Brussels Brontë Group April Weekend 2024

This weekend in Brussels, the Brussels Brontë Group April Weekend is held:

Talks

Saturday 20 April 2024 (morning)

Université Saint-Louis, Rue du Marais 119, Brussels.

10.00 Talk by Valerie Sanders: ‘The Brontës go to Woolworth’s: clothes and shopping in the Bronte novels’

The title of this talk is taken from Rachel Ferguson’s 1931 novel of the same name, in which the characters do indeed imagine what Charlotte and Emily might buy in the famous cut-price store. Professor Sanders will explore the themes of clothes and shopping, both in Charlotte Brontë’s letters and in her novels: not just the famous pink dress in Villette and Mr Rochester’s lavish shopping for Jane Eyre’s trousseau, but also Caroline Helstone’s attempts to refine Hortense Moore’s dress, and Charlotte’s own resistance to wedding dress advice.

Professor Valerie Sanders is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Hull in Yorkshire, the city where she was born and educated. She is a return speaker, having given us a talk in 2011. Specializing in nineteenth-century life writing, including studies of fatherhood and sibling relationships, her research interests include Charlotte Brontë’s friend Harriet Martineau and the novelist Margaret Oliphant, of whom she has written a biography. Recently she contributed to the volume of essays ‘Charlotte Brontë, Embodiment and the Material World’. She is currently a Trustee of the Brontë Society.

11.30 Talk by Octavia Cox: ‘Anne Brontë and the Sea’

‘The sea was my delight … It was delightful to me at all times and seasons, but especially in the wild commotion of a rough sea-breeze, and in the brilliant freshness of a summer morning … Refreshed, delighted, invigorated, I walked along, forgetting all my cares, feeling as if I had wings to my feet…’ (Agnes Grey)

Anne Brontë loved Scarborough, which was then a luxurious seaside spa resort; it was there to which she travelled in her final days, and there where she is buried. It has been said that that what the moors were to Emily the sea was to Anne: a soul-enlivening physical space, and an inspiring imaginative one. The sea and seaside feature importantly in Anne’s two novels, Agnes Grey (as we can see from the beautiful quotation above) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, as well as in her poetry. In this talk, Dr Octavia Cox will explore the symbolism of Anne’s sea imagery as a key element in her works.

Octavia Cox is a lecturer at Keble College, University of Oxford. She teaches courses for the Oxford University Department for Continuing Education on the Brontës, Jane Austen and other nineteenth-century writers including George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Trollope, Dickens and Hardy. Her first monograph, Alexander Pope in the Romantic Age, is due to be published soon and she is also researching a book on how Jane Austen plays with, challenges, and subverts genre conventions within her fiction.

Guided walk

Sunday 21 April 2024
10.00-12.00. Guided walk around Brontë places in Brussels in the Place Royale area. Registration essential.