The Instruments the Brontës Used to Craft Their Novels

An alert for tomorrow, November 13, in Somerville, MA:

Reading the Writing Desk: The Instruments the Brontës Used to Craft Their Novels
Wednesday, November 13 at 7pm
Katherine Small Gallery
108 Beacon Street
Somerville, MA 02143

Our eighth Standing-Room Only Lecture (co-sponsored by Triolet Rare Books and conveniently timed to precede the Boston International Antiquarian Book Fair) will have us looking closely at quills, dip pens, inks, pencils, quill cutters, blotting papers, ruling devices, bone folders, and embossed letter papers. These were the basic supplies and tools that nineteenth-century writers used to compose their great novels, including Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. This talk will provide a holistic look into the writing desks of Emily and Charlotte Brontë, and will show how the activities of cutting, canceling, copying, and pasting gave shape to novels—and how reading the writing instruments extant in Charlotte’s desk may shed new light on an old puzzle pertaining the fair-copy manuscripts of her last two published novels, Shirley and Villette.
Our speaker, Barbara Heritage, is the Associate Director and Curator of Collections at Rare Book School. She has published and presented widely on the writings of Charlotte Brontë, and was recently commissioned by the Brontë Society to write a chapter for Charlotte Brontë: The Lost Manuscripts (2018). Her recent research into the writing instruments of the Brontës was funded by an award from the Willison Foundation Charitable Trust, and is part of a larger book project, “Charlotte Brontë and the Labor of Writing.”

Fine Books & Collections quotes from Barbara Heritage:

“Some influential scholars and critics have referred to Charlotte as being essentially a ‘trance writer’ who did not spend time crafting her novels,” Heritage said. “I was interested in finding out more about Charlotte’s writing process and, more generally, in learning about what the physical evidence in her extant manuscripts could tell us about how her novels came to be.” Studying Charlotte’s manuscripts in-person, Heritage explored the intricate features of the physical objects so often taken for granted--the marks of excisions and revisions with pen and ink; residue from copying and pasting material with paper and glue--and determined that the sisters’ editing processes were precise.
“In Charlotte's case, these manuscripts were meticulously prepared and conscientiously edited as part of an ongoing dialogue with her publishers. My research suggests that she revised even more of her second novel, Shirley, than previously thought.” Heritage also unearthed ruling devices in their desks that allowed Charlotte and Emily to regulate the word count in their documents, which was essential to help the sisters meet their publishers' strict requirements. "By examining the writing desks, I also learned more about the pens, pencils, and blades she [Charlotte] would have used to create and edit her manuscripts, and about the kinds of evidence those instruments would have left in the manuscripts."
Does this fresh evidence change the way readers will approach the novels? In a word, yes, and Heritage hopes that her research will encourage contemporary readers and scholars to reexamine their notions of the sisters and how they worked. “It's misleading to characterize Charlotte as a trance writer, or to think of her, as some have, as a writer who wrote out her great novels with few corrections or changes. The mechanical craft of writing--including the physical materials and instruments that made that possible--inflected the very shape of her novels and their stories.”