrases, and costumes, and preferences, and antipathies — such was what I knew of existence.
And now I felt that it was not enough.
I tired of the routine of eight years in one afternoon.
I desired liberty.
For liberty I gasped.
For liberty I uttered a prayer.
It seemed scattered on the wind then faintly blowing.
I abandoned it and framed a humbler supplication.
For change, stimulus:
That petition, too, seemed swept off into vague space:
“Then“, I cried, half desperate, “grant me at least a new servitude!“
Here a bell, ringing the hour of supper, called me downstairs.“
(Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre)
The Brontë siblings began writing prose and poetry related to their paracosmic fantasy world in the 1820s, and in December 1827 produced a novel, Glass Town.
Glass Town was founded when twelve wooden soldiers were offered to Branwell Brontë by his father, Patrick Brontë, on 5 June 1826.
It was only during December 1827 that the world really took shape, when Charlotte suggested that everyone own and manage their own island, which they named after heroic leaders:
Charlotte had Wellington, Branwell had Sneaky, Emily had Parry, and Anne had Ross.
Each island’s capital was called Glass Town, hence the name of the Glass Town Confederacy.
“Much of the saga was formulated only in discussion amongst the creators.
Knowledge was assumed between the collaborators, who had no need to explain circumstances or background in individual stories“.
Simon Armitage, a creative partner of the Bronte Parsonage Museum, wrote that Branwell “was driving the whole show. He had this flurried imagination and they seemed to be wildly encouraging of each other“.
“At the end of 1839, Charlotte Brontë said goodbye to her fantasy world in a manuscript called Farewell to Angria.
More and more, she was finding that she preferred to escape to her imagined worlds over remaining in reality – and she feared that she was going mad.
So she said goodbye to her characters, scenes and subjects.
She wrote of the pain she felt at wrenching herself from her ‘friends’ and venturing into lands unknown“.
Both Branwell and Emily continued to write about their worlds until their deaths.
Glass Town was built around “the Great Bay at the confluence of rivers” in a fictional West Africa.
The manuscripts were originally centred on “the Glass Town Federation and its principal city Verdopolis (initially called the Great Glass Town), and then moved to Angria, a new kingdom created in 1834 to the west of the Federation.
The Brontës filled this imaginative space with their own version of early 19th-century society with its international relations and domestic affairs.
Wars and political upheavals dominate the events of the saga throughout its history.”
In an early manuscript (1826 – 1828) by Charlotte Brontë:
“There is a map, which is carefully divided into four provinces (one for each sibling).
The two lists of places explain what belongs to Wellington and what belongs to Parry.”
According to the British Museum, the Brontë siblings named their toy soldiers “the Twelves or ‘Young Men’ and created names and personalities that brought them to life.
As Wellington was Charlotte’s ‘Young Man’ and Parry was Emily’s, this is evidence of a partnership of the imagination between the two sisters.
The mention of the toy soldiers dates the little book to at least 1826, when the toy soldiers were given to the children“.
In the manuscript The History of the Young Men (1830 – 1831) by Branwell Brontë, Branwell chronicled the establishment of the Glass Town Federation colony by “twelve adventurers who set sail for West Africa” from his persona of Glass Town historian Captain John Bud.
In this manuscript:
“Branwell drew a map of the Glass Town Federation complete with mountain ranges, rivers and trade routes.
It shows the four kingdoms run by the siblings: Wellington’s Land, Parry’s Land, Ross’s Land and Sneaky’s Land.
Being the baby of the family, Anne has the diminutive kingdom of Ross’s Land.
Also shown on the map, outlined in red, is the cosmopolitan district.
This contains the Great Glass Town capital, (later known as ‘Verreopolis’ or ‘Verdopolis’).
This grew to be a thriving city of factories, prisons, palaces and dungeons.
As explained in the history, it even has a labyrinthine network of caves beneath, harbouring criminals and low life.”
Early characters were “literal transmogrifications of Wellington and Napoleon“, however, the Brontës eventually “focused on developing two of their own characters: Zamorna, the Duke of Wellington’s son, and Alexander Percy, known throughout the later works as Northangerland.
Although both were regular characters in Charlotte and Branwell’s early Glass Town writings, it is not until 1834, the siblings’ new kingdom Angria, and Zamorna’s subsequent marriage to Northangerland’s daughter, Mary, that the duo’s incredible dynamic is fully unleashed.
Betrayal and revenge are paramount in the Angrian saga.”
“It is a very strange sensation to inexperienced youth to feel itself quite alone in the world, cut adrift from every connection, uncertain whether the port to which it is bound can be reached, and prevented by many impediments from returning to that it has quit.“
(Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre)
Between 1831 and 1832, Brontë continued her education at a boarding school 20 miles away in Mirfield, Roe Head (now part of Hollybank Special School), where she met her lifelong friends and correspondents Ellen Nussey and Mary Taylor.
