Brontë Society Summer Festival Weekend & AGM

Once again, we are in June and that means that the Brontë Society Summer Festival Weekend is here:

June 8

15.00. Ann Dinsdale and Jane Sellars: 'Then and Now', The Brontë Parsonage Museum at 90
West Lane Baptist Centre

The Brontë Parsonage Museum opened to the public for the first time on 4 August 1928, and the stream of pilgrims who had been visiting Haworth for the previous seventy-five years could now look around the very rooms in which the Brontë family had lived, written and worked. Ann Dinsdale, Principal Curator at the Museum, and Jane Sellars, Curator of Cultural Services at Harrogate Borough Council and a former Director of the Brontë Society, discuss Haworth in the 1920s and the Museum’s journey through the last ninety years.

19.30  History Wardrobe: Gothic for Girls
West Lane Baptist Centre

History Wardrobe presents an evening  of enlightenment in all things gothic. This event will take you back to the 18th century to explore the origins of gothic novels, highlighting the gothic elements of the works of Emily and Charlotte Brontë, before moving forward through the centuries to examine how the gothic tradition has influenced literature, fashion and culture right up to the present day. The presentation will feature a fabulous array of original costumes and accessories, as well as readings from well-loved writers.

June 9

09:45.  Brontë Society Annual Lecture
Carol Dyhouse: The Eccentricities of 'Woman's Fantasy ... and Heathcliff
West Lane Baptist Centre

We are delighted to welcome Carol Dyhouse to Haworth to deliver this year’s annual lecture. In 1847, a reviewer in  The Athenaeum found Wuthering Heights ‘a disagreeable story’, complaining of ‘the eccentricities of woman’s fantasy’. Charlotte Brontë described Emily’s characters as full of ‘perverted passion and passionate perversity’. Carol will begin her talk with questions about how and why Heathcliff continues to be pictured as ‘a hero of romance’ when his author explicitly warned against this. She will widen her enquiry to consider why ‘woman’s fantasy’ has so often been seen as eccentric, unsettling, pathological or perverse.
Carol Dyhouse is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Sussex, and her research interests are in the social history of nineteenth and twentieth-century Britain, focussing on gender, education and women’s lives. More recently Carol has established a reputation for engaging scholarly histories which reach out to a general audience. She is the author of Glamour: Women, History, Feminism (2010), Girl Trouble: Panic and Progress in the History of Young Women (2013), and her most recent book, Heartthrobs: A History of Women and Desire (2017) was described by  The Guardian as  ‘a book that invites argument, and which romps along at an appropriately breathless pace’.

14.00. 2018 Annual General Meeting of the Brontë Society
West Lane Baptist Centre

19.00. The Great Who Wants to be a Brontë Mastermind Challenge!

How well do you know the Brontës? Can you sort your Haretons from your Huntingdons, and your Weightmans from your Smith Williams’? Quizmaster Lucy Mangan hosts  a fun-filled evening of fact and fiction as Brontë fans compete to be named the ultimate Brontë obsessive!
Lucy Mangan is a columnist for Stylist magazine, features journalist and author of four books with a fifth – Bookworm, a memoir of childhood reading – due out in March 2018. She appears frequently on radio and recently co-presented a BBC documentary about the Brontë sisters, but does not have the chutzpah to call herself a broadcaster just yet.