Charlotte Bronté« and the eccentricity of genius
The Bronté« family were all geniuses, probably including brother Branwell who dissipated himself with coke and booze. Why genius ran so rampant in the family has been the subject of countless books, one of which I’m currently reading: Charlotte Bronté«: A Fiery Heart (terrible schmaltzy title, but excellent book) by Claire Harman.
Like many others, I became a Bronté« fan when I was very young and first opened Jane Eyre, which grabbed me from the moment I began to read it and never let go, fostering many subsequent readings. How old was I? Probably around 11 or 12 at the beginning, later on mostly a teenager, and then once again in adulthood. The voice of Jane is one of the most vivid and personal in all of literature, and it’s a bang-up story, too.
Not long after that first reading I plowed through sister Emily’s Wuthering Heights as well, which was much sterner stuff but still hugely fascinating and which bore repeated readings, especially for favorite parts. Later on when I saw the movie starring the achingly young Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff, that didn’t hurt, either.
I never read anything by the youngest sister, Anne, but I did read Charlotte’s other novels, although they didn’t hold a candle to the great Jane Eyre, in my humble (and youthful) opinion. I also read a bunch of biographies of the family, including one dedicated to the decline of Branwell. All of the siblings died in their twenties and thirties, several of tuberculosis, leaving father Patrick to soldier wearily on until his death at 84, forty years after the death of his wife and six years after losing the last of his six children, Charlotte (the two oldest daughters had not survived childhood, dying in a manner somewhat similar to the “Helen Burns” character in Jane Eyre).
What a family. If you know anything about them, you also know that as children they were voluminous writers who created the saga of an imaginary world called Angria, an endeavor that continued well into adulthood and consumed (and helped polish) some of their formidable literary powers. But what I learned from the new biography of Charlotte I’m reading was that the Bronté« sagas were written in handwriting so microscopic as to be almost unreadable, in tiny books that might be more suitable for dollhouses.
Here’s a discussion:
Charlotte and Branwell Bronté« wrote many of their stories of Angria on tiny sheets of paper in nearly microscopic handwriting. This particular example consists of four sheets of notepaper folded into sixteen pages. The individual sheets are approximately 4 ½ inches long and 3 5/8 inches wide, and the entire text contains about nineteen thousand words…
It is unknown why the Bronté« children chose to write their stories in such tiny script, but several suggestions have been made. One is that the children may have been trying to hide their imaginative plays from their stern and religious aunt Elizabeth Branwell, their mother’s sister, who did not encourage their literary pursuits. “Aunt Branwell,” as they called her, seems to have been a somewhat forbidding and authoritarian figure for the children. If secrecy was the motivation, Charlotte and Branwell were probably successful ”“ most people cannot read the manuscript without a magnifying glass. Another possible explanation is that the children wrote to the scale of the toy soldiers that played such an important role in their imaginary world. Their fascination with the miniature may have played a material part in the mythos they developed around the world they called Angria…
However, it may have been that Charlotte and Branwell had simply developed a habit of writing in extreme minuscule. It is known that the Bronté«s produced tiny handwritten books and magazines from an early age…Charlotte’s earliest surviving manuscript is a miniature book she made at the age of ten for her sister Anne. One of Charlotte’s school friends recalled that when she asked about her tiny handwriting, Charlotte responded that she and Branwell had learned to print so small “by writing in their magazine. They brought out a ”˜magazine’ once a month, and wished it to look as much like print as possible.”
In the biography of Charlotte, it mentions that one of her Angrian works comes out to be 84 pages when printed in normal fashion and normal type, whereas in its original version (only several inches by several inches) the entire thing amounted to only 24 pages. That is extraordinary.
But one picture is worth 1,000 words (or 24 pages). This photo shows you the scale, and it gives the word “manuscript” a whole new meaning:
I also love Jane Eyre. I have read two bios – my favorite being the one about ALL the Brontes by Juliet Barker, which I have read twice. I also have the new one and can’t wait! I recently read The Professor and really loved it. I felt that it compares nicely to JE. I do love Anne Bronte as well. Agnes Grey is really very good. I liked it better than the Tenant of Wildfell Hall, although I love TOWH as well. (I think she must have used Branwell as her model for the dreadful husband.) Wuthering Heights is my least favorite, but I do love Emily’s poetry. The Brontes fascinate me! There is really so much we do not know, isn’t there? While the juvenilia provides much insight, I just feel there had to be MORE for them to come up with those books in the time period they lived in. Visiting Haworth is one of my bucket list items.Thanks for this post!
