'It seems like Christmas has come early at the Parsonage'

iNews features Brontë Parsonage Museum principal curator Ann Dinsdale.

Ann Dinsdale still remembers the low point of her 33 years at the Brontë Parsonage Museum. It was 2011 and the museum – based in the large house in Haworth, West Yorkshire, where the Brontë sisters wrote their world famous novels – had been about to make one of its most important acquisitions.

A “tiny book” written by Charlotte Brontë in 1830 when she was 14 had come up for sale. The 35 by 61mm volume contained three original stories – one seen as a precursor to Jane Eyre – and more than 4,000 handwritten words across 19 hand-stitched pages.

The Young Men’s Magazine, written for the toy soldiers that the Brontë siblings played with in the parsonage, even included a contents page and handwritten adverts. Ms Dinsdale and her colleagues decided to bring it home. “We’d raised a huge amount of money, including £85,000 of donations from literature lovers all over the world.” But it was not enough.

“We were outbid,” says the principal curator. She describes the book’s purchase for a Paris collection as “the worst thing that happened in my career – it was heartbreaking”.

But in 2019, the museum was tipped off that the same book was about to be released back onto the market, after being impounded as part of a fraud and money laundering investigation. The fundraising began again; and the museum finally bought the miniscule magazine. “It was quite dramatic,” says Ms Dinsdale. “That felt like a really big red letter day.”

This week that drama was repeated – surpassed even – when another tiny handwritten Charlotte Brontë book, from 1829, was bought for the Parsonage for £1m. A Book of Ryhmes by Charlotte Brontë, Sold by Nobody and Printed by Herself contains 10 poems she wrote aged 13, and had been thought lost.

Then it emerged that the book was coming up for sale in New York and a UK literary heritage charity, Friends of the National Libraries, decided to bring it back to West Yorkshire. “It all happened very, very suddenly,” says Ms Dinsdale. “I can’t even begin to digest it. It is absolutely incredible. It seems like Christmas has come early at the Parsonage.” [...]

“It has been an exciting 12 months,” says Ms Dinsdale. And it was a much needed tonic after the museum’s pandemic closure.

“The Parsonage, up to that point, had never been closed apart from a few days at Christmas and in January, when we carry out repairs. Even through the Second World War, the Parsonage remained open. So it was a shock.”

Ms Dinsdale started working part-time at the museum more than three decades ago, fuelled by an interest in literature. Since then she has worked in the parsonage’s research library before moving over to become a curator, a department she now heads.

“I knew as soon as I started work at the Parsonage that this is where I wanted to be,” she says. “Gaining experience from working here made me interested in museums, how they operate and how they care for their collections.”

And the level of care required for the legacy of the Brontës, authors loved and revered around the world, is a heavy responsibility. Museum assistants have to clean the exhibits daily and report any concerns they have about an item.

“We keep detailed records so we’re able to check and make sure that a crack in a piece of furniture hasn’t opened up any further,” says Ms Dinsdale. “We want the collection to last forever and it’s down to careful handling. We take temperatures and humidity readings, just to monitor what’s going on around the museum.”

But it needs paying customers to work – and not just for the money they bring.

“Seeing the museum empty during lockdown, I realised just how the visitors bring the house to life,” says Ms Dinsdale. “The Brontës attract some eccentric, passionate people… it’s an endlessly fascinating place to work because it’s such a potent mix.

“You’ve got the power of the books, you’ve got the dramatic and tragic story of their lives and you’ve got this wild landscape on the edge of the Yorkshire moors.” (Padraic Flanagan)

The Guardian gives 3 out of 5 stars to I Am No Bird at Stephen Joseph theatre, Scarborough.

Those of us with a hatred of costume drama are in good company. Although the three actors of Stute theatre turn up for their tribute to the Brontë sisters, I Am No Bird, in regulation bonnets and historically accurate cotton dresses, something is amiss.