Above: Town centre, Huddersfield Road, Mirfield
“If we would build on a sure foundation in friendship, we must love friends for their sake rather than for our own.”
(Charlotte Brontë)
Above: Portrait of Charlotte Brontë
In 1833 she wrote a novella, The Green Dwarf, using the name Wellesley.
Around about 1833, her stories shifted from tales of the supernatural to more realistic stories.
She returned to Roe Head as a teacher from 1835 to 1838.
Unhappy and lonely as a teacher at Roe Head, Brontë took out her sorrows in poetry, writing a series of melancholic poems.
Above: Roe Head
In “We wove a Web in Childhood” written in December 1835, Brontë drew a sharp contrast between her miserable life as a teacher and the vivid imaginary worlds she and her siblings had created.
In another poem “Morning was its freshness still” written at the same time, Brontë wrote “Tis bitter sometimes to recall/Illusions once deemed fair“.
Many of her poems concerned the imaginary world of Angria, often concerning Byronic heroes.
Above: Charlotte Brontë
But two miles more, and then we rest!
Well, there is still an hour of day,
And long the brightness of the West
Will light us on our devious way;
Sit then, awhile, here in this wood—
So total is the solitude,
We safely may delay.
(Charlotte Brontë)
In December 1836, she wrote to the Poet Laureate Robert Southey asking him for encouragement of her career as a poet.
Southey replied, famously, that:
“Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life and it ought not to be.
The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure will she have for it even as an accomplishment and a recreation.”
This advice she respected but did not heed.
Above: Portrait of Robert Southey
“Conventionality is not morality.
Self-righteousness is not religion.
To attack the first is not to assail the last.
To pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee, is not to lift an impious hand to the Crown of Thorns.
These things and deeds are diametrically opposed:
They are as distinct as is vice from virtue.
Men too often confound them:
They should not be confounded:
Appearance should not be mistaken for truth. Narrow human doctrines, that only tend to elate and magnify a few, should not be substituted for the world-redeeming creed of Christ.
There is — I repeat it — a difference.
And it is a good, and not a bad action to mark broadly and clearly the line of separation between them.
The world may not like to see these ideas dissevered, for it has been accustomed to blend them.
Finding it convenient to make external show pass for sterling worth — to let white-washed walls vouch for clean shrines.
It may hate him who dares to scrutinise and expose — to rase the gilding, and show base metal under it — to penetrate the sepulchre, and reveal charnel relics:
But hate as it will, it is indebted to him.“
(Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre)
In 1839, she took up the first of many positions as governess to families in Yorkshire, a career she pursued until 1841.
In particular, from May to July 1839 she was employed by the Sidgwick family at their summer residence, Stone Gappe, in Lothersdale, where one of her charges was John Benson Sidgwick (1835–1927), an unruly child who on one occasion threw the Bible at Charlotte, an incident that may have been the inspiration for a part of the opening chapter of Jane Eyre in which John Reed throws a book at the young Jane.
Brontë did not enjoy her work as a governess, noting her employers treated her almost as a slave, constantly humiliating her.
Brontë was of slight build and was less than five feet tall.
Above: Stone Gappe, Lothersdale, West Yorkshire, England
“It is not violence that best overcomes hate nor vengeance that most certainly heals injury.
Read the New Testament, and observe what Christ says, and how He acts.
Make His word your rule and His conduct your example.
Love your enemies.
Bless them that curse you.
Do good to them that hate you and despitefully use you.“
(Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre)
In 1842, Charlotte and Emily travelled to Brussels to enrol at the boarding school run by Constantin Héger (1809–1896) and his wife Claire Zoé Parent Héger (1804–1887).
During her time in Brussels, Brontë, who favoured the Protestant ideal of an individual in direct contact with God, objected to the stern Catholicism of Madame Héger, which she considered a tyrannical religion that enforced conformity and submission to the Pope.
In return for board and tuition Charlotte taught English and Emily taught music.
It was February 1842 when Charlotte and Emily, accompanied by their father, set off from Haworth on their journey to Belgium, crossing the Channel on the Ostend “packet”.
Since the railway line to Brussels was not yet fully opened, on arrival in Ostend they continued their long and tiring journey by stagecoach.
Above: Pier, Ostend, Belgium
The next day they went to the Pensionnat Heger.
Charlotte could not know when she entered it how profoundly her stay in this strange new place was to change her life.
The school was on the Rue d’Isabelle in a quarter close to the central park and near the grandeur of Rue Royale with its stately 18th century houses.
Above: The pensionnat and the Rue d’Isabelle, late 19th century
The Rue d’Isabelle and the Isabelle quarter had an ancient past, remnants of which could still be seen, but the street as Charlotte and Emily knew it dated back only 40 or 50 years.
