Month: February 2020

As we all know, the Brontë novels are all things of beauty, but that can beauty can be enhanced still further when they are accompanied by wonderful illustrations too. In today’s post we’re going to be looking at perhaps the most beautiful set of Brontë books of them all, illustrated by a master of the genre – Edmund Dulac.

Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë were masters of writing about the human condition and how our minds work, which is why their books are as relevant today as they’ve ever been, but they were also masters of descriptive writing. That’s why their novels are so easily turned into magnificent adaptations on the big and little screens. We can all argue about which is our favourite adaptation of Jane Eyre, and we can all argue about which are the greatest illustrated editions too – which is why I added ‘perhaps’ in the last paragraph. All I can say for certain is that this set of ten books covering all seven Brontë novels (some occupying more than one volume) are among the greatest treasures in my own collection.

What makes the Brontë story so incredible, if we leave aside their incredible works of genius, is that their background was very different to so many writers of the time. Edmund Dulac too had a rather different career in mind to the one that saw him become one of the greatest book illustrators of all time. Born in Toulouse, France in 1882 he was at first a practising lawyer, but found that his love for art was his real passion even above the riches that a career in law could bring. After leaving law behind and training at a Paris art school, Dulac moved to England in 1904 and was quickly recognised for his mastery of the art nouveau style. His illustrations for The Arabian Nights and Stories From Hans Christian Andersen are recognised as works of genius in their own right, but his first commissioned work was illustrating the novels of the Brontë sisters for J. M. Dent in London.

These books are incredibly beautiful, from their elaborate covers with gold relief lettering to the ribbon page marker integrated within them. Each volume contains six illustrations, so I’m now going to introduce you to one picture from each Brontë novel and look at what it tells us about the story:

The Professor

The Professor was Charlotte Brontë’s first novel, but it remained unpublished in her lifetime. She borrowed and improved on the central theme in Villette, but in this picture we see a familiar image from all Charlotte’s works – the young woman who has fallen in love with the older man, but whose social position makes it seemingly impossible for that love to flourish. Where could Charlotte have got that idea from?

Agnes Grey

Agnes Grey by our beloved Anne Brontë is largely biographical in parts, dealing with the heroines two stints as a governess, just as Anne had herself served at Blake Hall and Thorp Green Hall. She allows herself, however, to imagine a happy, love filled ending for Agnes with Reverend Weston – for which we can surely read Anne and Reverend Weightman. In real life, Weightman’s untimely death denied her this love, but nothing could deny Anne’s writing. We know that Weightman was a kindly man who was renowned for helping the Haworth parishioners, and here we see Weston returning a cat he has saved from being shot, with a grateful owner and a besotted Agnes looking on.

Wuthering Heights

Wuthering Heights is a book full of power, energy and magic – and Emily Brontë’s opening is one of the most memorable of them all. This illustration sees Dulac eschew his usual vibrancy, and create a moody, atmospheric image as Heathcliff flies to the window to bid the ghost of Catherine to return and haunt him, after Lockwood’s nocturnal encounter.

The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall

Anne Brontë used The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall to turn a spotlight on many of society’s ills, and especially on the abusive marriages that many women at that time were locked into. Among the outrages that Helen has to suffer, is the growing knowledge that her husband Arthur Huntingdon is having an affair with the haughty Annabella Wilmot, who later marries his best friend Lord Lowborough. Dulac here shows Helen catching Annabella in her room, but worse is to come.

Jane Eyre

Charlotte Brontë could have given up after failing to find a publisher for The Professor, but giving up was never in Charlotte’s nature. Undaunted, she created an overnight sensation when her second novel Jane Eyre was published. One reason for its success, then and today, is that we can all sympathise with Jane, we can all see ourselves in her. She is downtrodden, underestimated, ignored and seemingly beset by ill fortune at every turn – but like her creator she has a mighty heart and a mighty soul, and eventually she will prevail. Here Dulac reveals Jane being browbeaten by her cousin St. John Rivers as he tries to convince her to marry him and leave for India. Her heart is mute because Rochester occupies it, and we all know what happens next.

Shirley

I love Charlotte’s second novel Shirley because, disguised in name, she includes portraits of many of the people and places she has known – including her sister Anne under the guise of Caroline Helstone. Caroline is the real heroin of the novel (Shirley herself, based upon Emily, only appears many chapters in) and here we find Caroline at an emotional moment – she has discovered that Shirley’s governess Mrs Pryor’s real name is Agnes Helstone – she is her long lost mother. With those knowledge Caroline recovers from the illness that had taken her to the verge of death. Anne herself died whilst Charlotte was writing this novel, and she seems determined to save Anne on the page in a way that real life had denied her.

