'There’s just that extra spark of magic'

The Yorkshire Post is looking forward to this Tuesday's talk by Tracy Chevalier on the Brontës and their manuscripts at the Esther Simpson Building at the University of Leeds.

Up close with their miniature manuscripts, personal notebooks, and rare first editions of the sisters' most famous works, you can start, she says, to get a true sense of their remarkable journey from childhood writings to Yorkshire's most famous literary family.

“You have three great writers in one family…and it’s worth exploring how that happens and what it is about a specific family that makes them grow into being such good storytellers and such good wordsmiths,” Chevalier says.

Her own interest in the family began when she first read Jane Eyre as a university student in Ohio. After moving to the UK, she visited the Brontës’ home at Haworth Parsonage, and the Airedale landscape and the traces of their harsh childhood in the house renewed her fascination with Charlotte, Emily, Anne and their brother Branwell. [...]

Come 2016, Chevalier was creative partner at the Brontë Parsonage Museum for Charlotte’s bicentenary, curating an exhibition and editing a short story anthology inspired by Jane Eyre. Now she is returning to Yorkshire to illuminate the family's lives and legacy through objects currently on display at the University of Leeds’ Treasures of the Brotherton Gallery.

The gallery’s name is more than apt for an exhibition showcasing a lost treasure trove of Brontë riches. Running until October 28, Becoming the Brontës opens a window onto the writers’ imaginative world as it took shape, revealed by the precocious siblings in handwritten books, letters, sketches and poems.

Many of the items on display come from the Blavatnik Honresfield Library – a unique literary collection assembled by a Rochdale mill owner in the 19th-century, and saved for the nation in a campaign led by the Friends of the National Libraries and a consortium of libraries and writers’ houses including the co-curators of the exhibition – the British Library, Brontë Parsonage Museum and the University of Leeds’ Brotherton Library.

"These new manuscripts, publications and pictures can really help us to see how the Brontës were imagining themselves as published writers right from childhood,” says Dr Katy Mullin, senior lecturer in the University’s School of English. “They are very interesting to us because they give us this insight into how the Brontës were before they were known.

"Back in the early 1840s, they were unknown, pretty much penniless governesses, daughters of a country parson, without their mother who had passed away when they were little girls, with this alcoholic brother Branwell who was making a nuisance of himself all over Yorkshire. Their futures did not look bright and yet these acquisitions show the course of their imagination, their creativity, and a remarkable amount of self-belief and confidence in their abilities.”

Star items in the collection include eight miniature books crafted and written in minuscule script by a young Charlotte, and ten-year-old Emily’s pencil sketch that shows a small hand reaching through a broken window, evoking the later image of Cathy grasping Lockwood’s hand in Wuthering Heights.

They allow an “extraordinary insight into how Charlotte, Emily and Anne became the Brontës”, says Dr Mullin. "Other items, above all Emily’s notebook of 31 poems, with her own and Charlotte’s marginal notes, show the tensions and compromises required to make private writing public. Some of those tensions were to do with the increasingly painful gulf between the sisters’ successes and their brother’s conspicuous failure, as Branwell’s letter indicating his descent into addiction shows.”

Both Dr Mullin and Chevalier will discuss their insights into the collection in a talk next month, exploring with the audience what it reveals about the Brontës’ life and work and how the sisters developed as writers. “They were so isolated, they fell back on themselves as a little unit,” Chevalier muses. “They would make up and tell each other little stories, about the toy soldiers they had, other characters they came up with. We will be exploring what they were like and how these objects emerged from this hothouse of creativity.”

"I think it will always be a little bit of a mystery why three great writers came from one household,” she continues. “These [items] are more of the jigsaw puzzle but it’s still remarkable that three sisters used to sit and write and read together, read their stories out to each other in the evening...I don’t think there are many families where that would happen.”

With the death of their mother and the remoteness of their home, the sisters relied on each other and were forced on their own company and imaginations to entertain themselves, Chevalier says. “But then there’s just that extra spark of magic. And no number of uncovered manuscripts and letters is going to explain that.” (Laura Reid)

This week also sees the previews of the Lamb’s Players' ghostly take on Jane Eyre. As reported by The San Diego Union-Tribune:

Lamb’s’ world premiere production of “Jane,” created by David McFadzean is a play with music and it’s subtitled “A Ghost Story.”

Based on Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 classic novel, “Jane: A Ghost Story” is directed by Lamb’s artistic director Robert Smyth and stars Natasha Harris as English governess Jane Eyre and Manny Fernandes as her employer Edward Rochester, master of Thornfield Hall.

In McFadzean’s version at Lamb’s, the story is set in the 1920s rather than in the novel’s presumed 19th-century time period (the exact dates are not specified in Brontë’s book). The music, which Smyth described as “flavors that make transitions” rather than full songs, is a mixture of folk tunes, Gaelic lullabies and even ragtime jazz.

The origin of the “Jane” project dates back several years. McFadzean, who joined Lamb’s back in 1979 as a company member and, along with his wife, remained one until the mid-1980s, has remained a constant collaborator with the theater company. “Jane” is McFadzean’s eighth world premiere piece at Lamb’s. Among his previous plays presented at Lamb’s are “Deep River” and adaptations of “Servant of Two Masters” and “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.”

“He came to me with an idea before COVID about a ‘Jane Eyre’ adaptation,” Smyth said. “I thought it would be great. It fits in a variety of ways with what we do. We put it on our ‘to develop’ project list during the pandemic. I’m glad we’re now able to do it.”

Thirty-eight chapters’ long and spanning five stages of Jane’s life, Brontë’s novel is a sweeping, many-faceted work that might seem an unlikely candidate for a two-hour stage production. (...)

Harris, whose five-year association with Lamb’s began with her working among its front-of-house staff, admits she first “read” “Jane Eyre” via SparkNotes in high school.

“I have now re-read it as an adult in preparation for this show,” she said. “As a woman reading it, I get to reflect on my own life and the steps that got me to where I am. I’m a big fan of searching for what I identify with and relate to in a character and relying on my own experiences.

“I also love to reflect on how I’m different from Jane and what I can learn as a human being from this person.”

Smyth said that this production will connect with audiences on multiple levels.

“It’s Jane’s story from being an orphaned child to being on the adventure she goes through,” he said. “We call it a ghost story because of the Gothic elements to it. At its heart, it’s not just about her development but also about finding a partnership that makes no sense on the surface but that really works.” (David L. Coddon)

Jane Eyre is also one of 'Four Fall Books' selected by a contributor to HerCampus.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

“Reader, I married him.”

I have to end off with a classic. If classic literature is not your cup of tea, I totally understand, but I find Brontë’s work to be incredibly bewitching and enticingly gothic. 

We follow Jane, who grows up to be an absolute badass, working as a governess at Thornfield Manor, run by the brooding, sexy and morally gray Mr. Rochester. 

Jane is iconic. Rochester is iconic. The rest of the characters are so utterly iconic (shoutout Bertha). It’s a classic for a reason and it’s so classically feminist. (Dylan Courtney)