In the spirit of "don't just critisize, suggest better options", I followed up my Emily review by pondering how people who want to make movies about (female) writers but have the problem that either little is known about their lives, or what is known is extremely interior and thus doesn't lend itself to cinematic action should do OTHER than annoyingly inflict the plot of their best known novel on their lives. And inspiration struck, to wit: put them into someone else's trope/novel plot line for maximum hilarity and character goodness. By which I mean, using the Brontes as an example:

Emily: seeing as Emily disliked schools both as a student and as a teacher - both attempts at staying at one were brief and miserable -, was, otoh, very practical in her daily life (Emily gets bitten, Emily cauterizes her own wound with a hot iron in a famous anecdote), and had experience with animals, and was a brilliant poet, the solution is clear. Emily gets put in a boarding school fantasy. Severus Snape has nothing on Emily Bronte when it comes to disliking your students and snarling at them, only in her case it's not personal because she doesn't have hang-ups about anyone's parents. If you don't want to do a straightforward 19th century HPverse prequel for copyright reasons and because of JKR's behaviour through recent years, well, it's not like she has a patent on school stories and supernatural events in same. Thus my reccommendation: during Emily's brief stint as a teacher, a a supernatural event (fantasy menace of your choice) occurs. Suddenly the students and the headmistress (an enterprising woman who could have an intriguing bristly yet UST ridden relationship with Emily) realize their only hope is the anti-social teacher no one likes and who likes no one but who thinks nothing of going mano a mano with (supernatural menace du jour). At the end, Emily saves the day but also returns to Haworth to great cheer, the cheer being both for her world saving and her departure, though at least one of the students sees her now as an example and secretly decides to follow her footsteps as a demon slayer, and the headmistress promises to write.

Anne: Anne is the ideal detective for an Agatha Christie type story. She didn't like teaching any more than her sisters did, but she was way more efficient at it, and her students actually liked her. (We know this because the girls in question kept writing to her after Anne had left her job.) She also was very observant, just the type to make herself overlooked while spotting what everyone else was trying to hide. So basically Anne during her governess jobs gets a Miss Marple type of mystery, where the villain even after uncovered thinks they are getting away with it because hey, who's going to listen to the mousy Yorkshire governess, so they don't kill her, and later, after Anne has safely departed, find out Anne has outmanoeuvred them by convincing (sole semi-decent law person of the story) of her theory by presenting solid evidence.

Charlotte: now in rl, the entire Arthur Bell Nichols story of Charlotte's eventual marriage reads like not something from her novels but very much like a Jane Austen penned tale, and considering Charlotte's (hostile) feelings re: Jane Austen's work, I'm tempted to keep it simple and go with that, but that's not creative enough. I therefore declare Charlotte to end up in something else altogether... a Ruritanian type of adventure novel. During her time in Brussels, Charlotte who turns out to be the exact doppelganger of (Insert Princess here - either rl but not that well known - maybe Queen Victoria's half sister? - or fictional) gets kidnapped by sinister villains from a rival court faction. She is able to liberate herself from her first captors but ends up with a third party, revolutionaries (shock! gleeful horror, for Charlotte was a Tory but also somewhat fascinated by uprisings, see many an Angrian tale) who want to use the supposed princess to get some concessions. The ensueing plot includes doublecrossings, hilarity as the princess ends up having to temporarily hide heself as Charlotte Bronte in the Heger school, and Charlotte starting to see some of the revolutionaries points despite herself. Oh, and of course there's male-to-female crossdressing. (That part from Jane Eyre CAN be used in a Charlotte Bronte movie.) The whole thing ends with Charlotte delivering her original captors, the evil courtiers, to justice, lecturing the Princess on her responsibilities, not outing the revolutionaries and deciding she's got enough of living abroad for a while, so will return to England.

I'm not entirely serious about all of this, but also not completely kidding. Because come on: any of these fictions would be both fun and do more justice to their personalities than most (though not all) attempts at Bronte biopics so far.

