Exploring Anne Brontë’s Poetry

Emelie Sannen helped the Brussels Brontë Group continue the celebration of Anne Brontë’s bicentenary with a very evocative analysis of three of Anne’s poems. As one of the youngest members of our group, Emelie is in a good position to help us appreciate the poetry of the youngest of the Brontë sisters.

Emelie, who is a student at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), spoke during our Member Presentations day on Saturday, Feb. 15, 2020. Using ``word clouds’’ to help her examine some of her favorite poems by Anne, Emelie started with ``Home,’’ saying the work made her think of a time she was wandering in the big city away from her own home.

Emelie and a 'word cloud' of Anne's poem `Home'

The next poem, ``Memory,’’ also begins with an image of the sun, but then focuses on various flowers instead of the ``barren hills’’ and ``colder breezes’’ of the poem ``Home.’’ Both works are about memories, but of different kinds.

Mind-Mapping the Brontës

Mark Cropper has used mind-mapping to create memorable images of a couple of the talks we have enjoyed at the Brussels Brontë Group. On Saturday, Feb. 15, 2020, he shared his insights on how this note-taking technique helps him to create these colorful images.

Mark with his mind map of John Sutherland's talk.

Starting with a brief explanation of how mind-mapping developed, Mark gave a little seminar on how he uses the technique to show graphically the most important elements of a presentation. Along the way, he mind-mapped his own presentation.

The Brontës and Fanfiction

Ana Gauthier managed to connect the Brontës with Star Trek and Harry Potter in an entertaining presentation on the Brontës and fanfiction to the Brussels Brontës Group on Saturday, Feb. 15, 2020.

While the Star Trek television series could be credited by many with sparking the first ``fandom’’ around fictional characters, Ana showed how the tiny magazines that the Brontë children created for their imaginary worlds could be considered early versions of fanfiction. Just like modern-day fanfiction, the young siblings could use their fictional worlds of Angria and Gondal as an experimental playground to give their imaginations free rein, allowing them to ask what-if questions about real-world characters and development totally new characters, too.

But she also suggested that fanfiction is much older even than the Brontës. Lots of Shakespeare takes characters and plot elements from earlier works and reworks them. Milton’s Paradise Lost is a derivative work of the Bible where he repaints Satan as a tragic hero. Dante’s Inferno is a mash-up of the Bible, The Aeneid, and Greek mythology. The Aeneid itself is a spinoff of The Iliad, she explained.

A Conversation With Belgian Author Nathalie Stalmans

Belgian historical novelist Nathalie Stalmans visited the Brussels Brontë Group on Oct. 12 to talk about her novel Si j’avais des ailes (If I Had Wings). The book, published earlier this year, is a fictional account of Charlotte Brontë’s time in Brussels at the Pensionnat Heger in 1842-43.

 The conversation, led by Helen MacEwan and Myriam Campinaire, was like Nathalie’s novel, a very interesting blend of the past and the present. The lively exchange offered insights not only on Charlotte’s life and experience in Brussels, but also on life in the Belgian capital – all the while playing along the borders of fact and fiction.

‘A little romance’? -- Taking liberties with Brontë biography

Patsy Stoneman, Emeritus Reader in English at the University of Hull and distinguished Brontë scholar, on Oct. 12 gave us a fascinating critical tour of some of the highways and byways of Brontë biography, editions, critical works and biographical fiction. Her lucid and trenchant route-map through this changing, variable terrain was much appreciated.

It was after reading Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) that Patrick Brontë commented that the author should be permitted “a little romance” – saintly forbearance considering that Mrs. Gaskell had described him as “the strange, half-mad father” – and Dr. Stoneman used this first biography of Charlotte Brontë as a starting point in her discussion of different types of Brontë writers and the difficulties for unwary readers who can so easily be led astray by a blurring of fact and fiction.

We started with writers using known facts as the basis for serious biography, but, as Dr. Stoneman pointed out, even in this apparently limited field there is great variety. Mrs. Gaskell had the inestimable advantages of being a contemporary and knowing her subject personally, but she also had to deal with contemporary mores, her own prejudices and a novelist’s tendency to romantic exaggeration which led her to paint a highly coloured picture of life at Haworth parsonage and to suppress or gloss over anything she thought might be prejudicial to her friend’s reputation.