The street itself had a curiously sunken appearance, towered over on all sides by high buildings, with the old city wall alongside much of it.
On the ‘higher’ level lay the spacious aristocratic quarters with fine buildings, the beautiful Parc and the Palace Royale, the grand residence of the Belgian monarch, King Leopold I.
Above: Belgian King Leopold I (1790 – 1865)
These places were only a stone’s throw away from the Pensionnat.
Above: Rue d’Isabelle, 1894
Descending to the ‘lower’ level, the city centre, you found yourself in the busy commercial area and the higgledy-piggledy streets dating back to medieval times.
In the mid 19th century these little back streets had become a dirty and overcrowded slum area.
To reach the Pensionnat, below the Rue Royale, you went down a steep flight of steps.
Standing at the top of the stairs by the statue of General Belliard, you could look down on the chimneys of the Rue d’Isabelle below and the old city beyond.
Reaching the bottom of the stairs one had only to cross the street to reach the school.
It had been built 40 years earlier and was a plain white building two storeys high, long and low with a row of large windows on each floor.
Even though the school building itself was no more extraordinary than the other schools in the neighbourhood, there was an unexpected treasure, tucked away behind the house:
A delightful big garden with a line of ancient fruit trees.
This garden was to provide Charlotte with a haven of peace right in the centre of the city.
It is described in full detail in her novel Villette.
One can imagine her relishing every opportunity to escape from the pressures of school life to the bower (berceau) and the allée défendue.
Above: The Pensionnat garden
Nowadays, sadly, nothing of the Pensionnat remains and little of the Rue d’Isabelle or the old quarter apart from the area around the Place Royale and the Rue Royale.
Demolition in the 20th century destroyed many of the streets and ancient history of old Brussels.
Luckily, not all is lost and if you know where to look, remnants can still be found.
Today, the view from the top of the steps is completely changed and it is difficult to imagine the scene Charlotte and Emily would have seen.
The Palais des Beaux Arts (an arts centre in the Art Nouveau style built in the 1920s) and the Rue Baron Horta now cover the site of the Pensionnat and the Rue d’Isabelle.
Above: Palais des Beaux Arts, Bruxelles, Belgique
The Rue Ravenstein we see today is on a much higher level than the old street, but the Rue Villa Hermosa, which once led to the Rue Terarcken, still partly exists.
One can still go down the steps near the Hôtel Ravenstein to this street of which only a small section remains.
This little backwater is still on the original level and one can see the old cobbles paving the street where Charlotte and Emily once walked on their way to the Rue d’Isabelle.
Above: Hôtel Ravenstein, Bruxelles, Belgique
In the Pensionnat Charlotte and Emily were taught by the charismatic and inspiring Constantin Heger, whose wife owned the school.
He recognised their literary talents and gave them encouragement and guidance in honing their writing skills.
In Charlotte’s case his legacy was still more profound, since she fell in love with her teacher.
The Rue d’Isabelle, the school and the old city live on in the novels Charlotte Brontë created several years after her experiences, of which Villette is the best loved and most highly acclaimed.
I like Brussels and had, very briefly, a Belgian girlfriend resident there.
I had considered the idea of teaching English in Brussels, but I was handicapped by not being an EU citizen nor having the ability to converse in Flemish.
Brussels may not be as romantic a city as Bruges but it is nevertheless an enticing city that slowly seduces visitors, compelling them to explore and discover what the Belgian capital has to offer.
“Novelists should never allow themselves to weary of the study of real life.“
(Charlotte Brontë, The Professor)
Their time at the school was cut short when their aunt Elizabeth Branwell, who had joined the family in Haworth to look after the children after their mother’s death, died of internal obstruction in October 1842.
Charlotte returned alone to Brussels in January 1843 to take up a teaching post at the school.
Her second stay was not happy:
She was homesick and deeply attached to Constantin Héger.
Above: Constantin Georges Romain Héger (1809 – 1896)
“I longed for a power of vision which might overpass that limit, which might reach the busy world, towns, regions full of life I had heard of but never seen:
That I desired more of practical experience than I possessed.
More of intercourse with my kind, of acquaintance with variety of character, than was here within my reach.“
(Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre)
She returned to Haworth in January 1844 and used the time spent in Brussels as the inspiration for some of the events in The Professor and Villette.
After returning to Haworth, Charlotte and her sisters made headway with opening their own boarding school in the family home.
It was advertised as “The Misses Brontë’s Establishment for the Board and Education of a limited number of Young Ladies” and inquiries were made to prospective pupils and sources of funding.
But none were attracted and in October 1844, the project was abandoned.
“No mockery in this world ever sounds to me so hollow as that of being told to cultivate happiness.
What does such advice mean?
