When at the Pensionnat Heger in Brussels, Charlotte and Emily Brontë wrote quite a lot of essays, or devoirs, at the instruction of Monsieur Heger, in French. These compositions are not only an important part of the legacy of their time in Brussels, they are also “a crucial link between the juvenilia and the novels,” as Sue Lonoff put it in her The Belgian Essays, published in 1996 by Yale.
For the first time the texts of all the known manuscripts were published, also in English translations. Previously, some could be found in Elizabeth Gaskell's
Life of Charlotte Brontë; Enid Duthie's The
Foreign Vision of Charlotte Brontë, and several articles in the
Transactions of the Brontë Society.
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Cover of Enid Duthie's
The Foreign Vision of Charlotte Brontë |
The first separate publication of devoirs was Fannie Ratchford's and Loraine White Nagel's Emily Brontë.
Five Essays Written in French, published in 1948 by the University of Texas Press (with a 1974 reprint by Folcroft from Pennsylvania; 19 pp.). Fannie Ratchford (1887-1974), an important Brontë historian of the mid-20th century, was the Librarian of the Rare Book Collections of the University of Texas in Austin, which has among its collection of Brontë manuscripts one of the devoirs. She was the author of
The Brontës Web of Childhood, about the juvenilia, edited
Gondal's Queen: A Novel in Verse by Emily Jane Brontë (1955) and contributed to C.W. Hatfield’s edition of Emily’s poems (published in 1941) and the Oxford edition of the complete works of the Brontes. In 1960 she published an article in the
Transactions with three more essays.
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Cover of the 1948 Emily Brontë,
Five EssaysWritten in French |
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| Photograph of Fannie Ratchford |
