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selenakLooks like there will be a new Emily Bronte biopic...with, of all the people, William Weightman (one of her father's curates) as her love interest. Good lord. Wiliam Weightman, for non-Bronte-afficianiados, is a likeable character in the biographical saga of this talented family - he apparrently was both cheerful and kind; for example, when he heard that none the Brontes and Charlotte's friend Ellen Nussey had ever had a Valentine, he walked the twenty odd miles to Bradford to send anonymous Valentines for all three sisters plus Ellen. (They were both touched and amused, correctly identified him as the origin of the Valentines and wrote a bantering poem for him in return.) And he died tragically young (from cholera, which he contracted while visiting the sick). But the one member of the family who as far as we know showed zilch interest in him was Emily. Anne is the one suspected of having had a mutual thing with him, though as Bronte biographer Juliet Barker points out, this assumption solely rests on a quote from Charlotte about Anne and Weightman in a letter to Ellen ("he sits opposite to Anne at Church sighing softly – & looking out of the corners of his eyes to win her attention – & Anne is so quiet, her look so downcast – they are a picture" ) and ignores that Charlotte continues in that same letter: ‘He would be the better of a comfortable wife like you to settle him you would settle him I believe – nobody else would’., which doesn't sound as if she thinks Anne's affections are engaged. You could equally make a case of Charlotte/William Weightman, since she mentions him a lot in her letters and drew his portrait, or even Branwell/William Weightman, since Branwell counted him as a friend and was crushed when he died, especially since it was quickly followed by the death of the aunt who raised him and he was present during the deaths of both. (Charlotte and Emily were in Brussels at the time, and Anne was at Thorpe Green.) (" I have had a long attendance at the death-bed of the Rev. Mr Weightman, one of my dearest friends, and now I am attending at the death-bed of my aunt, who has been for twenty years as my mother. I expect her to die in a few hours", Branwell to his friend Francis Grundy.) For that matter, you can even find several affectionate quotes from Patrick Brontes about William Weightman, both when his curate was still alive and when he died. But from Emily, or about Emily and Weightman? Nothing.
Mind you, the fact is that Emily and Anne provide only a few diary papers in terms of primary source material on their lives, and what else we know of them comes via Charlotte and other people's memories has frustrated many a biographer and fictionalizer. And there's the notorious case of one of them misreading the title of a poem - "Love's Farewell" - as "Louis Parensell" and hunting up and down in Yorkshire registries for this supposed lover of Emily's. Not to mention good old Hollywood inventing in the 1940s a justly forgotten melodram in which Emily ends up in a love triangle with Charlotte and Charlotte's eventual husband, another of Patrick's curates, Arthur Bell Nichols. The desparation to find a fictional love interest for Emily when real life stubbornly refuses to provide one is presumably due to the idea that she couldn't written Wuthering Heights without a rl romantic experience of her own. Insert my eyeroll here. But if you have to put her into a romantic plot, there's always the headmistress of the one school where Emliy briefly taught, Law Hill, who as I dimly recall was an enterprising single woman. Or use the fact Emily never left Gondal (Charlotte left Angria behind, and Anne eventually stopped writing Gondal poetry and stories, but Emily kept writing Gondal poetry even after publishing) and literary give her a lover (of either sex) formed by her own imagination, be adventurous. But don't inflict her Dad's curates on her or her on the curates.
(Meanwhile, for all the bad opinion she and others had of her looks, the Bronte sister who actually turned down several marriage proposals from clergymen, had an unrequited love for her teacher, an intense flirt with her publisher and an eventual marriage right out of a Jane Austen plot was Charlotte. )
Another trailer for an upcoming historical tv show is this one about Catherine de' Medici, called "The Serpent Queen" and starring Samantha Morton in the title role. I note with approval that the trailer contains several scenes of child and teenage Catherine, because however you interpret her, I don't think you can leave out the horrible childhood or the humilation conga she went through as a teenage wife. And Samantha Morton certainly is excellent casting for Catherine in her days of power.
