Mapping the Brussels of the Brontës, part 1. The 1841 plan

An 1841 plan of Brussels (collection: Leiden
University Library; published in The Pensionnat revisited)

Cartography has been a rather neglected part of Brontë Brussels history, apart of course from the Quartier Isabelle, thanks to Selina Busch. With the aid of computer techniques and an excellent plan of Brussels, dated 1841, it is nowadays very well possible to show the city and all the many relevant places. The map gives a very good idea of what the city looked like when the Brontës arrived. It also shows the locations of many specific buildings. It seems possible that the Brontë sisters used this map when going out for a walk, at the beginning. Without a map one could quite easily get lost. The plan is foldable, and as one can see, easily in four smaller parts.

We have first digitally removed the black cross lines, which already gives a prettier result.

Then a version was made with the Pensionnat indicated on it (in red), and with the Senne river, the Petite-Senne and canals shown too (in blue). It is easy to forget nowadays, as the rivers have completely disappeared from view, but they made the city look rather different.

The Brontë Brussels calendar, or daily life in Brussels in 1842 and 1843: A first introduction

Charlotte Brontë clearly liked living in Brussels. Had there not been this somewhat problematic relationship with M. and Mme. Heger she would certainly have stayed longer. Brussels was fairly small for a capital city, but it had a “cosmopolitan character,” as she says in The Professor. The best artists visited the city for performances, there were very interesting museums, exhibitions, concerts (the sisters may have seen Berlioz and Liszt), theatre plays, flower shows, many bookshops.

In 2017 the Belgian Royal Library has digitized newspapers of 1842 and 1843, which give a very good idea about life in these years in general, and life in Brussels in particular. It seems rather likely that Charlotte read one or two of these newspapers that were published. It does at any rate seem certain that the Hegers were subscribed to one or two, possibly indeed those two from Brussels that have been digitized.

Lucy Snowe came to Madame “once when she was sitting in the sun in the garden, a cup of coffee at her elbow and the Gazette in her hand, looking very comfortable.” That is surely based on real life. It’s quite unthinkable that the Hegers did not read newspapers. They were the main source of news in these days, it should be remembered. It’s possible they even had the morning edition of one newspaper, and the afternoon edition of another. It also seems more than likely that Charlotte and Emily were allowed to read the newspapers too at the Pensionnat.

Villette and Charlotte Brontë’s Brussels: talk on 14 October 2017

John Sutherland was scheduled to visit us for a talk about Brontë puzzles but unfortunately had to cancel due to illness. We hope to enjoy his talk at a later date.

Helen talking about Villette

Instead, Helen MacEwan entertained us with a talk, Villette as vignettes of 1840s Brussels, introducing us to the Brontës’ Brussels. It contained quotations from writings by Belgian and foreign observers of Brussels, including guide books and travel books by visitors to the city. Among other aspects, it looked at the musical performances and paintings on which Charlotte must have based the descriptions in the novel. The talk was interspersed with readings in which Paul and Ola entertained us with details of Brussels at that period, helping us to visualise the city in which Charlotte and Emily walked.

Paul and Ola resting in-between performances

The talk gave a preview of Helen’s next book, Through Belgian Eyes: Charlotte Brontë’s Troubled Brussels Legacy, to be published next month. Here is the book description.

‘Charlotte Brontë’s years in Belgium (1842-43) had a huge influence both on her life and her work. It was in Brussels that she not only honed her writing skills but fell in love and lived through the experiences that inspired two of her four novels: her first, The Professor, and her last and in many ways most interesting, Villette. Her feelings about Belgium are known - her love for her tutor Heger, her uncomplimentary remarks about Belgians, the powerful effect on her imagination of living abroad. But what about Belgian views of Charlotte Brontë? How have Belgian commentators responded to her portrayal of their capital city and their society? Through Belgian Eyes explores a wide range of responses from across the Channel.

In the process, it examines what The Professor and Villette tell Belgian readers about their capital in the 1840s and provides the Brussels background to the novels. B russels has inspired few outstanding works of literature, and the makes Villette, considered by many to be Charlotte Brontë’s masterpiece, of particular interest as a portrait of the Belgian capital a decade after the country gained independence in 1830, and just before the city was transformed out of all recognition from the ’villette’ (small town) that Charlotte knew. Her view of Brussels is contrasted with those of other foreign visitors and of the Belgians themselves.’

It sounds like an interesting read. A highly enjoyable Saturday morning that helped to fill in our picture of the Brontës’ Brussels.

