'What was it they knew? Very little about “life.” They knew their own souls, they knew their own minds and hearts'

The Times echoes the news of the Brussels square to be named after the Brontë sisters.

Charlotte and Emily are to give their names to a newly created square in Brussels, Belgium, next year to mark the time the sisters lived in the Belgian capital 180 years ago. Their stay had a marked influence on Charlotte, in particular, and may even have provided the inspiration for the romantic hero Mr Rochester in her most famous work, Jane Eyre.

“The link has never been as widely known as it should be and until now there’s never been a Brontë street or Brontë square,” said Helen MacEwan, author of The Brontës in Brussels. “That this is about to change is great news for Brontë lovers everywhere and good for Brussels.”

“This is a really exciting development. Charlotte and Emily’s time in Brussels is an important part of the Brontë story and it’s totally fitting that their legacy will be commemorated in the city in this way,” said Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society and Parsonage Museum in Haworth.

Brussels had a very different impact on the sisters to Haworth. Both were in their twenties when they came to learn French from 1842 to 1843, because it was cheaper than Paris. They studied at a small school boarding house, or pensionnat, run by the teachers Constantin Héger and his wife, Zoe.

Although both sisters were taught by Héger, many believe that Charlotte fell in love with him and he inspired the character of Mr Rochester.

Emily left the city as soon as she had the chance and never apparently referred to her time in Belgium. In contrast Charlotte returned a second time for another year to teach English and music at the Pensionnat Héger.

The plan is to make part of Rue des Braves in the Koekelberg district into a square, Place des soeurs Brontë, designed by the Suede 36 consultancy, to be inaugurated next year.

The square, which is near a library and a school, will feature trees, a garden with benches and reading areas around a statue of the sisters, and quotations from Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, chosen by local residents and carved in stone.

“It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it,” reads one of the chosen quotes from Jane Eyre.

Tom Frantzen, a popular sculptor whose playful statues are dotted around Brussels, has worked on a maquette of Charlotte and Emily walking on the windswept Yorkshire moors.

MacEwan, the founder of the Brussels Brontë Group, said the link to the Koekelberg suburb of Brussels was an important one for the sisters.

“The link came through Charlotte’s close friend, Mary Taylor, who was studying at a school called the Château de Koekelberg with her sister, Martha, while the Brontës were at the Pensionnat Héger near Place Royale [in the centre]. Charlotte and Emily used to visit,” she said.

“Mary Taylor, a feminist who believed women should earn their own living, went on to run a store in New Zealand, lead a party of women up Mont Blanc [in the Alps] and write a feminist novel, Miss Miles.”

Muriel de Viron, the alderman for public works in Koekelberg, said the square would mark sisters “who left their mark on the history of literature and feminism”. She added: “We need more squares and street names with women’s names to make them visible in the public space.”

Charlotte’s darkly romantic novel Villette, published in 1853 at a bleak time in her life, was set in a fictional European city where both people and places were painted in an unflattering light. “Charlotte’s wonderful, dark novel Villette is closely based on her years in Belgium,” MacEwan said.

When it had been translated into French, the fictitious city name Villette was changed to “Bruxelles” in the text, upsetting many who felt wronged after seeing themselves in her story.

Such was the bad blood that her friend Elizabeth Gaskell, whose Life of Charlotte Brontë was published in 1857, vowed never to write another biography because she faced so many complaints and threats of legal action.

Letters from Charlotte to Héger, a romantic figure who had fought on the barricades during Belgium’s national revolution in 1830, were first published in the Times in 1913, recording her angry despair at his failure to return her affections.

“Day after day disappointment flings me down again into overwhelming misery,” she wrote. “I am in a fever. I lose my appetite and my sleep. I pine away.” (Bruno Waterfield)

Funnily enough, LitHub shares an article by writer Ursula K. Le Guin on 'How to Become a Writer' and mentions Charlotte and Emily's Brussels experience.

The most frequent evasive tactic is for the would-be writer to say, But before I have anything to say, I must get experience.

Well, yes; if you want to be a journalist. But I don’t know anything about journalism, I’m talking about fiction. And of course fiction is made out of experience, your whole life from infancy on, everything you’ve thought and done and seen and read and dreamed. But experience isn’t something you go and get—it’s a gift, and the only prerequisite for receiving it is that you be open to it. A closed soul can have the most immense adventures, go through a civil war or a trip to the moon, and have nothing to show for all that “experience”; whereas the open soul can do wonders with nothing. I invite you to meditate on a pair of sisters. Emily and Charlotte. Their life experience was an isolated vicarage in a small, dreary English village, a couple of bad years at a girls’ school, another year or two in Brussels, which is surely the dullest city in all Europe, and a lot of housework. Out of that seething mass of raw, vital, brutal, gutsy Experience they made two of the greatest novels ever written: Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.

Now, of course they were writing from experience; writing about what they knew, which is what people always tell you to do; but what was their experience? What was it they knew? Very little about “life.” They knew their own souls, they knew their own minds and hearts; and it was not a knowledge lightly or easily gained. From the time they were seven or eight years old, they wrote, and thought, and learned the landscape of their own being, and how to describe it. They wrote with the imagination, which is the tool of the farmer, the plow you plow your own soul with. They wrote from inside, from as deep inside as they could get by using all their strength and courage and intelligence. And that is where books come from. The novelist writes from inside.