Six years into the making, a few weeks ago the German production of Hamilton started in Hamburg, and while in advance there was a lot of scepticism (not about the musical per se, about a German language production instead of just keeping the English original text), there was a lot of praise for the result. Since there are such a lot of puns in the original text, not to mention the importance of rhythm, I had a hard time imagining something good myself, but I have to say, this sample of the cast recording the opening song, Alexander Hamilton, is impressive:




This pre-production performance of The Schyler Sisters in German isn't half-bad, either (and it amuses me that the one sentence in each song that's kept in English is the one praising NYC - "In New York you can be a New Man" and "the greatest city in the world" respectively).




And here is an interview with Frances O'Connor, who directed and wrote the not-really-about-Emily-Bronte film, which I read because yet another glowing review praising the film for "ossing aside the image of a shy, sickly recluse, replacing it with an antiheroine whose inability to fit in with the ordered world is a source of strength rather than weakness", I was curious as to what she was thinking. (Also: Good lord, Mark Kermode, Emily always had the wild child of nature image, that's not new. She wasn't described as "shy" by those inhabitants of Haworth willing to talk to Mrs. Gaskell but as rude. And until the final year of her life, she wasn't sickly, either. Anyway, this passage from the Frances O'Connor interview sounds somewhat more thoughtful than the review (on both the part of her and of the interviewer) :

The question that drives it is how the prickly recluse of historical record, holed up with her siblings in a parsonage (apart from a brief, disastrous stint as a schoolteacher), could have been able to summon such passion not only in her single novel but in her poetry.

O’Connor’s answer is to pair her up with one of the six curates who joined the Brontë household over the years: a man so beloved by the parishioners that he was memorialised by them, after his untimely death from cholera, in a plaque on the wall of Haworth church. William Weightman, it reads, was a man of “orthodox principles, active zeal, moral habits, learning, mildness and affability” – not the qualities that are brought most quickly to mind by Oliver Jackson-Cohen’s lusty portrayal.

Yes, but wasn’t it Anne Brontë with whom Weightman was thought to have had a romantic entanglement? “It is, but if you read up on it it’s disputed. There was one comment from Charlotte and that’s it,” says O’Connor, who cites a range of Brontë studies, not least one by Lucasta Miller, which argued that each age recreates the family in its own image. This may be fiction, but it has been conscientiously thought through.

Fine, but firstly, "you have to have had experienced (romantic) passion to write passionately" is rubbish, and secondly, while it's perfectly true the Anne/Willy theory rests only on one statement by Charlotte in a letter to her bff Ellen (a letter in which she also suggests Willy Weightman/Ellen as a (better) pairing, which is why Juliet Barker doubted it in her biography, too, there's not even that much to indicate that Reverend WW had any interest in Emily or vice versa. You can even make a better case for Charlotte/Willy Weightman (since she does have a keen interest on his romantic life and keeps speculating and reporting about it in her letters to Ellen). But that's not really the irksome thing here, it's this idea that a (female) writer absolutely HAS had to have experienced romantic passion, or else.

All of this makes me revise my opinion on the central theory in Catherine Lowell's The Madwoman Upstairs, because while Charlotte is also the villain in that one, at least it's about Anne (and meant to be something of a spoof on academia, as Lowell's heroine is convinced Charlotte stole Jane Eyre from Anne and Anne tried to avenge herself on Charlotte by attempting to set her on fire. I can buy that before I buy Emily/William Weightman). (No, not really, Anne wouldn't.) More seriously now, it's true that Charlotte as the longest surviving and most successful sibling edited her sisters (plural) works after their death, but the idea she might have censored Emily is sheer speculation (it mostly rests on the assumption Emily might have written a second novel, for which, again, there's no proof), whereas we do have it in black and white that Charlotte censored Anne. (She didn't permit a reprint of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall in her life time and treated the novel, which today is seen as Anne's masterpiece, as an embarassing mistake.) So if you really want to make a film about a Bronte sister who has been edited and displaced from her story and to whom this hasn't been done before, Frances O'Connor, you should have picked Anne. With or without Willly Weightman romance. :)

Looks 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.

Sally Wainwright is going to direct a movie about the Brontes!. Filming to start this month in Yorkshire. The names of the actresses don't sound familiar, but Patrick is played by Jonathan Pryce, which, yay! And Sally Wainwright sounds ideal.