Brussels Brontë Group events on 14-15 October 2017

Announcement

I’m very sorry indeed to have to announce that due to reasons beyond our control John Sutherland will not be able to come to Brussels and speak to us on Saturday 14 October as scheduled.

Instead, at the time scheduled (11.00 on Saturday 14 October – doors will open at 10.30 for coffee) I will give a light-hearted presentation on the following subject:

Villette as vignettes of Belgian life: further glimpses of 1840s Brussels in Charlotte Brontë’s last novel

At my talk earlier this year, on 1 April, I spoke about Belgian views of Charlotte Brontë and how Belgian commentators have assessed the view of Belgian life given in Villette and The Professor. This presentation will cover new ground by looking at further aspects of Brussels life reflected in Villette, and compare and contrast Charlotte’s views with those of other observers, both foreign and Belgian. The presentation is a further preview of my new book on this subject.

Other Group members will read passages from a variety of writers to build up a picture of life in 1840s Brussels.

The event is free of charge and you are all very welcome to come along. If you hadn’t already registered, please register by sending me an email. Directions to the venue below.

Best regards,

Helen MacEwan
Brussels Brontë Group
www.thebrusselsbrontegroup.org

Time: Doors open for coffee at 10.30 on Saturday 14 October. Presentation starts at 11.00.
Venue :: Room P61, Université Saint-Louis, Rue du Marais/ Broekstraat 119, 1000 Brussels
Metro: Rogier, exit Bd Jardin Botanique.






Saturday, 14 October, 2017

Don't forget to register for our upcoming event on 14 October, 2017, at 11.00. Professor John Sutherland will speak on "An hour’s worth of Brontë puzzles".

We look forward to welcoming many of you to hear John Sutherland, Emeritus Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London, He is a specialist in Victorian fiction and a distinguished speaker with a long list of published books to his credit and has a high-profile media presence. Popularly known for his books of ‘puzzles in classic fiction’ (Was Heathcliff a Murderer?, Can Jane Eyre Be Happy?, Who Betrays Elizabeth Bennet?’), he has wide-ranging interests and his books include many companions to and histories of literature. His miscellany of Brontë curiosities The Brontësaurus: An A–Z of Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë (and Branwell) was published last year.

We’re honoured that he’s coming all this way to talk to us!

Venue
Saturday 14 October 2017
Room P61, Université Saint-Louis, Rue du Marais 119, 1000 Brussels

11.00: Talk by Professor John Sutherland:
An hour’s worth of Brontë puzzles

Entrance charge: Non-members €10, members €

Sunday, 15 October, 2017

As usual we are organising a guided walk around Brontë-related places.
It starts at 10.00 in the Place Royale area and lasts around two hours.

Your guide will be Jones Hayden and there is a charge of €10.

To register for either (or both!) of these events just send an e-mail to Helen MacEwan.

Looking at Charlotte: Views of the eldest Bronte sister from Brussels and the UK

Talks by Helen MacEwan and Sam Jordison on 1 April

The first speaker at the Brussels Bronte Group's latest Saturday talks can more usually be found introducing lectures than giving them herself. But Helen MacEwan, founder of the group and a familiar face to all its members, on the 1st of April this year took the podium herself.

Helen MacEwan and Jones Hayden

In 2014 Helen’s book ‘The Brontës in Brussels’ was published, a guide to Charlotte and Emily Brontë’s time at the Pensionnat Heger. The subject of her talk was ‘Charlotte Brontë seen by the Belgians: Some views from ‘Labassecour’.' Charlotte was famously unimpressed with much that she found in Brussels in 1842 and 1843, at the same time as being in love with the beauty of the 19th century town - and very probably with one of its citizens, the school teacher Constantin Heger.

Helen sought to correct the idea that Charlotte's opinion of Brussels had been overwhelmingly negative, and to report some reflections from the other side: impressions the Yorkshire writer made on the Belgians. Yes, Helen said, Charlotte had renamed Belgium as Labassecour – the farmyard, or the poultry yard - for her novel. But she was writing at a time when England and Belgium found much to admire in each other, with Belgium seeing the United Kingdom as the cradle of democracy, and the the UK finding the first king of the Belgians, Leopold, an ideal constitutional monarch. Much of this positive feeling is reflected in Charlotte's description of the beauties of Brussels, in her novels and her letters, which were not only filled with damning portraits of slovenly Flemish students. Charlotte's personal and published writings are also full of praise for a wide range of Belgian pleasures, from the fashions seen on the streets and the culture and lights of the city, to the pistolets she seems to have enjoyed eating so much.