Villette

We return to Brussels for Villette, and this brilliant novel shows how far Charlotte’s powers had progressed since she was on similar territory with The Professor. Dulac’s illustration shows Lucy’s first love Dr. John rescuing a young woman after a theatre fire causes a stampede. She is the young Countess de Bassompierre, but in one of the novels many twists we discover that she is someone who Lucy had once known in very different circumstances (I won’t give this away, as it, like the novel as a whole, deserves to be read and enjoyed). The words are a perfect summary of Charlotte’s novel – Lucy wants someone she can rely on and fasten on to, but her hopes of love seem always adrift and then wrecked.

Edmund Dulac became a British citizen in 1914, and a pillar of the establishment who shortly before his death designed some of the most iconic stamps of Queen Elizabeth II. Like so many of us, however, his heart and mind was captured by those ladies of Haworth Parsonage.

On this day in 1842 two British girls were settling down to a life that was completely alien to the one they had known. They were four hundred miles from home, in a country where the language was alien to them and the Catholic atmosphere just as foreign. They were of course Charlotte Brontë and Emily Brontë, who arrived at the Pensionnat Heger school in Brussels on 15^th February 178 years ago. Today we’ll look at how this Belgian adventure affected Charlotte, Emily and Anne.

Let’s begin, appropriately for this blog and especially in this year, with Anne. Of course, Anne never made it to Brussels, indeed never travelled outside of England, but why did Charlotte choose Emily to accompany her to Belgium and not her youngest sister? On one hand, Anne would have seemed a more obvious choice for two reasons: Emily had lasted only a brief time at her previous school, Roe Head, before she was sent home suffering from such severe home sickness that Charlotte was worried she would die – it would not be so easy to return from Brussels as it had been from Mirfield should the same symptoms recur. Secondly, Emily was proving of huge value in Haworth Parsonage because of her domestic skills.

A clue to Charlotte’s choice comes in a letter that she sent to Aunt Branwell in August 1841 (from Rawdon where she was then a governess) in an effort to secure the funds she and Emily would need:

‘Dear Aunt… my friends recommend me, if I desire to secure permanent success, to delay commencing the school for six months longer, and by all means to contrive, by hook or by crook, to spend the intervening time in some school on the continent. They say schools in England are so numerous, competition so great, that without some such step towards attaining superiority we shall probably have a very hard struggle, and may fail in the end. They say, moreover, that the loan of £100, which you have been so kind as to offer us, will, perhaps, not all be required now, as Miss Wooler will lend us the furniture; and that, if the speculation is intended to be a good and successful one, half the sum, at least, ought to be laid out in the manner I have mentioned… These are advantages which would turn to vast account, when we actually commenced a school – and, if Emily could share them with me, only for a single half-year, we could take a footing in the world afterwards which we can never do now. I say Emily instead of Anne; for Anne might take her turn at some future period, if our school answered.’

Of course we know that in the end the school did not answer, but the generous aunt did, and she provided the money that allowed Charlotte and Emily to leave for the continent. Anne was always Aunt Branwell’s favourite niece, as attested to by Ellen Nussey, so Charlotte was careful to explain the possibility that Anne could also travel to Belgium at a later date. I believe that this was indeed Charlotte’s plan, rather than being in any way a snub to Anne. Anne Brontë was at that time a governess at Thorp Green Hall near York, and highly valued in her job, so it would have seemed more expedient to let Anne continue to hone these skills, and earn her salary, and take Emily to Brussels instead. Nevertheless, we can imagine Anne’s heart sinking as she thought of her sisters starting their continental adventure whilst she remained in a daily routine which she found a drudgery.

Charlotte’s years in Belgium (she spent almost two years there whereas Emily returned for Aunt Branwell’s funeral in the autumn of 1842 and remained in Haworth thereafter) were turbulent yet formative ones. She found love with Monsieur Constantin Heger, who was first her teacher and then her colleague, but it was not reciprocated, and she also lost her beloved friend Martha Taylor who was also in Brussels at the time.

These events were searingly painful for Charlotte; they changed her life for ever, and yet they changed her writing too. We see Martha as Jessy Yorke in Shirley, and her Belgian funeral is referenced twice in Villette. Heger casts an even larger shadow, as he can be seen in all Charlotte’s heroes and anti-heroes, most notably as Rochester and Paul Emanuel.

