Governessing and Brontëan Abstracts

Let's now take a look at a couple of more in-depth mentions.

Kathryn Hughes, who is very well acquainted with the Victorian Era, writes for The Guardian on the nouveau riches' need for butlers. What does this have to do with the Brontës? Oh, you'll see:

In 1841 Charlotte Bronte was employed as a governess by the nouveau riche White family to train up their "wild and unbroken" children. Bronte, a clergyman's daughter and so already a lady, burned with resentment at her lowly position. Mrs White, an excise-man's daughter, was skewered by the acid-tongued Miss Bronte as having a "very coarse unladylike temper". When the kindly Mr White suggested that the Rev Bronte might like to visit, Bronte virtually self-combusted at the thought of being beholden to people whose vowels, despite her best endeavours, remained as flat as an unrisen yorkshire pudding.

Didn't Charlotte love being a governess? ;)

The Brontë Parsonage Blog publishes a letter from photographer Simon Warner (who has his own blog: The Collecting Place) about Cornelia Parker's recent talk at the National Portrait Gallery. The talk was mainly on Brontëan Abstracts.

Following an illustrated presentation by the artist herself, she was joined by writer Deborah Levy for a conversation about the inspiration behind the work and the methods she used to pursue different aspects of Brontë mythology.

Cornelia was especially eloquent about her unfulfilled ambition to implant strands of the Brontë Sisters' hair into Nelson's (the Duke of Brontë's) hair on Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square. She felt this was an art intervention whose time has perhaps not yet come.

I was struck overall by how much work she put in to Brontëan Abstracts - not just the electron microscope investigations, but the close-up photographs of the Jane Eyre manuscript, the Plymouth interview with Phyllis Cheney which I filmed for her, and the psychics' visit to the Parsonage. There were other enquiries too that were not followed up for the exhibition, such as the forensic tests offered by West Yorkshire Police on items of Brontë linen.

Categories: Art-Exhibitions, Charlotte Brontë