Tea at Trianon: Emily Brontë Reappraised

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, November 21, 2018

Emily Brontë Reappraised

From Historia:

Emily, the elusive Brontë sister, is often portrayed as antisocial, difficult, perhaps even slightly unhinged. Two centuries of Brontë scholarship have created an inscrutable image of this singular woman; Emily as enigma has become integral to Brontë myth making. Academic Claire O’Callaghan agrees. “We have next to nothing from Emily about Emily – other than her poetry and only novel,” she says. “We have a void of sorts that readers and fans of the family rightly want to fill; we all want to know Emily better because we can’t fully know her.”

In Emily Brontë Reappraised, O’Callaghan sets out to explore our impressions of the author from a 21^st century perspective. “There were two drivers behind the book,” she tells me. “The first was the space opened up by Sophie Franklin’s companion title on Charlotte, that aimed to look back at her life and work 200 years after her birth, and I was inspired to do the same with Emily. Secondly, I wanted to pick up some of the pioneering work done by Lucasta Miller in The Brontë Myth and show that a lot of what we think about Emily isn’t wholly true – and what we do know has been distorted again and again. Emily is, like Charlotte, one of the most loved authors of all time, and yet she’s also presented as a really strange woman – an idea that’s based on falsehoods, myths, and a set of second hand Chinese whispers. So the book was a chance to revisit that territory and work through some of those issues.”

It’s a timely release from Manchester based independent publisher, Saraband. Emily’s bicentenary, coming mid-way through five years of celebrations at the Brontë Parsonage Museum, has seen a spike of renewed interest in all things Brontë; a modern, alternative view – as this book is billed – is most welcome. O’Callaghan clearly knows her stuff, but this is not a heavy scholarly work revisiting primary sources, rather a reassessment of the output of those who have gone before. It leans on established Brontë scholars, such as Juliet Barker, Lucasta Miller and John Sutherland, as well as Emily’s literary output.

It’s particularly strong on examining how our impressions of Emily have depended on hearsay, filtered first by her sister, Charlotte, and then Elizabeth Gaskell, who never met Emily, but presented a strongly fictionalised version of her in The Life of Charlotte Bronte. It’s clear that Charlotte’s decisions and actions after Emily’s death, however well meant, still colour our view. Another stand out chapter examines onscreen representations of Emily and her work. I nodded in agreement at O’Callaghan’s assessment of Sally Wainwright’s To Walk Invisible, to my mind the most convincing and rounded portrayal of the Brontë family to date. The book has a lot in common with that work, and might be criticised for placing 21^st century contexts on Victorian woman, but this is exactly what O’Callaghan sets out to do. Assertions that, had Emily been alive today, she would have been a passionate environmental and animal rights activist, and that she was indeed a staunch feminist, might ruffle a few feathers, but O’Callaghan makes it very clear that this is conjecture, even while backing up her convincing argument.

I particularly enjoyed the final chapter, which aims to dispel ‘fake news’ stories about Emily. Presented in a numbered list that just begs for column inches, O’Callaghan presents a consumer friendly summation of the evidence and, in ambiguous cases, takes sides – it’s lighthearted but not irreverent. (Read more.)