#different from some poets who describe nature in a too idealized way too clean too sanitized

[cntarella]

[Transcription: If I had known, would I have still made mistake/ after mistake until I had only the trunk of me/ left, stripped and nearly bare of leaves?/ If I had known, the truth is, I would have kneeled/ and said, Sooner, come to me sooner.]

"Against Nostalgia" by Ada Limón from The Hurting Kind (Milkweed Editions, 2022)

[eyreguide]

A recap of the Brontë2020 Virtual Conference

On Friday the very first virtual Brontë conference was held and included a program of various talks and presentations by people knowledgeable on many different aspects of the Brontës. And reader, I had a wonderful time.  

This post is just a brief overview of the event, with some commentary on the different topics and comments that were discussed and that I found interesting. This conference was held as a way to help support the amazing Brontë Parsonage in Haworth as they are going through a difficult time with the impact of Covid-19. If you are able, please donate whatever you can to the Parsonage by visiting this site. Help them reach their goal!

I live in the United States so I wasn’t able to attend all the panels - I decided to make my first one the discussion with Sandy Welch (screenwriter of the 2006 Jane Eyre adaptation) which was 5 am my time! I was so excited to hear what Sandy had to say about writing Jane Eyre that I was wide awake by the time her panel started.

Special Guest: Sandy Welch

First off, I didn’t realize Welch had also written the screenplay for North and South (one of my absolute favorite period dramas!) so I was pretty much in awe of her talent, even though the 2006 Jane Eyre isn’t exactly my favorite. If you read through my reviews of all the adaptations here. I have a few issues with the scenes after the failed wedding where Jane and Rochester are on her bed. And also I felt like the dialogue and added scenes did not always feel true to the novel. But Welch talked about her approach to adapting Jane Eyre and I agreed with all of her comments. Jane is a modern woman in that she is making her own way in the world, and that her thoughts and prose in the book are direct and clear to the reader. And Welch was glad to give more time to the conversations between Jane and Rochester so that the humor and intelligence that connects them shines through. The emotions were allowed to develop and we can see how Rochester changes with Jane.  

There was some discussion about the character of Rochester and how the audience needs to see that they deserve each other and are equals. So you see more of Rochester’s vulnerabilities and emotions in this adaptation. It’s important to remember too that Charlotte made Bertha irredeemable so that Rochester could not make his situation better, but he tried his best to take care of her.  

A question from the audience did bring up that scene where Jane must say goodbye to Rochester and they end up on her bed - I was very keen to know what Welch would say. She acknowledged that it was a bold choice, but there is that sensuality in the book, and Rochester wants to “impress” himself on Jane, and throughout the novel, Jane is very passionate. It seemed natural to Welch to have that shown on screen. It’s a bit of artistic license that still doesn’t sit easily with me, but I am glad to know the thought process was grounded in trying to take a realistic approach to how that scene would develop.

Another question also asked about the addition of the twins and the doubles theme in the adaptation. Welch included that to give Jane an opportunity to participate in the conversation around her since she is intelligent and able to hold her own. And to show that not all of the people in Rochester’s party are horrible. It also gives a little foreshadowing to the call across the moors between Jane and Rochester near the end.

The last topic I want to mention is when someone asked what the difference was between approaching Margaret Hale’s character (from North and South) and Jane Eyre. Welch worked to make Margaret more sympathetic and Thornton a little less so, so that they were equals in the story - much like Jane and Rochester already are.

A Day in the Life of the Parsonage

I was very excited about this next panel, where Ann Dindsdale, the collections manager of the Parsonage, and Rebecca Yorke, the communications manager, talk about what it is like to manage the Parsonage day to day. It made me long to be able to work there myself! Just think how lovely it would be to be up early in the morning at the house, preparing for the visitors that day.

On my last visit to the Parsonage, I was able to take the VIP tour (which I talked about here) and I have to say seeing a glimpse of the place behind the scenes and led by a knowledgeable docent was amazing. They do wonderful work there!

The two talked about the work that goes into maintaining the house - especially during the month-long closure in January where they clean every book and check every piece of furniture! When asked how they decide what to display, Ann said she puts out “what she likes” (lucky!) but it was also good to rotate everything regularly.  

The Parsonage feels it is important for guests to “engage with the Parsonage” - a wonderful way to describe how the guests are made to feel when they visit - as a part of the experience. And with social distancing right now due to the pandemic, visiting the Parsonage couldn’t be a more personal and intimate experience. I so wish I could make the trip across the pond right now and visit!