Charlotte’s letters to Constantin after she has left Belgium are difficult to read, and not only because they were at one point cut into pieces before being stitched back together again. For those of us who love Charlotte and her writing it is terrible to witness her heart in such turmoil, but as always her letters are brutally honest. We see her begging her love to write back to her, as on 8^th June 1845:

‘I know that you will lose patience when you read this letter. You will say that I am over-excited – that I have black thoughts etc. So be it Monsieur. I do not seek to justify myself, I submit to all kinds of reproaches – all I know is that I cannot – I will not resign myself to the total loss of my master’s friendship – I would rather undergo the greatest bodily pains than have my heart constantly lacerated by searing regrets.’

Charlotte begged for reproaches, even they would be better than the terrible silence which she had then endured for a year and a half, but reply came there none. We know, of course, that Charlotte Brontë had nothing to reproach herself for, other than a heart encountering the torments of love for the first time. Monsieur Heger, however, may not have been completely blame-free. 1915 saw a Scottish newspaper, the Carluke and Lanark Gazette, print a letter from a correspondent whose friend served as a teacher at the Heger school many years after Charlotte had. Her friend had found Heger’s vain and unfeeling attitude towards his conquest of Charlotte so distasteful, that she left her job:

Finally, we come to Emily Brontë. The months that Emily spent in Brussels were a struggle, and yet she conquered her demons in a way that she had been unable to when younger in Mirfield. Emily’s skills as a pianist were soon noted, and the Hegers not only arranged for her to receive tuition from a leading Brussels musician Monsieur Chapelle, they also hired Emily to teach the piano to other pupils.

Charlotte’s letters from Brussels to Ellen Nussey back in England at first revealed her worry that Emily would struggle as she knew not a word of French, and lessons were conducted solely in that language. She also wrote that Emily and Constantin Heger didn’t get on, and yet she soon won the hard hearted tutor over with her brilliance. He said of Emily that: ‘She should have been a man – a great navigator. Her powerful reason would have deduced new spheres of discovery from the knowledge of the old; and her strong, imperious will would never have been daunted by opposition or difficulty; never have given way but with life.’

Perhaps in her strength of character he found a kindred spirit in Emily, but he could never hope to match her brilliant mind. Wuthering Heights is not the only prose writing we have from Emily, for we also have a selection of her French language essays, or devoirs. When reading them now, translated into English by Sue Lonoff, it is incredible to think that she wrote them without any access to a dictionary, and within weeks of starting to learn the language.

They are miniature masterpieces that always take a philosophical turn. For example, when she was asked to write a devoir on ‘the butterfly’, she wrote:

‘During my soliloquy I picked a flower at my side; it was fair and freshly opened, but an ugly caterpillar had hidden itself among the petals and already they were shrivelling and fading. “Sad image of the earth and its inhabitants!” I exclaimed. “This worm lives only to injure the plant that protects it. Why was it created, and why was man created? He torments, he kills, he devours; he suffers, dies, is devoured – there you have his whole story.”’

We see a similar theme when Emily is asked to write about a cat. Her essay ‘Le chat’ was written again within weeks of her first encounter with the French language; not for Emily are platitudes such as ‘the cat has whiskers’ or ‘the cat is black with four legs’. Emily eschews the bland and instead produces sheer brilliance:

‘A cat, in its own interest, sometimes hides its misanthropy under the guise of amiable gentleness; instead of tearing what it desires from its master’s hand it approaches with a caressing air, rubs its pretty little head against him, and advances a paw whose touch is as soft as down. When it has gained its end, it resumes its character of Timon; and that artfulness in it is called hypocrisy. In ourselves, we give it another name, politeness, and he who did not use it to hide his real feelings would soon be driven from society. “But,” says some delicate lady, who has murdered half a dozen lap-dogs through pure affection, “the cat is such a cruel beast, he is not content to kill his prey, he torments it before its death; you cannot make that accusation against us.” More or less, Madam. Your husband, for example, likes hunting very much, but foxes being rare on his land, he would not have the means to pursue this amusement often, if he did not manage his supplies thus: once he has run an animal to its last breath, he snatches it from the jaws of the hounds and saves it to suffer the same infliction two or three more times, ending finally in death. You yourself avoid the bloody spectacle because it wounds your weak nerves. But I have seen you embrace your child it transports, when he came to show you a beautiful butterfly crushed between his cruel fingers; and at that moment, I really wanted to have a cat, with the tail of a half-devoured rat hanging from its mouth to present as the image, the true copying of your angel.’

It is incredible to think that Emily wrote all this in perfect French, so there is little wonder that Constantin Heger soon became awed by her abilities. We think also of Charlotte explaining that whilst Emily mixed little with the people in the outside world, somehow she knew them. It also brings to mind Ellen Nussey’s assertion that Emily was to her without doubt the greatest genius of the first half of the century.

