Finding Gondal : The Story of the Brontë Family

my love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath a source of little visible delight but necessary Nelly I am Heathcliff catherine earnshaw may you not rest as long as I am living you're said I kill you haunt me then I am no bird and no net ensnares me I am a free human being with an independent will [Music] [Laughter] in 1815 the Reverend Patrick Bronte an Irish author moved to the village of Thornton in Yorkshire County with his wife Maria Branwell and their two daughters situated in the heart of the Bradford district it was in this house that four more children were born into destinies as great as they were tragic Charlotte the eldest would write four novels the now classic Jane Eyre surely a story said during the industrial unrest of the Luddite rebellion Follette a forgotten masterpiece of romance set in Belgium and finally the professor actually her first immense crypt which was published posthumously Charlotte died in 1855 at the age of 38 just months after being married Emily published only one novel Wuthering Heights a dark and tortured romance of violence and passion highly contested by the critics due to its controversial content the book was released a year before her death in 1848 she was only 30 years old and the youngest depicted her experience as a governess in Agnes gray before writing an epistolary novel the tenant of Wildfell Hall in which the main character tries to rebuild herself after her husband's moral decay she died at the age of 29 near the cliffs of Scarborough where she is buried and finally there is Branwell the ever elusive brother Bradman sometimes poet or painter whom with great care went so far as to erase himself from the family portrait that he himself had painted leaving only his ghostly shadow overlooking the three sisters he would be the first of the siblings to die of tuberculosis at the age of only 28 in 1820 the Bronte family moved a few miles to the village of howarth where Patrick had been appointed vicar of st. Michael's Church they moved into the presbytery at the top of the village which had an amazing view of the town and the surrounding Heath a year later Maria Bramwell dies Elizabeth Bramwell Maria's sister moves into the presbytery in order to look after her nieces and nephew then in 1825 the two eldest daughters of the family Maria and Elizabeth both died at the age of only 10 and 11 years old these tragedies will profoundly mark all of the remaining members of the family in their lives but also in their works the cemetery located between their home and the village church serves as a constant reminder of the omnipresence of death in the Bronte stories Patrick for his part faced the series of personal tragedies by instilling in his children a love for the Arts whilst doing his best to stimulate and enlighten them both intellectually and spiritually helping them to transcend their pain and grief by encouraging their creativity he had great hopes to see Branwell his only son become a distinguished painter or an eminent poet alas vain hope Branwell would go on to lose himself into a life of debauchery it is elsewhere that the work with the Reverend will bear its fruits his three remaining daughters Charlotte Emily and Anne will go on to write a significant chapter of English literature Charlotte was actually the third child in the Bronte family she had two older sisters who very tragically died when they were all sent away to a town bridge school but that left her as the oldest child in the family but with her brother Branwell coming up so very close behind just a year younger and then year younger than that Emily and then two years younger the baby of the family and so little is known about Emily and you know among her her sisters she is the most private I think of the Bronte sisters and therefore quite mysterious quite a solitary figure in many ways but that belies the fact that she was very much a part of her family very important in the family and Charlotte for example was absolutely devoted to her and Vontae was the youngest child she was the elder siblings were rather dismissive towards her and particularly Bran well so she clearly had a pretty tough childhood with two very dominance older siblings she was very close to Emily and like Emily had a very strong love of animals and of nature one day in June of 1826 Patrick came home from Bradford with a present that would spark his children's imaginations and creativity a box of little wooden soldiers each one was given a name and a history and used by the siblings as characters of an imaginary world called glass town they created all sorts of elements linked to this new universe songs poems paintings and stories they wrote in tiny letters on little pieces of paper to create books no larger than a matchbox their heroes were inspired by personalities such as Lord Byron Napoleon or even the Duke of Wellington and that political intrigues took place in the imaginary colonies of Africa or the Pacific the more the bronty's published their works the more defined in their literary talents became Emily had strong tastes for poetry and Romanticism while Charlotte showed an interest in social issues and the destinies of her characters Branwell and Charlotte had started working on their early writing sometimes called the juvenilia wonderfully inventive tales that they modeled on a lot of their reading they they create a land in Africa where they send their heroes who build this a colonial