Meanwhile, the BBC and Netflix are going to co-produce a four part miniseries version of Watership Down, with James MacAvoy voicing Hazel, Nicholas Hoult Fiver (so, someone in the casting department really liked X-Men: Days of Future Past, huh?), John Boyega Bigwig and Ben Kingsley General Woundwort. This article also lists Olivia Colman as Strawberry. (A genderbent Strawberry I can see, but you can't change the gender of too many other rabbits without a major plot point/motivation needing to change, i.e. the reason why the rabbits go to Efrafra.)

Fannish life is gooood right now, I tell you....

Dear Yuletide Author,

thank you so much for writing a story for me! We share at least one fandom, and so I hope my request(s) are somewhat enjoyable to write for you. As far as general likes and dislikes go, I'm not that hard to please: gen, slash, het, any combination thereof, whatever floats your boat is fine with me. The same goes with tragedy versus fluff. I'm as prone to wish happiness upon my favourite characters as the next fan, but let's face it, sometimes the story just demands angst, misery, or even death. So whether you write something cheerful or absolutely heartbreaking or a mixture of both is entirely up to you; as long as the characterisation is good; I'm game.

As for my idea re: good characterisation: something that neither edits out flaws - and considering one of the canons I requested had the two characters I requested casually discussing their dinner arrangements while raping a helpless third party, the term "flaw" can be an euphemism with some of the characters - nor ignores layers, conflicting motivations, more dimensionality etc. I dislike vilifying a canon partner in order to bring a 'ship about, but since none of my requests lends itself to such a plot, that should not be a problem.

( Now for my actual requests: )

To allow a generalization: most writers don't have very interesting lives, or rather, the qualities that make their fictions compelling usually aren't there in their every day existence. Both because real life seldom bows to the necessities of plot, and because spending a good deal of your time reading, writing and redrafting isn't dramatic to read about. But there are exceptions. The Bronte family is one of them. It's not a coincidence that the very first biography, of Charlotte Bronte, published a short time after her death, was written by a fellow novelist: Mrs. Gaskell recognized a good plot when she saw one. Her interpretation shaped the idea of the Brontes for at least a century until biographers increasingly started to argue with it, not least because of the wealth of new material available, to the point that the current acknowledged standard biography, Juliet Barker's The Brontes (from 1994, recently republished and updated), explicitly markets itself as being anti-Gaskell, but the counter picture drawn is no less dramatic, and says a lot about the changed needs and expectation of readers as well. Mrs. Gaskell's biography above all wanted to defend Charlotte (and to a lesser extent, her sisters) from the charge of being "coarse and brutish", as many of the original reviews had accused the Brontes of being, especially before the secret of their feminine identities were revealed, and so she created Charlotte-the-perfect-Victorian-martyr, with everyone else in the family being slided in the appropriate roles. Today, Bronte-friendly readers are more inclined to defend Charlotte & Co. from the charge of having been proper Victorians.

My favourite about-the-Brontes books: Elsemarie Maletzke's biography "Die Schwestern Bronte", which is in German and written both in a fluid, suspenseful style and with a sense of humour, full of affection for her subjects but also not inclined to overlook the contractions and less attractive qualities; Lucasta Miller's The Bronte Myth, which covers a wide field from Mrs. Gaskell to Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (both poets explicitly tackled the Emily Bronte and Wuthering Heights in their poetry, and Ted Hughes' birthplace as well as Sylvia Plath's grave aren't that far away from Haworth), both fiction and non-fiction; and, yes, Juliet Barker's magnum opus The Brontes (over 800 pages narrative, about 127 pages in footnotes), which is a genuine family biography in the sense that it covers Patrick and Branwell with the same thoroughness as it does Charlotte, Emily and Anne. Mind you, if you're new to Bronte biographies, I wouldn't advise starting with Juliet Barker, because a) that volume is intimidating and b) it's very much an argument with Elizabeth Gaskell, so it helps being familiiar at least in broad outlines with what Barker's attacking. But if you already have a basic idea about the Brontes, Barker is really the most thorough and exhaustive biographer ever. Near the end of the book, which also covers the story of how Mrs. Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Bronte came to be written (a fascinating story in its own right, subtitled in Juliet Barker's biography Saintliness, Treason and Plot with a irreverent allusion to the Guy Fawkes rhyme), she sums up her argument with Mrs. G. thusly:

Mrs. Gaskell was a supreme writer of fiction, but she too easily identified what she perceived to be the facts of Charlotte's life with the themes of her own novels: Charlotte and her sisters thus became the dutiful, long suffering daughters and Branwell the wastrel son of a harsh, unbending father. The portrayal of Charlotte as the martyred heroine of a tragic life served its purpose at the time. Charlotte's wicked sense of humour, her sarcasm, her childhood joie de vivre which enlivens the juvenilia, are completely ignored. So, too, are her prejudices, her unpleasant habit of always seeing the worst in people, her bossiness against which her sisters rebelled, her flirtations with William Weightman and George Smith and her traumatic unrequited love for Monsieur Heger. What remains may be a more perfect human being, but it was not Charlotte Bronte. Mrs. Gaskell's Emily, too, reduced to a series of vignettes illustrating her unusual strength of character, betrays nothing of the obsession with Gondal which made her almost incapable of leading a life outside of the sanctuary of her home but led her to the creation of the strange and wonderful world of Wuthering Heights. Anne is simply a cipher, the youngest child, whose boldness in defying convention by adopting a plain heroine in Agnes Grey and advocating startlingly unorthodox religious beliefs and women's rights in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall finds no place in Mrs. Gaskell's portrait. Most of all, however, it was the men in Charlotte's life who suffered at her biographer's hands. The Patrick Bronte who took such tender care of his young children, campaigned incessantly on behalf of the poor of his parish and espoused unfashionable liberal causes is unrecognizable in her malicious caricature of a selfish and excentric recluse. Similarly, the Branwell who was his family's pride and joy, the leader and innovator, artist, poet, musician and writer, is barely touched uppon, despite the fact that, without him, there would probably have been no Currer, Ellis or Acton Bell.

Leaving biographer arguments aside, what keeps compelling me about the Brontes as people is that they were indeed an incredibly gifted family; that you have four children, rich in imagination, who create elaborate fantasy realms in which they role play and start to write stories for, but as opposed to many children who do the same never really stop (well, Charlotte did eventually, but it took her a long, long time and was not least due to the fact her game partners were gone), and the clash between Victorian reality and their fictional Angria and Gondal had such devastating result. And yet, out of this also emerged some unique novels and poetry which, though at the time so very different from what their contemporaries produced, now is seen as typical for the age. As Elsemarie Maletzke writes in her biography, every time you visit the National Portrait Gallery and see that painting, three school girls from the North painted by their brother who then wiped out his own portrait in what was originally a picture of four, that painting which hangs among the various worthies of the age depicted with far more professional and less haunting skill, it gets you. And yet they were very much part of their time and responding to it.

Juliet Barker certainly makes her case for Patrick Bronte as anything but the Gaskellian misanthropic hermit with lots of quotes from Patrick's campaigns, from his youth onwards, against a lot of Victorian injustices. He was a Tory (his hero worship of the Duke of Wellington was something all of his children inherited), but one who was simultanously full of liberal goals when it came to the poor. Of course, transforming himself from poor Irishman to respected Yorkshire Reverend via effort and brains alone already made for takes-nothing-for-granted start. He had the proverbial Irish temper, and nothing aroused it as quickly as seeing injustice.

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?

Another life long Patrick cause was improvement of sanitation (he saw too many people in Haworth die because the unhygenic water supply), and education for the poor. And he was startingly unconventional when it came to abusive behaviour in the marriage. A case that was to inspire his youngest daughter Anne for The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was that of Mrs. Collins, wife of a curate in Keighley who was not under Patrick's supervision, but the pastor for Keighly was not helpful, and so Mrs. Collins came to Patrick instead for advice. Writes Charlotte about Mrs. Collins: She asked Papa's advice; there was nothing, she said, but ruin before them. They owed debts which they could never pay. She expected Mr. Collins' immediate dismissal from his curacy; she knew, from bitter experience, that his vices were utterly hopeless. He treated her and her child savagely; with much more to the same effect. Papa advised her to leave him for ever, and go home, if she had a home to go to. She said this was what she had long resolved to do and that she would indeed leave him directly (...).