Emily Brontë had a unique and powerful mind, if only she had lived to write other novels than Wuthering Heights there can be little doubt that they would all have been masterpieces. Like her sister Charlotte her time in Brussels changed her life forever, and those changes would find their way onto the pages of the books the whole world now loves.

Storm Ciara is battering the United Kingdom and Ireland this weekend, so it seems a perfect time to look at storms and wind in the Brontë’s writing and lives. As visitors on Brontë pilgrimages soon find out, Haworth is in an elevated position, surrounded on three sides by moorland. Situated at the top of the steep Main Street, the Brontë Parsonage itself is particularly exposed, so it can often be subjected to severe winds and heavy rain.

For visitors today this only adds to its beauty and atmosphere, but for its Brontë inhabitants it could also bring problems, as Charlotte Brontë made clear in a letter to Ellen Nussey in December 1846: ‘the wind is as keen as a two-edged blade. We have all had severe colds and coughs in consequence of the weather. Poor Anne has suffered greatly from asthma, but is now, we are glad to say, rather better. She had two nights last week when her cough and difficulty of breathing were painful indeed to hear and witness, and must have been most distressing to suffer; she bore it, as she bears all affliction, without one complaint, only sighing now and then when nearly worn out. She has an extraordinary heroism of endurance. I admire, but I certainly could not imitate her.’

Nevertheless, Anne and Emily Brontë especially loved the wild, windy weather. Perhaps this is even more remarkable when we consider that we wouldn’t head out today without thick, waterproof coats on and sturdy boots, but nothing of the sort would have been available to the Brontës. Stormy weather wouldn’t stop Emily and Anne from taking a walk across the moors, the solution for them was to put on an extra layer or wrap another shawl tightly around themselves.

Their love of stormy weather can be seen plainly in their work. One of Anne’s earliest extant poems is even called ‘The North Wind’ and in it, under the disguise of a Gondal setting, she reveals how much she adores hearing the wild wind:

‘That wind is from the North, I know it well;
No other breeze could have so wild a swell.
Now deep and loud it thunders round my cell,
The faintly dies,
And softly sighs,
And moans and murmurs mournfully.
I know its language; thus is speaks to me —
‘I have passed over thy own mountains dear,
Thy northern mountains – and they still are free,
Still lonely, wild, majestic, bleak and drear,
And stern and lovely, as they used to be
When thou, a young enthusiast,
As wild and free as they,
O’er rocks and glens and snowy heights
Didst often love to stray.’

Emily was also inclined to praise stormy weather in her poetry, on more than one occasion. It often personifies a longing for, or love of, home as in this extract from Emily’s brilliant ‘F. De Samara To A.G.A.’ – more commonly known by its opening words, ‘light up thy halls!’:

‘How gloomy grows the Night! ‘Tis Gondal’s wind that blows,
I shall not tread again the deep glens where it rose –
I feel it on my face – Where, wild blast, dost thou roam?
What do we, wanderer, here, so far away from home?
I do not need thy breath to cool my death-cold brow,
But go to that far land, where she is shining now;’

Of course, the most well known reference to stormy winds in all the Brontë canon can be found in the title of Emily’s only novel Wuthering Heights – wuthering being a Yorkshire dialect word for a cold, howling wind of the kind that would be familiar to those living out on the moors like the Earnshaws and the Lintons (or the Brontës). Wild weather is almost a character in this novel, with the word ‘wind’ occurring 29 times and ‘storm’ featuring on a dozen occasions.

I will leave you with Anne’s brilliantly evocative poem, ‘Lines Composed In A Wood On A Windy Day’. This poem expresses Anne’s joy at wild weather, whether it be at Haworth, Thorp Green (where she composed this poem in 1842) or at her beloved Scarborough, watching waves crash against rocks. Even so, I don’t think Anne would have been wise to take a walk in conditions such as those that Ciara is bringing us – my advice to you all is take care, keep indoors, and settle down with a good book and a cup of something warm (whether that be tea, coffee, cocoa or whiskey I leave down to you). Let the storm do its worst!

‘My soul is awakened, my spirit is soaring
And carried aloft on the wings of the breeze;
For above and around me the wild wind is roaring,
Arousing to rapture the earth and the seas.
The long withered grass in the sunshine is glancing,
The bare trees are tossing their branches on high;
The dead leaves, beneath them, are merrily dancing,
The white clouds are scudding across the blue sky.
I wish I could see how the ocean is lashing
The foam of its billows to whirlwinds of spray;
I wish I could see how its proud waves are dashing,
And hear the wild roar of their thunder today!’

