Halloween – when the veil between this world and that of the departed is said to be thin and contact with the after-life easier. Haworth and the Bronte Sisters are no strangers to ghosts and other spooky goings on, so here are my top Seven spooky Bronte bits and pieces. Enjoy – if you dare!
Chilling Charlotte…. In her novel Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte writes of ghostly goings on, when young Jane is locked in the Crimson Room and sees the ghost of her uncle.
Teriffying Taby. According to the The Bronte Parsonage Blog, the ghost of Taby Ackroyd, the Brontes faithful housekeeper, is said to haunt the cottage in which she spent the last years of her life. A little, old grey haired lady has been sighted several times and the door latch, is often heard moving, only to find nobody there when the door is opened.
Vile Villette, the novel written by Charlotte Bronte features a teriffying ghostly nun. ‘A sudden bell rang in the house—the prayer-bell. Instantly into our alley there came, out of the berceau, an apparition, all black and white. With a sort of angry rush—close, close past our faces—swept swiftly the very NUN herself! Never had I seen her so clearly. She looked tall of stature, and fierce of gesture.’
Ghastly graveyards… The Bronte Parsonage overlooks the Haworth graveyard and this grim aspect influenced the Bronte’s writing – you can read more in Juliet Barker’s incredible book. Sat at their table, looking out over the graveyard, and surrounded by death (the sisters had lost their mother and Three siblings) they would also have witnessed daily funerals of friends and aquiantences, the ideas of ghosts and spirits must have come to mind with great ease and may have even brought a little comfort.
Morose Moors… The moors around Haworth are home to many ghost and spirits. The ‘willow-the-wisp’ has been seen on the moors for centuaries and the legend of the Black Dog; the ‘Barguest’ that haunted, nearby Trollers Gill, has been passed down for many genreations.
Putrid Pubs…. The Black Bull in Haworth is always worth a visit (and it’s not at all putrid – it’s actually very cosy and welcoming!) The Black Bull was the favourite pub of Branwell Bronte and where he spent much of his time. It is supposed to be haunted by a number of different ghosts, including the old landlord from Branwell’s time, a maid, muttering voices, moving objects, fliting spirits and even Branwell himself!
I hope you’ve enjoyed my little horrible Halloween Bronte tour…..
Happy Halloween and may all your ghosts be kindly!
Sarah x
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I really love reading the Bronte Sisters works and about their lives, interests, and inspirations and sharing my thoughts about that with you. So I wanted to share my favourite Bronte resources, so you can check them out too. They’re in no particular order and are all really great – perfect if you’re looking for in-depth detail or a quick puruse for a Bronte-based factoid!
1. Anne Bronte.org – A truely amazing website, that’s a must visit resource for any Bronte fan. The writer is both thoughtful and interesting and the site contains a vast wealth of information about all of the Brontes, their works and their lives. This is a go-to for all things Bronte!
2. Bronte Parsonage – An obivious one, but don’t miss it, as it has many lovely bits and pieces that will interest any fans of the Bronte sisters. Always up to date with the latest happenings at the Parsonage Museum.
4. The Brontes Book by Juliet Barker- The best Bronte SIsters book I’ve read. It is really thorough and well written, and contains a massive amount of detail. A must read if you’re a Bronte fan.
3. Hawoth Village.org – This is a lovely little local website that give a huge amaount of local information about Haworth Village, the home of the Bronte sisters.
5. To Walk Invisible – A fantastic BBC film depicting the lives of the Bronte sisters. At the time of writing it’s not on iplayer, so you’ll need to get yourself a DVD copy. It’s definately worth it, as I feel it gives a very good view of life in a Yorkshire town at that time and an excellent insight into their lives.
Finally, if you’re looking for a cool and unique Bronte Inspired gift, please come and check out our range of Bronte inspired gifts.
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Another of Charlotte’s miniature books has been returned to it’s home at the Bronte Parsonage and to celebrate, this wonderful event, I decided to focus on ‘Charlotte’s tiny books’.
The work of the Bronte sisters has had a massive impact on the world and is beloved by many. Looking back at them today, we understand what a winding path they all took towards being the famous authors that they were to become. They all travelled and taught, even tried to start a school and when finally Charlotte plucked up the courage to publish some of their work, Emily refused. Indeed the book of poetry, once published, was not an instant success – with only a few copies being sold. It’s clear, that very often and for a long time it was not at all obvious, that the huge and enduring literary success they acheived was to be their destination! However, a look at their early works shows us that they had a passion for literature well beyond the norm!
