Jane Eyre in context

On 15 October the Brussels Bronte Group heard a talk from Dr Sandie Byrne of the Oxford University Department for Continuing Education. Rather than taking one theme for her presentation, Dr Byrne gave her audience of students and Bronte fans an overview of the context in which Jane Eyre was written.

This began with a reminder of the historical background to Charlotte Bronte’s most famous novel. Chartism, Catholic emancipation, and the Irish Famine were just some of the issues in the newspapers of Charlotte’s day. In addition, Dr Byrne told listeners that the 1840s – the decade in which Jane Eyre was published – are known as ‘the hungry 40s’, and follow the beginning of economic depression in the mid-1830s. The Napoleonic wars meanwhile had left Britain with a shortage of men.

This meant that questions about governance, equality and the role of women were all in the air whilst Charlotte wrote.

Dr Byrne then moved to the seemingly more familiar ground, for a Bronte group audience, of the literary context of Jane Eyre.

She started however with some surprising facts: a list of ‘best sellers’ in the years surrounding publication of Jane Eyre offered very few familiar titles. In 1846, for instance, Disraeli’s Sybil was one of the most popular reads. Even authors who are still widely read today did not get most of their attention for the novels we now associate with them: Dickens in 1845 found success with The Cricket on the Hearth, in 1846 with The Battle of Life, and in 1848 with The Haunted Man.

A tour of the authors we now associate more easily with Charlotte also offered new insights. Most memorably, Dr Byrne showed how the structure of Jane Eyre mirrors that of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. According to this model, Lowood is Bunyan’s low point of life, and Thornfield a true thorny field of trials. “It is hard to overestimate the importance of the Pilgrims Progress to 19th century homes”, explained the speaker.

Jane Eyre is not, as many have claimed, a feminist novel, added Dr Byrne. Rather it is an individualist novel, created in an age when the romantic idea of ‘self’ was being formed. This linked to the “romantic eye”, seen also in Wordsworth and Byron, with the self the centre of all things.

She added that Jane, whilst one of the most remarkable heroines created in literature, is not the only strong minded and passionate woman character to be found. Examples dating back to the 18th century were cited, with Harriet Martineau’s novel Deerbrook (1839) and Mary Davys' The Fugitive (1705) given as just two places to look.

Dr Sandie Byrne was formerly Fellow and Tutor in English at Balliol College, Oxford, and now teaches and designs courses for the Oxford University Department for Continuing Education. She is the author of a number of books and articles on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, including publications on Austen’s Masnfield Park and Bernard Shaw’s Plays.

Emily Waterfield

Photos: the audience listens to speaker Sandie Byrne putting Jane Eyre in context; students of Facultés universitaires Saint-Louis and Brontë Society members with Sandie Byrne (on right). The second photo was taken by Paula Cagli.

The 2011 Brontë Society Conference

The biennial Brontë Society Conference was held from August 26 to August 28 at Homerton College Conference Centre, Cambridge. The theme was ‘The Brontës and the Bible: Influences both Literary and Religious’ – an appropriate subject as this year marks the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James Bible.

The venue was very attractive with wonderful flower beds bordering the huge lawns. We were staying in halls of residence on the campus. There were about a hundred delegates and the Brussels Brontë Group was represented by Helen MacEwan, Marcia Zaaijer, Brigitte Merle and myself.

As always many of the speakers were very eminent and established Brontë scholars: Christine Alexander, Patsy Stoneman, Marianne Thormählen and Tom Winnifrith (unfortunately Brian Wilks was unable to be present but his paper was read by someone else). In addition there were, among others, a heartening number of up and coming younger Brontë scholars who made valuable contributions which bodes well for the long term future of Brontë studies.

The theme of the conference offered a lot of scope, for of course the Brontë family were steeped in the Bible. Yet in spite of all the work that has already been done in this field, there are still aspects to be brought to light. So it was quite rewarding to listen to people who were actually, in some cases, theologians themselves who looked at the Brontë works primarily from the biblical viewpoint and manner of exegesis. It made us realise all the more how their work is permeated by biblical allusion, not just the odd phrase but the whole structure more often than not is centred round their religious beliefs (orthodox or unorthodox). For instance, Patsy Stoneman’s paper showed how closely Charlotte Brontë’s sentence structure echoes that of the bible. Her stylistic insights were triggered by the linguist David Chrystal’s recent study: Begat: The King James Bible. Another speaker, Emma Miller, dealt with the more figurative aspects, namely biblical and devotional colour symbolism as it related to colour symbolism in the Brontë novels.