Happiness is not a potato, to be planted in mould, and tilled with manure.
Happiness is a glory shining far down upon us out of Heaven.
She is a divine dew which the soul, on certain of its summer mornings, feels dropping upon it from the amaranth bloom and golden fruitage of Paradise.“
(Charlotte Brontë, Villette)
In May 1846, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne self-financed the publication of a joint collection of poems under their assumed names Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell.
The pseudonyms veiled the sisters’ sex while preserving their initials; thus Charlotte was Currer Bell.
“Bell” was the middle name of Haworth’s curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls whom Charlotte later married.
Above: Arthur Bell Nichols (1819 – 1906)
“Currer” was the surname of Frances Mary Richardson Currer who had funded their school (and maybe their father).
Of the decision to use noms de plume, Charlotte wrote:
Averse to personal publicity, we veiled our own names under those of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell.
The ambiguous choice being dictated by a sort of conscientious scruple at assuming Christian names positively masculine, while we did not like to declare ourselves women, because – without at that time suspecting that our mode of writing and thinking was not what is called “feminine” – we had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice.
We had noticed how critics sometimes use for their chastisement the weapon of personality, and for their reward, a flattery, which is not true praise.”
Although only two copies of the collection of poems were sold, the sisters continued writing for publication and began their first novels, continuing to use their noms de plume when sending manuscripts to potential publishers.
Above: The Brontë sisters
“I like to see flowers growing, but when they are gathered, they cease to please.
I look on them as things rootless and perishable.
Their likeness to life makes me sad.
I never offer flowers to those I love.
I never wish to receive them from hands dear to me.“
(Charlotte Brontë, Villette)
Brontë’s first manuscript, ‘The Professor‘, did not secure a publisher, although she was heartened by an encouraging response from Smith, Elder & Co. of Cornhill, who expressed an interest in any longer works Currer Bell might wish to send.
Brontë responded by finishing and sending a second manuscript in August 1847.
Six weeks later, Jane Eyre was published.
It tells the story of a plain governess, Jane, who, after difficulties in her early life, falls in love with her employer, Mr Rochester.
They marry, but only after Rochester’s insane first wife, of whom Jane initially has no knowledge, dies in a dramatic house fire.
The book’s style was innovative, combining Romanticism, naturalism with gothic melodrama, and broke new ground in being written from an intensely evoked first-person female perspective.
Brontë believed art was most convincing when based on personal experience.
In Jane Eyre she transformed the experience into a novel with universal appeal.
Jane Eyre had immediate commercial success and initially received favourable reviews.
G. H. Lewes wrote that it was “an utterance from the depths of a struggling, suffering, much-enduring spirit“, and declared that it consisted of “suspiria de profundis” (sighs from the depths).
Above: English literary critic George Henry Lewes (1817 – 1878)
Speculation about the identity and gender of the mysterious Currer Bell heightened with the publication of Wuthering Heights by Ellis Bell (Emily) and Agnes Grey by Acton Bell (Anne).
Accompanying the speculation was a change in the critical reaction to Brontë’s work, as accusations were made that the writing was “coarse“, a judgement more readily made once it was suspected that Currer Bell was a woman.
However, sales of Jane Eyre continued to be strong and may even have increased as a result of the novel developing a reputation as an “improper” book.
Jane Eyre is a Bildungsroman – a literary genre that focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from childhood to adulthood (coming of age), in which character change is important – that follows the experiences of its eponymous heroine, including her growth to adulthood and her love for Mr Rochester, the brooding master of Thornfield Hall.
The novel revolutionised prose fiction, being the first to focus on the moral and spiritual development of its protagonist through an intimate first-person narrative, where actions and events are coloured by a psychological intensity.
Charlotte Brontë has been called the “first historian of the private consciousness” and the literary ancestor of writers such as Marcel Proust and James Joyce.
Above: French writer Marcel Proust (1871 – 1922)
Above: Irish writer James Joyce (1882 – 1941)
The book contains elements of social criticism with a strong sense of Christian morality at its core.
It is considered by many to be ahead of its time because of Jane’s individualistic character and how the novel approaches the topics of class, sexuality, religion and feminism.
Jane Eyre, along with Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, is one of the most famous romance novels.
Jane Eyre is divided into 38 chapters.
It was originally published in three volumes.
The novel is a first-person narrative from the perspective of the title character.
Its setting is somewhere in the north of England, late in the reign of George III (1760–1820).
