Finding Brontë in Brussels: reflections on literary tourism

In March 2014 I visited Brussels to carry out some preliminary research for a project on Charlotte Brontë and Brussels. The work came out of my book research on mobility in the Victorian novel, in which I look at Charlotte Brontë’s writing on travel to Europe in Villette and The Professor. This was coupled with a developing project on literary tourism, and I became interested in how and why “Brontë’s Brussels” as a tourist site has received so little critical attention from scholars, overshadowed as it is by the more famous Brontë location, the Parsonage at Haworth.

My Brussels trip formed the basis for extending and developing these ideas; I wanted to get a sense of how the locations informed the descriptive settings of Villette and The Professor and above all to learn more about how literary tourists, past and present, have forged their relationships to the city’s spaces through these texts.

Just as any self-respecting nineteenth-century tourist would head to Brussels armed with their Baedeker or Murray’s handbook to tour the sites, I set off armed with copies of Eric Ruijssenaars’s Charlotte Brontë’s Promised Land: The Pensionnat Heger and other Brontë places in Brussels and Helen MacEwan’s Down the Belliard Steps: Discovering the Brontë’s in Brussels, both invaluable guides for touring Brontë’s Brussels locations (1). (I also later took one of the walking tours run by the Brussels Brontë group, a highly enjoyable and very informative experience).

The Belliard Steps
(photo Charlotte Mathieson)