Letters to Brussels

Huliq posts about the letters acquired by the Brontë Society a couple of months ago. The article doesn't say anything new, but will be an interesting read for anyone who missed the news last July. Incidentally, BrontëBlog was very lucky and got to see these letters quite recently.

More letters. The Brontë Parsonage Blog has an article by Helen MacEwan on the letters Charlotte wrote to M. Heger.

Deep in the heart of the British Library are four letters written by Charlotte Brontë to her Belgian teacher Constantin Heger. It is nothing short of a miracle that the letters have survived at all. They were torn into small pieces, repaired with needle and thread and then left forgotten in a drawer until 1913. [...]
It takes a certain dogged persistence to gain access to the letters, but Derek Blyth of the Brussels Brontë Group recently saw them for himself. With the letters on the table in front of him, he was able to obtain a better insight into Charlotte’s mind when she sat down to write to Heger. Study of the originals also helps to pinpoint the moment they were torn up, and to identify the person who saved these outstanding literary documents for posterity. Derek Blyth, a Brussels-based writer who has written guide books on Belgium, will be talking about the letters at the Cercle des Voyageurs Café in Brussels on Thursday 18 October.

The Brussels Brontë Blog had a very interesting post on these letters only a few months ago. And today's post on the Brontë Parsonage Blog ends on a 'mysterious' note as well:

... drawings from Charlotte Brontë's tale High Life in Verdopolis, the story that she presented to Heger and that turned up mysteriously in a Brussels secondhand bookshop in the early 1890s - now in the British Library. "Portrait of a Young Woman" c. 1833-34 and "King of Angria, Duke of Zamorna" c. 1834. (Click here to see these drawings)

Charles T. Downey from Ionarts talks about the Balthus exhibition taking place at the Museum Ludwig in Köln, Germany. he's translated an article originally published in the Belgian newspaper La Libre Belgique.

La Toilette de Cathy was inspired by Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. The exhibit shows the entire series of his beautiful China ink drawings illustrating the book. In the painting, Balthus shows himself as Heathcliff, the impetuous valet in love with Cathy, observing the latter, shown as his great love, Antoinette de Watteville, getting dressed and painted nude in the style of Cranach. (Original text by Guy Duplat. English translation by Charles T. Downey)

Balthus and the influence Wuthering Heights had over him have both been featured before on BrontëBlog. The painting in question, La Toilette de Cathy, is the one on the left.

Nine Dresses finds parallels between L. M. Montgomery's Emily of the New Moon and Wuthering Heights and its author, Emily Brontë.

I wonder did LMM read Wuthering Heights or any of the biographical monographs that came out about the life of Emily Bronte afterwards. How neat it would be to prove a chain: LMM reading about a highly imaginative girl, with masses of dark hair and a pale, pointed face, who lived alone with her father (almost true in Bronte's case), who wrote poems compulsively and equally compulsively destroyed earlier ones after rereading them, who lived in a family threatened by inherited consumption, who found God in the wild beauty of nature and comfort in her animals. In turn then, the chain would link to Forest reading LMM's Emily books, delighting in her twisting of the usual, in the dark, abusive plotlines that lurk behind the flowery descriptions of Blair Water. Maybe this was what led Forest to choose Wuthering Heights in that writing competition, which led to her exploration and defence of Gondal in her own novels. Or maybe it just led her to overturn the received modes of fiction in her own context. Who knows.

Meanwhile The Bluestocking Roundtable wonders how 19th-C female writers would like being deconstructed.

The larger question, of course, is whether any of the heroines of this book - the Brontes, say, or Emily Dickinson - would recognize themselves in the postmodern/deconstructed/exquisitely-partisan world of the critics, whose vocabulary has become so fractured and abstruse as to seem ("seem," madame?) deliberately obscure. (Sandra Gilbert's phrase "a jargon... of our own" made me snort with glee.) They would appreciate, I believe, the original work that Gilbert and Gubar undertook, to examine and excavate their art in the context of their times, but I can not imagine any of them being particularly sanguine in the face of their imminent deconstruction.

Finally, Musings from the chair has posted three pictures from a trip to Haworth.

Categories: Art-Exhibitions, Books, Brontëana, Brussels, Haworth, Juvenilia, Wuthering Heights