Eric Ruijssenaars

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1439571.html

This is a follow-up volume to Ruijssenaars' earlier Charlotte Brontë's Promised Land, about the Pensionnat Heger where Charlotte and Emily Bronte lived briefly in the 1940s. Most of it is Ruijssenaars' investigation of the demolition of the Pensionnat and the whole Rue Isabelle district of Brussels in 1910, with a couple of codas on the cultural life of Brussels when the Brontës where there (including the identification of the paintings mentioned in Villette) and on the best surviving photograph of the Pensionnat, suggesting that it is much older than had been thought. I hadn't previously made the connection, but I have actually walked on the upper end of the Rue Isabelle which is now preserved in the Coudenberg museum. I hope this gets bound with Charlotte Brontë's Promised Land for future editions; it's not quite coherent enough to work as a standalone volume, but interesting for Brontë completists.… (altro)

http://nhw.livejournal.com/744315.html

I must be in the very small minority of readers who bought it more because of Brussels than the Brontës; in my last job, I often went for a sandwich lunch in the Parc de Bruxelles, and even now I find myself trying to thread my car through the relevant streets a couple of times each month as I head to the north of the city centre. Plus there is something very fascinating about vanished streetscapes; the school where Charlotte and Emily Brontë lived in 1842, and to which Charlotte returned alon for a year in January 1843, was demolished in 1909 as part of the development which has resulted in today's Palais des Beaux-Arts, built in the 1920s. As well as that, of course, the sense of place in Villette is so well developed that there is a certain fascination in reading more about the reality on which the fiction was based.

One does feel, however, for the unfortunate Hegers, who had taken the unattractive, reserved and disconcertingly intelligent Brontë girls under their wing for a few months as an act of kindness, and then found themselves and their country portrayed in Villette in a way they simply could not have anticipated. Ruijssenaars has attached to his own text a half-dozen glorious accounts from Brontë fans between 1871 and 1916 coming to gaze at the Pensionnat and its inhabitants, reverently plucking leaves from the pear-trees in the garden, and generally harassing the Hegers. That is not to minimise the interest of Ruijssenaars' own work, bringing together the archives and published architectural history of Brussels with the accumulated lore of a century and a half of Brontëology.… (altro)