Above: British King George III (1738 – 1820)
It has five distinct stages:
- Jane’s childhood at Gateshead Hall, where she is emotionally and physically abused by her aunt and cousins
Above: Young Jane argues with her guardian, Mrs Reed of Gateshead
- her education at Lowood School, where she gains friends and role models but suffers privations and oppression
Above: “Lowood School“
- her time as governess at Thornfield Hall, where she falls in love with her mysterious employer, Edward Fairfax Rochester
Above: Haddon Hall / “Thornfield Hall“, Bakewell, Derbyshire, England
- her time in the Moor House, during which her earnest but cold clergyman cousin, St John Rivers, proposes to her
Above: St John Rivers admits Jane to Moor House
- her reunion with, and marriage to, her beloved Rochester
Above: Reunion with Rochester
Throughout these sections it provides perspectives on a number of important social issues and ideas, many of which are critical of the status quo.
A talented amateur artist, Brontë personally did the drawings for the second edition of Jane Eyre.
In the summer of 1834 two of her paintings were shown at an exhibition by the Royal Northern Society for the Encouragement of the Fine Arts in Leeds.
“If you think, from this prelude, that anything like a romance is preparing for you, reader, you never were more mistaken.
Do you anticipate sentiment and poetry and reverie?
Do you expect passion and stimulus and melodrama?
Calm your expectations.
Reduce them to a lowly standard.
Something real, cool and solid lies before you.
Something unromantic as Monday morning, when all who have work wake with the consciousness that they must rise and betake themselves thereto.”
(Charlotte Brontë, Shirley)
In 1848, Brontë began work on the manuscript of her second novel, Shirley.
It was only partially completed when the Brontë family suffered the deaths of three of its members within eight months.
In September 1848, Branwell died of chronic bronchitis and marasmus, exacerbated by heavy drinking, although Brontë believed that his death was due to tuberculosis.
Branwell may have had a laudanum addiction.
Above: Portrait of Branwell Bronte (1817 – 1848)
“I describe imperfect characters.
Every character in this book will be found to be more or less imperfect, my pen refusing to draw anything in the model line.
(Charlotte Brontë, Shirley)
Emily became seriously ill shortly after his funeral and died of pulmonary tuberculosis in December 1848.
Above: Portrait of Emily Brontë (1818 – 1848)
Anne died of the same disease in May 1849.
Above: Portrait of Anne Brontë (1820 – 1849)
Charlotte was unable to write at this time.
“This is a terrible hour, but it is often that darkest point which precedes the rise of day.
That turn of the year when the icy January wind carries over the waste at once the dirge of departing winter, and the prophecy of coming spring.“
(Charlotte Brontë, Shirley)
After Anne’s death, Brontë resumed writing as a way of dealing with her grief, and Shirley, which deals with themes of industrial unrest and the role of women in society, was published in October 1849.
Unlike Jane Eyre, which is written in the first person, Shirley is written in the third person and lacks the emotional immediacy of her first novel.
Reviewers found it less shocking.
“Better to be without logic than without feeling.”
(Charlotte Brontë, The Professor)
Brontë, as her late sister’s heir, suppressed the re-publication of Anne’s second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, an action which had a deleterious effect on Anne’s popularity as a novelist and has remained controversial among the sisters’ biographers ever since.
“I believe in some blending of hope and sunshine sweetening the worst lots.
I believe that this life is not all.
Neither the beginning nor the end.
I believe while I tremble.
I trust while I weep.“
(Charlotte Brontë, Villette)
In view of the success of her novels, particularly Jane Eyre, Brontë was persuaded by her publisher to make occasional visits to London, where she revealed her true identity and began to move in more exalted social circles.
Brontë was acquainted with William Makepeace Thackeray and G.H. Lewes.
Above: English novelist William Makepeace Thackeray (1811 – 1863)
“Yesterday I saw Mr. Thackeray.
He dined here with some other gentlemen.
He is a very tall man — above six feet high, with a peculiar face — not handsome, very ugly indeed, generally somewhat stern and satirical in expression, but capable also of a kind look.
He was not told who I was, he was not introduced to me, but I soon saw him looking at me through his spectacles.
And when we all rose to go down to dinner he just stepped quietly up and said “Shake hands”, so I shook hands.
He spoke very few words to me, but when he went away he shook hands again in a very kind way.
It is better, I should think, to have him for a friend than an enemy, for he is a most formidable-looking personage.
I listened to him as he conversed with the other gentlemen.
All he says is most simple, but often cynical, harsh, and contradictory.“
(Charlotte Brontë)
Above: William Makepeace Thackeray
She never left Haworth for more than a few weeks at a time, as she did not want to leave her ageing father.
Above: Interior, Brontë Parsonage Museum, Haworth
Thackeray’s daughter, writer Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie, recalled a visit to her father by Brontë:
Two gentlemen come in, leading a tiny, delicate, serious, little lady, with fair straight hair and steady eyes.
She may be a little over thirty.
She is dressed in a little barège dress with a pattern of faint green moss.
She enters in mittens, in silence, in seriousness.
Our hearts are beating with wild excitement.
