I've dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas: they've gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the color of my mind.
Emily Bronte
Wuthering Heights

zaterdag 3 september 2011

What did the bronte Sisters see, when they walked on the moors in september?

September sees the transition from Summer to Autumn, the weather can still be warm but the shortening days bring change such as cold nights and with it the possibility of frost. The Autumn Equinox, 21st - 23rd September is when there is equal periods of night and day and marks the start of Autumn. This period is celebrated as Harvest Festival, and is known as the 2nd harvest, the first being August 1st known as Lammas.


What to see
By now most birds will have finished moulting their feathers. There is still plenty of food to eat, but as the month progresses they will begin to establish their territory in preparation for winter. Summer visitors such as Swallows, House Martins and Swifts leave early in the month. Other birds such as Meadow Pipits start to migrate to lowland areas.

The insect population declines rapidly with the progress of the month. This is the time that wasps may become more of a nuisance. During the summer they have been feeding their larvae in return for sugar saliva. Now there is no larvae to feed as the queen has stopped laying eggs, the wasps search for other food such as fruit to feed on.

Dragonflies and Damselflies are now becoming scarcer as our weather becomes a challenge for them; cold wet and wind makes it difficult for them to survive. The large Hawkers such as the Common Hawker will be seen less, the smaller Common Darter (photo left) is probably the one dragonfly you are likely to see during the month.

Spiders and Cranefly (Daddy-long-legs) can be seen, noticeable by their long dangling legs and weak flight. House spiders as their name suggests are seen in the house, looking for somewhere warm now the weather is becoming cooler.



BlackberryHimalayan Balsam is flowering early September, its pods exploding as it spreads seed in a wide direction. The hedgerows are full of berry particularly Hawthorn, elderberry and blackberry. The leaves of deciduous trees begin to take on their russet colours.

Fungi start to appear in woodland and fields.
haworth-village.org.uk/nature/nature-diary/september/september.asp

vrijdag 2 september 2011

Film set to lure visitors - Local - Sheffield Telegraph

THE Peak District is bracing itself for a tourism windfall following next week’s release of Jane Eyre in the U.K. Medieval Haddon was the obvious choice when director Cary Fukunaga was looking for a suitable Thornfield Hall.Charlotte Brontë visited Hathersage in 1845 and is thought to have based much of her novel on landmarks she encountered in the area.Haddon is no stranger to the role – it was cast as Thornfield by Franco Zeffirelli in 1996 and ten years later in the BBC version.

The ruins of Wingfield Manor  crich parish manor of crich book

Other locations include the ruins of Wingfield Manor near Alfreton, which double as Thornfield after it is ravaged by fire, and White Edge Lodge – a former gamekeeper’s cottage, now a National Trust holiday home on the Longshaw Estate – which serves as The Moor House. And the wild romantic landscape that first inspired Charlotte Brontë is allowed to speak for 
itself

Stanage Edge, one of the area’s most dramatic natural landmarks, has been chosen to capture Jane Eyre’s profound sense of isolation. The area around her school is filmed near Edale and the softer countryside where Rochester rides around Thornfield is represented by the lush water meadows below Haddon Hall. Jane Eyre is due for UK release on Friday, September 9.Read more:Film set to lure visitors - Local - Sheffield Telegraph 

donderdag 1 september 2011

Free Trade Feelings

Exploring works by Walter Scott, Harriet Martineau, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens and their lesser-known contemporaries, this book historicizes globalization as it traces the sense of dissolving borders and the perceived decline of national sovereignty back into the nineteenth century. Read more on: Free Trade Feelings


First clips from Andrea Arnold Wuthering Heights

dinsdag 30 augustus 2011

I love the weblog Abigails Ateliers




It gives great information about the dresses the Bronte Sisters wore. And the pictures gives such a good idea about the Sisters in their natural surroundings.
/abigailsateliers/ the-governess-gown-and-the-1840s-underlayers/


