It's like holding hands with Charlotte Brontë

Yesterday, we posted about the opening of the Cornelia Parker's exhibition Brontëan Abstracts in the Brontë Parsonage Museum. One of the most shocking things that can be seen is the recording of the visit of two psychics to the Parsonage and what were their impressions.

Justine Picardie (the author of My Mother's Wedding Dress and of the introduction of the most recent edition of Daphne du Maurier's The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë) was there and talks about it in The Telegraph. It's an extense, and very interesting, article from which we will only quote some highlights. We really encourage our readers to read it. Don't expect spectral appearences, though.

The 10.05 GNER train from King's Cross to Leeds is not a setting one would usually associate with the supernatural, but this morning there is a distinctly eerie atmosphere on board. I am here with two psychics, Henrietta Llewelyn Davies and Coral Temple, travelling to the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, where they are to conduct a séance that will be recorded by the artist Cornelia Parker as part of her forthcoming exhibition. (...)

As for me: my presence here is as an observer, returning to a place I have written about often in the past; though it's not only Haworth that I am revisiting, but also the subject of spiritualism, and the relationship between the living and the dead (all of which continues to fascinate me, for my new book is partly set in and around the Brontë parsonage, and concerns, among other things, the ghosts that emerge from between the lines of manuscripts). I'm already an admirer of Cornelia Parker (...).

And, like Cornelia, I'm fascinated by the Brontë myth, and the manner in which their lives have come to engage the imaginations of so many, as powerfully as their fictional creations; yet at the same time wanting to know whether it it possible to find a new way of looking at the Brontës that is not obscured by the inventions and accretions of mythology. Cornelia has already achieved this with images she has created through science: going back, in a sense, to source material, by magnifying Emily's blotting-paper and pen nibs, or looking at the Brontë sisters' hair through an electron microscope, so that it seems to come vividly to life. 'What was really exciting,' she says, when we meet up in Haworth, 'was seeing a tiny plait of Emily's hair, most probably plaited by Charlotte after her sister's death. Seen through the microscope, it had a surprising vitality and energy. It really did feel like I was touching the subconscious of this mythologised person.'

Having used scientific apparatus thus far, she now wants to see what emerges from tonight's psychic investigation of the parsonage; for it is the house itself that will be both venue and (partial) subject of her exhibition. 'It was rereading Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights that made me think this might be fruitful, because those novels are permeated with the idea of the supernatural… I have these burning questions building up in my mind, and I couldn't use science to find all the answers, so to ask a psychic seems to be an interesting experiment.' Chief among her unanswered questions is whether there are any living descendants of Branwell Brontë, the famously reprobate brother rumoured to have had an illegitimate daughter; Cornelia tried to establish the truth to the claims with DNA testing, but discovered that this method cannot be used to trace a female line. (...)

Inside the parsonage, silent aside from our whispers and the chiming of the Rev Brontë's grandfather clock, it occurs to me that simply being allowed to wander here, without the usual crowds, is an entry into the unknown. We start in the dining-room, to the left of the hall, where Charlotte gathered with her sisters in order to talk and write in the evenings, and where she worked, alone, in the wake of their deaths. (...)

Upstairs, we visit the servants' room ('Very cosy,' says Coral), and then go into Charlotte's bedroom, where she slept in her mother's deathbed, and where she was also to die. Suddenly, Coral's eyes fill with tears. 'There's an enormous amount of grief in this room,' she says.
'I'm really surprised at how intensely you can feel the unhappiness in here,' adds Henri. 'I didn't expect this - I expected to sense all the tourists that have passed through this room, but instead you get this feeling of someone hanging on to her sanity by the skin of her teeth. And yet she was able to go on writing - she was so stalwart.' (...)

(...) Cornelia asks her burning question: did Branwell have an illegitimate child? Yes, say both Henri and Coral, immediately - and together they describe a girl with long curly red hair, born close to Haworth, and never openly acknowledged as his daughter. This is, of course, no better evidence than the failed DNA testing on Branwell's supposed descendants, but what is possibly more interesting than the issue of proof, or lack of it, is the way in which the story conjures up Branwell as a frustrated young man.

It is at this point, too, that I ask my own question: did Branwell have anything to do with the writing of Wuthering Heights? His friends claimed he did; others have poured scorn on the idea, and the psychics are equally sceptical. 'Absolutely not,' says Henri, while Coral looks quite cross. 'Yes, he was an inspiration,' she says, 'but he didn't write any of it.' (...)

At the end, after several hours, we are back to where we started - in the dining-room, where Cornelia sits at the table with Henri and Coral. It's the closest they have come to conducting a traditional séance; but instead of asking, 'Is anyone there?' Cornelia gives each of them, in turn, the parsonage's most precious relics. These are the objects that she has used as a starting point for her exhibition: Emily's blotting-paper which, as she points out, might contain the ink from Wuthering Heights; Anne's linen handkerchief, said to be stained with her blood; Charlotte's white kid-leather gloves; Branwell's empty wallet; locks of the sisters' hair, cut, as was customary, on their deathbeds and meticulously preserved. The provenance of the handkerchief is doubtful, but, as Andrew McCarthy observes, it has interest here, as part of 'Brontë apocrypha' (a Haworth version of the Turin shroud).

And there is something undeniably powerful about seeing each of the two psychics holding Charlotte's gloves. 'It's like holding hands with Charlotte Brontë,' says Cornelia, and in that brief moment, miraculously, everything that separates us seems to fall away.

Categories: In_the_News, Art-Exhibitions