power with its own mills its industry constantly fighting their shanty though it's it's not very African based because they actually then start to build a form of Yorkshire out there in Africa Victorian Yorkshire is absolutely full of ghost stories and authentic proper folklore dating back in some cases hundreds of years in part because Luke share is undergoing lots of changes itself it's changing from being a very rural area to being a very industrial area they were very close to pendel on the pendel district which is where one of England's largest witch trials took place it's pendleton Lancashire that house very close to the Lancashire border and I think the bronty's might have known Harrison Ainsworth's novel about those witch trials which made them famous all over again and which portrays the witches in quite a sympathetic light in some of the early writings Shola and bran will produce their own copies of Blackwood's Edinburgh magazine which is a periodical that they'd really loved it had all sorts of materials it had politics it had fiction poetry editorials Charlotte and Bramwell trying to mimic these and they probably also found it exciting to incorporate supernatural stories into their own kind of fantasy worlds and they wove together in their own writings those kind of gothic stories that they read in print and the folk tales that their servants told them and that I think is what gives their work it's extraordinary edge and quality of daring that other Victorian Gothic doesn't really have they're constantly drawing on romantic tales but also the materials of what they find around them every day in howís which despite what people think was not a tiny little village it had many mills and factories and the parsonage was just at the top of the Main Street and so they were very linked into the community in 1831 the two younger sisters and Emily succeeded from glass town and created their own alternative world called gondola Charlotte and Bramwell continued administrating their universe now under the name of Anglia we know much less about that world of gondol than we do about Andrea there's just less there's less of that material that that's come down to us that was preserved with Emily and Anne's vision of gondol then those powerful figure is the woman the first time I've taken a long journey together and they went the two of them by by train to to York the whole time they were on the train journey they were taking the various characters and she names them all of characters from gone doll they lived their fantasy world the whole train journey while dealing with all the practicalities of our journey and life and enjoying that and I think that says something about Emily she was able to inhabit these worlds and and there was not really a demarcation for her between that fantasy world and everyday life Charlotte and Emily went to school in row head Emily quickly became depressed and returned home to live at the presbytery where she invested herself more in the household chores while getting on with her education and took Emily's placed at the school and Charlotte soon became a teacher there as time went on bran well went from bad to worse and failed in all of his attempts to break into the cultural and artistic world Charlotte sent a few of her poems to the eminent poet Robert Southey in order to get his opinion on her work he replied that literature cannot be the business of a woman's life and it ought not to be the three sisters worked alternatively as governesses and teachers and several families in schools however they usually didn't keep these positions for long and worked at longest in the service to the Robinson family at thought Green Hall New York determined to become independent they decided to open a school for young women and in order to realize this project they needed to complement their own education especially in French for that reason they enrolled at the AJ boarding school in Brussels in 1842 Monsieur AJ who was the husband of the the woman who ran the school he took a great interest in them where we still have their essays that they wrote for him but it's quite clear that Charlotte conceived quite a grand passion for him there aren't died they both had to come back to house and then Charlotte returned alone and I assume that is at this point that the passion grew we were unclear about the extent of it until the last century when letters were discovered which I think had been suppressed earlier which show how strongly she felt we she sent them to to him and his wife apparently discovered them in the wastepaper basket and put them together again so we are indebted to her but a sense of absolute yearn love how could he not reply that her whole life was being destroyed and you get this sense then I think coming through in a lot of her writing the three Bronte sisters eventually reunited when Charlotte returned home from Belgium they printed out leaflets advertising the opening of their new school but as no one enrolled they were obliged to abandon the project one day Charlotte discovered Emily's poems Charlotte was electrified by these poems and said I'd never read anything like these before especially from the pen of of a woman Emily was furious it took quite some persuasion for Charlotte to convince her sister that these these poems should be published and the intercession of the so called peacemaker of the family and by showing her own poems as well to Charlotte sort of interceded and led the way to convincing Emily that