Napoleon relic that Charlotte Brontë picked up in Brussels

When Charlotte Brontë was in Brussels perfecting her French in the mid-1840s, she was gifted a Napoleonic relic — a fragment of Napoleon’s coffin that her tutor Constantin Heger gave her.

In an article in The Brussels Times Magazine, Helen MacEwan tells the story of one of the most curious items in the Brontë Parsonage Museum.

©Brontë Society 

 

Emily and Charlotte and … 48 teenagers from Asse

This summer we received a special request in our mailbox: a teacher at a Flemish secondary school, GO Atheneum Vijverbeek Asse, contacted us because they were interested in taking one of our guided walks about Charlotte and Emily in Brussels with 48 of their final-year students. 

Reappraising Emily Brontë

Claire O’Callaghan is on a mission to rehabilitate Emily Brontë. 

The author of Wuthering Heights has been an elusive and enigmatic figure ever since the publication of her one novel in 1847. Due in no small part to her sister Charlotte’s efforts to explain the conception of such a sui generis work, Emily has been seen as introverted and unsociable, almost misanthropic. Certainly somewhat mystical.

Wonderful, Weird, Wuthering

Wuthering Heights has perplexed readers ever since it was first published in 1847. Justine Pizzo, lecturer at Southampton University, explored what it is about Emily Brontë’s novel that continues to puzzle readers today, in a talk to the Brussels Brontë Group on Saturday 14 October 2023. 

Michael Stewart on walking to Liverpool

Award-winning writer Michael Stewart gave the Brussels Brontë Group a delightful talk on Friday 13 October 2023 about his journey into “Brontë nerd-dom.”

Dr Stewart is the author of “Walking the Invisible: Following in the Brontës’ Footsteps” – about hikes across the Yorkshire moors and other Brontë places in the north of England – and the novel “Ill Will” – about what Heathcliff was up to in those three missing years in Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights.” He is also the creator of the Brontë Stones project, which celebrates the Brontës on the moors that they loved.