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

Two launches of Brontë books by Helen MacEwan

‘Les Soeurs Brontë à Bruxelles’

On 3 December ‘Les Soeurs Brontë à Bruxelles’, the French edition of Helen MacEwan’s ‘The Brontës in Brussels’, was launched at Librairie Quartiers Latins in Place des Martyrs.

It was translated by long-standing Brussels Brontë Group members Myriam Campinaire and Daniel Mangano and published by CFC-Éditions, who run the Quartiers Latins bookshop.

‘Les Sœurs Brontë à Bruxelles’

This publisher’s catalogue contains lovingly-produced, richly-illustrated books about Brussels. ‘Les Soeurs Brontë à Bruxelles’, an illustrated guide to Charlotte and Emily’s time in the city, forms part of the collection ‘La Ville Écrite’; in the same collection is ‘Les Écrivains dans la Ville’, a guide to the literary plaques and statues in the city.

Helen MacEwan introduced the book in conversation with Frédérique Bianchi, who specialises in nineteenth-century literature and organises literary walks in Brussels, and Claire Billen, a retired ULB lecturer specialising in the history of Brussels.

Helen MacEwan (centre) introduces the book with
Claire Billen (left) and Frédérique Bianchi (right)

‘The Brontës in Brussels’ is the first book dedicated exclusively to Charlotte and Emily Brontë’s time in Brussels. The French translation introduces readers to a little-known literary connection of Brussels and also to a historical period in the city (the 1840s, shortly after the Belgian Revolution) less thoroughly chronicled than the later 19th century, which saw its expansion and transformation under Leopold II. Numerous additional images have been included in this lavishly-illustrated French edition.

It is always a pleasure to spend time in Quartiers Latins, a marvellous place a little off the beaten track and located in one of the most beautiful squares of Brussels. The genuine love of books that motivates the publishers and booksellers who work in this tranquil spot is almost palpable in the air.


‘Winifred Gérin: Biographer of the Brontës’

On 29 November 2015, Waterstones Brussels hosted the launch of a book about a Brontë biographer with Belgian links.

Winifred Gérin, who moved to Haworth in the 1950s to research her biographies of the four Brontë siblings, was the best-known Brontë biographer after Mrs Gaskell and before the historian Juliet Barker became the definitive chronicler of the family in the 1990s. Helen MacEwan’s life of Gérin draws on her unpublished memoir and on hundreds of letters to the family of her first husband, a Belgian cellist called Eugène Gérin. Helen met members of the family when researching the book, one of whom (a great-nephew of Eugène Gérin) attended the launch.

Winifred Gérin’s colourful life took her to Paris, where she lived with her musician husband in the 1930s; to Brussels, where the couple were living at the time of the German invasion in May 1940; and to southern France where they found themselves trapped for the first two years of the War and became involved in helping Jews to escape arrest under the Vichy government. Having escaped back to England themselves, they worked for Political Intelligence near Bletchley Park.

Eugène Gérin died in 1945. Ten years after his death, Winifred’s life changed direction after a first visit to Haworth on which she met her second husband, a Brontë enthusiast. Once her Brontë biographies were completed she went on to write lives of other nineteenth-century women writers including Elizabeth Gaskell and Anne Thackeray Ritchie.

Around 30 members of the Brussels Brontë Group attended the launch and heard the story of the research for the book that uncovered the story of Gérin’s hitherto unknown life.

Previously, on 21 November, a launch was organised at Waterstones Piccadilly, London. It was attended by the publisher of the book, members of the Brontë and Gaskell Societies and people who helped with research.

Helen MacEwan with members of the Brussels Brontë Group
at the launch at Waterstones Brussels

‘Winifred Gérin: Biographer of the Brontës’ is available in Waterstones Brussels. Read about the book here:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Winifred-Gerin-Biographer-Helen-MacEwan/dp/1845197437/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8