Helen MacEwan

Some of the first Belgian reviews of Villette were as uncomplimentary as Charlotte's descriptions of her pupils at the Pensionnat Heger, Helen said. A 1954 review said the book was full of “mockeries and calumnies.” Another critic said it was as misleading for Charlotte to base her portrait of Belgium on experiences at one school as it would be for a writer to use a workhouse as a model for the whole UK. Later critics compared Charlotte to Baudelaire, whose 'Pauvre Belgigue' gives an almost universally negative report of Belgium.

The first French translation of Villette available in Belgium, 'La maitresse d'anglais, ou Le pensionnat de Bruxelles' gives Brussels and Brussels place names their real names, dropping Villette and Charlotte’s fictional names. More significantly, many of the more damning passages about Belgium and the Belgians are changed in translation to become much more flattering. Helen, a translator for the European Commission as well as a writer, said she would never be allowed to do such such "creative" work in her day job.

But despite the positive spin given to Charlotte's novel in its French translation, Jane Eyre remained the more popular novel for Bronte fans visiting Brussels in the writer's footsteps, Helen said. Many members of her audience this month nonetheless will feel a special fondness for Villette, as a portrait of the fascinating but at times frustrating town in which they live - many of them as immigrants, like Charlotte herself.

The second speaker in Brussels on 1st April was unfamiliar with Brussels - but has published a guide to the worst towns in Charlotte's home country. Titled ‘Crap Towns: the 50 worst places to live in the UK’, Sam Jordison controversially includes the Brontes’ birthplace of Haworth in his list of places no sensible person should choose to live.

Sam Jordison

Jordison is a journalist, critic and humorous writer, as well as leader of the Guardian's Reading Group. He has also led anti-Brexit campaigns in the UK - an affiliation that won him a round of applause from most members of the audience at this month's talk. Jordison  explained that, while many of the "crap towns" had won their place in his book because they fostered the social problems and alienation "that led to the disaster of Brexit," Haworth's inclusion could be blamed on the Brontes themselves.

Haworth "killed the sisters," he said, with its open sewers and lack of hygiene giving citizens an average life expectancy of 25.8 years in the mid-19th century. Had they lived in another town, Jordison said, the sisters might have lived "full lives." Instead, their early deaths were followed by Haworth's conversion into "a theme park," with no real life of its own, only a series of tributes and commemorative sites in honour of its famous former inhabitants. He refereed to a 1977 documentary, "the Bronte Business," which showed how the life had been drained out of the town in favour of a money-making tourist industry.

Following Helen's comments on how the Belgians saw Charlotte, Jordison remarked on how the Brontes would have seemed to their own contemporaries in Haworth. Far from being isolated, as is often imagined, the parsonage would have been "the centre of life" in the Victorian hill town. But the Brontes were "cut off" from life in Haworth, he said. "Of course they were eccentric." The sisters would have seemed out of place at any time in history, he said, choosing to keep themselves apart from their neighbours. Even Jane Eyre was in its time an "old fashioned" story, he said, with its "Byronic hero" two decades after Byron's death.

The distance we sometimes feel from the Brontes' writing is sometimes even greater today, said Jordison, a self-described "long-standing admirer" of their work. A reader often finds him or herself "making excuses for Jane" when reading Charlotte's most famous novel, he said. Jane operates under "a very different moral code" from 21st century readers - as well as from Rochester and the Rivers in her own time.

But the fact that we do make excuses and sympathise with the writer and her heroine is "a mark of how real Jane feels,"  Jordison said. But he added that Jane Eyre is "a book out of its own time, just as Bronte was out of her own time.”

Emily Waterfield

Yorkshire and Irish roots explored: talks by Blake Morrison and Monica Wallace on Saturday 22 October 2016

Ireland and Yorkshire were both featured in our day of talks on 22 October. The Yorkshire writer Blake Morrison, who is half Irish, spoke about growing up near Haworth and his play We Are Three Sisters. Monica Wallace, who recently returned to her native Dublin after five years working in Brussels, returned to Belgium to give us a talk on Charlotte Brontë’s Irish honeymoon.