After a pretty piano song, they try reading some Brontë prose. But the corsets are too tight and the mood too genteel. The passages come across as melodramatic where they should be impassioned. Instead of the maverick Brontës, they are giving us heritage theatre. It can’t last.

In something of the iconoclastic spirit of Isobel McArthur’s Pride and Prejudice* (*sort of), they strip back the trappings of chocolate-box history in an attempt to capture what made the sisters striking in the first place. Breaking the rules was one of them. It isn’t long before they’re dropping the needlework in favour of talking to the audience, taking phone calls and appearing to go off script.

In a cheerful hour-long show, they run briskly through the story of Charlotte, Anne and Emily – plus ambivalent mention of brother Branwell. They alight in particular on the advice of poet laureate Robert Southey that “literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life: and it ought not to be”. That was just a forewarning of the male-centric publishing industry and misogynistic press to come. Central to this all-female show is the principle of women’s empowerment.

Sophia Hatfield, who co-writes with director Lisa Cagnacci, plays Charlotte as a woman torn between obedience and rebelliousness, trying to keep control of her own play even as she recognises the creative disruptiveness of her sisters. “Is it advisable to bring someone like Heathcliff into the world?” she asks Emily, uncertain whether to be shocked or thrilled.

Claire-Marie Seddon’s Emily, the least conformist, has no time for such reticence. Emma Swan’s Anne is happy to go with the flow. When in doubt, they whip out the trumpet, violin and clarinet, set up a vocal loop and sing sweet harmonies under the musical direction of Farhaan Aamir Shah.

It makes for a bright and breezy show, but for all its anarchic impulses, it remains at heart a biographical drama, dedicated to the facts as much as the feminism. (Mark Fisher)

While British Theatre Guide reviews the Jane Eyre adaptation that was recently premiered at the same venue.

Over the years, I have seen a plethora of Jane Eyres, encompassing the worlds of film, television and theatre. However, with the exception of the BBC’s terrific 2006 mini-series starring Ruth Wilson and Toby Stephens, all of my favourite retellings of Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 novel have taken place on stage.

It’s not that long ago since Sally Cookson’s ambitious, large-scale production of Jane Eyre was performed at the National; subsequently, the play toured across the country and was then made available to the public via YouTube during lockdown. So director Zoë Waterman and adaptor Chris Bush face the double challenge of (i) bringing a beloved literary classic to the stage and (ii) contending with a well-admired, widely-seen stage production.

As a theatre-in-the-round, the Stephen Joseph doesn’t allow for an ornately designed version of Jane Eyre in which the creepiness of Thornfield Hall—Rochester’s isolated mansion—is conveyed through set dressing. However, one of the great benefits of this production is its increased sense of intimacy. Furthermore, the scarcity of props allowed for lightning-fast transitions between scenes, ensuring that the pace of the production never flags.

Adaptation is a tricky business with numerous pitfalls. Overall, the reliably excellent Chris Bush does a fine job of preserving the key plot elements of Charlotte Brontë’s original novel whilst trimming some sections (for example, young Jane’s bullying at the hands of her odious cousin) that might have taken the play past the three-hour mark. Bush is particularly good at conveying the deep affection (and erotic charge) that exists between Jane and Rochester, and this is further enhanced by the stripped-back nature of the staging.

Jane Eyre is well performed by a talented cast of six actor-musicians. Eleanor Sutton is a charismatic lead, conveying the title heroine’s indomitable spirit and strong sense of justice. It was a clever idea to have Sutton double as Rochester’s first wife because it allows the production to explore the idea that Bertha is Jane’s distorted reflection, symbolising her repressed anger and resentment.

Equally excellent is Sam Jenkins-Shaw. Having enjoyed his performances in more light-heated fare such as The 39 Steps, it was a pleasure to see him playing a darker, more conflicted character. His Rochester is bracingly blunt, chastising his new employee at every possible moment. Together, Sutton and Jenkins-Shaw achieve the spark one would hope to see between Jane and her saturnine employer.

There is fine support from Tomi Ogbaro, Nia Gandhi, Zoë West and Sarah Groarke, who breathe life into a gallery of supporting characters.

With evocative lighting from Nao Nagai and wistful melodies courtesy of Simon Slater, this Jane Eyre is fluid, fast-paced and gripping. (James Ballands)

Penguin interviews writer Lucy Hawking.

If you could have any writer, living or dead, over for dinner, who would it be, and what would you serve them?

I would love to have dinner with Charlotte Brontë. I’d want to talk to her about how she used her imagination to create worlds that she could never visit and why storytelling matters. As food is a symbol of generosity in Jane Eyre, I’d make sure the table was laden with every kind of delicious food in the hope Charlotte would understand how welcome she was.

Reading Jane Eyre is one of 'An English Major’s Five Steps to Finding God' as reported by The Torch.

2. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte.

Confession time: when I first read this in high school, I thought Jane should move away with St. John. How embarrassing!

Encountering the novel again this year, I was reminded that womanhood is power. Kindness, thoughtfulness, and femininity are so often labeled as weaknesses but Jane Eyre proves to us that they are most certainly strengths (Beth from Little Women is yet another example of this). Though she’s constantly ridiculed for being “less than,” Jane insists that her interpretation of the world, and the quality of her own soul in relation to God, matters. 

I have met exactly zero men who have finished this book. Too many people see a book about a woman written by a woman and think, that can’t be important. Criminal! Charlotte Brontë didn’t write, “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being, with an independent will; which I now exert to leave you,” so men in 2022 could exhibit only the worst traits of Mr. Rochester. (Mary Rose Corkery)

The Times reviews the biography of Jean Rhys, I Used to Live Once by Miranda Seymour:

The Caribbean of Rhys’s childhood inspired her most enduringly popular novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, a 1966 “prequel” to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre that tells with rare sympathy and heady atmosphere the story of the courtship, honeymoon and marriage of Mr Rochester and Antoinette Cosway, whom he renames Bertha and confines to the attic of Thornfield Hall. (Laura Freeman)

Gatopardo (Spain) discusses mental health in the works of women writers.

Pero la representación de la locura, especialmente en personajes femeninos, viene de antes y tiene una marca aterradora. Me refiero a la loca del ático, de Charlotte Brontë, en la novela Jane Eyre, que luego Jean Rhys resignifica en su brillante Ancho mar de los Sargazos. Quien, para Brontë, era una mujer desquiciada, traída de las colonias y cercana a la bestialidad (una carga para que Mr. Rochester pudiera concretar su amor con Jane), se convierte, en la imaginación de Rhys, en una mujer vulnerada y vulne­rable, a quien llevan a una fría habitación en Inglaterra, dopada y contra su voluntad, desde Dominica (un sitio con una naturaleza en la que siempre encontraba refugio). Una habitación cerrada y vigilada que luego ella prenderá en llamas. Otra mujer triste, como las heroínas que caracterizan la obra de Rhys; mujeres, generalmente extranjeras, que buscan un lugar en el mundo. (Maria José Navia) (Translation)

In The New York Times, Judith Flanders reviews Antonia Fraser’s The Case of the Married Woman, which is about 'Caroline Norton, who scandalized 19th-century London society — and upended its laws'

Norton influenced art, too: It is suggested, says Fraser, that both Disraeli and Trollope modeled fictional characters on her. She also suggests, interestingly, that the heroine of Anne Brontë’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,” who flees a violent husband, might have been modeled on the notorious Mrs. Norton.

Stuff (New Zealand) looks back on the country's Brontë-related past with amazement.

“The majority of those who set up in the drapery and dressmaking trades were British,” explains Regnault. “They relied on deliveries from friends and family back home.”

It’s surprising to discover that Wellington women during the 1850s may well have worn a bonnet or cuff chosen by novelist Charlotte Brontë. She picked and sent supplies to a drapery store owned by her friend [Mary Taylor]. (Samantha Murray Greenway)