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February 17, 2018 - June 7, 2019
‘Currer’ was familiar to the Brontës as that of the philanthropist Frances Richardson Currer, who was a benefactor of many local institutions, including the Clergy Daughters’ School
The Ellis family were the main mill owners in Bingley,
The name ‘Acton’ was probably familiar to Anne from her days at Thorp Green. The ‘Bell’ surname may have been suggested by the middle name of Patrick’s curate Arthur Bell Nicholls,
The poem is rightly one of Emily’s most famous, as it includes the powerful and intensely emotional description of the captive’s vision.
And visions rise and change which kill me with desire –
The sustained quality and increased philosophical depth of the poems she had produced over the previous eighteen months prove that Emily was at the very height of her poetic powers when Charlotte proposed publication.
with her usual
– I might have spared myself the trouble as he took no notice & made no reply – he was stupified
On 7 May 1846 the first three copies of Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell arrived at the parsonage.
Here at last was the solid reality resulting from all those years of fevered imagination and frantic scribbling, the culmination of a life’s dream.
the Reverend Edmund Robinson of Thorp Green had died on Tuesday, 26 May 1846, at the age of forty-six.
Confident that Mrs Robinson loved him as much as he loved her, he waited for her summons to Thorp Green.
Of course he then became intolerable – to papa he allows rest neither day nor night – and he is continualy screwing money out of him sometimes threatening that he will kill himself if it is withheld from him –
Mr Robinson’s purpose was actually to punish his eldest daughter, Lydia, for her rash elopement and marriage to the actor Henry Roxby, by cutting her out of his will.
1831, left all his property, valued at some £60,000, in trust for his son.
However obvious this may seem to the modern commentator, it is a measure of the spell she had cast over Branwell that the idea never even occurred to him.
sending her coachman, William Allison,
If anything points to her guilt in the affair it is surely the fact that she involved so many people as her messengers and go-betweens.
when the curious came to investigate they found Branwell lying ‘in a kind of fit’, literally prostrated by the unexpected blow to his pride and prospects.55
While Mrs Robinson cast herself in the role of tragic heroine, threatening madness and retreat into a nunnery, Branwell was genuinely driven to the edge of insanity.
Again, aptly summarizing his plight for the remaining two years of his life, he complained:
J. G. Lockhart, Walter Scott’s son-in-law and biographer,
Producing Poems had taught valuable lessons: poetry did not sell and it was not economic to pay for the publication of one’s own work:
Returning to the habits of their childhood, the sisters wrote their books in close collaboration, reading passages aloud to each other and discussing the handling of their plots and their characters as they walked round and round the dining-room table each evening.
As she later claimed in a preface to the work, ‘in many a crude effort destroyed almost as soon as composed I had got over any such taste as I might once have had for the ornamented and redundant in
composition – and had come to prefer what was plain and homely’.
This determination to put Angria behind her and write about the real and the ordinary was somewhat marred in the execution.
In the saintly Helen Burns, too, she drew from life, taking as a model her eldest sister, Maria.
the adult’s equally spirited declaration of her own self-worth:
in Branwell she had an object lesson of her own fate had she given in to her inclinations.
By November he was so far recovered that Arthur Bell Nicholls was able to return home to Ireland for a well-earned three-week holiday, leaving Patrick to perform all
Ellen Nussey’s confidences about her brother George.
Henry Nussey’s pragmatic offer of marriage provided the model for St John Rivers’ proposal, from which Jane was only saved by the magical intervention, in the truest tradition of Charlotte’s Angrian tales, of Rochester’s spirit calling aloud to hers across the miles that separated them.
a ‘lamentable instance of what a man becomes who trusts for happiness in earthly things alone’,
Branwell’s habit of mixing verse and sketches was becoming more pronounced as he slipped further into alcoholic excess.
for at 28 I am a thouroghly old man – mentally and bodily – Far more so indeed than I am willing to express …
a farewell tea in Bradford for Dr Scoresby, whose ill health had compelled him to resign. The new vicar, John Burnett,
Oxenhope became a separate parish in its own right,
Birmingham, where they were to live at Great Barr Hall with Sir Edward Scott, a distant relative, who was soon to be Mrs Robinson’s second husband.
The final removal of any hopes Branwell had cherished concerning Mrs Robinson absolutely prostrated him. He sought comfort in the oblivion of drink and abandoned all serious attempts at writing.
Thomas Cautley Newby, the publisher,
the small publishing house of Smith, Elder & Co. of 65, Cornhill, London.
William Smith Williams, the firm’s reader, had recognized the ‘great literary power’
of The Professor, but did not believe it would sell.
When William Smith Williams, who was a more clear-headed judge of literary matters, confessed that he had sat up half the night to finish the manuscript, George Smith was intrigued and, at Williams’ behest, read it for himself.
The story quickly took me captive.
George Smith always gave the impression that his firm had instantly recognized the novel’s potential and accepted it with unqualified enthusiasm.
Though Charlotte remained loyal to Smith, Elder & Co. because the firm had been the first to recognize her talent, the issue of her remuneration was always to be a touchy subject.
Poor Mr Nicholls, who was so uninteresting even to the normally kind and gentle Anne, attracted nothing but disapproval from Charlotte.
his narrowness of mind always strikes me chiefly – I fear he is indebted to your imagination for his hidden treasures.’