Blake Morrison and the Brontës

Blake Morrison began his talk by drawing out parallels between his own childhood and the Brontës’. He told us about growing up near Skipton close to the Yorkshire-Lancashire border, in an old rectory at the top of the village, not far from Pendle Hill where the ‘Pendle Witches’ famous in local legend were hanged in 1612. His mother was Irish and his father, as a doctor (in fact both parents were doctors) was an important man in the village just as Patrick Brontë the parson was in Haworth. He told us about reading Jane Eyre in secret as a teenager – in secret because it was not considered boys’ reading in the laddish Yorkshire culture of the time; it was not on the curriculum at the boys’ grammar school he attended – and about the affinity he felt with the young Jane and the novel’s power as a book for young adults. Blake told us how he found out that his mother was hiding her copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in her bedside table around the same time that he was hiding his of Jane Eyre (a novel that when it first came out was also regarded as a ‘naughty’ book!).

Blake Morrison

Blake went on to tell us how he came to write his play about the Brontës, We are three sisters. First he recounted how an earlier Brontë-inspired stage production, a musical version of Wuthering Heights he wrote in 1986, was never performed; four other musical versions of the novel were doing the rounds at the time and in the end Heathcliff with lyrics by Tim Rice, starring Cliff Richard, was the only one to be staged. To give us a taste of his own version of Wuthering Heights, Blake read us the ballad Isabella’s Song, which starts:

As I stepped out one summer night

to feed my white ring-dove

a shadow fell across the gate

and swore undying love.

The shadow stretched out tall and slim,

its face was black as night.

It spoke to me of wedding-rings

and bridesmaids bathed in light ….

The full poem can be read in his book of verse A discoverie of Witches (2012) prompted by the Pennine landscape in which he grew up. In a very different mood, the collection also includes the Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper, an exploration - in dialect - of the deeds and motives of Peter Sutcliffe, convicted of killing 13 women in 1981. Morrison has never shrunk from tackling such subjects, and has written a book on the James Bulger murder case.

Blake Morrison chatting to a
Brussels Brontë Group member

Turning to the genesis of his play We Are Three Sisters, in which he took up the challenge of re-writing Chekhov’s play with Charlotte, Emily and Anne as the sisters, Blake told us that when a theatre critic friend first suggested the idea to him, he dismissed it as ‘bonkers’. He was however persuaded to go ahead with the project by the artistic director of the theatre company Northern Broadsides, which staged the play in 2011.

In Blake’s play, Moscow, to which Chekhov’s three sisters long to go, has become London, and, similarly, various characters in the Chekhov play are replaced by equivalent characters from the Brontës’ circle (their doctor, Patrick’s curate). Blake explained that although he used the Brontës own words in his text where possible, the use of Chekhov’s play as a basis meant he had to take some liberties with the Brontës’ life story, with sometimes amusing results. For example, in his play the woman with whom Branwell is believed to have had an affair, his employer’s wife Lydia Robinson, turns up at the Parsonage, which she never visited in real life. Members of our group read out extracts from two scenes in the play: Charlotte and Anne telling Emily about their trip to reveal their identity to the publisher George Smith in London, and Charlotte telling her father about the publication of Jane Eyre.

Contrary to the common perception of the Brontës’ lives as eventless, Blake found them full of interest and drama and wanted to show Haworth as less bleak than it is generally portrayed. His play has many touches of humour and he describes it as a ‘tragi-comedy’, much like the original Chekhov.

In the course of the talk, in addition to some of his poems, Blake read us extracts from his memoir And when did you last see your father? Made into a film in 2007 starring Jim Broadbent and Colin Firth, it contains many memories of his childhood. By the end of his time with us we had gained many insights into his personal background and the wide range of his literary output as well as becoming acquainted with his Brontë play.

Charlotte Brontë in Ireland

It was good to welcome back Monica Wallace, who has spoken to our group before and was an active member of it when working in Brussels as transport attaché for Ireland in 2009-14. She is now back in Dublin, working for the Irish transport department. For this presentation she researched the family of Charlotte Brontë’s husband, the Anglican clergyman Arthur Bell Nicholls, and the route taken by the couple on their honeymoon in the summer of 1854 at the start of their brief marriage (Charlotte died 9 months later in March 1855).

Monica Wallace

Monica began by filling us in on Nicholls’ family – born in County Antrim as one of a large family that was struggling financially, he was adopted at a young age by a more affluent uncle, his mother’s brother Alan Bell, who ran a school in Banagher. Arthur never saw his own parents again; his mother died 5 years later. Like Charlotte, he had a stint as a badly-paid teacher when he helped out at his uncle’s school. His biographer Alan Adamson (whose widow Monica met on a trip to Canada) speculates that despite Arthur’s happiness in his new family, he probably suffered from insecurity as a result of these upheavals and financial problems in his early days.