It was thanks to their ‘papa’ – Patrick Bronte that all the Bronte children were taught to read and write. He encouraged them to read many things (including some that would have been considered inappropriate for young girls, at the time). He felt it was vital for them to be well read and well informed young people, especially the girls who would need to go out into the world and make their own way and earn their own livings.
It’s but a small step from reading to writing and before long Branwell, Charlotte, Emily and Anne had all taken it. As children and young people they wrote stories, plays, poems and more, some of which survives today. The most beguiling of the ‘Bronte Juvenilia ‘ as their childhood efforts are collectively known, are the ‘tiny books’ or ‘miniature manuscripts’. The earliest is a joint effort by Branwell and Charlotte and dates to 1829 and is their version of the popular periodical Blackwoods Magazine. We don’t know how many they produced.There are several by Charlotte that are held by the British Library and the Bronte Parsonage and to my reckoning the are now 11 that we know of. Earlier this year one popped up at auction in New York and thanks to the help of the Friends of the National Libraries (FNL), a UK charity devoted to saving the nation’s written and printed heritage, it was aquired by the Bronte Parsonage and I cann’t wait to go and visit it!
Some of Charlotte Bronte’s tiny books.
These incredible tiny books are handmade, written and illustrated, mostly by Charlotte. They measure around 4 inches / 10 cm tall and the writing is so tiny, that most adults struggle to read it! They’re clearly a labour of love and contain articles, adverts, poems and stories that the Bronte children created, around a set of toy soldiers that Patrick had given Branwell for his birthday when he was 9 years old. Over the next few years the Bronte children created characters and a whole intricate world for the toy soldiers and these feature in the tiny books. It’s believed that some of the tiny books were gifts between the siblings and also for the soldiers and they are indeed the gift that keeps giving!
Thank you for reading & have a great week!
Sarah X
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Gone to the heather – As we gear back up to our ‘new normal’ things are really busy right now, so as the jobs stack up and the ‘to-do list’ lengthens I’m trying to remember to incorporate Emily Bronte’s fantastic habit into my own daily routine and you should too!
When all the duties and chores got a bit much, she’d take herself off to the place she loved best – the moors to re-charge herself and seek inspiration. She’d ‘gone to the heather’. Here’s Charlotte’s quote about Emily’s habit, it explains, beautifully, just why it was so important to Emily and shows us how important it is to us today.
So get out there and go to the heather – wherever yours is….
“My sister Emily loved the moors. Flowers brighter than the rose bloomed in the blackest of the heath for her; out of a sullen hollow in a livid hillside her mind could make an Eden. She found in the bleak solitude many and dear delights; and not the least and best-loved was – liberty.”
It’s Anne’s 200th birthday this year and to celebrate her and her life I wanted to look a little closer at her and how we view her.
The portrayal and our understanding of the Bronte Sisters has had many incarnations and has changed dramatically over the years. It’s always interesting to look at this, as it reveals other facets of their complex personalities, offering us another tantalising glimpse of who they really were.
The sisters have been variously portrayed as the scourge of decent society, the lonely gentle geniuses, victims of a hard, cruel and isolated environment. There are so many words that have been used to describe them and it’s all too easy to accept a one-dimensional view of them. They are long gone and as we view them through the lens of our current 21st century view-point we can easily mistake our contemporary impressions and influences that colour our view of them, for the actuality of their existence and who they were. This is especially true of Anne, we know relatively little of her and she’s often been portrayed as the quiet, weak sister.
She was born in Thornton West Yorkshire on 17th January 1820, the youngest of the Bronte children. Within a year the family had de-camped from Thornton to Haworth where Anne’s dad Patrick had been offered a parish to watch over and reasonable sized home for his growing family. Within a few months of arriving in Haworth, Maria Bronte; Anne’s mum had died, leaving Patrick to raise their six children alone.
Anne has often been described as gentle and sometimes referred to as weak, however, I really feel that she was so much more that this and her perceived weakness comes, in part, from her position as the youngest of the family. I also feel that looking at the events of her life and her writing she was really very strong and self-sufficient.
It’s documented that Anne was the only Bronte sibling that had no memory of their mother and so from the very start, that fact set her apart from the rest of her sisters and brother. When Patrick Bronte finally decided to send his daughters to school, it was decided the Anne was still too young to go, so she stayed at home, alone in a house full of adults.