indeed these should see the light of day they should be publicly known Charlotte didn't include Branwell at this point because he'd gone off the rails to put it very politely and mildly he was the great hope of a family the one in whom the money was invested to ensure that he could make her career but in fact as we know he he drunk himself stupid he took drugs he was very dissolute at this point poems by Cora Ellis and Acton Belle was published by aileth and Jones in 1846 they decided to use male pen names and self-funded the printing Charlotte became Kura Belle Emily Alice Bell and an act in Bell the book was that a great success regardless of the quality of some of the work especially Emily's and only two copies were sold nevertheless this collection of poetry contains the core and the essence of their work all the poetry of gondol is I think much more linked to our a romanticism and also a lyric subjectivity a turning a turning into the self it's about it's about love it's about passion it's about grief grief about death one of her poems remembrance and it begins cold in the earth and a deeply snow piled above the far far removed cold in the dreary grave have I forgot my only love to love thee severed at last by times all severing wave now when alone do my thoughts no longer hover over the mountain on that northern shore resting their wings where Heath and fern leaves cover by noble heart forever evermore cold in the earth and fifteen wild December's from those brown hills have melted into spring faithful indeed is the spirit that remembers after such years of change and suffering sweet love of youth forgive if I forget thee while the world's tide is bearing me along other desires and hopes beset me hopes which obscure but cannot do the wrong [Music] it ends with that question mark and the rest of the poem goes on to say no I have not forgotten my love it's been 15 years I have not forgotten this love but I also in some ways have to realize that it's that it's buried and he or she says to the lover please forgive me but I also life his dreary without you but I have to go on I have to be part of this world 1847 was the Bronte sisters big year they worked in secret Patrick had no idea that the juvenilia era was over and that his daughters were all starting their first novels they ambitiously planned to publish them all together the professor Charlotte's first novel was completed in June of 1846 the manuscript was refused by the editors and only published after her death it contains nevertheless the essential themes at the core of Charlotte's work and was mainly inspired by her time in Brussels it is the story of William Crim's wife who moves to Belgium to teach after having refused to become a member of the clergy while teaching at a school for girls he falls in love with a student Frances Charlotte Bronte wrote the professor first of all her novels but she returned to the themes in Villette because they both feature a protagonist in professor it's male in Valletta it's female who has no other means of support ghosts of Russell's to try and and make a living teaching English and in both of them you get the interaction in the school and both of the characters finally make it and start to run their own schools some very interesting material in the professor particularly the rivalry between the hero William Crim's Worth and his brother who that they hate each other basically but also another figure Hunsdon who is almost a sort of not quite in a sexual relationship with William but the such a sense of some charge between them and Hunsdon is a various of peculiar figure and so you get these forms of disruption throughout the professor that turn it into a very interesting novel I think and rather far removed from what you might think an account of a schoolmaster setting up his own school might it might actually be published at the same time as withering Heights Anne's first novel Agnes gray is based on her own experiences as a governess for the Ingham family the children she looked after were wild and misbehaved and she could not educate them the way she wanted in her novel the young governess Agnes gray quickly discovers how in some families values and principles can be completely lost the main character descriptions and the attention to detail make this book an amazing testimony of the life of a governess concentrating however more on her turmoils than her joy Agnes gray was published first of all in a three-volume edition with weathering heights the publisher of Agnes gray and weathering Heights who was rather an unscrupulous man had it put around that the three belle writers were all the same person and went with Charlotte to London to see George Smith who was the publisher of Jane Eyre to show that they were not in fact the same person two women from Yorkshire in black dresses and their only means of identification was the fact that they had some correspondence that showed that Charlotte was in fact Carrabelle she clearly has very particular views about education and the correct forms of education and quite radical views about education so her novels are some of the most important expressions I think in literary form when fictional form about the the terrible conditions that governess is have to go into in order to make a living so her account of how dreadful it is to be a governess and how powerless a woman is in that situation during her long walks in Howard's surrounding Heath Emily worked on her one and only novel withering Heights on