Author Roundtable: The Brontës, the 21st Century and Us

This was a fascinating panel with talented authors. I’ve read some of their books so I’ll link to my review of their work when possible. The panel was moderated by Rowan Coleman (The Vanished Bride) and included Finola Austin (Brontës’ Mistress), Syrie James (The Secret Diaries of Charlotte Brontë), Sarah Shoemaker (Mr. Rochester), Julie Cohen (Spirited), Lucy Powrie (The Paper Hearts Society) and Nikita Gil (a well-known poet, although unfortunately I am unfamiliar with her work.  

The conversation was dense and thought-provoking. The authors touched on many topics and ideas beginning with how each author felt about the Brontës’ work. Their books are about identity and who we are as people - we can live by their ideals, said Lucy. Sarah said that women are still not equal to men in how they are treated today and she loves how Jane does not hesitate to tell Rochester that she does not think him handsome - it’s an unconventional answer, the unexpected one, and it shows how they are opening up to each other and on their way to being equals. Syrie is fascinated by the almost mythical story they lived in their little place in the world. And how you can feel their rage against patriarchal societies in their work. Nikita pointed out that patriarchy erases the role of women, but the Brontës have endured in spite of that.

In their approach to writing stories that revolve around the Brontës and their work, they try to be as reverential as possible and stick to the facts because so much of their lives are known, and their stories can be very autobiographical.  

Julie talked about how we read the Brontës to find out about ourselves. With Villette especially there is a sense with Lucy Snowe that she is hiding a part of herself from the reader and people can relate to that.

The talk ended with thoughts on publishing bias - how women may not need to publish under pseudonyms today, but there is still a bias against what a woman writes and against race, sexuality, and many other things. We as readers need to show that we are interested in reading about a variety of lives and experiences.

In Conversation with Adam Nagaitis

Adam Nagaitis played Branwell Brontë in the film To Walk Invisible and talked with the organizers about his role. They opened by asking him trivia questions about Branwell to see how much he remembered from his research. Adam mentioned that he is still in touch with the actresses who played his sisters which I think is wonderful. They seem to all have gotten along very well.  

Adam read all the classic works on Branwell to prepare, but he also dived into documentaries on alcoholism and it’s gruesome realities to understand Branwell better. Branwell wasn’t mature enough to deal with the vicissitudes in his life - with his relationship with Lydia he was excessive and consumed. He thought that turned her off from him, and that started a cycle where he blamed himself for the failed relationship and his failures in his art.  

Because he was always surrounded by the people who knew him best, he was always reminded of his failure. Adam’s approach was very sympathetic to Branwell and tried to understand him mentally. Adam also talked about how he felt Branwell was never free as an artist. He always needed to work for the family or money but he could have been a brilliant newspaper satirist - something that might have been more along with his interests since he made wonderful biting cartoons.

In Conversation with Sally Wainwright

The last panel of the conference was a talk with Sally Wainwright - the writer and director of the superb Brontë biopic To Walk Invisible. Sally was approached to write this back in 2010 but she didn’t have time until 2016 which coincided with Charlotte’s bicentenary. It was a tough shoot for her as she felt she didn’t get all the shots she wanted, but the set was fantastic. They recreated the Parsonage as accurately as they could, resulting in a place that is bleaker and more isolated than the actual Parsonage today.  

Sally also mentioned something that I found interesting - that she felt like the “Victorian” speak that people use today in period dramas probably didn’t really exist. We have constructed people in our period drama adaptations to speak in a particular way. And that the inclusion of curse words in her program showed that the characters were very like us - of course Branwell would curse and say the F-word.  

Her approach to adapting the story was always to show it as realistically as possible and she wanted to show how the family was an interdependent team. For people who felt that Branwell was featured too much in the story - it’s important to remember that he was the leader of their gang as children and that when they were older, living with an addict affected their work as can be seen in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Wuthering Heights.  

And speaking of Tenant of Wildfell Hall, apparently, Sally is working on a screenplay for the story, although it is on the backburner at the moment. She is having a hard time empathizing with Helen - especially because it is difficult today to empathize with a character who behaves in a certain way solely because of their religious beliefs. I do hope we get to see her adaptation of Anne’s work someday soon though!

[dwellordream]

“Middle-class girls who no longer spent their days as their mothers’ apprentices in domestic maintenance and manufacture were not left to their own devices. Just as their mothers’ responsibilities reoriented from home industries to the rearing of children, girls’ own primary goals shifted from the manufacture of cloth and the preserving of foodstuffs to the culturing of themselves. Self-culture was a broad-based project in the nineteenth century which was central to the emergence of a middle class. 