Monica also filled us in on some of the developments in Irish history in Nicholls’ and Patrick Brontë’s lifetimes, for example Daniel O’Connell’s campaign for Catholic Emancipation, which was followed with interest by the Brontës; the Anglican Patrick Brontë initially opposed it but changed his position. She sketched conditions in Ireland at the time of Charlotte’s visit and the often condescending attitudes of English visitors to the country, such as Thackeray.

Monica Wallace fills us in on Arthur Nicholls' family

She then took us on a richly-illustrated tour of the honeymoon route, starting in Dún Laoghaire (where Monica herself lives) and thence to Cuba House, the family home in Banagher, via Dublin. From there, Charlotte and Arthur went on to visit Kilkee, Tarbert in Co. Limerick and Tralee, the Lakes of Killarney and the Gap of Dunloe (where Charlotte escaped unharmed when thrown from her horse) in Co. Kerry. We saw some of the hotels where they stayed and learned that at that period hotels were strictly segregated into Protestant and Catholic.

We gleaned fascinating snippets about Arthur’s family, such as that one of his brothers had a daughter named Charlotte Brontë Nicholls, and Banagher: Anthony Trollope lived there in the 1840s in the first years of his marriage and is sure to have met the Bells.

Arthur Bell Nicholls

Charlotte may have had some misapprehensions about the Bell family. For example, she appears to have believed that Cuba House was owned by the family (in fact it came courtesy of the school of which Alan Bell was headmaster) and that Nicholls’ aunt Bell was educated in England (actually she spent just one week at an English boarding school before being brought back to Ireland as her family missed her). What is certain is that where the Bell family was concerned Charlotte was forced to abandon her prejudices against Ireland, and had nothing but praise for her in-laws’ ‘gentility’ and kindness. She also gave positive reports of her new husband as she began to really get to know him for the first time, in his native country and his family circle.

Helen MacEwan

Villette in Russian – Part Two

There were three editions of the translation in 2007. Two of them were published by AST Chranitelj from Moscow. The first of these had 525 pages and was 17 cm high, the second was 18 cm. 

Covers of the two 2007 AST
Russian Villettes
(Painting: Karl Bryullov - Portrait
of Princess Elizabeta Saltykova (1841))

The third Villette of 2007 was published by Eksmo (605 pp.)

Cover of the 2007 Eksmo
Russian Villette
(Painting: Heinrich Maria Hess -
Portrait of Fanny Gail (1820-1))

Becoming Jane Eyre by Sheila Kohler

As a member of the Brussels Brontë Group you are, twice a year, invited to a lunch; in the summer, normally at the Belvue museum restaurant and, in the winter, at Carpe Diem. It is always a great pleasure to meet other members of the group,  the atmosphere is great and the discussions never cease. Especially, at the Christmas lunch. It is not only a lunch, but accompanied by various pieces of entertainment under the guidance of Jones Hayden. The quiz, put together by Jones, is testing our knowledge of the Brontës, a theatre play performed by members (it turns out that Brontë members are very talented in many different fields), singing, poetry reading and much more. At the end there is a lottery with all prices connected to the Brontës. It was in this lottery that I won Becoming Jane Eyre last year.

I am quite familiar with the story of the family and at first I could not really engage in the book. It is very well written, beautiful prose. It follows the thoughts of Charlotte, Emily, Anne, the father and a nurse helping the father during his convalescence after his eye operation. Sheila Kohler lets us into the minds of the sisters and how their experiences in life has found its way into their books. We hear the thoughts of the father, always somehow distancing himself from his children, except possibly from Branwell, the promising son of which became nothing.

The more I read however, the more I do engage in their story and destiny.  Sheila Kohler has integrated happenings in their life and shows us how these events have been woven into their stories. It is very delicately and respectfully done, and towards the end of the book you feel their pain and the solitude of their lives, which were rich in literature and work, but somehow seemed to lack the spirit of life.

An easy readable and thought worthy book on the life of the Brontës, which has given me another dimension of their writings. Kohler carefully guides you through their personalities, and characters as we know them.  In the end of the book there is a chapter ”A conversation with Sheila Kohler”. Here is her answer to the question ”How long did the research for the novel take? Were there moments in writing the book where your creative impulse went in one direction and the truth of Charlotte Brontë’s life went in the other? Which did you follow?