This then is the authoress, the unknown power whose books have set all London talking, reading, speculating.
Some people even say our father wrote the books – the wonderful books.
The moment is so breathless that dinner comes as a relief to the solemnity of the occasion, and we all smile as my father stoops to offer his arm.
For, genius though she may be, Miss Brontë can barely reach his elbow.
My own personal impressions are that she is somewhat grave and stern, specially to forward little girls who wish to chatter.
Everyone waited for the brilliant conversation which never began at all.
Miss Brontë retired to the sofa in the study, and murmured a low word now and then to our kind governess.
The conversation grew dimmer and more dim, the ladies sat round still expectant, my father was too much perturbed by the gloom and the silence to be able to cope with it at all.
After Miss Brontë had left, I was surprised to see my father opening the front door with his hat on.
He put his fingers to his lips, walked out into the darkness, and shut the door quietly behind him.
Long afterwards Mrs Procter asked me if I knew what had happened.
It was one of the dullest evenings Mrs Procter had ever spent in her life.
The ladies who had all come expecting so much delightful conversation, and the gloom and the constraint, and how finally, overwhelmed by the situation, my father had quietly left the room, left the house, and gone off to his club.”
Above: English writer Anne Thackeray Ritchie (1837 – 1919)
Brontë’s 3rd novel, the last published in her lifetime, was Villette, which appeared in 1853.
Its main themes include isolation, how such a condition can be borne, and the internal conflict brought about by social repression of individual desire.
Its main character, Lucy Snowe, travels abroad to teach in a boarding school in the fictional town of Villette, where she encounters a culture and religion different from her own and falls in love with a man (Paul Emanuel) whom she cannot marry.
Her experiences result in a breakdown but eventually, she achieves independence and fulfilment through running her own school.
A substantial amount of the novel’s dialogue is in the French language.
Villette marked Brontë’s return to writing from a first-person perspective (that of Lucy Snowe), the technique she had used in Jane Eyre.
Another similarity to Jane Eyre lies in the use of aspects of her own life as inspiration for fictional events, in particular her reworking of the time she spent at the pensionnat in Brussels.
Villette was acknowledged by critics of the day as a potent and sophisticated piece of writing although it was criticised for “coarseness” and for not being suitably “feminine” in its portrayal of Lucy’s desires.
“Women are supposed to be very calm generally, but women feel just as men feel.
They need exercise for their faculties and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do.
They suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer.
And it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags.
It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.“
(Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre)
Before the publication of Villette, Brontë received an expected proposal of marriage from Irishman Arthur Bell Nicholls, her father’s curate, who had long been in love with her.
She initially refused him and her father objected to the union at least partly because of Nicholls’s poor financial status.
Elizabeth Gaskell, who believed that marriage provided “clear and defined duties” that were beneficial for a woman, encouraged Brontë to consider the positive aspects of such a union and tried to use her contacts to engineer an improvement in Nicholls’s finances.
Above: English writer Elizabeth Gaskell (1810 – 1865)
According to James Pope-Hennessy in The Flight of Youth, it was the generosity of Richard Monckton Milnes that made the marriage possible.
Above: English biographer James Pope – Hennessy (1916 – 1974)
Above: English poet Richard Monckton Milnes (1809 – 1885)
Brontë, meanwhile, was increasingly attracted to Nicholls and by January 1854, she had accepted his proposal.
They gained the approval of her father by April and married in June.
Her father Patrick had intended to give Charlotte away, but at the last minute decided he could not, and Charlotte had to make her way to the church without him.
The married couple took their honeymoon in Banagher, County Offaly, Ireland.
By all accounts, her marriage was a success and Brontë found herself very happy in a way that was new to her.
Above: Banagher Bridge
“What animal magnetism drew thee and me together—I know not.“
(Charlotte Brontë, The Professor)
Brontë became pregnant soon after her wedding, but her health declined rapidly and, according to Gaskell, she was attacked by “sensations of perpetual nausea and ever-recurring faintness“.
She died, with her unborn child, on 31 March 1855, three weeks before her 39th birthday.
Her death certificate gives the cause of death as phthisis, but biographers including Claire Harman and others suggest that she died from dehydration and malnourishment due to vomiting caused by severe morning sickness or hyperemesis gravidarum.
Brontë was buried in the family vault in the Church of St Michael and All Angels at Haworth.
Above: St Michael and All Angel’s Church, Haworth
“By dying young, I shall escape great sufferings.
I had not qualities or talents to make my way very well in the world:
I should have been continually at fault.“
(Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre)
The Professor, the first novel Brontë had written, was published posthumously in 1857.
The fragment of a new novel she had been writing in her last years has been twice completed by recent authors, the more famous version being Emma Brown: A Novel from the Unfinished Manuscript by Charlotte Brontë by Clare Boylan in 2003.
