Review: ‘The Brontës, My Mother and Me’ by Anna M Biley

The title of this book intrigued and fascinated me, having lost my own mum with whom I had a very close bond and still grieving for this great loss. Anna M Biley’s book was described as “a tender story of mother-daughter love and gentle compassion; reaching out to all who have been touched by grief and loss.” 

I decided to buy the book — “The Brontës, My Mother and Me: Forgetful wanderings of love and loss” — and was looking forward to reading it, hoping that it would help me to deal with my loss and grief.

The book is a tribute to the author’s mother Rosie. It describes the author’s relationship with her mother through her own childhood memories of family members and events, through stories told by her mother, but also via the diaries that her mother started writing in her final year when she was facing “forgetfulness” (dementia). These diaries were just notes and memories that Rosie wrote down in her final year and were sometimes confusing for the author, but also helped her in coping with her grief and loss. 

 

Anna Biley is a former nurse and cared for her mother in the last years before her death. Eight years earlier, she had lost her husband to cancer and also went through a difficult process of grief and loss, but her mother was there for support. After the death of her mother, she felt lost and lonely, even more so when the Covid-19 pandemic struck. 

And what about the Brontës, you may ask? Where do they fit in the story? The author and her mother were real Brontë enthusiasts. Their family home was situated on the Lancashire/Yorkshire border. Wycoller and Haworth were a stone’s throw away, in their back garden as it were, and these places were often visited. They regularly walked the moors that inspired the Brontës. 

The author was introduced to the Brontës by her mother, who had always been fascinated by the Brontës’ lives and works since she read “Wuthering Heights.” Throughout the book, Biley reflects on the Brontës’ childhood, their many losses and how they coped with these. Each chapter starts with an extract from one of the novels or poems and throughout the book you can find references to the lives of the Brontës, the landscape that inspired them and their work, both novels and poems. 

On the back cover, the Brontë connection is formulated as follows: “Woven into the story is an empathic understanding of how the bereft Brontë children saw their world and why this matters today, making this book suitable for Brontë enthusiasts everywhere.” 

This book is beautifully, movingly and respectfully written as a tribute to “our Rosie.” It really reaches out to people who have been touched by loss and grief. I was moved by many of the feelings expressed in the book, feelings that I also experienced in the same way. 

One of the things that moved me was the fact that the author had the need to celebrate her mother’s birthday and the anniversary of her death in a way that would have pleased her mother: listening to her mother’s favourite music, buying the flowers she loved, burning a lavender-scented candle, eating cake and just remembering happy times. So did I … 

One sentence really struck me: “My gift was that of time, celebration, gratitude and remembering, but it was a fragile peace. One wrong move and I was in bits.” 

I could so relate to these feelings! I could mention many more sentences that have moved me throughout the book. 

There were so many parallels between Anna Biley’s story and mine. Our mothers were both born just before the Second World War; they were strong women who lived for their families; they supported their children in realising their dreams; they loved us and were proud of us. 

But there were also differences. My mother was not a Brontë enthusiast as such; she died suddenly after a fall and not of an illness; and she did not live in Brontë county. But she has always supported me in my fascination with the Brontës, encouraged me in reading the novels, listened to my experiences with the Brontës (visiting Haworth, the Brussels Brontë Group events, my calligraphy of the Brontë poems, etc.) and was always there for me. 

This is a book to keep and to read again. Did it help me? Yes, it did, in so many ways. There will always be a sense of loss and grief, but there is also joy in knowing that my mother and me always had this very special bond, which can never be broken. 

   Marina Saegerman