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September meeting 2006
"The world of The Brontes", the first lecture of a new series, coincided
with a new television production of Jane Eyre, and gave the Society an
insight into the lives of this unique family. The speaker Mr Andrew McCarthy of the Bronte Parsonage Museum, Haworth, showed how the Bronte chidren, isolated from other village children by their social position and education, retreated into a world of the imagination, fuelled by wide reading and a strong literary talent.
Childhood plays were followed by poems composed by "Ellis, Acton
and Currer Bell", to disguise their true, and female, identities in an age which frowned upon women writers. "Jane Eyre" and "Wuthering Heights" were published sensationally soon afterwards under the writers true identities. Further novels and poems followed from Charlotte, Emily and Anne, while their brother, Branwell, developed his artistic talents.
Social conditions, however, came to affect the family, with all of them
dying young, and all from the effects of tberculosis, compounded in Branwells case with his alcoholism. They were all outlived by their father, Rev Patrick Bronte, who died, aged 84, in 1861. |