a hill a few kilometers outside of Howarth is top with it's an old Elizabethan farmhouse that dominates the surrounding countryside it is difficult to stand there and not to think of Heathcliff's home especially where the winds are blowing across the heath another exceptional location that Emily spent countless hours after was pond and Kirk a gigantic stone protruding from a cliffside seemingly unaffected by time Emily calls it Venice tone cracks in the novel lower down on the heath is pondan hall a large mansion reminiscent of Thrushcross Grange that can be seen whilst heading down the road towards the village however given the curved features of the mansion's architecture mentioned in the novel the Linton abode seems to have been inspired more by Shipton hall near Halifax [Music] catherine earnshaw Oh Catherine Heathcliff Catherine Linton [Music] [Music] let me in [Music] who who are you [Music] it all started in this hostile land at the top of a hill called withering Heights the owner mr. Earnshaw came back from Liverpool with a young orphan he renamed Heathcliff his family has mixed feelings regarding the arrival of the boy in their home from the very first day Earnshaw's son Hindley truly hated this intruder while his sister Catherine who had a wild and passionate temper like Heathcliff's falls madly in love with him and the two children become inseparable spending all of their time together running through the Heath far from Hindley when mr. Earnshaw passes away Hindley inherits the estate and Heathcliff now deprived of his benefactor has no protection from the bitterness of Hindley's hard feelings towards him now teenagers Heathcliff and Cathy have an encounter that will change the course of their lives at the foot of withering Heights that was a beautiful mansion called Thrushcross Grange Heathcliff and Cathy decide to spy on the people living there but they are chased away and Cathy is bitten by a dog [Music] she stays there for several weeks convalescing during which time she meets Edgar Linton meanwhile at Wuthering Heights Heathcliff's situation is more and more desperate and he can no longer stand being so far from his beloved back the returning heights Cathy seems to have become a different person one evening Heathcliff overhears the conversation between Nelly and his loved one saying that it would be humiliating for her to marry him it would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now deeply hurt by this comment regarding his origins the young man leaves the estate when Kathy realizes that he is gone she is devastated Heathcliff Heathcliff [Music] he's glyph when he returns to withering Heights years later Heathcliff is a changed man now a perfect gentleman who seems to have been very successful financially he soon learns that Cathy has married his rival the wealthy Edgar Linton and that she now lives at Thrushcross Grange Heathcliff takes control of watering Heights soon afterwards [Music] Kathy dies giving birth to little girls also named Katherine an inconsolable Heathcliff will not find peace until he has had his revenge [Music] if you look at mothering Heights we all know Heathcliff and Catherine have that you know they are iconic romantic lovers and yet the whole novel is couched within a world of of quite intense realism as well when you look at the different houses when you look at the the life the everyday life of weathering Heights you you sort of know when people are having their meals you know what the room looks like people passing in and out over the thresholds the the sort of farming life that that's going on around everyone famously says that her love for Heathcliff is like the rocks beneath it will be eternal but she says you know he is me and I am him we are the same person so we have this extraordinary not even unity but or not even affinity but sameness between the white heroin and the non-white hero that's remarkable they live with a passion that is extremely powerful but also would tend to bring down those elements which thread society together this is a subversive passion and Lockwood is a very poor reader of that kind of passion so there's this moment when when Lockwood first meets a young Cathy and as he's going in the door he sees or he sees what he thinks are young kittens playing there and he says to Cathy oh I see you've got some of your young favorites here something like that and Cathy kind of sneer as derisive Lea at him because she says well those would be strange favorites because they're dead rabbits and this is something that that Lockwood just can't understand he's somebody who's come from the city he can't read the Desai 'ti that he's in one story that I think Emily probably did know was it's really a whole set of stories about the fact that people who died before their time were the most likely people to become ghosts the the girl would die first without getting to have sex with the man she loved and she would then haunt the man she loved and he would sometimes be tempted to kiss her or to have sex with her but if he did she would turn into this sort of sex vampire and would drain him completely dry and he would actually be found dead the next morning Kathy he's never had sex with Heathcliff she's never had sex with the man she loves and that I think is what she's doing out there wandering on the moor I don't think its attraction to the more I think she's looking for something the other kind of factor in the story is the irony factor that Heathcliff is actually very much