Charlotte Brontë The Lost Manuscripts

by Charlotte Brontë

The story of a shipwrecked book belonging to the mother of the Brontë sisters, its provenance history following the deaths of the family, its return to Haworth, and the lost manuscripts of Charlotte Brontë found tucked away inside.

Genres: Nonfiction

175 pages, Hardcover

Published November 1, 2018

About the author

Charlotte Brontë was an English novelist, the eldest out of the three famous Brontë sisters whose novels have become standards of English literature. See also Emily Brontë and Anne Brontë.

Charlotte Brontë was born in Thornton, Yorkshire, England, the third of six children, to Patrick Brontë (formerly "Patrick Brunty"), an Irish Anglican clergyman, and his wife, Maria Branwell. In April 1820 the family moved a few miles to Haworth, a remote town on the Yorkshire moors, where Patrick had been appointed Perpetual Curate. This is where the Brontë children would spend most of their lives. Maria Branwell Brontë died from what was thought to be cancer on 15 September 1821, leaving five daughters and a son to the care of her spinster sister Elizabeth Branwell, who moved to Yorkshire to help the family.

In August 1824 Charlotte, along with her sisters Emily, Maria, and Elizabeth, was sent to the Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge in Lancashire, a new school for the daughters of poor clergyman (which she would describe as Lowood School in Jane Eyre). The school was a horrific experience for the girls and conditions were appalling. They were regularly deprived of food, beaten by teachers and humiliated for the slightest error. The school was unheated and the pupils slept two to a bed for warmth. Seven pupils died in a typhus epidemic that swept the school and all four of the Brontë girls became very ill - Maria and Elizabeth dying of tuberculosis in 1825. Her experiences at the school deeply affected Brontë - her health never recovered and she immortalised the cruel and brutal treatment in her novel, Jane Eyre. Following the tragedy, their father withdrew his daughters from the school.

At home in Haworth Parsonage, Charlotte and the other surviving children — Branwell, Emily, and Anne — continued their ad-hoc education. In 1826 her father returned home with a box of toy soldiers for Branwell. They would prove the catalyst for the sisters' extraordinary creative development as they immediately set to creating lives and characters for the soldiers, inventing a world for them which the siblings called 'Angria'. The siblings became addicted to writing, creating stories, poetry and plays. Brontë later said that the reason for this burst of creativity was that:

'We were wholly dependent on ourselves and each other, on books and study, for the enjoyments and occupations of life. The highest stimulus, as well as the liveliest pleasure we had known from childhood upwards, lay in attempts at literary composition.'

After her father began to suffer from a lung disorder, Charlotte was again sent to school to complete her education at Roe Head school in Mirfield from 1831 to 1832, where she met her lifelong friends and correspondents, Ellen Nussey and Mary Taylor. During this period (1833), she wrote her novella The Green Dwarf under the name of Wellesley. The school was extremely small with only ten pupils meaning the top floor was completely unused and believed to be supposedly haunted by the ghost of a young lady dressed in silk. This story fascinated Brontë and inspired the figure of Mrs Rochester in Jane Eyre.

Brontë left the school after a few years, however she swiftly returned in 1835 to take up a position as a teacher, and used her wages to pay for Emily and Anne to be taught at the school. Teaching did not appeal to Brontë and in 1838 she left Roe Head to become a governess to the Sidgewick family -- partly from a sense of adventure and a desire to see the world, and partly from financial necessity.

Charlotte became pregnant soon after her wedding, but her health declined rapidly and, according to biographer Elizabeth Gaskell, she was attacked by "sensations of perpetual nausea and ever-recurring faintness." She died, with her unborn child, on 31 March 1855.

Reviews

[Beleth · Rating 3 out of 5]

No está mal pero los artículos que contiene me parecen un poco random... especialmente el que va sobre Cumbres borrascosas, que no termino de entender qué pinta aquí; también me hubiera gustado que le dieran más importancia a los documentos encontrados.

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

So this was lovely. It is a series of essays about a volume of poetry once belonging to Maria Branwell Brontë, and descriptions and analyses of the fragments of juvenalia and marginalia found within. It has lots of detailed photographs and explanations of the literary, political and social environment in which the Brontës were writing.
All of the essays emphasise its importance and its influence on the Brontë children, particularly Charlotte and Emily, and all have a similar theme:
"former owners can embed themselves within its pages, and therefore an enduring bond to the book itself as a physical object" (p 69).
As an underliner and margin-scribbler myself, I found this very touching.

Just an aside, the story of the book's provenance and how thrilling it was for the Brontë Society to finally obtain it (in exchange for a six-figure sum) just reinforced what I've always thought - that artefacts of literature belong in the public domain, where they can be used to contribute to humanity's body of knowledge for the benefit of everyone. People who profit financially from dealing in artefacts are despicable.

[Freya Hutchins]

In 2015, Maria Branwell's copy of The Remains of Henry Kirk White was purchased by the Brontë Society Museum after it was in the hand's of private American collectors for over 100 years. Inside this book, was not only annotations and drawings made in the margins of the volume by the family but small fragments of Charlotte Brontë's juvenilia never before seen in by the public.

In the late 2010s, I was lucky enough to see this volume and the attached fragments in a special evening event held by the Brontë Parsonage Museum. To get to read the transcripts of the fragments has been a treat.

The Lost Manuscripts is a collection of essays that examine the history of the tome, the influence the book would have had on Emily's writing of Wuthering Heights and the blend of Charlotte's fictional world of Angria and it's cross over into the real world of Haworth that occurred in the prose fragment.

I found the majority of the essays fascinating to read. However, the dissection of Charlotte's male characters was not my cup of tea. I can see that those who love to examine literature would find this article a fascinating read.

The layout of the book could have been improved by moving the transcripts of the juvenilia to either the start or the end of the articles they are referenced in. This would make it easier for the more casual reader to read, as they are inserted in the centre of the essays. Photographs of the fragments and the doodles and annotations in the Kirk White book where a delight to see.