The Green Dwarf, A Tale of the Perfect Tense - Charlotte Bronte

Guys, I seriously love this book. It's even better than the title suggests it could be and by gum does it suggest a lot.


It's a piece of Bronte juvenilia and it shows - everywhere the marks and illusions of the fictive worlds the Bronte siblings, and specifically in The Green Dwarf Branwell and Charlotte - created and inhabited in their youth.

It's kinda clunky in bits and the courtroom scene at the end is just odd, just as the resolution of the plot is definitely a bit deus ex machina-tastic, but the rawness of it is very engaging and I found myself entirely drawn in by the action and the romance-suspense-war narrative arc triumvirate. It was great to read this having already experienced the mature literary mastery of Charlotte Bronte in Jane Eyre, as in this so-early work I could really feel the full effect of her playfulness, charm and wit unencumbered by the writerly techniques and skills she developed later. I don't mean that to sound snotty or patronising - Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre are unquestionably brilliant and I love them hugely but there is definitely something very refreshing and not a little bit endearing in engaging with the cavalier and romantic world of a Bronte's comparatively happy childhood. Plus The Green Dwarf is hilarious and so ridiculous it's the least boring kind of Romanticism there is.

Not much more to say about this one except to recommend it highly if you want to experience a lot of Bronte in-jokes, some chivalry, some dastardliness, some mysterious cloaked strangers of varying heights, some stabbings, some smooching and some fun old times.

***^/***** (Three and a half stars)

The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Elizabeth Gaskell

Earlier in my Bronte summer, while immersed in the wonders of Kinokunuya I forced myself (in order to aid a future trip to Bronte country) to choose between a biography of Branwell Bronte by Daphne du Maurier and The Life of Charlotte Bronte by Elizabeth Gaskell. I eventually chose the latter - for once thinking more of the merits of the biographers than the sexy mysteriousness of their subjects. Being filled with recent memories of Richard Armitage from a recent TV version of Gaskell's North and South and remembering vaguely that Mrs Gaskell and Charlotte had been bffs - I decided that I could spend time with my literary crush now and come back for Daphne's Branwell on my next trip to Sydney.



Is it bad that I enjoyed reading about the Brontes more than some stuff by them? Elizabeth Gaskell is a hoot - she's funny and thoughtful and lets her imagination run away with her just enough to enrich but not undermine her meticulous research. The Life of Charlotte Bronte is well put together too - appropriating material about Charlotte and her family from letters that the subject wrote to her school friends, some publishers and a few other acquaintances as well as info from interviews Gaskell sought out with Charlotte's friends and father after her death.

The importance of The Life of Charlotte Bronte as a feminist piece - the first biography of a female novelist by another female novelist - is not lost on me, and I'm sure it accounts for the thoroughness of Gaskell's dedication to verisimilitude. The status of the female novelist was a major subject of concern for all the Bronte sisters, and for Gaskell herself throughout her life. Charlotte, Emily and Anne famously adopted the pen names of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell while trying to publish their work - fearing that their work would be discriminated against or just dismissed as women's writing. A letter from Charlotte to one of her reviewers argues this point so strongly and eloquently in Gaskell's book - it's actually the most passion we hear from the eldest surviving Bronte outside of her own novels.

My favourite part of Gaskell's biography is where she tries to put in a good word for Emily - whom Charlotte loved above all others, but who comes across in all accounts from outside the family as the prettiest and most obviously brilliant sister, but certainly high-maintenance and probably more than a bit anti-social. I've always been a fan of the tortured weirdo artist school of genius anyway so all that made me like Emily more and Gaskell is so polite that none of the worst stuff that we now know about the Brontes (well mostly Branwell) now appears beyond a vague, charming illusion in the book or is reconfigured as an illustration of the sisterly love and concern the Bronte girls had for one another, their father, and brother.

Gaskell's biography of Charlotte works so well because they were contemporaries, peers and friends. Gaskell understood the pressures and problems Charlotte and her sisters faced in regards to earning a living through teaching and writing but by virtue of her close friendship with Charlotte she also caught a rare glimpse of the personal lives and relationships among this very private and territorial family. As a biography The Life of Charlotte Bronte is fascinating as it contains so much of the authors own sensibilities and feelings while painting a vivid and very believable picture of the inner workings of Charlotte, mostly in her own words. Gaskell's account of the troublesome Branwell, emo Emily, saintly Anne and kind, down-to-earth Charlotte was the beginning of a mythmaking process that grew around the Brontes then and continues unabated and ever increasing in fantasy to this day - the book is practically fanfiction, and all the better for it! I think more biographers should feel such a reasonable but very real emotional stake in the reputation and appreciation of their subjects.

It's really good dudes - go read it!
****/***** (I'd have made it four and half stars out of five if I could but we don't have a key for that)

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall - Anne Bronte

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, published in 1848 was the second and last novel of Anne Bronte, the youngest of six Bronte children, and a unique text amongst the many splendid creations of that family. Anne's voice contrasts strongly with those of her more famous sisters - where they are romantic and gothic, Anne is ironic, realistic and radically Protestant.