wishing to fulfill dead Cathy's wishes for necrophiliac sex it's his fantasy too it's almost as if his fantasy is coming from the ghost is coming to him out of the ghosts desires but ultimately neither of them can achieve it it's like they miss each other in the dark and so the only way that Heathcliff can enact that fantasy is the demand that he and Cathy be buried together and that their coffins be kind of knocked apart so their bodies can reach out to one another and that's a very ballad theme to when that happens typically a one kind of vine will grow out of the man's grave and another out of the woman's grave and the two vines twined together in a kind of sexual act that wasn't available to the people in life [Music] when mothering Heights was first published it was very harshly reviewed Emily was somebody who had a great deal of will and resolution and and sort of independence of mind and Charlotte says that at first they just laughed about these reviews but of course they were extremely harsh one critic said that it was a course and Savage thoroughly Savage loathes and the kind of thing that should the kind of Savage that just should not be seen in any work of art it won't take Charlotte long to bounce back following the professor's failure Jane Eyre comes out in October of 1847 and propels the Bronte sisters or the Belles to the top of the literary scene in the story an orphan Jane Eyre is sent by her aunt to Lowood boarding school where she suffers 10 long years of humiliation and deprivation afterwards she finds a position as governess of Thornfield the home of mr. Rochester a love story begins between these two protagonists but they are forced to confront social conventions and the secrets of Thornfield mansion the Cowen Bridge boarding school where Charlotte's two elder sisters had died of typhoid fever was only a few kilometers away from how Earth and Charlotte spent enough time in this institution to depict it as the Lowood boarding school as for Thornfield it is very similar to East Riddle cinhal a splendid 17th century manor house in Keighley West Yorkshire Jane is forever challenging as she did when she was at home with her aunt she challenges the reverent Brocklehurst who runs the school and is forever asking why they should be treated in this way she believes that a child has a right to speak out and to express their anger and their passion and I think in Jane Eyre you get the first real representation of a child who believes that there should be just just for children and I think this is what makes Jane Eyre so special it was the first time that anybody had really created such a passionate articulate child who was determined to challenge adults rights to control children this same passion and sense of self-worth and rights comes out later in Jane's life when mr. Rochester proposes to her first of all a marriage which she is very unsure about because she is his social inferior but then when she discovers he's already married she in a very moral way leaves him and tries to find herself again one of the most beautiful scenes in the novel is of course when Rochester proposes to Jane and it's a worldly passionate but also achingly romantic scene that takes place in an English garden but at the critical moment of that seen a giant colourful moth flies into Rochester's view and he's distracted by it and he says to Jane it looks like a moth or an insect from the West Indies and so what we have there this very very subtle moment in an English country garden in this great romantic moment the Westerners colonisation slavery infiltrating penetrating that scene and I think it's really rather extraordinary how that scene is orchestrated in such a subtle way and it indicates the way in which Charlotte has a global sensibility an idea that this domestic romance is happening in an enormous political tumultuous political scene too it's a novel that frames lots of questions and poses the difficulties of being a particular kind of woman in a particular historical moment so one of the most curious things about Jane Eyre and the novel is that the action of the novel takes place in around we think the 1820s 1830s period and that's an extraordinarily important moment particular in British history mainly for one thing which is the slave trade the slave trade act is passed in the UK in 1807 and the abolition of slavery happens in 1833 so these enormous things are happening this novel is absolutely embedded in that political history so Jane herself often refers to herself as a slave rock just to talks about governor Singh as a kind of slavery the idea of slavery the political activity of abolition is part of the allegory of Jane's position as a subjugated woman in the 1830s [Music] Charlotte was raised as a clergyman's daughter and that comes over very clearly in her novels they're absolutely suffused with religious imagery all the time you get little quotations from the Bible but quite interestingly what Charlotte does with many of these quotations is used them almost to challenge the ways in which they've been read she takes the words of Christ on the cross and uses these herself as if she almost feels that she's impersonating God that there are other aspects where she seems almost a bit blasphemous and I'm quite sure she never thought of herself as such but in her creativity what she's doing is drawing upon the language of the Bible and challenging the ways in which it's been interpreted by a male society [Music] there is also a very strong