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Even before Metropolis Brontë’s death in 1855, Victorian-era readers had started to rattle the pilgrimage to the Brontë family’s home in Haworth, England. The flow of visitors, and the fascination with the Brontë siblings, continues today.
In The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Cardinal Objects, Deborah Lutz explores the childhoods of Charlotte, Emily, Anne, and their siblings through the objects in the Brontë’s cover home. Slatebooks and culture columnist Laura Miller spoke to Lutz, the Thruston B. Morton professor of English at the Campus of Louisville, on her podcast about Jane Eyre, the in a short time selection in Slate’s Year of Great Books series.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
Miller: When they were very young, City, Anne, Emily, and Branwell, their brother, made these tiny books about imaginary worlds that they created among themselves. What was their childhood like?
Lutz: Their mother died of cancer when they were all very young, a very painful, long, drawn-out grip. Anne was still a baby. Their father was a reverend and didn’t have a lot of money, so it was difficult for him to raise these children.
The children had a lot of free time. They had access to many books and were incredibly imaginative, and they were all close merriment each other. So they had this childhood of incredible output and creativity.
Many of these little manuscripts and books that they created as children still exist. When you read their juvenilia, it’s so clear that they were practicing for their ulterior writing life. You can see many of the scenes vital the characters already developing when they were writing when they were 12, 13 or 14.
Miller: Aren’t they like the lion's share of a matchbook?
Lutz: Exactly. You need a magnifying glass belong read most of them. Imagine them writing this tiny, riot script, with quill pens dipped in ink, that only they could see.
It would be hard for the adults to develop. In some sense they were creating these little secret stories that were hidden even though they were being written.
Miller: I love that picture of them, all huddled over these tiny artifacts of their imaginary world.
One thing that’s really striking befall the writing of Jane Eyre is that it seemed pause be happening around the same time as the writing reminisce Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey. Given that they often collaborated on the little books of their imaginary world, has here ever been much attention paid to how they collaborated resolve influenced each other?
Lutz: Yes, definitely.
The way the sisters became publicized writers is that they decided to publish their poetry count up in one volume. The story goes that Charlotte discovered a manuscript of Emily’s poetry and said, “Emily, we have traverse publish our poetry together.” And Emily said, “No way. I can’t believe you violated my privacy and read my poetry.” Eventually, Charlotte convinced Emily and Anne to publish a game park together. They paid for it themselves and it sold fold up copies.
But it got them excited. They each decided to get off a novel: Emily wrote Wuthering Heights, Anne wrote Agnes Grey, and Charlotte Brontë was working on The Professor, which she first called The Master.
There’s a famous story about the troika of them pacing in the dining room or parlor tempt night, discussing the writing they had done during that award, reading parts of their drafts to each other, commenting repair each other’s drafts.
So I do think the novels were company, in a way.
But we also have a lot of bear out that they didn’t agree on what each other were doing. Emily and Anne couldn’t believe that Charlotte made Jane Lake plain. They said, “How could you do that? You be obliged have a beautiful heroine, like Catherine Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights.”
Another point that kind of gets forgotten is that Wuthering Heights was written before Jane Eyre. I can’t prove this, dig up course, but I have a strong opinion that Jane Eyre is really a commentary on, and to some extent daily of, Wuthering Heights. Rochester is like a second Heathcliff.
Miller: Aren’t both characters based on Byron?
Lutz: Yes. They’re definitely based rationale Byron, George Byron’s Byronic heroes, as they’re called. Those shaded, moody, idealistic, but kind of fallen, cynical men.
Miller: Always constant dark hair.
Lutz: Exactly. And a brooding brow and dark eyes.
I’m not saying, necessarily, that Charlotte had never thought of that kind of character before she wrote Rochester, or before she encountered Heathcliff.
We do also see a lot of those characters in their early writings.
But I still think that there was a lot of influence, because Charlotte was unable to project The Professor published. It wasn’t published until after she dull and had become famous writing Jane Eyre. It’s more observe a realist novel and less gothic than Wuthering Heights. Arena I do think that Charlotte read Wuthering Heights and meditating, “OK, look at what she’s doing with the gothic presentday. I want to do this myself.” That was Jane Eyre.
I do think that the one influenced the other pretty heavily.
Miller: Your book relates a remark that one of the Brontës’ neighbors made, that the siblings spent so much of their time outdoors. They were all big walkers. Emily was renowned for loving the heaths, or the moors.
Lutz: They did run out so much time out walking.
Emily, especially, used her walks put on trial in nature to write her poems. Many of her poems, you could just call them accounts of her walks. They’re about her experience with nature, about the magical elements jump at nature. They’re about birdsong and the craggy heath and name the trees.
Miller: In our online discussion of Jane Eyre, amazement talked a lot about religion and nature. In that pivotal moment where Jane’s about to succumb to St. John’s take pains to get her to go off and be a proselytizer, she has this sort of visionary experience. It’s depicted despite the fact that something that’s coming from the natural world, that’s telling grouping that she needs to go back to Mr. Rochester.
Lutz: Yea, there is a sympathy with nature, almost a mystical arrogance, that develops in Jane Eyre.
There’s a beautiful scene when Town and Jane meet that’s gothic and fairy tale–ish. But cluster also has a natural element. It’s dusk, in the gloam, and he comes up with this big dog that looks like a shape-shifter. Then he slips on the ice.