Mind you, the fact is that Emily and Anne provide only a few diary papers in terms of primary source material on their lives, and what else we know of them comes via Charlotte and other people's memories has frustrated many a biographer and fictionalizer. And there's the notorious case of one of them misreading the title of a poem - "Love's Farewell" - as "Louis Parensell" and hunting up and down in Yorkshire registries for this supposed lover of Emily's. Not to mention good old Hollywood inventing in the 1940s a justly forgotten melodram in which Emily ends up in a love triangle with Charlotte and Charlotte's eventual husband, another of Patrick's curates, Arthur Bell Nichols. The desparation to find a fictional love interest for Emily when real life stubbornly refuses to provide one is presumably due to the idea that she couldn't written Wuthering Heights without a rl romantic experience of her own. Insert my eyeroll here. But if you have to put her into a romantic plot, there's always the headmistress of the one school where Emliy briefly taught, Law Hill, who as I dimly recall was an enterprising single woman. Or use the fact Emily never left Gondal (Charlotte left Angria behind, and Anne eventually stopped writing Gondal poetry and stories, but Emily kept writing Gondal poetry even after publishing) and literary give her a lover (of either sex) formed by her own imagination, be adventurous. But don't inflict her Dad's curates on her or her on the curates.
(Meanwhile, for all the bad opinion she and others had of her looks, the Bronte sister who actually turned down several marriage proposals from clergymen, had an unrequited love for her teacher, an intense flirt with her publisher and an eventual marriage right out of a Jane Austen plot was Charlotte. )
Another trailer for an upcoming historical tv show is this one about Catherine de' Medici, called "The Serpent Queen" and starring Samantha Morton in the title role. I note with approval that the trailer contains several scenes of child and teenage Catherine, because however you interpret her, I don't think you can leave out the horrible childhood or the humilation conga she went through as a teenage wife. And Samantha Morton certainly is excellent casting for Catherine in her days of power.
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Date: 2022-08-15 02:31 pm (UTC)This is even more infuriating than that Jane Austen movie a while back! I absolutely hate the insistence that all fictional work must in fact be autobiographical. It's stupid and reductive and wrong. (Also as an ace person who writes romance sometimes, it's personally insulting to me.)
I am also insulted as a reader/viewer by the assumption that if I like the Brontes' works enough to want to watch a movie about one of them, I must be only interested in the romantic angle. Look, we already have a good biofilm about the Brontes, and it's called To Walk Invisible and it was totally compelling even without the romantic angle! (The romance was with writing!!!!)
And there's the notorious case of one of them misreading the title of a poem - "Love's Farewell" - as "Louis Parensell" and hunting up and down in Yorkshire registries for this supposed lover of Emily's.
Lol!
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Date: 2022-08-15 02:33 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2022-08-15 11:37 pm (UTC)the idea that she couldn't written Wuthering Heights without a rl romantic experience of her own
*headdesk*
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Date: 2022-08-16 10:19 am (UTC)On the more hilarious side, I was always amused about the deliciously evil coincidence of Charlotte - who of course had no idea about London gossip in general and Thackeray's private life in particular - dedicating the second edition of Jane Eyre to Thackeray because he'd said such nice things about her novel, and him publishing Vanity Fair, which caused no small number of Victorian tin hats who had heard that Thackeray's wife had gone mad to conclude that the author of Jane Eyre must be none of other than a former governess of Thackeray's, whom he portrayed as Becky Sharpe but who wrote her version of their relationship as Jane/Rochester. If that's not a warning to the "but real life must have inspired writer x!", nothing is...
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Date: 2022-08-15 11:53 pm (UTC)LOUIS PARSINELL, I REMEMBER THAT ONE.
give her a lover (of either sex) formed by her own imagination
I thought this was what people were doing with that Captive poem anyway! ("He comes with western winds, with evening's wandering airs....") But I guess not anymore. Emily was the one who wrote "Love I laugh to scorn." She didn't seem to need much social contact. Anne wasn't that into Romance much either. Charlotte was the Romantic one.
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Date: 2022-08-16 10:31 am (UTC)Now that's one I luckily missed. The most dreadful one I've read so far, years ago, was something called The Masques of the Brontes which goes for the child abuse angle and has Patrick molesting and raping Emily (and Branwell), with the author earnestly assuring us in the afterword she thinks that's a plausible theory because going by the number of kids Patrick had with his wife and by his failed attempts to remarry, Patrick must have liked sex, and when he couldn't get any legally and going to prostitutes was out for a Reverend in Haworth, incesteous child rape it was.
Oh, and then there's the novel where a character theorizes that the story of Branwell setting his bed on fire while drunk was just a cover up for Anne setting Charlotte's bed on fire a la Jane Eyre and Bertha Mason in revenge for Charlotte stealing her thunder (as Anne was the first to write a novel with a governess heroine narrating in first person, but because Charlotte's Professor, a worse book than Agnes Grey, wasn't published and Jane Eyre was, Charlotte was the one to make the splash). But at least in that novel, the narrator is supposed to be unreliable and self deluded...