In the increasingly fluid and unpredictable climate that accompanied the emergence of a market economy, young men and women were urged to form regular habits of restraint and self-control as their best protection against future disasters. A self-regulating man could chart an even course for his family; a self-cultured and refined woman could safeguard her family’s standing whatever economic circumstances should befall her. Self-culture was especially critical for girls for whom freedom from domestic labor left a good bit of free time during their impressionable years. 

The advice writer William Thayer, who at midcentury had worried that for some girls the result might be ‘‘a study in how to kill time,’’ offered an alternative: ‘‘What an opportunity for mental culture and religious improvement!’’ Thayer’s proposed means to these ends was significant. He proposed that girls accomplish their goals through reading, ideally a hundred pages a day. The elevation of reading to a central and defining aspect of bourgeois girls’ lives helped to define a specifically Victorian adolescence. 

Many girls followed Thayer’s advice and read for several hours a day, often supplementing their reading with the writing of letters or the keeping of a journal and diary. Reading and writing, the twin activities of literacy, became the vehicles to self-culture and the central activities of many privileged Victorian girls’ lives. They reinforced each other abundantly, as girls read and then wrote about what they read—time profitably filled twice over. 

Although Victorians came to debate the influence of various kinds of sensational reading material and the health of the practice of writing gushing prose, the activities of literacy had much to recommend them to adults over other occupations. As pastimes which took place in the imagination, they had a provisional quality which allowed for the displacement of desires for drama. In the best of circumstances, the cautionary tales of Victorian moralists and even the passionate dramas of romance would be processed through a girl’s writing and help her to grow into an understanding woman of character, restraint, and refinement. 

Many middle-class girls read voraciously—their reading often limited only by supply. The diaries and journals they left contain lists of books read over the course of a year and descriptions of time spent in reading over the course of a day. The advice writer Heloise Hersey estimated in 1901 that in the years between age twelve and twenty-one, ‘‘the average young gentlewoman reads a novel more than an hour a day. Thus she gives one and one-third years of solid working days to this occupation.’’ 

It was common for reading, scattered through the day, often accompanied by writing, to be the single most time-consuming activity mentioned in girls’ diaries. One girl reported reading in four different books through the course of a day, and sometimes reading straight through (over the course of several days) such massive volumes as George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, and Dickens’s Oliver Twist. Another noted that on July 14, 1864, ‘‘I believe that I have not read a bit today—such a singular thing that I must record it.’’

Girls read by the window, in the hammock, on the horsecars, as well as in the parlor. Not all of girls’ reading was for the same purpose, of course. Some of it was dutiful and dull; some of it was romantic and dangerous; some of it was inspirational. But it is clear that in comparison both with the eighteenth and the late twentieth centuries, nineteenth-century Victorian girls of a certain class came to spend much of their lives—and perhaps also do much of their living—on and through the written word. 

The dominance of the Victorian culture of reading and writing was sufficient that even girls who had other substantial chores often used their curtailed discretionary time engaged in literacy. Thus Hannah Davis, who at the age of twelve in 1851 appeared to be living out as ‘‘help’’ in Ohio, reported one day’s activity: ‘‘I got up eat my breakfast washed the dishes and read till noon then washed the dishes after dinner and read till supper eat supper washed the dishes and went to read a while then Milton Elvira Sarah and me told some tales and went to bed.’’ 

Of course, we know about these reading regimens only because they were accompanied by writing regimens. Like reading, writing was a plastic medium which filled various needs and purposes. As witnessed by numerous late Victorian portraits, girls frequently spent hours at desks, composing poetry, writing letters, pasting scrapbooks, keeping diaries or journals. The youth magazine St. Nicholas received a poem from one girl not yet ten and cautioned her, ‘‘Don’t write verses yet, cleverly as you do them for one of your age. There is time enough for that’’—time which would come when she reached her teens. 

This time came not only for girls in the city, who could not ‘‘frolic’’ in the open air, as the little poet was advised to, but for rural girls as well. Like Mark Twain’s Emmeline Grangerford, who lived on the banks of the Mississippi and wrote mournful poetry that she kept in a scrapbook, actual girls from the hinterlands, too, kept diaries and wrote poetry, and intermingled their descriptions of household chores with locks of hair, autograph albums, and florid poetry. 

Writing was sometimes a solitary act, as we envision it today, but it often had an important social component. Girls formed clubs to write stories together, wrote poetry for each other, and often described writing their diaries together. Writing was not simply an activity for moments of solitude and silence, but one which compelled attention even among friends and in company. This ‘‘crescendo of verbal activity’’—a fascination with both the power and the possibilities of literacy—played a variety of roles for girls in the process of becoming women.