(Mrs. Collins a few years later showed up in Haworth again and was thankfully far better off, sans husband. But just in case you need a precedent for a Victorian clergyman to advise a wife to leave her abusive husband, the Reverend Patrick Bronte is your man.)

His habit of sharing newspapers and what books he had with the six children he found himself with after the death of his wife meant that when Angria and Gondal were created, Charlotte and Branwell first did this in the form of writing fictional newspapers for their fantasy realm. But at that point, the two eldest sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, were already dead, victims of the brief but horrible time the Bronte girls spent at Cowan Bridge, a school for clergymen's daughters. Charlotte neither forgot nor forgave, and her thinly veiled portrait of said schooll in Jane Eyre practically pulsates with anger and grief to this day. (She named it Lowood which contemporaries would have known was the name of Napoleon's prison on Elba, which tells you something about Charlotte, too.) It was homeschooling for everyone from this point onwards for a few years, and the story of how this led to the writing game is an inevitable highlight in any biography; Branwell gets toy soldiers, shares them with his sisters, and they decide to claim countries in Africa with them. (Oh, Victorian colonialists in a tiny town in Yorkshire...) And then they become Chief Genii writing odes:

Awful Braniii gloomy giant
Shaking over earth his blazing spear
Brooding on blood with drear and vegeful soul
He sits enthroned in clouds to hear his thunder roll
Dread Tallii next like a dire Eagle flies
And on our mortal miseries feasts her bloody eyes
Emmii and Anniii last with boding cry
Famine and war fortell and mortal misery.

Being Chief Genii of Angria is all very well, but after some time Emily and Anne apparantly weren't content anymore to let Branwell and Charlotte run the game and founded their own realm, Gondal. A few years later, Charlotte satirizes all four of them in an Angria story where she pokes fun at her brother in the guise of "Patrick Benjamin Wiggins" ("I was always looking above my station", Wiggins said, "I wasn't satisfied with being a sign-painter at Howard, as Charlotte and them things were with being sempstresses"), but she doesn't spare herself and her sisters, either:

'I've some people who call themselves akin to me in the shape of three girls.(...)'
'What are your sisters' names?'
'Charlotte Wiggins, Jane Wiggins and Anne Wiggins.'
'Are they as queer as you?'
'Oh, they are miserable silly creatures not worth talking about. Charlotte's eighteen years old, a broad dumpy thin, whose head does not come higher than my elbow. Emily's sixteen, lean and scant, with a face about the size of a penny, and Anne is nothing, absolutely nothing.'
'What? Is she an idiot?'
'Next door to it.'

Sibling teasing aside, they were all still very close through their teenage years; one sign for this is that when Patrick finally risked sending Charlotte as the surviving eldest to school again (a different one, Roe Head), Branwell once visited her on foot, walking 41 kilometres to and back, just to update her on political events in Angria so she wouldn't have to wait for his letter. Only once everyone enters their twenties does it start to fall apart. Branwell is unable to keep any of the jobs he gets (as painter, railway man, tutor) very long. All three sisters tackle one of the few jobs available to women, being a governess, and all three hate it. Emily tries least, memorably telling a charge the only one in the household she liked was a dog, and ending up in Haworth again. Charlotte tried longer and wrote savage portraits of her employers and their offspring in her letters home, but one has to feel for the employers in question, too, for, as one of them later commented:

My cousin Benson Sidgwick, now vicar of Ashby Parva, certainly on one occasion threw a Bible at Miss Bronte! and all that another cousin can recollect of her is that if she was invited to walk to church with them, she thought she was being ordered about like a slave; if she was not invited, she imagined she was excluded from the family circle.

Anne fared best at governessing - proven not least by the fact that her charges kept up correspondance with her and visited her long after she'd left the position - but didn't like it much more, either. The truth was that all four of them wanted to be writers, kept writing throughout, but couldn't earn their living this way. Branwell managed to get a few poems published in Yorkshire papers but both he and Charlotte had bad luck when sending their poems to the higher literati; Robert Southey's reply to Charlotte became (in)famous in its condescension, not least because today, Charlotte is far better known and well read than he is, but it was fairly representative:
.
Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life, and it ought not to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure she will have for it, even as an accomplishment and a recreation.