It is undoubtedly a feminist novel - Anne's primary concerns are with the inequalities of marriage laws which rendered wives chattels of their husbands, and the problems she saw in the education of children at the time; here boys were trained in machismo and excess and girls in financial dependency and social helplessness. None of the men are particularly likable – in fact any of them named with ‘H’s are at the very least insensitive, selfish bores without any of them being so charmingly evil and engaging as Emily’s Heathcliff. Even the hero at endgame is a bit of a knob and his transformation into marriageable material seems only to be that he now internalises his whining insecurities instead of beating random men up and insulting plain women.

There are no haunted houses in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, only the depressing strains of dissolution and decay. Anne's novel echoes her beloved sister Emily's Wuthering Heights in it's repetition of 'H' names and unflinching examination of male depravity. Anne's heroine Helen also shares traits with Charlotte's titular character from Jane Eyre in her self-sufficiency, unshakeable moral compass and rebelliousness. Yet Helen doesn't receive Jane's reward of a happy, equal marriage with a brooding spunk-rat - to my mind Helen settles for a man who is merely the best of a quite a despicable bunch. Helen is more complicated than Jane but never more likeable. She lacks Jane's humour and intriguing mind. Anne's heroine makes mistakes, big ones, and pays for them - but does so with a air of sanctimony that gets on my nerves a whole little bit.

Though a criticism on the heightened gothic passions and sentiments - The Tenant of Wildfell Hall still appropriates many of the flavours of writing around at the time. Though unpopulated by ghosts, the landscape becomes a character in Anne's book too. Houses act like prisons, 'town' is a place of vice and depravity, people who work with the earth and animals are rooted in decency, and travelling through the countryside externalises the inner journey towards greater senses of goodness and selflessness. Like her sisters' most famous texts, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall comes to an imagined reader via readers and listeners in the narrative. Anne's novel is constructed through a framing narrative of the farmer Gilbert Markham's letters to a friend where he reveals his impressions of Helen and eventually encompasses the primary narrative which is told through Helen's journal. I think the form of the novel is the most auto-biographical marker because Anne, like so many good writers is preoccupied with the nature of truth in language and literary expression. Maybe this particular thought is a blog for another day though.

It's a good book. Anne Bronte was a very accomplished writer and her message and observations were keen and I'm sure, very pertinent at the time. My problem was that the biting social commentary could sound too much like preaching to my ears and that there was no redeeming feeling in the romantic storyline to engage me enough to muster sympathetic feelings about any of the main characters. You can't even love/hate them like in Wuthering Heights, so while appreciating the cool skill of the youngest Bronte's writing, I received it coldly too.

***/***** (3 of 5 stars)

Greetings from Haworth

Every summer I try and trick my brain into thinking it's on a holiday somewhere cold and lovely by making it read something pretty epic, preferably with snow in it. Two years ago I began meandering through Proust's In Search of Lost Time and failed after two and a half of the seven volumes. I spent the last summer with the Sherlock Holmes stories and novels which made things much more enjoyable, especially since I've retrospectively cast Robert Downey Jr as the title hero in my mind after seeing what a wonderful job he's doing currently in the film. The location for this summer's brain holiday had been near top of my favourite travel destinations for years and since meeting Isa it had become one of our most talked of landscapes. In October of 2009 I saw the comic below, made by one of my favourite artists Kate Beaton (who is fantastic and everyone should read her stuff all the time!), I was irrevocably sold on spending this summer with the Brontes.




I'm pretty sure there's a some fundamental divide between devotees of Jane Eyre and those of Wuthering Heights, not unlike the deep rifts between the Teams of Edward and Jacob in the Twilightverse, but certainly more civil. I fell in love with Jane and Rochester while a teenager but never warmed to Cathy and Heathcliff in the same way, probably because I found Emily Bronte's writing so emotionally charged and therefore a bit alienating for someone discovering Wuthering Heights, on the far side of a love affair with Austen. Also because I thought Cathy and Heathcliff were such arseholes and with their albeit unwitting association with Kate Bush really just made things worse between me and Emily's book. I really hope Isa will fight me on this.

So I knew and loved these two Bronte books before this summer, and had heard tons of different versions of the Bronte myths, seen BBC adaptations, Cliff Richard's musical version of Heights (amazing!) but had never done any investigating for myself beyond that. So I now have a large pile of books by my bed all by and about different Brontes and several more being flown in from the internet. So far I've read Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Elizabeth Gaskell's biography of Charlotte. Anne is definitely maligned as a writer - there's nothing shabby about The Tenant. It shows too that Anne doesn't lack the romantic passion of her elder sisters, it's just that she has an overriding drive to expose the problems with passion as well. Mrs Gaskell's book will get it's own blog post soon, it's extraordinary in it's own right.

So I just wanted to warn you guys about what you'll be hearing from me for some months to come and where my reading has taken me to. All Brontes all the time! Let's all meet up in Yorkshire!