I feel like a very spoilt woman: after I had read the book “Charlotte & Arthur” (which I reviewed some weeks ago) my husband accidentally came across another book on Charlotte Brontë’s Irish honeymoon, “Charlotte Brontë – An Irish Odyssey”, which takes a very different but interesting approach.
It has been a long time since I reviewed a “Brontë” book, but this one grabbed my attention immediately for a lot a reasons. In “Charlotte & Arthur,” Pauline Clooney tells the story of Charlotte Brontë and Arthur Bell Nicholls as they took their honeymoon in Wales and Ireland in 1854.
Dinah Birch, Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool, gave a most stimulating and wide-ranging talk on Victorian education systems and the position of women in society when the Brontës were growing up.
She took in religion, school curriculum and the expectations for women, among other topics. What makes a good school, a good teacher? Should education develop the full potential of the child or train them to fill their position in society? Victorian society expected women to work for a wage when only a few decades earlier they were supported by a father, brother or husband.
For the Brontës, education was not only a way to gain financial independence, but more importantly a way to improve oneself. That was one of the main messages of the very interesting talk last week by Dinah Birch, Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool, to the Brussels Brontës Group.
It all started with their father Patrick. Eldest son of a large family in County Down in the north of Ireland, he was fond of books. It seems suprising to me that he took to the written word, because we are always told that his father Hugh was a great storyteller, a man of the spoken word. Patrick Brontë was ambitious and determined and seems to have met the right people to help him get to Cambridge University. His hard work at university brought him an ordination in the Church of England. And eventually he made his way to Haworth.