I thought this was what people were doing with that Captive poem anyway! ("He comes with western winds, with evening's wandering airs....") But I guess not anymore.
Wasn't there a biographer with the extra complicated theory of Emily shipping herself with the late Percy Bysshe Shelley in that poem?
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Date: 2022-08-16 10:10 pm (UTC)//turns green
As Dorothy Parker once said re a similar acccusation about Elizabeth Bartlett's father, he was terrible all by himself, you don't need to make him terrible with raisins in it.
LOL I kind of like Anne as a Fury! if nothing because it's so OOC. "You stole MY idea!" "You can't steal an idea!" "You so can and you stole mine!" &c &c
Oh yes that biography wasn't half bad but it sure made a lot of hay from a couple of blades of grass as my dad used to say. Byron was obviously the big influence in that house but Shelley....?? From what I remember the biographer got very excited at the address of "Emilia" (one of Shelley's teenaged loves) as "Emily".
To me Emily was clearly just one of those people who lived in her head, and it maddens people who buy into the author as reporter or the author as transforming only Lived Experience.
I think one is always in love with something or other; the error, and I confess it is not easy for spirits cased in flesh and blood to avoid it, consists in seeking in a mortal image the likeness of what is, perhaps, eternal -- Shelley on his own poem
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Date: 2022-08-19 03:34 pm (UTC)None of which is to say Patrick was a saint or the perfect father. But I do think Mrs. Gaskell's depiction of him as misanthropic ogre wasn't fair, and I liked his remarkably un-ogre like comment to her after reading her biography of Charlotte:
I do not deny that I am somewhat excentrick. Had I been numbered amongst the calm, sedate, concentric men of the world, I should not have been as I now am, and I should, in all probability, never have had such children as mine have been. I have no objection, whatever to your representing me as a little exccentric, since you, and other learned friends will have it so; only don’t set me on, in my fury to burning hearthrugs, sawing the backs of chairs, and tearing my wife’s silk gown . . . It is dangerous, to give credence hastily, to informants – some may tell the truth, whilst others from various motives may greedily, invent and propagate falsehoods . . . I am not, in the least offended, at your telling me that I have faults! I have many – and being a Daughter of Eve, I doubt not, that you also have some. Let us both try to be wiser and better, as Time recedes, and Eternity advances.
While I'm quoting, here are a few examples of Patrick Bronte, campaigner. A petition against the death penalty for robbery:
Consider, moreover, the inadequacy of punishment. A man will be hanged for stealing a fat sheep, though he be hungry; – he will incur no greater punishment for murdering twenty men! In the name of common sense, what is the necessary tendency of this? Most undoubtedly, the man who robs, will find it [in] his interest to murder also, for by so doing, he will be more likely to prevent discovery, and will, at all events, incur no greater punishment. It has always been a sorrowful reflection to me, when I have heard of robbers being hanged on the evidence of the person robbed, that in all probability they came to their melancholy end, through that little remains of conscience, and tenderness of heart, which they still possessed, and which prevented them, even at their own peril, from imbruing their hands in their fellow creatures’ blood.
As he was the type of clergyman who thought he needed to look out for his parishioner's physical welfare as much as for their spiritual one, he did that from the moment he arrived in Haworth. Writes the estimable Juliet Barker:
On 6 June 1820, for instance, he assisted the overseer of the poor in drawing up a petition addressed to the committee of the charity at Harrogate responsible for enabling ‘the Afflicted and Distressed Poor’ to receive the spa waters there. The petition, which Patrick was the first to sign, stated that James Parker, a wool-comber of Haworth, had been unable to provide for his family because of unemployment and a severe scorbutic complaint and requested financial assistance to enable him to take the waters at Harrogate in the hope of either relieving or curing his condition.
Another life long issue were fire hazards:
As if he had not enough to do, Patrick also wrote to the papers on a matter which had always been a personal obsession of his – the dangers of fire. Prompted by the recent condemnation of the Hindu practice of suttee, or widow-burning, he wrote to point out that parental negligence frequently led to children being burnt to death. In particular, he drew attention to the fact that linen and cotton clothing was especially inflammable and recommended that children and women (who, with their long skirts, were also vulnerable) should be encouraged to wear silk or woollen clothing. As a graphic illustration of his argument he explained that in his twenty years at Haworth he had buried between ninety and a hundred children who were burnt to death after their clothes caught fire.
In short, between him and Barrett Snr., I'd take Patrick Bronte anyn time.
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