”J.M. Coetzee once said to me when I told him about my project: ’Don’t stay too close to the truth.’ I think that it is good advice. Certainly, one cannot falsify the facts that are so well known, and I hope I have never done that. However, there is so much one doesn’t know about someone else’s life, even someone so famous, and there I let my imagination work freely. Besides. there is always a selection of facts made. I was particularly interested  in the bond between Charlotte and her married professor and also in the relationship between these three sisters, who died so young. …”

I think Sheila Kohler has managed to stay true to the sisters, and the areas where she has let her imagination flow, she has nevertheless held back in line with their characters. A different read on the Brontës, and a dimension of their lives, which can only be guessed, but nevertheless seems realistic.

Lisbeth Ekelof
The Content Reader

Villette and The Professor in Portugal and Brazil

Portugal

Villette
The first Portuguese Villette was published in 1943, by Portugália from Lissabon, as Villette ou num colégio de raparigas (‘or a girls’ school’; 539 pp.). It was translated by Ersilio Cardoso (1911-1996). He also translated Pride and Prejudice, Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop, Shakespeare’s Hamlet and a lot of other works, and wrote English-, French- and German-Portuguese dictionaries.

Cover of the 1943 Villette ou num
colégio de raparigas

It was republished by Portugália in 1958 (511 pp.)

Cover of the 1958 Villette ou num
colégio de raparigas

The Cardoso translation was again published in 1974 and 1985, by Celidis from Lissabon (491 pp.). Unfortunately no pictures can be found of the covers.

Villette and The Professor in Spain and South America

Villette
The first Spanish translation of Villette was published in 1944 by Nausica from Barcelona (613 pp.), in a translation by P. Elias, who also wrote a preface. Elias also translated Anne Brontë’s novels, Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop and books by Mark Twain.

Cover of the 1944 Spanish Villette

Spain’s second translation was published in 1996 by Rialp from Madrid (462 pp.). Or rather, this version, ‘realized by Miguel Martin,’ was based on Elias’ translation, as is shown in an article written by Maria Teresa Fernández Martinez. In it she also relates how this Spanish Villette censored “every single element considered to be critical of Catholicism, thus distorting the meaning.”

Cover of the 1996 Spanish Villette

The real second translation in Spanish, by Eduardo Arana, was published in 1945, in Argentina, by Ayacucho from Buenos Aires. Bizarrely, Emily Brontë is given as the author of the novel. With 394 pages it is probably an abridged version. Unfortunately no picture of the cover could be found.

A bit more about Villette translations and revenge

Recently a series of articles centering around the early translations of Villette was published on this blog. But much more can be written about translations of this novel after 1860, in many other languages, and about translations of Charlotte Brontë’s other Brussels novel, The Professor. So far I have found 27 languages into which Villette was translated. There will be some more.

Here for instance is a Chinese Villette. Only recently I found this in the collection of Leiden University Library, with this fascinating catalog card description:
• 洛雪小姐遊學記
• Title: Luoxue xiao jie you xue ji
• Author/Creator: Brontë, Charlotte 1816-1855
• 伍光建; Wu, Guangjian
• Description: Note: Translation of: Villette.
• Related Titles: Series: 人人文庫 Renren wenku
• Edition: 臺1版.; Tai 1 ban..
• Publisher: Taibei : Taiwan shang wu yin shu guan; 臺北 : 臺灣商務印書館
• Date: [Minguo 60 [1971]
• Form: 2 volumes in 1 (2,4,1,300 pages) ; 18 cm.
• Language: Chinese
 I rushed to the Library and found this book:

Cover page of the 1971 Taiwanese Villette 

Back page of the 1971 Taiwanese Villette

(Jane Eyre in this series was published six years later, in 1977 (Minguo 66), as:
ï  孤女飄零記
ï  Title: Gu nü piao ling ji.)

A measure of greatness is the number of languages a novel  has been translated into. But it seems no research has been done for Brontë translations. Wikipedia has a list of the most translated works. It goes down to books with a minimum of 28 languages, but it does not have a single Brontë work. Yet, Jane Eyre has at least 32 languages, and probably quite a few more. Wuthering Heights surely also has more than 30, and Villette will surely have at least 28.  This aspect of their novels makes it also interesting for bibliographical reasons, and for book collectors of course.

