Hello to all our subscribers, and to some new ones too! Thank you for subscribing to The Anne Brontë Society newsletter! It’s also Yorkshire Day, which is quite fitting since the Brontë family are from Yorkshire!
Firstly, we have some exciting news: we have expanded our social media and we have a new website too!
Here are the links:
Facebook: The Anne Brontë Society
website: annebrontesociety.wordpress.com
We also have an exciting piece about a visit to Scarborough by Pauline Ghyselen of the The Brussels Brontë Group. A huge thank you to Pauline for writing this piece to publish in our newsletter!
The Brussels Brontë Group goes Scarborough
I was born and raised in Belgium but from a very young age I started reading the novels of the Brontë sisters, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and then Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. I read Anne Brontë’s work before I went to Charlotte’s other novels, of which two are set in our capital city, Brussels. After my university studies, I moved to Brussels and I found myself fascinated by the fact that Emily and Charlotte have lived here as well. I can’t help but feel amazed at the fact that they walked some of the very same streets and our broad boulevards, they saw the same sights: the Belliard statue, the band stand under the golden autumn leaves in Parc Royal, the stately cathedral that towers over the city, … I think of Charlotte and Emily whenever I’m in Parc Royal where Emily and Charlotte must have taken walks and heard the cathedral bells. No wonder that I soon joined the Brussels Brontë Group that was established by the author and Brontë scholar Helen MacEwan in 2006. Helen wrote three books about the Brontës’ time in Brussels, and she still is the beloved Chair of our Group. We organize lectures, events, Christmas and summer lunches, guided walks and we have a nineteenth-century literature reading group. One of our main aims is to make the Brontë connection better known in Brussels and outside.
I personally love Brussels and I love being part of the Brussels Brontë Group. It was here in our city that Charlotte fell madly in love with her Professor, Monsieur Heger. Her letters to him are heartbreaking to read. When I guide people around on the guided walks, I read them fragments from those desperate letters. Emily does not seem to have been affected by her stay in Brussels as much as her sister. I often wonder why Charlotte brought Emily to Brussels and not Anne. I think Anne would have enjoyed and appreciated our city with its cobbled lanes, majestic churches and long galleries. She would have been able to thrive here, whereas Emily was mostly quite homesick for Haworth and the moors.
This summer I made a longstanding dream come true, I took some trains and travelled to Haworth, all the way from Brussels. I stayed there 5 days to really soak up the surroundings and I went for long walks on the moors, in all kinds of weather. While it was impressive to finally see the Brontës’ home and their texts, books, needlework, paintboxes… my fondest memories will be of those walks on the moors, it really is the kind of landscape that stays with you.
My final stop before going back to London and then Brussels was Scarborough. Scarborough, the lovely seaside town that I have always known because of the folksong that I learned to play on the recorder when I was a child. Are you going to Scarborough Fair? Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme. Scarborough, the name sounded magical to me as a child. It’s also the place where Anne Brontë died; and she was the quiet Brontë, the one I have always loved best without really being able to explain why.
So, my literary holiday in Northern England ended on a hill in Scarborough. Ever since reading Samantha Ellis’ movingly personal biography of Anne Take Courage: Anne Brontë and the Art of Life; have I felt this need to come here. In this book that has meant a lot to me over the years, Ellis describes in the last chapter how she finally musters up the courage to go to Scarborough and places some heather on Anne’s grave. It’s this poignant chapter that has stuck with me ever since. When I went on my own literary pilgrimage to Scarborough, it was a Sunday and it rained the entire day… I took a bus from York, the skies were grey, I sat on the front seat of the double-decker bus. It was a misty morning and there was so much fog that when I had climbed the hill to the cemetery, I could not even see the wide sea that Anne had loved so much. While I was standing at her grave, I was wondering whether Anne wasn’t lonely out here, on this weather-beaten hill, the salt in the sea breeze slowly eroding the name on her tombstone. It feels strange - a bit random almost - that Anne is resting here, away from the moors and the family she loved. However, the roaring of the waves downhill is comforting in a strange way and though I cannot see them, I hear the seagulls that are soaring and swooping above in the sky. As often, I think of Anne’s last words that she spoke to Charlotte and that Samantha Ellis has used as the title for her biography: ‘Take courage, Charlotte, take courage.’
They are words that have often comforted me.
In 2021 Samantha Ellis gave a Zoom-lecture to the Brussels Brontë Group about Anne Brontë in which she stated that writing about Anne has taught her a lot about living life to the fullest, not giving up and dealing with the fears and challenges that life throws at us. This was during those terrible Covid pandemic times. I remember sitting in my dark living room after that lecture, having said some awkward goodbyes to the people, each in their little box on my screen. I remember opening the windows and looking outside at the deserted Brussels street. A view I had been observing every evening during the several lockdowns we had gone through. I knew this view by heart, I had seen it in sun, wind, rain and snow. The sad little trees, the yellow bricks and empty rooms of the opposite building and the pigeons sitting on the eaves, looking back at me. I remember the empty bus going by, so slowly, through the street, and the solitary walker ignoring the evening clock. And while I was seeing all of this, I thought of Anne Brontë, dying in Scarborough, younger than I was then…
She was younger than I am now. It is Anne’s story, her two novels, her poems, her last words that have brought me here to this very hill in Scarborough where the rain is softly falling on her grave.
Pauline Ghyselen, Brussels Brontë Group
Brussels Brontë Group website: https://www.thebrusselsbrontegroup.org/
Brussels Brontë Group Instagram
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Hope you have a happy Yorkshire Day!
Best wishes
Lauren
Founder & Head of The Anne Brontë Society