Back to Brontë

 

I am very glad to let roads lead me back to the Brontës. I have been eyeing this biography on my to-read stack, and I finally picked it up, and I'm so glad I did. I've read some other biographies of Charlotte, and the Brontës. I have always felt a closeness with Charlotte. She was an avid reader, passionate about writing, creative, independent, had poor eyesight, was always creating stories to figure out life, and was also adaptable with her work. She could take jobs she disliked (governessing, teaching) but kept onwards trying to make it work, whilst her siblings failed at keeping any positions for various reasons. Their lives are filled with tragedy, as they lose their mother and two sisters very young in life. Their father, the minister at the parish church in Haworth, outlived all of them.

This biography delightfully focused a lot on her (and her siblings) literary genius and challenges. I love learning more about them all. They are endlessly fascinating to me. Living in Yorkshire, in the small village of Haworth, the siblings grew up (Charlotte, Anne, Emily, and  their brother Branwell) creating stories, poems, and news articles of their created worlds. They were all keen to know all about the political occurrences going on in their youth - newspapers brought that to them. Their teenage writings are so enjoyable, especially Charlotte's which explore themes relational, political, wealth, power, status. They take place in a parallel world that feels like the future or history, and at the same time fantasy. 

The Brontë children's profoundly visual imaginations fed avidly on them all, and by the age of thirteen Charlotte already had a very developed "list of painters whose works I wish to see," which included "Guido Reni, Julio Romano, Titian, Raphael, Michael Angelo, Correggio, Annibal Caracci, Leonardo da Vinci, Fra Bartolemeo, Carlo Cignani, Vandyke, Reubens, Bartolemeo Ramerghi."

I don't even know who many of those artists are, but now my own interest and list has grown. Still, Charlotte feels like my friend from the past. She was author, poet, writer, thinker, independent woman, plain yet engaging, quiet, introverted in public, didn't like the spotlight as she became famous, hid behind her books, but engaged with other famous authors of her day. She wrote a few letters back and forth with Robert Southy, the Poet Laureate, and he replied to her, reviewing her poems and offering some kind advice. He even offered her to come visit him. She met many times with William Makepeace Thackery. She met Charles Dickens and his books had some influence on her writings. Elizabeth Barrett Browning wondered about her. It was so interesting to read about the context of their time - relating to the other authors at that time developing their books.

The three sisters took such a chance with publishing their books. They wrote through hard times, suffering, loss of family members (Anne and Emily died so young, ages 29 and 30, respectively), and they drew from personal experiences to build into their characters. They had imaginations to pull a story together as they had for all those years of sibling collaboration with the Angria and Glass Town stories. They created something new in their books, models we still use today, and are often required reading for English classes. They were so influential that we try to replicate them today. We never can, of course, we don't live in the 1830s- 1850s, and they had actual experiences to draw from.

They were wanting to make their way in the world not by some revolution but subtlety through their books, using male-sounding names to get their books published: Currier, Action, and Ellis Bell they were. It wasn't until years later when the fame of the authors (One author? Society was not sure) of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Agnes Grey was brought into question and Charlotte decided to show up suddenly in London with Anne, to show her publisher who they really were (it was a shock to him, needless to say). Very talented young women writers. It's always good to go back to Brontë.