This picture is GREAT

maandag 29 augustus 2011

On this day in 1849 Charlotte completed her novel Shirley


Charlotte Brontë's second published novel, Shirley (1849), followed by two years the very popular Jane Eyre: An Autobiography. In Shirley, Brontë abandoned first-person narration by the main female character—which she had successfully employed in the earlier effort and which would reappear in Villette (1853)—in favor of an omniscient third-person narrator and not one, but two, principle characters, Shirley Keeldar and Caroline Helstone. In a further departure from her earlier success, Brontë moved out of the realm of the purely personal to include elements of the social and political as well. Set in Yorkshire during the time of the Luddite unrest—a labor movement that began in 1811-1812 in an effort to protect the interests of the working class—the novel consists of two narrative strands woven together, one involving the struggles of workers against mill owners, and the other involving the romantic entanglements of the two heroines.
e text /brontec/shirley/
Work in progres /scharlotte-brontes-shirley
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
It was not all machinery that the Luddites opposed, but rather "all machinery hurtful to commonality".
www.mindfully.org/Reform/Luddite-History
yas.org.uk/content/treasures/luddites

Charlotte Bronte, of all people, gives the best description of the Luddites’ motivation in her novel Shirley. She describes how at the same time as the war closed export markets for Yorkshire’s woollen mills, “…certain inventions in machinery were introduced into the staple manufactures of the north, which, greatly reducing the number of hands necessary to be employed, threw thousands out of work, and left them without legitimate means of sustaining life.”
She then goes on to give a short lesson that every political and business leader should learn by heart. “Misery generates hate. These sufferers hated the machines which they believed took their bread from them; they hated the buildings which contained those machines; they hated the manufacturers who owned those buildings.” in-praise-of-the-luddites

The Parlour

The Parlour

Parsonage

Parsonage

Charlotte Bronte

Presently the door opened, and in came a superannuated mastiff, followed by an old gentleman very like Miss Bronte, who shook hands with us, and then went to call his daughter. A long interval, during which we coaxed the old dog, and looked at a picture of Miss Bronte, by Richmond, the solitary ornament of the room, looking strangely out of place on the bare walls, and at the books on the little shelves, most of them evidently the gift of the authors since Miss Bronte's celebrity. Presently she came in, and welcomed us very kindly, and took me upstairs to take off my bonnet, and herself brought me water and towels. The uncarpeted stone stairs and floors, the old drawers propped on wood, were all scrupulously clean and neat. When we went into the parlour again, we began talking very comfortably, when the door opened and Mr. Bronte looked in; seeing his daughter there, I suppose he thought it was all right, and he retreated to his study on the opposite side of the passage; presently emerging again to bring W---- a country newspaper. This was his last appearance till we went. Miss Bronte spoke with the greatest warmth of Miss Martineau, and of the good she had gained from her. Well! we talked about various things; the character of the people, - about her solitude, etc., till she left the room to help about dinner, I suppose, for she did not return for an age. The old dog had vanished; a fat curly-haired dog honoured us with his company for some time, but finally manifested a wish to get out, so we were left alone. At last she returned, followed by the maid and dinner, which made us all more comfortable; and we had some very pleasant conversation, in the midst of which time passed quicker than we supposed, for at last W---- found that it was half-past three, and we had fourteen or fifteen miles before us. So we hurried off, having obtained from her a promise to pay us a visit in the spring... ------------------- "She cannot see well, and does little beside knitting. The way she weakened her eyesight was this: When she was sixteen or seventeen, she wanted much to draw; and she copied nimini-pimini copper-plate engravings out of annuals, ('stippling,' don't the artists call it?) every little point put in, till at the end of six months she had produced an exquisitely faithful copy of the engraving. She wanted to learn to express her ideas by drawing. After she had tried to draw stories, and not succeeded, she took the better mode of writing; but in so small a hand, that it is almost impossible to decipher what she wrote at this time.