In particular, girls’ writing was an arena of contest between parents and daughters. Girls came to use their writing, especially their writing of diaries, not as an escape from the Victorian family, but as a way of discovering self within it. Girls wrote in a variety of genres and hands, often composing notes and letters to friends within the same city. They were particularly encouraged to occupy themselves by keeping accounts of their lives in the form of diaries. Diaries filled a variety of functions for the girl diarist. 

Arising from an empiricist desire to record events accurately, diaries served to store a range of information, from financial accounts to observations about the wind and the weather. Private writing had religious roots as well, in the spiritual autobiography or conversion narrative of earlier days. Parents encouraged diary writing for their daughters as a means of spiritual reflection and to promote good character and virtue. Parents had always encouraged virtuous conduct among their offspring, of course, but in eighteenth-century New England, sustained good behavior was secondary to a conversion experience as the mark of a good Christian. 

Unlike tales of conversion, however, which recounted the one-time odyssey of the soul to God, the nineteenth-century diary made religious virtue a daily affair to be demonstrated through repeated good deeds and regular habits. With the disestablishment of the church and the dislocations occasioned by urbanization and industrialization, internalized character and steady habits assumed new importance. This function of the diary is captured by the term used by the modern theorist Michel Foucault to describe the ritual practice of the Catholic confessional: parents hoped that girls’ diaries would be ‘‘disciplines of the self,’’ which would encourage them in their pursuit of a reliable and steady goodness.

Parents and advice givers suggested journals for girls and boys, but the conventional wisdom was that girls took to writing and diary keeping more naturally. Agnes Repplier, who wrote a piece on ‘‘The Deathless Diary’’ for an 1897 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, repeated this common assumption: ‘‘Even little girls, as we have seen, have taken kindly enough to the daily task of translating themselves into pages of pen and ink; but little boys have been wont to consider this a lamentable waste of time. . . . As a rule, a lad commits himself to a diary, as to any other piece of work, only because it has been forced upon him by the voice of authority.’’ 

Repplier had good reason to know about the affinity between girlhood and writing. As a convent schoolgirl in the 1860s, she was one of a band of friends who were ‘‘addicted’’ to poetry and spent long hours copying it into blank books. There were structural reasons for the popularity of diary keeping among girls, as we have seen. The affluence of middle-class urban families marginalized daughters’ work within the household, yet the constraints of propriety at midcentury discouraged outside employment. Advisers encouraged girls to devote themselves to the development of order in all features of their lives. 

Once one’s room was cleaned, there was one’s own life to systematize. In 1878, when the children’s magazine St. Nicholas published a piece on keeping a journal, it gave as the first reason that it taught habits of order and regularity. Because the purpose of a journal was to train a girl in orderliness, clearly the entries themselves ought to be orderly and reflect an ordered life. Ideally, therefore, a diarist wrote daily, and often drafted her entries first before copying them into her diary. The diary was to be a credit to a girl’s accomplishments, and those included her penmanship. 

The diary entry, like the constitutional walk, was usually a ritualized part of the day; often the girl wrote it in the bedroom immediately before retiring. It was considered less stressful than schoolwork by both parents and their daughters. The St. Nicholas adviser, W. S. Jerome, suggested a routine recording of the weather, letters received or written, money paid or received, the day of beginning or leaving school, visits, books read, all set down in the correct order of time. The end result would be a useful family history. As he wrote, ‘‘Perhaps, some evening when the family are sitting and talking together, some one will ask, ‘What kind of weather did we have last winter?’ or ‘When was the picnic you were speaking of?’ and the journal is referred to.’’

Clearly, the journals Jerome had in mind were semipublic family records rather than personal confessions. They were also designed for self-grooming along prescribed lines rather than experimentation. Of course there was another, romantic use of the diary more familiar to modern Americans. Jean-Jacques Rousseau borrowed from Catholic ritual the title of his revolutionary Confessions, which were designed less to appease an angry God than to explore an individual life history. As such they represented less a ‘‘discipline of the self ’’ than a ‘‘technique of the self,’’ in Foucault’s terminology. 

Rousseau’s romantic exercise in self-construction provided one model for the nineteenth-century diary, but it was not one that most parents had in mind for their daughters. Although they often encouraged their daughters to use diaries for self-exploration, they remained ambivalent about girls’ rights to a self separate from family duties and responsibilities. The advice literature describing the practice of diary keeping rushed to close off romantic possibilities. It was better for a girl to have no diary at all than to have one which encouraged fantasy and ambition and distracted a girl from her domestic priorities.”

- Jane H. Hunter, “Writing and Self-Culture: The Contest Over the Meaning of Literacy.” in How Young Ladies Became Girls: The Victorian Origins of American Girlhood