An evening with Charlotte Brontë

Our Brontë day on Saturday 16 April was rounded off by an evening of readings from Charlotte Brontë’s novels and letters in the Auderghem Cultural Centre. The readers were members of the Brussels Shakespeare Society, directed by Tracie Ryan, who also chose the readings and wrote the account of Charlotte’s life narrated in the first person by Deborah Griffiths. The readings were given by Charles White, Miranda Ryan White, Kendra Doherty, Jonathan Sawdon, Robynn Colwell and Graham Andrews. We heard from Mr Brocklehurst, the young Jane Eyre and her friend Helen Burns. There was plenty of emphasis on Charlotte’s stay in Brussels, with extracts from Villette and Charlotte’s letters home from the Pensionnat. We heard some of the comments written by Constantin Heger on Charlotte’s devoirs, and were introduced to his alter ego in Villette, M. Paul.

Deborah Griffiths as Charlotte

Miranda Ryan White as Jane Eyre, Kendra Doherty as Helen Burns
and Deborah Griffiths as Charlotte.

Jane Eyre and Helen Burns.

Jonathan Sawdon, Graham Andrews and Robynn Colwell

Graham Andrews

Juliet Barker in Brussels for the Charlotte Brontë bicentenary: 16 April 2016

Juliet Barker’s eagerly-awaited talk in Brussels, over our weekend of events to celebrate the Charlotte Brontë bicentenary, took place against the backdrop of travel disruption following the attacks of 22 March. With flights cancelled or deviated, the weeks leading up to 16 April were anxious ones and the news of a Belgian air traffic controllers’ strike shortly before she was due to fly seemed the last straw. But she made it to beleaguered Brussels Airport, all the way from her home in North Yorkshire.

The main focus of her talk was The things Gaskell left out of her Life of Charlotte Brontë. Over dinner the evening before the talk, Juliet expressed admiration for Mrs Gaskell as a novelist, but her talk made it clear that she has a few bones to pick with Gaskell the biographer. In Barker’s view, the problem with Gaskell’s Life is that it is a fiction rather than a truthful biography.

To my sister - a poem

To prepare for the bicentenary of Charlotte's birth, we asked members whether they would like to contribute to the blog during this special period.  We are pleased to present one of our Dutch members, Louise van Proosdij, who is also a member of the Brontë society. Her contribution is a poem named To my sister. It  is not only creative but reflects the form that, some argue, came most naturally to the Brontes: poetry.


To my sister

Jane and I have always been together.
She guided me during my whole life.
Her strong and independent character
was a great help for me, in times of stormy weather.

I thank this to her mother Charlotte,
who was so gifted and so strong.
Her spirit is still there in Haworth.
I felt it of them all, they came along:

I saw her father, mother and her brother.
They were still young, holding each other's hand.
And all the girls, looking very cheerful,
dancing with each other in that lovely land.

Of course I also know the tragedy.
The crows who live there cried out in my ear :
“They all suffered cruely, died very young.
We know it's hurting you to hear”.

 Once I walked along the graveyard very late and woke up the crows who were asleep.
The eldest said to me : “Always remember this fantastic family “.
The youngest whispered : “Look well after what they have left us “.
 “ I will “.

Louise van Proosdij

The Brontës by Juliet Barker

I’ve never done more than one post about a single book (except read-alongs), but I’ll open an exception for this one. It’s not just because it’s probably the biggest book I’ve ever picked up, but I’m half-way through it and it’s fascinating enough to make me want to put some thoughts down. This is compulsory reading for anyone with an interest in the Brontës and don’t be intimidated by its size: it’s one of those books that just floooows.

Juliet Barker’s approach is that a reliable biography of each Brontë cannot be done in isolation, since their lives were too connected and they constantly inspired each other’s works. She’s also in the business of myth-busting.

It was especially enlightening to read this after Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë. While Gaskell’s clear agenda was to give a sympathetic view of Charlotte and ease the shock the family’s books generated at the time, she did it by making certain sacrifices. Patrick and Branwell for instance, were not portrayed in the best of lights and it was clear Gaskell bent the truth to carry this argument.

The Life is responsible for many Brontë legends, namely “poor Charlotte” (the martyr daughter and saintly sister) and Emily as the romantic and wild free spirit. With The Brontës, Barker set out to defy these and other dogmas by diligently re-visiting all direct and indirect sources and re-accessing every established assumption.

My perception of Charlotte in particular changed from the “picture of perfection” image I had of her. I was spellbound by her struggle between her duty towards her family (a job she didn’t like and was bad) and the ever-present temptation of her imaginary worlds.

