#anne Brontë

[ivynightshade]

fatima aamer bilal, from moony moonless sky’s ‘i am your mould, but the shape of you is true absence, leaving me purposeless.’

[text id: and is this not treason? / my soul belongs far more to you than it does to me.]

[hairtusk]

The bloodstained handkerchief belonging to Anne Brontë, used in the weeks leading up to her death from tuberculosis in May 1849

[flowerytale]

Power Of Love, by Anne Brontë

[gwydpolls]

Lucian's Library 2

Feel free to suggest never written books you wish you could read.

[rayatii]

A few years ago, I had the idea of making one of those movies about a girl who falls in love with some asshole “bad boy” with the idea that she can “fix him” with her good influence, but it’s portrayed in a realistic way, and instead of improving, he becomes more and more abusive, until she has to escape.

A couple of days ago, I started reading The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and finished it yesterday… and I realized that Anne Brontë already beat me to it 177 years ago.

[petaltexturedskies]

Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

[perfectquote]

He who dares not grasp the thorn should never crave the rose.

Anne Brontë, The Narrow Way

[nymphpens]

[thehopefulquotes]

He who dares not grasp the thorn should never crave the rose.

Anne Brontë, The Narrow Way

[literarylumin]

I'll walk where my own nature would be leading: it vexes me to choose another guide.

- Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

[yvain]

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall opens with Gilbert Markham telling the story of his meeting Helen who has just moved into his neighborhood after leaving her husband. A fugitive from the law, she lives under an assumed name and tries to avoid the society of her immediate neighbors—Markham and his cohorts. Seen through the lens of Gilbert’s desire, Helen’s character emerges as the archetypal misanthropic stranger, inhabiting a wild and romantic Gothic mansion, her past replete with dark secrets. Brontë has done something astonishingly new: she has created a plausible female Byronic hero, coveted for her very “unfeminine” qualities: inquietude, difficulty, and distance. She is the “mysterious lady” who is so reserved that, “they tried all they could to find out who she was, and where she came from, and all about her, but [no one] ... could manage to elicit a single satisfactory answer ... or throw the faintest ray of light upon her history, circumstances, or connections. Moreover, she was barely civil to them .…” Anne revises Charlotte's Jane Eyre and Emily's Wuthering Heights: it is not Rochester who rules this Thornfield Hall nor is it Heathcliff who lurks about Wuthering Heights seeing ghosts. This time, the woman takes the role of the stormy and seductive artist who charms and mesmerizes the man. Wildfell Hall is a dilapidated, storied mansion, like so many other homes of Gothic literature; it is “cold and gloomy... with its thick stone mullion and little latticed panes, its time-eaten air-holes, and its too lonely, too unsheltered situation” surrounded by trees “half blighted with storms, and looking as stern and gloomy as the hall itself” which “harmonized well with the ghostly legend and dark traditions our old nurse had told us respecting the haunted hall and its departed occupants.” Helen haunts these bleak rooms, and Gilbert longs to redeem her from her dark past and bring her back into the fold, just as Jane yearns to be Rochester's salvation, his earthly paradise.

Deborah Lutz, introduction to The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë

[bethanydelleman]

I wonder if part of the reason a lot of people end up hating Gilbert Markham in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is that he's just so honest in his recounting of the past. He admits to being petty, occasionally cruel, and stupid. He doesn't have a very good reason to hit Lawrence; he was overcome with emotion. He doesn't always respect Helen's boundaries, he is occasionally mean to Eliza, he isn't always the best son, and sometimes he just openly admits that he doesn't know why he did something stupid and/or mean.

Comparing him to another narrator, like say Nick Carraway from The Great Gatsby, you can see a stark difference. Nick is detached from the narrative and he shows us so very little of himself. Everyone else's faults are on full display, but he remains faultless to the point of almost having no personality.

Another occasionally hated narrator, Nelly Dean of Wuthering Heights, is perhaps not quite so honest, but she also shows us her faults and people get mad about them even though they are so human. Of course she didn't like Heathcliff at first, she was a teenager and he was a stranger. Of course she thought Catherine was faking illness at first, but she regrets it later. Her faults are so relatable and human.

Maybe what we really don't like is a mirror of our own faults. We want to be Nick Carraway, we want to sit above the rabble and hand down our judgments. God forbid we are honest with ourselves.

[thoughtkick]

He who dares not grasp the thorn should never crave the rose.

Anne Brontë, The Narrow Way

[burningvelvet]

In a letter to W. S. Williams (14 August 1848), Charlotte Brontë compares Jane Eyre’s Rochester to the Byronic heroes of her sisters’ novels, Heathcliff from Emily’s Wuthering Heights and Huntingdon from Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall:

“You say Mr. Huntingdon reminds you of Mr. Rochester. Does he? Yet there is no likeness between the two; the foundation of each character is entirely different. Huntingdon is a specimen of the naturally selfish, sensual, superficial man, whose one merit of a joyous temperament only avails him while he is young and healthy, whose best days are his earliest, who never profits by experience, who is sure to grow worse the older he grows.

Mr. Rochester has a thoughtful nature and a very feeling heart; he is neither selfish nor self-indulgent; he is ill-educated, misguided; errs, when he does err, through rashness and inexperience: he lives for a time as too many other men live, but being radically better than most men, he does not like that degraded life, and is never happy in it. He is taught the severe lessons of experience and has sense to learn wisdom from them. Years improve him; the effervescence of youth foamed away, what is really good in him still remains. His nature is like wine of a good vintage, time cannot sour, but only mellows him. Such at least was the character I meant to portray.

Heathcliffe, again, of Wuthering Heights is quite another creation. He exemplifies the effects which a life of continued injustice and hard usage may produce on a naturally perverse, vindictive, and inexorable disposition. Carefully trained and kindly treated, the black gipsy-cub might possibly have been reared into a human being, but tyranny and ignorance made of him a mere demon. The worst of it is, some of his spirit seems breathed through the whole narrative in which he figures: it haunts every moor and glen, and beckons in every fir-tree of the Heights.”

Source: The Brontës Life and Letters (Clement King Shorter, 2013)

[the-fairy-thing]

[starkidobsessedgiantgremlin]

this is how Poe party goes right