As far as "proper" duties were concerned: despite considering herself ugly and described by everyone who knew her as "plain" (though also everyone said she had beautiful eyes), Charlotte did get no loss than four proposals, all of whom she declined because I could not sit all day long making a grave face before my husband - I would laugh and satirize and say whatever came into my head first (Charlotte explaining to her friend Ellen Nussey why she said no to Ellen's brother Henry). Bless. This makes it all the more painful in any version of the tale to read what happened when Charlotte did fall hopelessly, painfully in love. She and Emily had gone to Belgium to improve their home-learned French and to aquire the necessary skills to open their own school (which they never did) eventually; Charlotte fell in love with the directrice's husband, Monsieur Heger, promptly demonized his wife and her later letters from Britain begging for Monsieur Heger's love and attention are so raw and self abasing and honest that one keeps cringing on her behalf. For his part, Heger never seems to have encouraged her and done his best to let her down gently, but there is no real "best" in such a case. That Branwell simultanously was dismissed from his tutor position for having had an affair with his employer's wife (whether he did or didn't and only told an Angrian fantasy became a matter of long controversy, but biographies in the last twenty years settled on "yes, he did") rubbed salt into the wound and destroyed the last bit of sister and brother closeness. Having to keep your misery to yourself while your brother tells all and sunder about his and proceeds to drink himself to death must have been extra awful. Charlotte got out of her depression and rage by reading Anne's and Emily's Gondal poems without permission and deciding that the three of them should try to publish again, under gender-free pseudonyms. Then came prose, and literary history ensued.

It's fascinating to read contemporary reviews from the time the reviewers didn't know yet the authors were female, and how said reviews changed the moment "Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell" were outed as women. Before that happened, you get stuff like this:



Jane Eyre combines 'masculine hardness, coarseness, and freedom of expression' and the whole book expresses 'a total ignorance of the habits of society, a great coarseness of taste, and a heathenish doctrine of religion'; Wuthering Heights is 'coarse and loathsome', showing the 'brutalizing influence of unchecked passion' and 'there is such a general roughness and savegeness... as never should be found in a work of art'; The Tenant of Wildfall Hall brings the reader 'into the closest possible proximity with naked vice, and there are conversations such as we had hoped never to see printed in English. Or: Books, coarse even for men, coarse in language and coarse in conception, the coarseness apparently of violence and uncultivated men.

Hence Mrs. Gaskell's effort to rehabilitate Charlotte in the public eye, and before that, Charlotte's own effort to do this for Emily and Anne. The series of deaths - Branwell, Emily (who left the house for the last time at Branwell's funeral), Anne (who was already coughing when Emily died) all within nine months - is tragic in any version of the story, and makes you understand where Charlotte came from, but still, the way she rewrote and censored several of Anne's and Emily's poems upon republication and her foreword for her sister's novels, basically excusing Emily for having been too naive to understand the monsters she created and Anne as too nice are nearly as infuriating to read as Southey's letter to her was.

"Charlotte and the literati", once "Currer Bell" has become a surprise bestselling author, otoh, makes for an amusing tale. Charlotte was an enthusiastic Thackeray reader (whereas she had no time for Dickens at all), and was thrilled when her publisher told her Thackeray had loved Jane Eyre, so much so that he wrote a fan letter to the publishers, who passed it on to Charlotte, who was in author heaven.

Quoth the great man: I wish you had not sent me Jane Eyre. It interested me so much that I have lost (or won if you like) a whole day in reading it at the busiest period, with the printers I know waiting for copy. Who the author can be I can't guess - if a woman she knows her language better than most ladies do, or has had a 'classical' education. It is a fine book though - the man & woman capital - the style very generous and upright so to speak. Some of the love passages made me cry - to the astonishment of John who came in with the cloals. St. John the Missionary is a failure I think but a good failure. There are parts excellent. I don't know why I tell you this, but I have been exceedingly moved & pleased by Jane Eyre. It is a woman's writing, but whose?

