Juliet R.V. Barker
Autore di Agincourt: The King, The Campaign, The Battle
Sull'Autore
Fonte dell'immagine: photo credit: Chris Henderson
Opere di Juliet R.V. Barker
Opere correlate
Regarding Jane Eyre: Writers Respond to Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1997) — Collaboratore — 16 copie
Etichette
Informazioni generali
- Data di nascita
- 1958
- Sesso
- female
- Nazionalità
- UK
- Nazione (per mappa)
- England, UK
- Luogo di nascita
- Yorkshire, England, UK
- Luogo di residenza
- Yorkshire, England, UK
- Istruzione
- Bradford Girls' Grammar School
University of Oxford (St Anne's College) - Attività lavorative
- historian
museum curator
biographer - Organizzazioni
- Bronte Parsonage Museum
- Premi e riconoscimenti
- Fellow, Royal Society of Literature
- Agente
- Andrew Lownie Literary Agency
Utenti
Recensioni
Liste
Best Biographies (1)
Premi e riconoscimenti
Potrebbero anche piacerti
Autori correlati
Statistiche
- Opere
- 15
- Opere correlate
- 1
- Utenti
- 2,923
- Popolarità
- #8,763
- Voto
- 4.1
- Recensioni
- 50
- ISBN
- 72
- Lingue
- 4
- Preferito da
- 1
The book starts with Patrick Bronte, father of the family, as a young man going to one of the colleges in Cambridge. As an Irishman, and from a not-wealthy background, he had done well to obtain an education in Latin and Greek - which anyone going to such a university had to have in those days - and to win a scholarship. With his hard efforts, he won prizes every year to supplement his grant, but still had to survive on a shoestring. Eventually he graduated and was able to apply to be a clergyman in the established church (Church of England). He then started on a series of jobs as a curate and worked his way up to being the vicar of Haworth, the town made famous by its Bronte association, where he served for many years.
Patrick has apparently been much maligned because of unsubstantiated stories about him in Mrs Gaskell's biography, which relied on malicious gossip from those with various axes to grind, including a servant sacked for unsatisfactory service and Charlotte's friend Ellen Nussey who wanted to monopolise Charlotte and was extremely jealous of her eventual husband. With the documented sources used in this biography, which includes local newspaper reports and the letters Patrick wrote urging reform of various social ills of the day, he comes across as a very tolerant clergyman who had a great deal of sympathy for the poor of his parish and for the Dissenting movements (non Church of England), and who held much more conciliatory views than most of his contemporaries. He campaigned for education of the local people and for improved sanitation - in a deplorable state in the town and causing a lot of premature death - and worked very hard for a comparatively low salary into old age, when he was forced by frailness and failing sight to hand over to the curate who eventually became Charlotte's husband. His only real faults are that as a younger man he had had rather unrealistic ideas about his eligibility as a marriage partner.
His children are each delineated although, as the author says, there is a paucity of material on Emily and Anne, resulting in previous biographers taking at face value Charlotte's published statements about them - which portray Emily as a wild, free spirit and Anne as a patiently enduring, rather depressive woman with strong Christian views whose talent wasn't a patch on Emily's. However, Barker is able to show that a lot of this over praises Emily, who had a selfish side and was content to live at home and keep house while her siblings had to work away on jobs they hated, and does injustice to Anne who had a tough, practical streak and was (certainly from what I am seeing now, being in the process of reading 'The Tenant of Wildfell Hall') a much more talented writer than Charlotte was prepared to admit. Their early deaths, together with the ruin of their sole brother, Branwell, are a tragedy, but Barker also shows that Branwell lacked the industry and perseverence of his sisters and had an arrogant sense of entitlement which alienated the publishers of Blackwell's Magazine and others to whom his early attempts at being published were directed.
Barker destroys a few myths created in biographies
An interesting aspect is the depiction of Charlotte's stubbornness and almost bullying tactics in forcing her sisters to publish their poetry, then novels. She went so far, after their deaths, as to rewrite parts of their work, especially Anne's poems, and deplored her two sisters' choice of subject matter for their novels, which had been considered scandalous by many critics. She produced very odd defences of this, portraying them both almost as unlettered simpletons, cut off from any society - Barker shows that the area, although deprived, had a thriving cultural climate including libraries, lecture rooms and concerts - and despite the fact that both had received an education as good as Charlotte's own: Emily alongside Charlotte in Brussels, and Anne at school with Charlotte. In Anne's case she was even able to teach basic Latin to her pupils when a governess, which was unusual as this was usually taught by male tutors. In fact, it seems that Emily had at least commenced on a second novel and it is likely that Charlotte destroyed it, as it would have contributed further to her sister's bad reputation from the then-shocking "Wuthering Heights".
Charlotte also suffered from depression and hypercondria. I did wonder whether Branwell's swings from high spirits to depression might have been due to bipolar disorder (or as it would have been termed at the time this biography was published in the 1990s, manic depression) and also whether Charlotte had a touch of this too though not to the same degree as she was able to pull herself out of her lows by hard work. Both siblings did form unsuitable attachments and were desperately unhappy as a result, although Charlotte did manage to control her feelings more than Branwell
The book finally winds up with the fates of the two men in the parsonage - Patrick and his son-in-law Arthur who took care of him, carried out all his duties, and was treated disgracefully when Patrick died. It also describes the start of the Bronte cult with all the attendant myths, mostly derived from Mrs Gaskell's biography.
On balance I have rated this at 4 stars as I did find the lack of any suggestion of bipolar disorder affecting the two best-documented Bronte siblings rather an omission. There were also so many people to keep track of, especially clergyman colleagues of Patrick's, that it wasn't always possible to remember who someone was when reintroduced later. But other than that, it was a very satisfying read.… (altro)