From the Belgian Essays to Villette's Grisette

Some recent Brontë scholar work at Conferences:

Literature+Translation Conference
Monash University
Caulfield, Melbourne, Australia
11-12 July 2011

Translation in Dialogue: Charlotte Brontë’s Belgian Essays
Dr Lesa Scholl
Emmanuel College, University of Queensland
In 1842, Charlotte Brontë travelled to Brussels, where she studied for two years at the Pensionnat Heger. The influence of her travels and living abroad on her fiction is widely understood, yet the crucial role that language and translation played in shaping these experiences has not been sufficiently addressed. This paper will examine Brontë’s little-studied Belgian devoirs, which reveal the dialogic relationship between Brontë and her French language master, Constantin Heger. There is both tension and fusion between Brontë’s and Heger’s respective Frenchness and Englishness, and, even more significant, Heger’s Catholicism and Brontë’s staunch Protestantism. The study of French language and literature expands Brontë’s ability to articulate her own cultural values.
The dialogue that takes place between Brontë and Heger in these essays exemplifies the way the translator vies for precedence with the original author. The linguistic aspect of translation becomes secondary to the struggle to validate cultural supremacy. The essays depict the translation of ideas, the rewriting of ideologies, and the dynamics of influence that take place between this master and student. Brontë uses Heger’s forms to express her own ideas, as a translator who creatively uses the framework of the original work to present their own message. She is influenced by Heger’s pedagogical style, but also challenges it. He moulds her writing – both ideologically and physically – through her competing resistance to and collusion with his ideas, a process that impacted Brontë’s expression of her political and cultural understanding of her world.

Romantic Studies Association of Australasia
Romanticism and the Tyrannies of Distance Conference 2011
10-12 February 2011

Prof. Christine Alexander, University of New South Wales
Negotiating ‘divine intoxication’: Charlotte Brontë and the Revolutionary Sublime

“Gissing’s World within the World: Art and the Artist” 
Monday 28 to Wednesday 30 March 2011 University of York, UK
Constance Harsh
Reading Charlotte Brontë’s Mark on the Wall: Gissing’s Engagement with Brontë’s Artistic Example 

The University of Rhode Island, URI
April 16, 2011

Panel C - Labor and Curiosity: 19th Century British Women Writers
Sarah Feldberg, Clark University
“The Most Flourishing Grisette”: Labor, Sexuality and Textiles in Brontë’s Villette

and today in Brussels, a talk organized by the Brussels Brontë Group:

Room P61, Facultés Universitaires Saint-Louis, Bld. du Jardin Botanique/Kruidtuinlaan 43, 1000 Brussels

14.00: Jane Eyre in context.
Talk by Dr Sandie Byrne of the Oxford University Department for Continuing Education, who will fill us in on the literary background to Jane Eyre - the writers both of Charlotte Brontë’s generation and previous generation who influenced her; the publishing scene in the 1840s; and much else besides.
Sandie Byrne was formerly Fellow and Tutor in English at Balliol College, Oxford, and now teaches and designs courses for the Oxford University Department for Continuing Education. She is the author of a number of books and articles on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature.