‘Reader, I’ll tell you what – my heart is like to break’

Northern Soul reviews the Becoming The Brontës exhibition at Treasures of the Brotherton Gallery, University of Leeds.

Taking in the evidence of the imaginative play in which they shared, it’s easy to speculate how they might thereby have been drawn into a more intimate proximity, coming together to shelter collectively against the arbitrary cruelties of an existence from which you, or those you loved, could be snatched at any moment.  

Arguably, the exhibition is at its most mesmerising in the light it can throw on these formative years. The worlds into which they sought refuge were rich in detail, even down to the production of what have since become known as the ‘little books’, roughly the size of a commemorative postage stamp, fashioned by the children as a library for the entertainment of their culturally-enlightened toy soldiers.  

Long before the cinematic universe Marvel (developed out of the raw materials of its comics) was a glint in writer Stan Lee’s eye, the Brontës were fleshing out their own interconnected mythologies. A notebook in Charlotte’s minuscule handwriting, credited to the pseudonymous ‘Captain Tree’, collects Two Romantic Tales from her fictional Glass Town. She and her brother Branwell also penned stories of the imaginary Angria, represented here in two tiny volumes with covers cut in the blue of repurposed Epsom Salts packaging.  

From such precocious juvenilia, the three sisters in particular began to hone distinctive styles, standing together, but increasingly on their own two feet. Their first collection of poetry, under cover of the aliases Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, was, after all, a joint enterprise. Still, their individuality was beginning to assert itself. Charlotte’s Fireside Tales opens with the conversational ‘Reader, I’ll tell you what – my heart is like to break’, a directness of address that anticipates the ending of her own Jane Eyre. [...]

The final exhibits exchange the written word for tokens of a different kind of fame; the shawl, handkerchief and bow tie that are sanctified by their prior ownership by various Brontës.  

They represent, perhaps, the way in which those first childlike fictions, invocations against death’s caprices, can be seen to have finally warded it off; escaping the frailties of flesh through the immortality of renown, and, in the process, throwing off the confines of a world in miniature for one very much larger than life. (Desmond Bullen)

On Whatever, writer Rachel Cantor discusses her 'big idea': 'a modernized look at the Brontës in her new novel', Half-Life of a Stolen Sister.

I was overseas working on my first novel when I ran out of books to read (something that could happen before the blessed advent of e-readers). I was beyond thrilled, then, when I found Charlotte Brontë’s Villette in a dusty corner of a Danish bookshop. I’d never read Villette, despite it being the favorite book of a college chum whose opinion I madly respected: probably I knew it couldn’t match Jane Eyre, which had always been my favorite book by a super long shot.

The preface stunned me. It described how, one by one, Charlotte Brontë’s four sisters and one brother died young, the first at the age of ten, the last at barely thirty-one, leaving Charlotte, for all intents and purposes, alone, likely for the rest of her life. Having reached the “spinsterly” age of thirty-three, she could not reasonably expect to wed. Lonely and wrecked by grief, she survived and, by some measures, thrived. How? How had she done it? My novel, Half-Life of a Stolen Sister, arose not so much out of a Big Idea as a Big Question. I wanted to understand.

For almost a decade, I kept the thought of a Brontë book in my head: when the time came, I would read novels, biographies, letters, and anything else I could find, and based on these sources, write four long stories from the point of view of Anne, Emily, Branwell, and Charlotte, respectively. Each would take place during a particularly important time in their collective lives; all would have as their natural backdrop Yorkshire, England, 1821-1855.

Big Problem: I am not a “realistic” writer; I adore historical fiction but I am even more definitely not a writer of realistic historical fiction. Luckily for me, I was (am) capable of enormous literary self-deception: more than ten years later, when it was time to write this book, I went for it. I bought all those research books and read, or reread, all those novels. Which was when, mercifully, my imaginative sub-brain, which is much smarter than I am, took over. I say mercifully because my imaginative sub-brain wasn’t interested in the plan I’d held on to all those years (my Big Idea, possibly): instead, it immediately placed young Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne Brontë not on the moors, not in quaint Haworth Parsonage, but in a park, where they hid behind bushes, conferring on “talkie-walkies” and looking for spies.

What?

When they left that park, it was to sketch dioramas at a nearby museum; when they returned home, it was via a subway to a rent-controlled, much-too-small apartment. I had migrated this family, through a process mysterious—a process I still can’t say I understand—to a mid-sized North American city, probably in the late twentieth or early twenty-first century.

This shift was, obviously, decisive. It changed everything—it had to. No longer would I try to write in a manner to which I’m not suited; rather, I could rely on my strongest skill, which applying my imagination to questions of the heart. And possibly have fun doing so.

Thus I was able to convey the father’s extremely rushed (and entirely unrealistic) search for a replacement wife, seemingly moments after the death of the mother of his six children, via a dating-site profile.

Thus I could allow Charlotte’s publisher to share his thoughts about the sisters’ secret identities on a public radio show.

Thus Charlotte could express unmediated anguish following the loss of Branwell, Emily, and Anne in her diary, and a more curated version of same through letters.

And so on.

This freedom was exhilarating. It allowed me to present Charlotte and those around her not as inert figures in a wax museum (or romantic figures striding across the moors, or delicate ladies coughing tubercular phlegm), but rather as people who grow and change and spat and try really hard to do well—people who are, in other words, very much like us. It brought me close to their joys and sufferings and complications and achievements, which in turn allowed me to answer my Big Question—How did she do it?—long after I’d abandoned my Big Idea.

The New Yorker mentions K. Patrick’s novel Mrs. S, describing it as

a sly rewriting of Charlotte Brontë’s boarding-school romances, plays it as lesbian erotica with comic touches, (Merve Emre)

El placer de la lectura (in Spanish) recommends 25 must reads and one of them is

14.- “Jane Eyre” de Charlotte Brontë

Esta novela histórica que redefinió la conciencia narrativa se centra en la homónima Jane Eyre, una huérfana nacida en la Inglaterra de 1800. A medida que Jane crece, toma su destino en sus propias manos, lo que se vuelve particularmente conmovedor cuando se encuentra con el melancólico Sr. Rochester en Thornfield Hall. (Translation)