Most of her writings about the imaginary country Angria have also been published since her death.
In 2018, the New York Times published a belated obituary for her.
Kazuo Ishiguro, when asked to name is favourite novelist, answered “Charlotte Brontë’s recently edged out Dostoevsky.
Above: Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821 – 1881)
I owe my career, and a lot else besides, to Jane Eyre and Villette.“
Above: Japanese – British writer Kazuo Ishiguro
If you are an architect, you should read architectural literature.
If you are in computers, you must keep up with what is being written about terabytes, hacking and the latest operating systems.
Reading the books and trade magazines as well as checking out the key websites of your particular field will not keep you informed.
It will show how experienced writers are turning the jargon and the complexities of your vocation into readable prose.
But no matter what your field of expertise, you should also read books, magazines designed for the general reader.
Though the daily paper and online news sites contains much that is swill, they also contain some good writing.
From them you can learn to write leanly, to get to the point and to compress several facts into a single clear sentence.
If you read mysteries and romances, you will discover how writers create curiosity and build tension.
You will also learn how to construct an event, a person or a place with just a few well-chosen words.
Read novels.
You will see how words can be used to communicate subtleties and stir emotions, how words can be arranged one way to make you worry, another to make you laugh.
Read magazine articles and you will see how quotes are pared down from lengthy interviews until they contain nothing but the words that matter.
Notice how opinions are supported by facts.
Watch to see how the writer makes his points by calling on outside help, such as scientific reports, quotes from books, surveys, and so on.
Then go to the online version and see whether they have a longer version so you can see what was edited for the print copy.
Read.
And listen to what you read.
Listen for the sound of the language, the music.
Note the punctuation, the spelling, the logical progression of information.
Find the things that fail, also.
Listen to how two similiar sounds close together can cause a disturbing noise ın your head.
Hear how the use of the wrong word wakes you from your reading spell.
Be a critical reader and look upon all that you read as a lesson in good writing.
I do believe that before you hold up a piece of classic literature to intense word-by-word examination a reader should first grasp the unity of the whole work.
The unity of a story is always in the plot.
You have not grasped the whole story until you can summarize its plot in a brief narrative.
First, read the story quickly and with total immersion.
Let the story works its magic and imagination on you.
Let the characters into your mind and heart.
Do not disapprove of something a character does before you understand why he does it.
Try to live in his world rather than force him to live in yours.
I have given the briefest of summaries above about the plot of Jane Eyre, but it is only in reading the story as a whole did I feel the impact of this book upon my heart and mind.
It has become easier in these modern times to become cynical regarding romantic love.
Women view men as pretenders seeking only sexual solace.
Men view women as pretenders seeking only to dominate and profit from his need for companionship.
But consider the great love stories in literature and the cynicism dissipates.
Jane loves Rochester despite his dutiful deception of concealing his mad wife.
She loves him despite the injuries of the fire that rendered him blind and the loss of a hand.
Certainly, one could argue that a penniless governess would find Rochester’s wealth an incentive, but she chose to leave Rochester (for a time) despite his wealth and chose to return to him despite another man’s marriage proposal.
Had the acquisition of wealth, status or security been Jane’s sole goals then she would not have behaved in the manner in which she did.
Rochester was a mature responsible man despite the wave of desire and love that Jane generated in him.
Only his love for Jane made him waiver on his duty to his unwell wife and had him consider bigamy, but even at a risk to his own life he sought to save Bertha from the fire that she had started and ultimately perished in.
Jane Eyre follows a familiar formula:
- Initial wretchedness at home and the call to a wider world
- Out into the world and initial success
- A central crisis
- Independence and the final ordeal
- Final union, completion and fulfillment wherein “they all lived happily ever after“
Having completed Jane Eyre, I then turn back to Chapter One and begin examining how Charlotte Brontë weaved her narrative, word by word.
“There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.“
“No possibility” already sets up an image of difficulty and creates curiosity.
Why was a walk impossible?
Why did Brontë write “no possibility” instead of “It was impossible to walk that day“?
Perhaps to set into motion the hopelessness of Jane’s situation at Gateshead Hall?
There were no possibilities, no options, no escape from the fate of the situation.
“A walk” suggests that it is not a singular experience, a unique moment, but that walking on that day would have been merely one walk among others that had been done before.
“That day” suggests that the day in question will be singular and different from other days that preceded it.
“That” suggests that the day will have a particular significance.
We are then given in this first paragraph that follows the book’s opening line the reason why a walk was not possible.
“We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning.“
Jane had walked with others earlier that day.
“Wandering” suggests that there is no goal, no definitive destination, a walk for the sole purpose of walking.
“Indeed” suggests to me that Jane felt another walk that day was not needed.
“Leafless shrubbery“:
Why leafless?
Winter?
Why shrubbery?