Of particular interest to me was Leonora Obed’s paper on Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights in which she compared Emily’s notion of nature to ancient Celtic myth where the natural world has its own soul, a kind of super -- naturalness or immanence within it. This, presumably, is the place which the lovers Heathcliff and Catherine will eventually wish to inhabit. To describe it Leonara Obed used the notion of ‘inscape’ developed by the later poet and Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins. I thought this an excellent and original insight.

In addition to the scholarly talks, on two evenings we were entertained on a lighter note. On Friday, Donald Burrows, renowned expert on George Friedrich Handel, talked to us about the organ in Haworth church, for which Patrick Brontë had raised the funds, and the supposed performances there of Handel’s Messiah of which no tangible trace remains. So Donald Burrows had to hazard guesses as to how it had probably sounded. He did this by means of playing the piano and recordings of very old versions of excerpts from the Messiah. It was a really informative and amusing evening.

On Saturday there was the conference dinner in the sumptuous Great Hall of Homerton College and a great occasion it was. The after-dinner speaker was Patrick Wildgust, curator of Shandy Hall in North Yorkshire. This is a museum dedicated to the author Laurence Sterne (1713-1768) who lived in the house in the 1760’s, and wrote most of his novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy there. The speech turned out to be a sermon on how (not) to deliver a sermon, with extracts from various sermons and pseudo sermons ranging over some 350 years, including ones by Laurence Sterne, Patrick Brontë, James Joyce and Richmal Crompton (Just William)!

The conference ended after lunch on Sunday. It had been an intensive, worthwhile and memorable experience, thanks to the indefatigable Sarah Fermi and her dedicated team who organised it. I now look forward to savouring the talks on paper when they appear as a special publication of the journal Brontë Studies.

Maureen Peeck

Photos:
Homerton College, Cambridge
Brontë Society stalwarts Stephen Whitehead and Tom Winnifrith
Sarah Pearson and Marilyn Nickelsburg

The Literary World in 1853

The Literary World was a New York based weekly magazine published between 1847 and 1853. Recently I had a little bit of time to look at its year 1853. I presumed they would have a review of Villette, probably in March. This indeed proved to be the case. On the 19th of that month they had quite a lengthy review, though much of it was quotation from the novel. “We must do ourselves the pleasure of quoting the capital description of Miss Snowe’s first introduction to the school room”. It also gives the “description of Rachel’s acting … equal in intensity to the great actress’s best efforts”, and it quotes the last page of the book, “a most admirable example of concise, powerful writing.”

It certainly is a positive review. Here are the opening lines:
“There is a freshness about the books of Currer Bell which we find in no other writer. She seems to cast herself loose from all novel writing precedents, and constructs from beginning to end, after her own fashion. Her independence is shown in the choice of a heroine. She takes a plain looking woman, with no graces of manner or speech, unpropped by rank or fortune. The heroine tells her own story. At the outset we dislike her; she takes no pains to ingratiate herself, but, on the contrary, turns the rough side of her character to us. As we read on, we are, in spite of ourselves, interested in her adventures.”

Like The Athenæum in England this magazine also realized immediately that the novel is set in a fictionalized Brussels. In London, it describes, Lucy “takes passage for a port in Labassecour, and journeys thence to Villette – a happy name for the snug little capital, the miniature Paris, Brussels.”

“Caroline No”
On 15 October the magazine ran an article about ‘Anonymous works’, which attempted to reveal a number of writers’ pseudonyms. The ninth book was “”Jane Eyre,” 1848, by Caroline Bronte (who has since sent out “Shirley,” and “Vilette [sic],” though of conceded talent, producing less sensation, under the pseudonym of Currer Bell; the only survivor of three sisters; one other of whom is also known to the reading world.”

The article also has Mrs “Gaskill”. The magazine earlier in the year had a very positive review of her Cranford.

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The magazine does have one advertisement for the American Villette, published less than two months after the English edition, by Harper & Brothers. Apart from that there was only one Agnes Grey ad – “By the author of “Jane Eyre,” “Shirley,” etc”. This book was published by T.B. Peterson’s.

In November it was reported that much of the publishing house of Harper and Brothers had been destroyed by fire.Other authors
Thackeray (who, in 1853, was in the US) and Dickens (who in that year published Bleak House; January e.g. has a few articles about spontaneous combustion) often feature in the magazine. There are two articles about Rachel, apart from the Villette review. Unfortunately The Literary World stopped at the end of the year, suddenly it seems.