Today I’m going to be reviewing a new Brontë book – Glass Town by Isabel Greenberg. As the name suggests it tells the story of the Brontë juvenilia, but it does so much more than this too. Before I begin my review it’s only fair to say that I was sent a copy of this book free of charge by the publisher Jonathan Cape – but regardless of that fact I’m going to give my honest and full opinion of this book.

I’ve read many books on the Brontës, from the sublime, such as the weighty fact filled biography by Juliet Barker and the series of books by Winifred Gerin, to the ridiculous where pages are spent describing the author’s car problems. Nevertheless, I’ve never before read a Brontë related book like Glass Town. In part that’s because of the format – this is a graphic novel; not a genre I’m overly familiar with, but I know they’re very popular, and to be frank if they’re all up to this standard I can see why.

I don’t want to give too much of the plot, or the ending, away, but the title places this firmly in the early days of the Brontë writing – the days when the ‘scribblemania’, as Charlotte called it, took hold, resulting in the tiny little books that we can still marvel at within the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth.

The earliest incarnation of the, by then, four Brontë siblings’ creative world was Glass Town, which later expanded into the world of Angria. At this point the writing was carried out by Charlotte and Branwell Brontë only. It took Charlotte’s voyage to Roe Head School in Mirfield to liberate Emily and Anne Brontë, at which point they created their own fictional worlds of Gondal and Gaaldine – one that Emily in particular found solace within throughout her life.

This is all contained within this marvellous book. I said ‘by then’ in the preceding paragraph because the eldest Brontë sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, had tragically died from tuberculosis before the writing adventures had begun. I was pleased to see that this was referenced by the author, and emphasis was placed upon how the eldest sisters were always remembered.

We also see the catalyst for this early creativity – the present of twelve toy soldiers that Patrick Brontë made to Branwell Brontë in July 1826, and which he then shared with his sisters. I found it very moving how reference is also made to Anne’s soldier being named ‘waiting boy’, as we learnt from Charlotte’s later account of this incident – in this year especially, Anne need wait no longer for the love and acclaim she deserves.

This is a large, thick book that is an absolute pleasure to look upon and hold, with a beautiful red ribbon incorporated as a page marker. Each page turn is a sheer delight, and I love the way that each pair of pages are different – some are monochrome, some bold and colourful; some consist of a single image, some of many individual boxes. It is simply beautiful, and I found that it had a very cinematic quality too, particularly when Greenberg utilises moments of silence, and lets the emotion so inherent in the pictures do the talking.

Is this then simply a telling of how the Brontë children became such powerful and proficient writers? In fact, it’s far more than this. It is three stories in one novel, woven together immaculately. Yes, we see the young Brontës as they grow up, and there’s a lot of biographical information included – the author is clearly a Brontë enthusiast who has revelled in her research. We also see a telling of these early writings themselves, so we enter Glass Town and see how the devilish Zamorna becomes locked in a deadly power struggle with Northangerland and others. We also see Charlotte herself dragged by Zamorna into Glass Town – she is not only the writer, she has become a character.

I found this particularly magical – it is a look at the power of the creative process, and how Charlotte in particular as a youth, and Emily in adulthood, became obsessed by the worlds and people they created. In this, it has almost a Magic Realism touch to it, as the lines between reality and the imagination become blurred. Glass Town asks us which is more real, our day to day lives, or the words we speak and the ideas we conjure up? Can Charlotte ever escape her Glass Town world – does she even want to? Is it better sometimes to live in our own imaginary kingdoms rather than face what can be sad, painful realities? This is a deep question that this book addresses, but I will leave you to discover the answer for yourself.

It is clear that Isabel Greenberg is a master of this genre; an excellent artist, a wonderful wordsmith, and, above all, this is a book with a mighty soul. I found it incredibly moving in places, and it has certainly brought me solace when I needed it. In short, I can’t recommend this book highly enough. It could be a quick read, but I found myself lingering over each page – it’s certainly an object of beauty as well, that would enliven any shelf or coffee table. If I was giving marks I would have no hesitation in giving this ten out of ten. If you want an in depth look at the large and varied juvenile output of the Brontës I would always recommend Nicola Friar’s remarkable blog on that matter – but this serves as a fascinating introduction to what can be a complex subject. Is it a graphic novel, a biography, a work of fiction? It’s all three, and it’s also a book that I have no hesitation in recommending. I found it a very worthy addition to the canon of Brontë related books in Anne’s special year.

Glass Town by Isabel Greenberg is available in hard back and Kindle editions, and is published by Jonathan Cape on 6^th February.