An alert from the Australian Brontë Association:
8th MARCH Anne Collett – READING INTELLIGENCE
Charlotte Bronte’s first novel, The Professor, begins with a letter from the narrator, William Crimsworth, to his friend Charles, in which he describes his first sight of his brother’s wife and, in contrast, a portrait of his mother. Of Mrs Crimsworth junior, he writes:
“I sought her eye, desirous to read there the intelligence which I could not discern in her face or in her conversation; it was merry, rather small; by turns I saw vivacity, vanity, coquetry, look out through its irid, but I watched in vain for a glimpse of soul.”
and of Mrs Crimsworth senior:
“The face, I remembered, had pleased me as a boy, but then I did not understand it; now I knew how rare that class of face is in the world, and I appreciated keenly its thoughtful, yet gentle expression. The serious grey eye possessed for me a strong charm, as did certain lines in the features indicative of most true and tender feeling.”
The eye it would seem is the window of the soul. Much of Brontë’s novel (and those that followed) is concerned with appearance: with looking and seeing, with revelation and concealment, truth and deception. The Professor is a book that is interested in the method and mystery of reading – for Bronte suggests that the ability to read with intelligence or indeed to read intelligence, determines the course of a life. This idea of reading, and the extent to which we are enabled or disabled by the measure of skill with which we employ the art and science of reading, is of interest to me because it reveals much about Charlotte Brontë, as a woman and a writer, and the kind of intelligence she expected of her reader.
A short AGM will take place at this meeting.
Categories: Alert, Talks, The Professor
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