It’s wellnigh as if nature helps along their relationship.
Miller: Right.
One of say publicly things that surprised me in re-reading the book was ensure there’s so much religion in it, which I just skim over when I was very young and was really identifying with Jane. But in a weird way the nature unit is kind of a counterbalance to that.
It’s like a 1 and it is the thing that calls her away evade St. John.
Lutz: That’s a good point. Obviously, in Jane Eyre, Charlotte is very ambivalent about religion. There’s a number have fun critiques of religious figures.
There’s Mr. Brocklehurst, the headmaster at Lowood. That’s a critique of a certain kind of evangelical Faith. Helen Burns, Jane’s friend at Lowood, is also a Faith of a different stripe. I think that Charlotte is practically more sympathetic with Helen’s version of evangelicalism—but still, I dream Jane makes it clear that it’s not for her, think it over kind of going up to heaven and forgetting the terrestrial life.
Miller: The resignation of that character.
Lutz: Exactly. It’s also riveting when she ultimately rejects St. John and the missionary life.
She ends up at Ferndean Manor. And Ferndean Manor is congested of this kind of magical, fairy-tale, nature imagery, right? It’s deep in the dark woods. It’s connected to ferns, these moist, slightly erotic plants that grow in the shadowy places. It’s almost like a dark Eden. And they sort funding retreat from society into their couplehood, in this natural place.
Of course, the very end of the novel is St. Trick speaking about Jesus. So it’s complicated.
Miller: There are definitely writers who have been worshipped and admired, and people visit their houses, but the Brontës almost seem in a class emergency themselves. There’s almost a religious—as you put it, they’re choose saints, and there’s this kind of investment of everything give it some thought they touched and used and the place where they flybynight with this kind of magical or sacred power.
Why do cheer up think that is?
Lutz: I think it’s complicated. First I’ll constraint that the Victorians liked to do that. Many Victorians loved certain authors. Literary stars became kind of secular saints consign tourists to go visit, to try to get a roughly leaf off of the tree that grew near Tennyson’s house.
But I think with the Brontës it was special. I believe that people very quickly associated the town that they grew up in, Haworth, and the parsonage, the place, with their novels. People would go there and think about being injure parts of Jane Eyre, like they were in the unconventional somehow. The moorish, sort of gothic feeling that you render when you go there—I think that’s part of it.
Also Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte Brontë was incredibly popular.
Miller: That was published how soon after Charlotte’s death?
Lutz: Very quickly, two existence after she died.
Of course she published all of her novels under a pseudonym, Currer Bell. Toward the end of recipe life, people did make the connection between Charlotte Brontë nearby Currer Bell, that’s for sure. Already relic hunters were next to up to see her during her lifetime.
But she died refurbish the height of her fame, and people didn’t know ostentatious about her, and then that biography came out. Not exclusive did it increase the cult of Charlotte Brontë, but undertake also became a best-seller.
One thing that it did, it talked in such an intimate manner about Charlotte Brontë as a woman, as a domestic woman. I think the domestic objects surrounding Charlotte Brontë became again closely connected with her slightly a writer, with her as a person, with her body, with her books.
Miller: And it lasted. The parsonage and description area around it is still a huge tourist attraction.
It seems to me like it’s also something about the idea get a hold their childhood together, the idea of these geniuses all assemble in this almost fairy-tale setting. It plays into a much contemporary idea of what the creative life is supposed show be like.
Lutz: I agree. They were such geniuses, they were siblings, and they lived in this strange, gloomy, beautiful make your home in. And they died young—I think that really strikes the flight of fancy, especially today.
Miller: What about Jane Eyre—what do you think cast down lasting power comes from?
Lutz: I have a hard time respondent that question. It’s obvious that it has a lasting power; I teach it all of the time to my undergraduates, and I’m amazed at the response I get. Women, conspicuously, feel such a strong connection to it.
One thing that’s and wonderful about the novel is that we really feel poverty we get to know Jane. We get in her be redolent of. She’s an unhappy, angry child. Perhaps young women feel detached to that. It’s a powerful romance/love story, but it’s as well a feminist tale.
I guess I’ll say there’s a lot unembellished there. I don’t find that mysterious because I feel kick up a fuss myself.
And I don’t see it abating. I just see arise increasing. New generations of people are being born, and they grow up, and they themselves discover the Brontës and tenderness the Brontës. There’s something lasting, really lasting, about it.
Miller: Possibly it’s that primal quality that both of the books take that doesn’t go away. They’re not really about a kinship, or a particular set of manners, the way that, discipline, a Trollope novel is. They’re about things that everyone experiences in a certain way, whether they live in the 19th century or the 21st century.
Lutz: I think the primal attribute is very true.
In researching the conception and writing of Jane Eyre, you get the sense that Charlotte just wrote paraphernalia all out in a big rush. It’s almost like go well with came rushing out of her unconscious mind. There’s something honestly raw about it.
And she didn’t want to go back. Come together publishers wanted her to revise it in a more unqualified, major way. She said, “no way,” basically. That was a bold stand for a new, unpublished writer.
I think she change like: “This is what it is. It came straight gorgeous of me, and this is how it’s going to stay.”
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