moral element within her her novels but not as Victorian society would recognize it she scandalized people by the ways in which she represented sexual passion Jane Eyre is very very strongly sexualized in her desires she represents a potential bigamous marriage and so in many ways she was absolutely violating everything that a decorous and moral Victorian woman should think or say when Jane comes out it is greeted extraordinarily with almost adulation this is an unknown author but almost immediately reviews are coming out saying this is real this is a new way of looking at life and of nineteenth-century characters Jane Eyre made Charlotte Bronte him into an instantly famous author when her sex was revealed there was a lot of critical reviews suggesting that a woman should never have written in this way and broke new ground with the tenant of Wildfell Hall she found most of her inspiration in her own experience as a governess to depict a certain view of the society at the time Helen Graham a young widow arrives in a village with her young son in spite of the curiosity and gossip that she creates she quickly develops a friendship with one of the inhabitants Gilbert Markham in order to help Helen Markham decides to discover the truth about her past and soon finds out that she is married to the violent and alcoholic Arthur Huntington wanted to protect her son she escaped from a life of misery by pretending to be a widow the tenant of Wildfell Hall was her second novel and in its themes it's very similar to weathering Heights although it's a very different treatment of those particular themes it seems to be about education and about marriage and about the condition of women much of the novel is about Helens desire to protect her child from his father and from the corrupting influence of his father and his father's circle and a lot of the novel is directed towards alcohol and alcoholism it's very likely that the novel is much of the novel is based on the experiences that Ann has when she was the governess to the Robinson family and in many ways Arthur Huntington seems to be modeled on Branwell and his wild lifestyle while she was a governess she had encountered things happening within that household that she was very shocked by and quite traumatized by she wrote in the back of the prayer book and very small writing that she was sick of mankind and his disgusting ways so clearly that she was had been very affected by whatever that she'd witnessed in that household when it was reviewed it was felt to be a very shocking novel and in fact Charlotte thought that Ann should never have written it and wanted to excuse it in some way the critics complained about the very frank accounts of adultery I mean for our eyes they're read Oh in the 21st century it doesn't seem particularly Frank but I think for a reader middle of the 19th century that these forms of behavior were discussed in a very frank way that people thought was was quite shocking particularly for a young unmarried woman writer to be writing about these topics Charlotte's novel surely takes place during the uprising of 19th century English textile artisans the Luddites their jobs being threatened by the arrival of the first mechanical looms they decide to destroy the machines and organize a rebellion against the factory owners a young heiress Shirley Keller moves to town hoping to help Robert Moore one of the manufacturers as well as the poor workers there are several connections between Charlotte's Bradford's social circle and the novel for instance Mary Taylor's home the red house a tutor like mansion served as the model for briar maids Allan irsie one of Charlotte's oldest friends introduced her to Oakwell Hall a place she describes in the book as field head in her novel surely although it's set back at the early the early part of the century of the Luddite rebellions she's clearly paralleling the the life of the one of the heroines caroline hailstone who leads a very imprisoned life with that of the workers who are revolting against the introduction of machinery so as the sense that both of them are being oppressed by society in which they live surely makes very interesting contrast to her friend Elizabeth Gaskell's novels both Mary Barton and north and south because in those it's quite clear that Elizabeth Gaskell is taking the side of the workers and Mary Barton for example really focuses virtually entirely on the workers and and their sense of injustice and their suffering whereas in shirley charlotte brontë is very even-handed we focus on the middle class and so we see the workers often through their eyes and very little in their actual lives at all so that they are figures who are there in the background creating this turmoil there's a wonderful scene where the workers attack the mills and the two heroines Carolyn and Shirley are sitting up on the hillside they've been excluded and they're both sympathizing with the men who are defending the mills but also it seems with the workers as well and so Charlotte brontë it is not coming down on either side except that she makes the the novel that the structure of it means that she is paralleling the role of the women particularly Caroline who is unable to get married because the the mills cannot turn because of the political rebellions and that of the workers and so it's only when the external war has finished that the own mill owner can marry Caroline is a strong sense vert it's looking at the the role of women in relation to the problems of