Emily Bronte talk and reading on October 13th - report

The Brussels Brontë Group commemorated Emily Brontë's bicentenary on Saturday, Oct. 13, 2018, with a talk on Wuthering Heights by John Bowen, professor of 19th-century literature at the University of York, followed by a celebration of Emily's poetry.

Professor John Bowen

Professor Bowen delved into the strange appeal of Wuthering Heights despite the violence and cruelty in the novel and the public’s enduring fascination with the book more than 150 years after it was first published.

The title of his talk was bleak -- `Dividing the Desolation’, taken from the first paragraph of the novel. But Prof. Bowen showed how that first paragraph highlights the richness of Emily Brontë’s language right from the start. While focusing on the depth of ideas in Lockwood’s declaration that  

``Mr. Heathcliff and I are such a suitable pair to divide the desolation between us,'' Professor Bowen also touched on the multiple layers of meaning in phrases like ``solitary neighbor’’ and ``be troubled with.’’

Then we were off on an exploration of the characters in the novel and what they mean to different readers and critics. Along the way, Prof. Bowen touched on the importance of naming in Emily’s novel, Charlotte Brontë’s feelings about Heathcliff, and Heathcliff’s feelings about himself. And throwing in an entertaining rendition of Joseph’s colorful chidings in Yorkshire dialect.

Bowen, who is president of the Dickens Fellowship, also mentioned Charles Dickens’ apparent antipathy to the Brontës. There is only one recorded instance of Dickens talking about the sisters from Haworth, and that is someone’s note about a conversation with the novelist in which Dickens said he never read the Brontës but ``disapproved of the whole school.’’ But reading Bleak House, it's hard to think that Dickens hadn't read Jane Eyre, Prof. Bowen said.

On Wuthering Heights, the question he wanted to ponder was: Who is the main character? And relatedly: what is central to the novel? These may sound like straight-forward questions, and most of us no doubt had our own straight-forward answers. But Prof. Bowen demonstrated the complexity of the queries and how they go a long way to helping understand how readers react to Emily’s book.

A day to remember: the Brussels Brontë Group meets Lucasta Miller and John Sutherland

Our annual talk(s) around the time of Charlotte Brontë’s birthday, which this year fell on the exact date (21 April), proved a memorable day in the Group’s annals, with talks by two important figures in Brontë studies and literary criticism, Lucasta Miller and John Sutherland.

Our wonderful speakers

Brontë weekend talks on 25 April with Claire Harman and Bonnie Greer

Claire Harman

Claire Harman, whose biography of Charlotte Brontë is due to be published in October, was our first
speaker at our Brontë weekend this year. Her talk on Saturday, April 25, was very special for the Brussels Brontë Group because Claire focused on the wrenching letters that Charlotte sent to her teacher, M. Heger, after she left Brussels and the importance of her Belgian experience in her life and art.

The feelings of unrequited affection and desperate anguish that Charlotte shows in these letters coloured all of her subsequent writing after she went back to Haworth at the start of 1844, Claire said. The four letters are now at the British Library in London, where they have been since being donated by the Heger family in 1913.

Claire, the author of several biographies including one of Robert Louis Stevenson, also provided interesting insights into the biographer's craft. She has also written Jane's Fame on the legacy of Jane Austen, in the vein of Lucasta Miller's The Brontë Myth. In writing her forthcoming book on Charlotte Brontë, Claire said she refrained from reading other biographies of the writer, though she heavily consulted Juliet Barker's The Brontës as a reference, saying she wanted her biography to contain her ``own very personal take'' on the letters and other material, such as the devoirs written in Brussels.