My main topic of research here, this year, is a man named Abraham Staets, who came to New Netherland in 1642, so it was nice to find a literary reference related to my research. The magazinehad several articles about New Netherland, including a curious little article about Dutch Van - names in a story written by the American author J. Fenimore Cooper. After a lengthy list of these names the writer adds that there's also a Van Staets in it, but that as far as he knows this name was never written preceded by Van.

Eric Ruijssenaars

Eric in New York State (2)

Eric Ruijssenaars sends his second bulletin of news from the US where he is spending a year doing research into Dutch settlers at the New Netherland Institute in Albany. He is taking the opportunity to do some Brontë research as well.

A century ago, in March 1911, fire broke out in the Capitol building in Albany, the capital of New York State. It burned for four days. The state’s Archives, Library and Museum were housed in the building, and there was enormous damage to their collections. Because of the intense heat shelves broke down, which is why relatively few Dutch seventeenth century documents were lost. The English documents fell on top of them, as they were all near the ground. A great many of the English documents were lost.

The first picture is from a nice plan of Brussels, dated ‘around 1850’, with illustrations of buildings, from the NY State Archives. The upper part on the left was destroyed by that 1911 fire. It was an interesting find, being so close to 1842-3, and how Charlotte and Emily would have seen the city.

A few weeks ago I was in New York City again. I think it’s a wonderful city. On Thursday I went to the Holland Society of New York, and its fine library, for the research for the New Netherland Institute. On Friday my friend Margaret and I went to the New York public Library, to see the BBC’s Radio Times of 1970. Some years ago I found that at the very end of May 1970 a Villette television series started. Unfortunately this TV series is ‘lost’. I had much hoped to see a picture of this series’ Pensionnat in an article about the series. Would it look in any way like the real scenery?

The Radio Times only gave a (colour) picture of the actress as Lucy Snowe, and the few articles about it were also mainly about the actress. No picture of the Pensionnat. It was interesting to see that on Friday May 29th BBC Radio 4 broadcast a play about Emily (“Whom the Gods loved: Another in the series of portraits of some brilliantly gifted people who died young”). And on May 21st , also on Radio 4, Story Time, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall started, with the first of 10 instalments.

That Saturday I gave a talk to Brontë Society members in this part of the US, or rather a walk, a virtual walk, through the old Quartier Isabelle. In the afternoon Mary Meeks gave a very interesting lecture about Villette and the Bible and it ended with an excerpt from a new theatrical performance about the Bronte sisters. All of it based on their own words, used in the novels and the letters. Unfortunately there was only a small audience, including Sue Lonoff, and Margaret (a great Villette lover) and her husband Steven (now reading it for the first time). But it was a very nice Bronte day indeed, and good to meet the Brontë people here in the NYS and New Jersey region. All thanks to Joy Weiner, who organized the event.

I very much enjoy being in the US. A few days ago I had the pleasure of experiencing the Fourth of July here. I was in the tiny village of Old Chatham again, and saw a cute patriotic parade, after which the Star Spangled Banner was sung, and the Declaration of Independence was read aloud. It was a very pleasant day.

On the day before, a rainy Sunday, we went to the beautiful Catskill Mountains. It was a very Dutch area and is immortalized in Washington Irving’s Rip van Winkle story, the afterword to which contains a reference to the Kaaterskill Falls. After coming back home, having seen these Falls,having twice crossed the Hudson River via the Rip van Winkle bridge, I read the story for the first time.With a picture of these literary Falls I say goodbye for now from New York State.

PHOTOS:
Plan of Brussels circa 1850
TV adaptation of Villette in Radio Times (May 1970)
Eric taking US Brontë Society members on a virtual walk in the Isabelle quarter
The Kaaterskill Falls

Eric Ruijssenaars

Brontë weekend in Haworth

Return to Haworth I

After the outstanding AGM of 2010 (a first for me), I felt happily excited when the bus dropped me off in Haworth in the afternoon of 3 June.

Less focused on lectures this time, we had nevertheless a highly enjoyable weekend full of variety again and also extremely amusing in different ways: a great evening of light entertainment provided by Haworth’s Gilbert and Sullivan group (among others a funny and very special version of “Cinderella”), but above anything else the Brontë spoof Withering Looks by Britain’s most famous literary lunatics Maggie Fox and Sue Riding – extremely inventive and utterly hilarious!