Only to be re-joined by her two eldest sisters when they returned home from school to die of Consumption, which they did in rapid succession. One can only imagine how traumatic these events must have been for young Anne and how self-reliant she must have had to be, whilst all attention was focused on her two dying sisters. We know that Helen Burns in Charlotte’s Jane Eyre was based on their eldest sister Maria and it is to be wondered if the Helen’s death scene described in Charlotte’s Jane Eyre was a result of Anne’s description of their sister’s deaths. A few days later her next two sisters Charlotte and Emily returned home, as the school closed due to the outbrake of Consumption. Anne must have lived in fear that they too would die. They did not succumb to Consumption, during childhood, but these events must have given Anne nerves of steel and a very solid sense of self-reliance.
It is very clear from the writing of the Bronte Sisters that the idea of becoming a governess was a terrible nightmare to them, but it was Anne who went and found herself a position as a governess to the Ingams at Blake house. Her letters show that it was indeed a nightmare; she was homesick and felt out of place and it is understood that several episodes in Jane Eyre; where John Reed throws a book at Jane and when the Ingrams discuss how they mistreated their governesses came from Anne’s actual experiences as a governess that she related to Charlotte. Despite the horrors, and the loss of her post at Blake House, she endured and was determined to help support her family financially. She found another post at Thorpe Green Hall, staying for over 5 years – refusing to give up and return home.
She even managed to get a place for her brother Branwell, who had a very sketchy professional history. This was no mean feat for a lowly governess and she was clearly aware that bringing her brother into her place of work, was a risk, yet she bravely stepped up.
Anne’s worries regarding her brother’s behaviour were well founded, but she kept going, as a governess, through the subsequent scandal as Branwell & Mrs Robinson proceeded to have an affair. She was revolted by their behaviour and had to put up with the humiliation of household servants, locals and friends gossiping, and she did. She only left her position when the Mr Robinson dismissed her and Branwell, after he found out about the affair. Throughout, she had shown remarkable strength of purpose and resilience – it wasn’t the first time and it wouldn’t be the last.
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Anne wrote her novel Agnes Grey, a largely autobiorgaphical account of the life of a governesss. She also wrote poems on the subject of love and loss which are ascribed to her (as believed unrequited) feeling for Willie Weightman, her father’s curate. Willie died of Cholera and her writing shows that Anne felt his loss deeply, but again her strength of character is evident as she kept to her purpose and plans regardless of suffering and how hard she found it.
In the following years Branwell met with further disappointments in his professional and love lives and he fell into alcoholism and Laudanum addiction. As his physical and mental health declined, Anne stoically nursed him, watching him waste away as he purged and ranted – not a task for the faint hearted.
After the loss of Branwell, Anne wrote her novel: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, It’s the story of Helen Graham, abused by her alcoholic husband, Arthur Huntingdon, she runs away. She meets Gilbert Markham and falls in love with him, but they are unable to marry. Anne’s depiction of Arthur’s decline was based on Branwell’s death. Anne’s story speaks clearly of the unfairness faced by abused wives, it is an unflinching depiction of alcoholism, she refused to romanticise what happened to her brother. Helen Graham is a clear-thinking, strong woman and Anne creates a narrative about the choices that the men in her story faced and how they handled them, which even today feels relevant – none of her sister’s Byronic heroes for Anne, just real men with real demons and choices.
Despite bravely facing more loss and heart-ache when Emily died shortly after, Anne also had great joy in her love of the seaside. Right until the very end of her short life, Anne retained her strength of character. As her health declined, Anne decided that she wanted to spend some of her little time left at the Yorkshire Coast. Charlotte and her farther both felt that Anne was too weak to travel and along with Ellen Nussey tried to pursued her that her plan was a bad one, but they failed. Anne, strong and independent as ever, carried her point and with Charlotte to help her, she travelled to her beloved Scarborough, where she died a few days later. Again showing her brave spirit, she remained unafraid of death to the end.
I feel that when we look at Anne, we have to accept that she was a multi-facetted, complex individual and far more so that then labels that have been applied to her would leads us to believe. She was gentle and quiet, but she was also clear-sighted, brave, persuasive, smart, resilient and really, really, strong.
It remains only to say that; Anne was an amazing woman and she left an incredidble legacy. The best way to honour her and her birthday is to read her wonderful writing, so let’s do just that!
Gone to the heather 