A delighted Charlotte promptly told her publisher to dedicate the second edition (as the first was quickly sold out) to Thackeray. What Charlotte, living in Yorkshire, couldn't know, but all of London did, and what her publisher should have told her, was that Thackeray's wife a few years earlier had gone insane. (And ended up not in an attic but in an asylum.) Also, his novel Vanity Fair was just then published in a magazine, featuring his anti heroine Becky Sharpe, con woman and for a time governess. So when the second edition of Jane Eyre was dedicated to Thackeray, conspiracy theorists immediately deduced that Currer Bell must be a fired governess (now depicted as Becky Sharpe) in love with Thackeray. Charlotte was mortified. Some time later when she was in London and got introduced to Thackeray, more awkwardness ensued as he waved his cigar around her, but she didn't recognize this was supposed to be a Rochester joke. And then:

With his usual high spirit and thoughtlessness, Thackeray had said in a loud voice 'audible over half the room', 'Mother, you must allow me to introduce you to Jane Eyre.' Naturally, heads had turned in every row and everyone stared at the 'disconcerted little lady' who grew confused and angry when she realized every eye was upon her. (...) The next day Thackeray paid an afternoon call. Which Charlotte's publisher, with whom she was staying, describes thusly:

Thackeray was tanding on the hearthrug, looking anything but happy. Charlotte Bronte stood close to him, with head thrown back and face white with anger. The first words I heard were, 'No, Sir! If you had come to our part of the country in Yorkshire, what would have have thought of me if I had introduced you to my father, before a mixed company of strangers, as 'Mr. Warrington'? Thackeray replied, 'No, you mean 'Arthur Pendennis'. 'No, I don't mean Arthur Pendennis!' retorted Miss Bronte; 'I mean mr. Warrnginton, and Mr. Warrington would not have behaved as you behaved to me yesterday.' The spectacle of this little woman, heardly reaching to Thackeray's elbow, but, somehow, looking stronger and fiercer than himself, and casting hier incisicve words at his head, dresmbled the dropping of shells into a fortress.

So much for you, Thackeray. Observe that Charlotte remains a fan to the last, though; as far as his own characters are concerned, she doesn't identify him with snobbish Pendennis but with noble Warrington.

Given Charlotte's HUGE Jane Austen issues (which among other things tell you something about Charlotte's enormous class chip on the shoulder; she imagines the late Jane Austen looking down at her "with a well-bred sneer", i.e. basically casts her as Blanche Ingram or any of the ladies she worked for as governess, never mind the actual circumstances of Jane Austen about whom she couldn't know anything, being only a generation apart), it's ironic that her eventual marriage totally reads like a Jane Austen plot, not like one of her own novels, with the hero being someone she'd known for a long while, her father's curate, Arthur Nichols, who had loved her from afar but had needed years to get up the courage of asking her. Charlotte says no, everyone at Haworth, especially her father (who until then had gotten along fine with his curate) is horribly sarcastic and ridicules poor Arthur Nichols, which promptly drives Charlotte to sympathize with him, as she knows what that feels like, and lo and behold, falling in love and marriage ensues. But because the Brontes' lives were not written by a Moffat but rather by a Joss Whedon or RTD type of fate decider, this is but a brief reprieve; Charlotte dies, pregnant, presumably of the same disease that took all of her siblings, consumption.

Patrick, having survived his wife and all his children, somehow managed not to end up bitter; he also reacted stoically and with self deprecating humour to finding himself depicted as a half-mad recluse in Mrs. Gaskell's biography. The letter he wrote to her makes for a fine concluding quote:

The principal mistake (...) which I wish to mention, is that which states that I laid my Daughters under restriction with regard to their diet, obliging them to live chiefly on vegetable food. This I never did. After their aunt's death, with regard to housekeeping affairs they had all their own way. Thinking their constitutions to be delicate, the advice I repeatedly gave them was that they should wear flannel, eat as much wholesome animal food as they could digest, take air and exercise in moderation (...). I do not deny that I am somewhat excentric. Had I been numbered among the calm, 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 excentric, 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!
(...) 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 have also some. Let us both try to be wiser and better, as Time recedes, and Eternity advances.