A suggestion that full growth had already been achieved, that future growth is no longer possible?
An image of stunted growth lacking leaves, lacking life, lacking achievement?
“But since dinner (Mrs. Reed, when there was no company, dined early) the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so somber, and a rain so penetrating, that further out-door exercise was now out of the question.“
As it is dangerous folly to wander in darkness, we can surmise that dinner was held in the late afternoon.
We haven’t been introduced to Jane yet but we learn of a Mrs. Reed.
“Mrs. Reed” – a married woman.
Why only the married surname?
Is her role more significant than her person?
Is there, was there a “Mr. Reed“?
Where is he?
“When there was no company“:
So there were moments when there were no visitors to Gateshead Hall?
Who would visit?
Why would they visit?
“There was no company“:
No companionship, a sense of isolation.
Why was there “no company“?
“The cold winter wind“:
No comfort, no blossoms of spring nor warmth of the summer sun nor the cascade, the kaleidoscope, of falling leaves of autumn.
The cold is not content to simply be but rather is driven by the wind.
“Had brought with it clouds so sombre“:
The wind is not content to simply be felt physically but bears with it sombre clouds, clouds that block the sun’s warmth and light, clouds that suggest a serious sadness and deep sorrow.
“And a rain so penetrating“:
The discomfort is felt deeply.
“That further out-door exercise was out of the question“:
There will be no more.
There will not be questioning.
A decision has been made not to walk.
Besides, this is merely, simply exercise, motion, movement without a purpose beyond exercising.
Why is outdoor hypenated?
Perhaps an out door, a way out, is out of the question?
Thus, in careful examination of Brontë’s choice of words, we see a glimpse of her intentions.
This story does not begin joyfully.
Perhaps joy is not possible here.
You, gentle reader, have wandered past leafless shrubbery on a day without mercy.
The winter wind is cold.
The rain penetrates us.
The mood is sombre.
Clouds in the sky.
And there are no options available.
Possibilities are out of the question.
Certainly, Hollywood could show us the leafless shrubbery, the clouds, the rain.
But Hollywood cannot completely capture how the clouds are sombre, how the rain penetrates, how cold the wind feels, the mood of oppression, or answer any of the questions aforementioned just from a close reading of this first paragraph of Jane Eyre.
It is our imagination unaided by nothing but the words that matter is how literature captures our hearts and minds in subtle and mysterious ways that a screen can never do.
I am told countless times by my students and my younger colleagues that they don’t like to read, that they prefer to watch streaming series or play video games.
Why read when the same has been adapted to film?
Why write love letters when SMS / WhatsApp is so much quicker and emotions need only emojis to be conveyed?
Why walk when planes, trains and automobiles are readily available?
Why be a victim of circumstance when one can choose to shut out the noise with Spotify and ignore the landscape by watching YouTube on one’s phone?
This madness, this modernity, this means of global communication that fails to connect us with our own humanity, this insane drive to live Life faster while denying ourselves that which is truly worth living for, saddens me.
Give me a book and my heart and soul are engaged.
Show me a path and I will find myself and touch eternity in the splendour of the universe wherein I wander with the curious awe of a child.
Walking and reading integrate the body and mind.
We need to rally against the soulless supremacy of the machines we have chosen to dominate us.
We need to ramble through life with a sense of wonder, to taste true freedom in a spirit of open-minded exploration and the magic of serendipity.
We may reach our goals but without savouring the details, without pondering perspectives, Life’s journey is merely a medium that leads to our final fatal finish.
Rebecca Solnit captures my thoughts:
Insidious forces are marshalled against the time, space and will to walk and think and against the version of humanity those acts embody.
One force is the filling-up of “the time in-between“, the time of getting to and from a place.
That time has been deplored as a waste, reduced.
Its remainder is filled with earphones playing music and mobile phones relaying conversation.
The very ability to appreciate, to savour, this uncluttered time, the uses of the useless, often seems to be evaporating, as does the appreciation of being outside – including outside the familiar mobile phone comforts that serve as a buffer, a barrier, against solitude, silence and encounters with the unknown.
The fight against this collapse of imagination and engagement is important, because only by resisting this headlong oppression and erosion of our minds and bodies can we truly discover a sense of our own personal and individual freedom.
Read a book.
Go for a walk outside.
Slow down.
Live.
Savour this moment.
(To be continued)
Sources
- Wikipedia
- Wikiquote
- Google Photos
- How to Read a Book, Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren
- The Seven Basic Plots, Christopher Booker
- Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
- Get Started in Creative Writing, Stephen May
- Reading Like a Writer, Francine Prose
- 100 Ways to Improve Your Writing, Gary Provost
- Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Rebecca Solnit
- Your Creative Writing Masterclass, Jurgen Wolff
- thebrusselsbrontegroup.org