We also had lots of fun around the usual dinner at the “Old White Lion” on Sunday evening - pitting our Brontë brains against everyone else while trying to find the correct answers to Judith Bland’s 60 questions out of the Brontë books and lives.

But the real highlight for me was our walk on Sunday morning to Ponden Hall, often cited as the model for the Lintons’ home Thrushcross Grange– although none of the sisters left evidence of making such a link themselves. In part this opinion is due to its location, on the way up to the moors, in part to the fact that there were so few larger houses in this area.

Actually, Ponden Hall corresponds in some measure to the description of Wuthering Heights given by Emily and seems thus far more identifiable with Heathcliff’s home - being less grand and more humble than Thrushcross Grange as described in the novel. The date plaque above the main entrance, by the way, identifies the rebuilt house as dating from 1801 - the date that begins the story in Wuthering Heights.

Emily Brontë’s association with the Heaton family at Ponden is well documented: one of the Heatons served as a churchwarden to Patrick and it is known that she used the library which was reputedly the finest in West Yorkshire. Branwell Brontë was also a frequent visitor to Ponden where he attended pre-hunting gatherings.

As soon as I entered the large hall - realising that this was Wuthering Heights as I had imagined it – I had a kind of vision, i.e. Heathcliff standing by the fireplace when Mr Lockwood came in and asked for shelter from the snow-storm outside … And a second one in the master bedroom overlooking the valley beyond, where a tiny single-paned window in the east gable - underneath which a box bed, as in Wuthering Heights, was once standing but has sadly disappeared - is said to be the one where Cathy’s ghost knocked at the glass. I closed my eyes one second and could nearly hear her voice pleading: “Let me in, let me in”….

I didn’t take photos – unfortunately for those who read these lines, but not for me because for me the best souvenirs are those that you keep in your heart. And this I will – forever !

Now that I am back home again I feel like Emily when she was away from Haworth – nostalgic and missing the Moors already, their stillness, their grandeur and beauty and I can’t wait to go back to them!

Renate Hurtmanns

Return to Haworth II

There are many delights to sample over the annual Brontë Society weekend in Haworth apart from the hearty Yorkshire fare in its pubs.

There is the opportunity to meet other members. They come from all over the world but the Society’s heart is in Haworth and the Parsonage Museum. Members include local people with a stock of anecdotes from their years in one of Britain’s oldest literary societies as well as encyclopaedic knowledge of every place in Yorkshire ever visited by a Brontë or used in one of their novels (over the weekend we had a private viewing of Ponden Hall, supposedly the model for Wuthering Heights, and a visit to Gawthorpe Hall whose owner introduced Charlotte Brontë to Mrs Gaskell). Some of these Yorkshire members even have links to families who were associated with the Brontës. Thus they form a living link stretching right back to the Brontës themselves.

There are the local researchers like Keighley archivist Ian Dewhirst who spoke about the grimness of working-class life in Haworth in the 1840s with wit and passion, conveying to us the immediacy with which the period can be experienced through the mis-spelt letters of farmers and mill workers of the time. Again, a local enthusiast acting as a living link between us and the past.

There is traditional entertainment such as that provided by the Haworth light opera group, which included one of the monologues performed in 1930s music halls by the comedian Stanley Holloway, recited in a broad Lancashire accent challenging for members from outside the British Isles!

There are the traditional, time-honoured rites of the Brontë Society, such as the annual service for its members in the church where Patrick Brontë preached for over 40 years and the cream tea always partaken of outdoors unless it’s raining too hard.

But the Society isn’t just about the past and tradition. The Museum runs an arts programme with talks and exhibitions by contemporary writers and artists. This year we listened to novelist Sally Vickers (Miss Garnet’s Angel) talking about her work and how the Brontës have influenced it. At the prize-giving for the Society’s literary competition, the winners included many young writers. The winner of the poetry section has just published her first book of poems.

And from this year the Society has a new President. The writer Bonnie Greer is from Chicago, although she has lived in Britain for decades. This was her first AGM and she was delighted to be invited to lead the Society, mingled affably with members and gave us a stirring speech about the need to work to preserve literary societies and museums for future generations.

Helen MacEwan

Photos:
Ponden Hall
Withering Looks
Gawthorpe Hall
Bonnie Greer, the new President of the Brontë Society