I asked her whether she had ever taken opium, as the description given of its effects in Villette was so exactly like what I had experienced, - vivid and exaggerated presence of objects, of which the outlines were indistinct, or lost in golden mist, etc. She replied, that she had never, to her knowledge, taken a grain of it in any shape, but that she had followed the process she always adopted when she had to describe anything which had not fallen within her own experience; she had thought intently on it for many and many a night before falling to sleep, - wondering what it was like, or how it would be, - till at length, sometimes after the progress of her story had been arrested at this one point for weeks, she wakened up in the morning with all clear before her, as if she had in reality gone through the experience, and then could describe it, word for word, as it had happened. I cannot account for this psychologically; I only am sure that it was so, because she said it. ----------------------She thought much of her duty, and had loftier and clearer notions of it than most people, and held fast to them with more success. It was done, it seems to me, with much more difficulty than people have of stronger nerves, and better fortunes. All her life was but labour and pain; and she never threw down the burden for the sake of present pleasure. I don't know what use you can make of all I have said. I have written it with the strong desire to obtain appreciation for her. Yet, what does it matter? She herself appealed to the world's judgement for her use of some of the faculties she had, - not the best, - but still the only ones she could turn to strangers' benefit. They heartily, greedily enjoyed the fruits of her labours, and then found out she was much to be blamed for possessing such faculties. Why ask for a judgement on her from such a world?" elizabeth gaskell/charlotte bronte



Poem: No coward soul is mine

No coward soul is mine,
No trembler in the worlds storm-troubled sphere:
I see Heavens glories shine,
And faith shines equal, arming me from fear.


O God within my breast.
Almighty, ever-present Deity!
Life -- that in me has rest,
As I -- Undying Life -- have power in Thee!


Vain are the thousand creeds
That move mens hearts: unutterably vain;
Worthless as withered weeds,
Or idlest froth amid the boundless main,


To waken doubt in one
Holding so fast by Thine infinity;
So surely anchored on
The steadfast Rock of immortality.


With wide-embracing love
Thy Spirit animates eternal years,
Pervades and broods above,
Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates, and rears.


Though earth and man were gone,
And suns and universes ceased to be,
And Thou wert left alone,
Every existence would exist in Thee.


There is not room for Death,
Nor atom that his might could render void:
Thou -- Thou art Being and Breath,
And what Thou art may never be destroyed.


--
Emily Bronte

Family tree

The Bronte Family

Grandparents - paternal
Hugh Brunty was born 1755 and died circa 1808. He married Eleanor McClory, known as Alice in 1776.

Grandparents - maternal
Thomas Branwell (born 1746 died 5th April 1808) was married in 1768 to Anne Carne (baptised 27th April 1744 and died 19th December 1809).

Parents
Father was Patrick Bronte, the eldest of 10 children born to Hugh Brunty and Eleanor (Alice) McClory. He was born 17th March 1777 and died on 7th June 1861. Mother was Maria Branwell, who was born on 15th April 1783 and died on 15th September 1821.

Maria had a sister, Elizabeth who was known as Aunt Branwell. She was born in 1776 and died on 29th October 1842.

Patrick Bronte married Maria Branwell on 29th December 1812.

The Bronte Children
Patrick and Maria Bronte had six children.
The first child was Maria, who was born in 1814 and died on 6th June 1825.
The second daughter, Elizabeth was born on 8th February 1815 and died shortly after Maria on 15th June 1825. Charlotte was the third daughter, born on 21st April 1816.

Charlotte married Arthur Bell Nicholls (born 1818) on 29th June 1854. Charlotte died on 31st March 1855. Arthur lived until 2nd December 1906.

The first and only son born to Patrick and Maria was Patrick Branwell, who was born on 26th June 1817 and died on 24th September 1848.

Emily Jane, the fourth daughter was born on 30th July 1818 and died on 19th December 1848.

The sixth and last child was Anne, born on 17th January 1820 who died on 28th May 1849.

Top Withens in the snow.

Top Withens in the snow.

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