I had the great luck of reading Wuthering Heights without any expectations whatsoever. What I mean by that is: being German, it wasn't a part of our literary canon we had to read, so I didn't encounter it in school (though I was still a teenager when reading it - I simply came across it in the library, started and couldn't put it down), I had never heard about the characters before and had not seen any of the film versions. Given that a lot of the time when I come across references to WH, I have the impression that the people in question either haven't read the book at all or came to it because they had to and/or expecting a romance and not surprisingly were bewildered by what they found (WH not being a romance in the sense we use the word), and given that I am by no means immune to the effect of coming to a literary, cinematic or tv work via hype/raised expectations and then feeling let down not so much by the content on its own merit but by the wrong expectations, I think that's very lucky indeed. (Vide my Jane Austen reaction; I didn't read any Jane A. until I did know her reputation, that she was the greatest of the great, P & P was supposed to be the epitome of novels, Lizzie and Darcy the pairing of pairings, etc., etc., and that may have contributed to my "well, yes, it was fun to read - and?" reaction when I finally got around to it.) (I take it in recent years WH also had the misfortune of being liked by Stephanie Meyer, but really, that has nothing to do with anyone's reactions predating Twilight.)

It's been a few decades since I was a teenager, and here are some reasons why I still love Wuthering Heights in my jaded 43rd year of life, which also hopefully explain the "have you actually read the book?" reaction I often have when encountering said references. (Also why I think most of the films get it completely wrong.) (Not least for missing the book's sense of humour.)

( I’m come home: I’d lost my way on the moor )

As I won't get to watch the new Fringe until the 21st or thereabouts, have some links collected over the last week referring to other interests instead:

Sherlock and Doctor Who:
A Scandal in Fandom: Stephen Moffat, Irene Adler and the fannish gaze: probably the best post on the matter I've read so far, blessedly unpolemical, and great with putting everything in context. Very good to read both if you've liked A Scandal in Belgravia (which I did), or if it made you add another item on your personal "I hate Moffat" list. I especially appreciate what the essayist points out about the original Irene (in Doyle's story) versus how she lives in the fannish consciousness, because I tend to fall into the trap of misrememberance there as well.


19th century English literature:

Bronte-saurus: one of those posts that make me nodd and say, "me, too". For all that I appreciate Austen, I love the Brontes, and their fantasy role play obsessed childhood.

T.E. Lawrence:

Lawrence' sexuality: the 2012 edition: a post in which the still hotly debated matter of Lawrence's sexuality is written about with far more insight and grace than your avarage biographer manages.


When fandoms collide, Take #4355:

Karen Gillan interview about her upcoming role as model Jean Shrimpton in in We'll Take Manhattan, which by the sounds of it is about David Bailey's (= most famous photographer of Swinging London, young padawans) big breakthrough as a photographer in 1962. Quoth the article:

We'll Take Manhattan is a portrait of a photogenic love affair, but lit with flashes of class anxiety and period misogyny. While Shrimpton is portrayed as a beguiling ingénue, a muse who says little but looks great, Bailey (played by Aneurin Barnard) is the domineering, hostile "artist", who shouts threateningly at women, uses Shrimpton and forgets his wife. I'll say it – Bailey comes off like a bit of a dick, doesn't he?

To which I say: how is this news? Not if you've ever read an interview with David Bailey during the last 50 or so years. (Or watched Blow Up; the photographer in it is famously based on Bailey.) He's sublimely gifted without a doubt, but prone to come up with such charming statements as the one in this interview: People say I seduced a lot of women, which makes me very immature. Well, what does that make the women I seduced? Or boastings like the one in this article:

'I remember Jean Shrimpton,' says Jane. 'She was lovely.'
'I remember her well, dear,' chortles Bailey. 'In every position!'

Of course, if like me you're somewhat invested in a certain group from Liverpool, you come across David Bailey also in the context of a legendary 1965 photo session where he only wanted to photograph John Lennon originally as he wasn't interested in the rest of the Beatles (and, rumour has it, was very interested in John indeed), was told John wanted to be photographed with Paul and ended up shooting smouldering-with-something portraits. (The only other time when John did a session with him was with Yoko at his side in 1969. You had it coming, Bailey, you had it coming.)