The Brontës & Axel the Cat, our temporary guest.
Photo by Andre

I discussed this book with other Brontë fans and some thought Barker was sometimes too set on thoroughness at the expensed of compelling story telling (the opposite of Mrs. Gaskell?). I didn’t feel that way, even though I admit to a few skims here and there. Baker’s very keen on describing several juvenilia characters and after a while it became too difficult to keep up with who killed, (de)crowned or married whom. Certain parts on the religious and political activism that took so much of Patrick’s time could also have used a little trimming, but the fact remains these were central events in the family’s lives.

Other myths Barker busted included the image of Haworth as an isolate, stagnated village, Branwell being an alcoholic from a very early age and Patrick as a severe and distant father. And we’re only talking about the first half of the book!

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)

Launch of ‘Charlotte Brontë’s Secret Love’, the English translation of Jolien Janzing’s novel ‘De Meester’

On 29 October members of the Brussels Brontë Group were among those who gathered at Waterstones for the launch of Charlotte Brontë’s Secret Love, the English translation of Jolien Janzing’s novel inspired by Charlotte Brontë’s time at the Pensionnat, first published as De Meester.

On the left, Jolien Janzing

Jolien Janzing, a Dutch journalist and novelist, has lived in Flanders since early childhood. De Meester, first published in 2013 and translated into English by the prize-winning translator Paul Vincent, is her second novel. It is also to be translated into German, French and Turkish. It was selected for Books at Berlinale and the film rights have been sold to David P. Kelly films.


Earlier in October Jolien was invited by the Brontë Society to be their speaker at the Society’s annual literary lunch, held this year in Yorkshire. And on the morning of the Waterstones launch she was in London where she joined Claire Harman, author of the new biography of Charlotte Brontë just out, to speak on Woman’s Hour on BBC Radio 4 (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06kggh1). They began by discussing Charlotte’s love for Constantin Heger and confession at the Cathedral of St Gudule. The first chapter of Janzing’s novel relates this scene in the Cathedral, and, interestingly, so does the prologue to Harman’s biography.

Jolien reading from
'Charlotte Brontë's Secret Love

At the Waterstones launch, against a backdrop of projected images of nineteenth-century Brussels, the audience listened to readings from the novel and an interview with Jolien conducted by Jones Hayden of the Brussels Brontë Group. We heard about the novel’s vision of Charlotte and Emily’s stay at the Pensionnat, with suggestions of homo-eroticism in Emily’s friendship with a fellow pupil, Louise de Bassompierre, and more than suggestions of eroticism in Charlotte’s relationship with Monsieur Heger, the husband of the school’s directress. Rather than presenting Charlotte’s love for Heger as unrequited, Jolien explores a more romantic scenario in which Heger, portrayed as a flirtatious character, is attracted to Charlotte in his turn. She shared with us her view of 1840s Brussels (described in her novel as ‘dissolute’ and evoked with great sensuousness) as a place of relaxed morals where flirtation and adultery were very much in the air. We heard about one of the novel’s sub-plots, the liaison between King Leopold I and his much younger mistress Arcadie Claret, whose destiny is counterpointed in the novel with Charlotte’s. When the liaison began, around the time of the Brontës’ arrival on the Continent, Arcadie was only sixteen.

On the right, Jones Hayden, who interviewed Jolien

After this presentation of a book which, unusually, offers a take on the Brontës’ stay in Brussels by a writer on this side of the Channel, attendees mingled and relaxed in the approved continental style – over a glass of wine!

Helen MacEwan

Brontë weekend with the Brontë Society and Waterloo bicentenary

A quite unusual Brussels Brontë Group event took place on Saturday 20 June. Due to the bi-centenary of the Battle of Waterloo, which was fought on 18 June 1815, we had the pleasure to welcome a group from the Brontë Society. Since Wellington and Napoleon were early heroes of the Brontës, the Society decided to take this opportunity to organise a visit to Brussels and meet our group. They kindly invited us for a lecture on Saturday morning.

The lecture on The Brontës’ Early Heroes was held by Emma Butcher. Emma is still a student, and already a very accomplished and wonderful speaker. Since Emma is writing her thesis on The Brontës and War, she has done a lot of research into this particular interest of theirs. Apart from some background information on both Napoleon and Wellington, we got an interesting ‘guided tour’ through their Juvenilia creation of Anglia, with their dashing characters of Zamorna (based on Wellington) and Percy (based on Napoleon). It is amazing how imaginative they were. Emma also told us that apart from one woman, Elizabeth Hastings, all the women in their Juvenilia writing are rather helpless creatures. They obviously came a long way, when it was time for them to create their own very strong, female characters.

Lisbeth Ekelof