My uncle was one of the few owners of the guinness book of records smallest bible… there was only about 20 made… they were on microfilm…
the whole bible on a square a bit larger than an average postage stamp.
and not only that, but when you put it under a microscope, you could see it was an illuminated bible with color pictures and such like the ones from the middle ages… and it had complete sets of concordance and tables at the end..
now they are more common…
though i suspect that whomever went through his belongings threw out tons of valuable things that they did not know ere valuable.
much like the man who brought a faberget egg to a scrap dealer, which later sold for 33 million…
i was going through some old stuff and i found one of the original prints of the earth from the moonshot… in fact to this date, its still the only image of the whole planet…
it was printed the day of or day after it was taken
and i have no idea what its worth, though i should see if i can get some of the remaining living astronaughts to sign it..
you can tell its an original from the 1960s by the paper, process, etc..
I can vouch for genius’ eccentricity 😉
But the wisdom of common sense is far more rare.
Not exactly on topic, but this reminds me: Neo, how is it that you don’t like Jane Austen? I thought that was kind of odd–as in you’re probably the only woman I know who doesn’t–when you mentioned it recently, and it’s even more so now that I know you like the Brontes. Not that they aren’t fairly different from Austen, but I would think there’s enough similarity that you would enjoy Austen, even if you weren’t one of her really devoted fans.
Mac:
Austen bores me to tears. The things she writes about don’t engage me emotionally. They seem shallow. The Brontes are very intense. Jane Eyre begins with VERY intense and difficult childhood experiences. Its emotional hook is very different. The narrator speaks of things that are very deep, almost primal. She is searingly honest. She is in society but not of it. To me, the two authors are as different as day and night.
Yes, they are very different in that way–the Brontes are much more intense. But they have in common with Austen a focus on relationships, particularly but not only romantic relationships, and that seems to interest women to a degree that it typically doesn’t interest men. In fact I think of the three of them (Austen, Charlotte and Emily B) as having more or less invented the romance novel, though obviously executing it at a much higher level than the genre that it became. It’s not surprising to me that you prefer the Brontes, but that you don’t care for Austen at all. I really can’t think of another woman I know who doesn’t like Austen, and most of them seem to like her a lot.
For the record, I like all three, but they are not my favorites.
neo, if i didn’t feel like we were separated by birth already (curly hair, political migration and a love of ballet among other things) this post would do it. I also read Jane Eyre when I was 11 or 12 and probably re-read it a dozen times. Wuthering Heights came a bit later when I was 14. I related to Jane Eyre on many levels as a child who definitely felt like an outsider. And I don’t think I’ve ever read another book that comes close to depicting passion like Wuthering Heights. On the other hand…Jane Austen? I tried reading Emma probably six times and never got past the third page. Yes, it’s the things she writes about. They just do not engage me. I can’t even watch the movies. Didn’t these people have better things to do?
When I think about the books I and my friends were reading at that age, it makes me sad to see the offerings for Young Adult reading today. Why is the Young Adult genre even necessary given the vast canon of literature available, a lot of it online? Never mind, that’s a rhetorical question.
There’s a children’s book about the Toy Soldiers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Twelve_and_the_Genii
I’ve never completed reading a book by a Bronte or by Jane Austen. However, I’ve watched Emma Thompson’s version of Sense & Sensability repeatedly even though the story is melodramatic, the suppressed characters are weak as knees, and the acting is sometimes theatrical. But the production as a whole is spectacular, almost making you want to read this arch type of a romance novel. It is so good that you are transported back in time to that era. Ang Lee is a master. There are scenes that need stop motion to allow you to fully enjoy the Vermeer like beauty. The score matches the graphics.
Those kids ought to be credited with inventing microfiche — a century early.
For that’s what they achieved — data below the level of detection.
Astonishing — right there.
Count me in as a fan of the Brontes and Jane Austen as well. Austen was not dramatic, but she was capable of very sly, subtle but stinging satire. I would recommend her book Persuasion to someone who thinks they don’t like her. It’s more mature and the characters are wonderful.
As for the Brontes, it is remarkable that genius ran rampant in the entire family. I have read that Elizabeth and Maria, the two who died young showed promise while they were at school, and they might have been writers like their sisters. So might Branwell, but he drank himself to death.
I loved the version of Jane Eyre with Toby Stephens as Rochester and Ruth Wilson as Jane.
I loved the children’s book about the toy soldiers — I loved it; it stuck with me for a very long time.
I’m afraid my exposure to either Austen or Bronte comes not from their works (which, try though I might, I just can’t get into) but from the send-up series by Michael Thomas Ford that starts with “Jane Bites Back,” (see the website link) wherein Jane Austen was turned into a vampire and has spent the last couple of centuries in hiding and currently runs a bookshop in New England. I love the series and every time I read it I try (once again) to pick up works by Austen or her contemporaries.
Sadly, the Bronte sisters, especially Charlotte, are portrayed in a less than flattering light, but more in the “comic relief and pseudo-arch-nemesis” style of defamation rather than any serious commentary on her works.