Helen MacEwan, founder of the Brussels Brontë Group, will give a talk by Zoom for The Arts Society Brussels next week.
Helen will take her audience on a virtual tour of Brussels at the time Charlotte and Emily Brontë were in the city in the early 1840s.
Charlotte Brontë’s stay in Brussels in the 1840s inspired two of her own novels and also two recent novels published on the subject. Jolien Janzing published De Meester in 2013. Si j'avais des ailes, by Nathalie Stalmans, was published in 2019.
The difference between the two writers is instructive. Stalmans is an historian and has an academic past. Janzing, for her part, is a journalist and rather fascinated by current events, which she weaves into her work.
The two have different views on Charlotte and on Brussels itself.
How wonderful it was to join the Brussels Brontë Group for Karen Hewitt's
marvellous talk about what the word "Gentleman" meant to a
Victorian audience. I could not believe I was sharing the experience with
you all, it was almost like being in Brussels.
Like Monica
in Dublin, my memories of all the Brontë events are highlights
of my time in Brussels.
Karen Hewitt is the type of speaker that we really appreciate here at the Brussels Brontë Group. Not only is she very charming and personable in her delivery (even on Zoom), she also considers the Brussels-based Villette as Charlotte Brontë’s best novel.
On October 7, she gave a delightful virtual talk on “the English gentleman” in Villette. And even on Zoom, the Q&A after her talk was just as engaging as the talk itself.
Karen delineated what it
took to be an English gentleman in the nineteenth century (too complicated to include
here). Her bottom line: “There are no English gentlemen now.” (To which many attendants
begged to disagree, I’m sure.)
One example of a gentleman was Patrick Brontë, Charlotte’s father, who worked hard to earn this status, gaining a scholarship to Cambridge University and then being ordained into the Church of England, one of the few avenues to gentleman-hood available if your family wasn’t already there. So Patrick Brontë was a gentleman, and his daughters were therefore the female equivalent – ladies.
On 7 October we came together to listen to a talk. Before COVID, this always happened in a room. But this time we met on Zoom.
My memories of rooms we have gathered in
over the years go back to 2007, when the Brussels Brontë Group started up. There
was the library in the Cercle des Voyageurs, that atmospheric downtown Brussels
restaurant cum cultural centre in Rue des Grand Carmes. Fifty of us crammed into
it for our first-ever talk, by Brussels journalist Derek Blyth. There was the
room in Université Saint-Louis on the Boulevard du Jardin Botanique that became
our permanent venue for a decade. And there is our current venue near the
Woluwe Shopping Centre, where we hope to return post-COVID restrictions.
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| Nicholas Marsh speaking to the BBG at Universite Saint-Louis in 2010. |
