Nature alone was her friend

Science Musings presents an interesting essay entitled Vile Bodies, Inmortal Souls where the approach of Charlotte Brontë and the Victorian Society to the real nature of women in particular is confronted:

As long as the world was thought to exist as matter and spirit, matter was certain to draw the short straw. The pernicious dualism of Victorian evangelical religion was countered only by science, which began its modern advance when it turned its back on the supernatural. The essential task of empirical science is to discover knowledge that conforms to nature -- turning Reverend Brocklehurst's sorry dictum on its ear. Charlotte Bronte, as a novelist, sought to do the same. She was determined that her stories not conform to the upperclass fancy-dress fantasies of the time, but would rather describe nature as she observed it with a hard, unsparing eye. As her biographer Lyndall Gordon notes, nature alone was her friend. (...)
The Bronte women were put upon by a religion, a class system and a patriarchy that sought to describe a woman's nature without bothering to look at nature itself. Charlotte, Emily and Anne looked into their own hearts and minds to decide what nature was, and helped create the conditions in which women could emerge from the shadows of religious self-abnegation and domestic servitude. Their ally was nature. Their triumph inspiring. (Chet Raymo)

We don't know if it's the influence of the Brontë sisters sitcom project but lately there are a lot of humour/parodical articles that somehow slip a Brontë mention. The Telegraph has one example today:

"Mr Pritchett, you have two minutes on your chosen specialist subject, Embarrassing Moments on University Challenge 2004 to 2006, starting now. (...)
What was the longest whispered consultation by a team, leading eventually to an incorrect answer?"
"Thirty-four seconds. They ended up with the wrong Brontë sister." (Oliver Pritchett)

Brand new UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown has a long tradition of Brontë-ish comparisons (check these old posts where he was compared to Heathcliff, Bertha Rochester and St John Rivers). Camilla Long in The Observer does it again:

One [friend] even went so far as to describe him as 'steamy ... he's got that Heathcliff thing going on, and I do love disturbed men.

Henk Grasduint publishes an article in Dutch about Anne Brontë.

Categories: Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Humour, References