When Charlotte Brontë was in Brussels perfecting her French in the mid-1840s, she was gifted a Napoleonic relic — a fragment of Napoleon’s coffin that her tutor Constantin Heger gave her.
In an article in The Brussels Times Magazine, Helen MacEwan tells the story of one of the most curious items in the Brontë Parsonage Museum.
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| ©Brontë Society |
I always find it jarring when the film concentrates on the director's interpretation rather than making the the film believable. People, manners and social behaviour were different back then.
In the film Emily, Emily Brontë was romping around the moors and barns in a very unvictorian way! If nothing else, the weather in Haworth would make you think twice – and it took so long for them to unbutton all their clothes in the barn, I was left worrying about how on earth they would get Emily back in a neat enough manner to walk back to the Parsonage!
The Brontë-related area around the Bozar was the subject of a fascinating guided walk by Dr Christophe Loir from the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB) on Saturday 3 June 2023. In this walk, devised specially for the Brussels Brontë Group, Dr Loir talked about the rue Isabelle and its environs and the redevelopment of the area in the first half of the 20th century.
Dr Loir conjured up the area as it was in the 1840s when the Brontë sisters were there, with the help of street plans of the period, travel guides, engravings, early photographs and press articles.
Once I saw a beautiful film about the French writer Colette. So beautiful that I watched it again when it was on television. I knew and still know very little about Colette, so I could enjoy the movie without thinking about the historical facts of her life or the international reception of her books.
Now there is Frances O’Connor’s film Emily about Emily Brontë, a writer of whom I like to think I know a lot more. This is also a beautiful film. But I have a few questions.
For a special reason, I viewed Frances O’Connor’s film ‘Emily’ not once but three times. It was inevitable that I should see this movie. I first read Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights more than half a century ago. But it wasn’t until 53 years after reading the book that I visited Haworth for the first time.
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| Jean de Wolf with his model of Top Withens |
The Heritage Days have a firm reputation in Brussels, but recently there has been an addition to the program which focuses specifically on the women-centered heritage and history of our city. Since 2019, the non-profit organization L’architecture qui dégenre, has started organizing the Journées du Matrimoine (Matrimony Days), with ‘Matrimony’ signifying a ‘tangible or intangible good of artistic or historical importance inherited from women.’
Especially for the Matrimony Days, we have developed a guided walk in the city center that focuses on the feminist elements in the work of the Brontë sisters.
Frances O’Connor’s film Emily is full of surprises. This is perhaps only to be expected in a movie that the writer-director herself describes as a story inspired by the Brontës’ lives, not factually based on them – a fictional story inspired by real-life people.
For me, one of the film’s more agreeable surprises is how much French there is in it. Not only are we startled to find Patrick’s curate William Weightman, with some difficulty, unlacing Emily Brontë’s corset in a scene of passion as they embark on a love affair; we are also taken aback to find him tutoring her in French in a deserted Haworth schoolroom.
The new film Emily is often described as “a part-fictional” portrait of Emily Brontë. When I saw it recently, I found it only partly satisfying.
The film is directed by Frances O’Connor who, more than twenty years ago, starred as Fanny Price in a creative Mansfield Park adaptation, which departed from the novel in many ways and transformed the least popular Jane Austen heroine into a more spirited and almost feisty character while including feminist and post-colonial themes as well.
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| Frances O'Connor and Emma Mackey |
Dawn Robey, a former Brussels Brontë Group committee member who now lives in France, returned to Brussels to give a talk to the group on ‘Interior Design in Charlotte Brontë’s “Belgian novels” – The Professor and Villette. In her presentation on Saturday 11 February 2023, Dawn explained how Charlotte uses descriptions of rooms to provide insights into the characters with whom they are associated.
Through readings and commentary on numerous extracts from The Professor and Villette, Dawn highlighted the details in Charlotte’s descriptions of settings that give clues to character – contrasting, for example, the glitter and gilt of Zoraïde Reuter’s parlour with Frances Henri’s much plainer lodgings.
