Cancelling Emily Brontë. The wokes tried it, Trump does it

The Trump-Musk alliance threatens to completely redefine the values, pacts, and agreements that maintained stability and prosperity—as precarious as one might consider it, but still the most lasting in human history—of the world as we know it. And it will not be pretty.
So we'll take refuge in our hobbies, in the things that make us happy and that we like to share, while we still can. Because sooner or later, as Niemöller would say, the barbarians will also reach our shores.

So we wrote in the new year's message on BrontëBlog. Well, the barbarians are already on our shores. Megan Marshall writes in The Boston Globe about the termination of the grant received by Deborah Lutz, professor at the University of Louisville and author of the quite extraordinary book The Brontë Cabinet. The grant was connected to a new biography of Emily Brontë.

The words that chilled us the most in the terse, accusatory letter Deborah Lutz received by email from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) on April 3, terminating her Public Scholar grant for a biography of Emily Brontë “to safeguard the interests of the federal government,” were those of Executive Order 14168: “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” The alleged violation of EO 14168 was one of “several reasonable causes” cited by NEH acting chairman Michael McDonald as grounds for cutting off Lutz’s funding midstream — and, by a wide stretch of the imagination, the one most closely related to Lutz’s and our own ongoing work.

We were three women biographers meeting for lunch on a Friday to discuss our projects: Heather Clark, a 2018 Public Scholar fellow for her biography of Sylvia Plath, “Red Comet,” a Pulitzer finalist, at work now on a book about Anne Sexton; Abigail Santamaria, recipient of a 2022 Public Scholar grant for her biography-in-progress of Madeleine L’Engle; and me, a veteran biographer in quest of a new subject. But conversation stalled as we kept returning to the text of the letter Lutz had posted on Instagram that morning: “Defending women”? Isn’t that what we do? Isn’t that what the NEH had done for us and our subjects by funding our books? (...)

After the weekend passed, I phoned Lutz to ask how she was handling her loss of funds and the rude letter, so unlike the initial good news email from the old NEH. She thanked me, then brightened. By coincidence, the day she received the termination email was the date her final NEH lump sum payment of $20,000 was due to be released for direct deposit to her bank account. The termination email had not come from the secure “.gov” address from which all financial communications were meant to be issued. She guessed the new admins had failed to successfully navigate the secure system of payment set up by their predecessors. And lo, the $20,000 appeared in her bank account Monday morning. She quickly transferred the sum to a different account, having heard from another NEH fellow that their own “pending” lump sum payment had disappeared.

Lutz is back at work on her biography, set for publication in 2026. By then, presumably, American women will have been secured against the threat posed by the likes of Emily Brontë, the Alcott and Blackwell sisters, Hannah Crafts, Sojourner Truth, and Isabella Stewart Gardner.

Welcome to dystopian and very dark times.