political upheaval as in the professor her first novel the intrigue of Charlotte's Villette is largely inspired by her relationship with the great love of her life Constanta AG her teacher and later colleague in brussels lucy snow the main character arrives and Villette the capital of the kingdom of her labeouf school to teach english in a school for girls she witnesses and becomes embroiled in numerous intrigues involving blooming young women a very nosy principal a charming doctor and even the ghost of a nun she depicts in fine detail the psychological portraits of these characters before describing her own part of the story with the truculent Monsieur Paul another teacher with vilette's she she says purposely made her heroine a cold character and she called her first of all she called her Lucy Frost then she changed it to - Lucy snow so in her novels you do get the sense of love of a master it's it's not closely based on charlotte brontë his own life but you do get the orphan Lucy Snow who decides she will go and try and make her fortune in Belgium lands and Brussels finance herself a rel teaching English in the school and is quartered by the firing Monsieur Hall who is clearly modelled to some degree on mr. chair but in this case rewards Lucy by falling in love with her see snow idolizes the doctor John who in fact he's dr. John Graham and he's based upon the the name of her father's medical book which is by Thomas John Graham modern domestic medicine you find in these texts an absolute obsession where the female reproductive system with menstruation we tend to think that women in the Victorian age would never have talked about these things with their doctors on the contrary the medical companions say that you must always go to your doctor whether your flow is to thick to thin they invented about ten different forms of disease that you could have associated with a reproductive system they also in discussions of insanity believe that there are about twenty different forms of insanity that women could suffer that were all linked in one way or another to their reproductive system one that I think Charlotte brontë probably draws upon is a Rotter mania which was the idea of being obsessed by a loved one but chastely and I think you can see that in Villette Charlotte brontë describes Lucy as being a monomaniac and a lot of what she does is obsess about dr. John and I think Ferrante is following quite closely there some of the ideas about female Victorian psychology but again she's break through them because she's not making Lucy a passive sufferer she suffers but she challenges and she demands her right to have these feelings rather than simply be classified as someone who is is mentally ill [Music] in the span of two years between 1848 and 18-49 Brian well Emily and Anne died of tuberculosis Emily inconsolable after her brother's death became ill the day of his funeral and passed away a few months later and thought she could cure herself by breathing the fresh air of Scarborough in vain she never returned and is buried there a few hundred kilometers away from the Bronte crypt in Howarth where the rest of the family lay this distance contributes to the theory of the other Bronte sister however Charlotte's poem about Anne's death is a reminder to us of just how much she was loved and cherished there's little joy in life for me and little terror in the grave I've lived the parting hour to see of one I would have died to save calmly to watch the failing breath wishing each side might be the last longing to see the shade of death or those beloved features cast the cloud the stillness that must part the darling of my life from me and then to thank God from my heart to thank him well and fervently although I knew that we had lost the hope and glory of our life and now the nighted tempest-tossed must bear alone the weary strife Charlotte died in March of 1855 aged 38 a few months after her marriage to her father's assistant ironically his name was Arthur Belle Nichols Belle being the common pseudonym of the three sisters shortly afterwards Patrick asked Elizabeth Gaskell to write the biography which remains to this day one of the main sources of information about the family Patrick outlived his wife and his six children he finished his days in the Presbyterian howarth where he died in 1861 Arthur Belle Nichols Charlotte's husband stayed by his side up until the end behind the presbytery a small path runs along a wall and leads down to the heat in the distance you can just hear the rustling of a waterfall mixed with gusts of winds stroking the tall grass a small stone bridge takes you across the stream further on the view which has been obstructed up until now suddenly opens up into endless fields of Heather as far as the eye can see a wild landscape intertwines with hills and shrubs in constant battle with the never ceasing wind seemingly eternal and full of stories it is here where Emily Bronte's verses come to life the night is your your wall wins boldly but a time [Music] to me and I cannot Oh but it and I cannot the giant trees Armand [Music] with [Music] and it's done Steve [Music] rates beyond please feel of [Music] I will [Music] the dream I will [Music]

Channel: Glass Town Films

Views: 16,926

Keywords: brontë, Finding Gondal, Wuthering heights, Jane Eyre, Les Hauts de Hurlevent, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Anne Brontë, Brontë Sisters

Id: k_riQGTkGAw

Length: 53min 35sec (3215 seconds)

Published: Sun May 10 2020