Month: May 2025

Today, the 28th of May, will forever be a mournful one for lovers of the Bronte family. It was on this day in 1849 that Anne Bronte took her last breath. Elder sister Charlotte Bronte and friend Ellen Nussey were by her side as she took her last breath, looking out of their window at Wood’s Lodgings and gazing at the infinite sweep of the horizon, mind on the infinite sweep of what was to come.

Anne Bronte died in a time of faith, she was not afraid to die, it was those left who would suffer. Little could Anne have guessed that 176 years later we would still be reading her books, still talking about her life. Her last moments were captured in print by Ellen Nussey, and a very beautiful and moving read it makes. I discuss it below in my latest House Of Bronte video:

We will all be thinking of Anne Bronte today, particularly at 2 pm, the moment which marked her passing from this world. Let us not dwell on the challenges she faced, however, but on the triumphs she achieved. Through her great novels she will live forever, so let’s raise a glass and say “Thank you Anne Bronte!” I hope you can join me next Sunday for another new Bronte blog post.

In last week’s Brontë blog post we took a first look at the Brussels the Brontë sisters, or at least Charlotte and Emily Brontë, knew, and how it looks now. Today, we will take a further look in our concluding walk in the Brontë footsteps through the Belgian capital.

As readers of this blog will know, or followers on Twitter, I was lucky enough to be invited to Brussels to give a talk to the Brussels Brontë Group. It was an honour and a pleasure to meet so many Brontë fans from across Europe and beyond, and my wife and I were lucky enough to stay on the Rue Royale just a stone’s throw from the old Brussels the Brontës came to know so well.

At the top of the Rue Royale is the royal palace, but before you get there you come to a beautiful area of greenery now known as Brussels Park. At the time Charlotte and Emily lived nearby it was the Royal Park, and it features in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette.

At one point Lucy Snowe is given a potion, a drug, by Madame Beck (modelled on Claire Heger) and in a drug fuelled insomnia Lucy sneaks by the guards and waks the park during the night hours:

“Quiet Rue Fossette! I find on this pavement that wanderer-wooing summer night of which I mused; I see its moon over me; I feel its dew in the air. But here I cannot stay; I am still too near old haunts: so close under the dungeon, I can hear the prisoners moan. This solemn peace is not what I seek, it is not what I can bear: to me the face of that sky bears the aspect of a world’s death. The park also will be calm—I know, a mortal serenity prevails everywhere—yet let me seek the park.

I took a route well known, and went up towards the palatial and royal Haute-Ville; thence the music I had heard certainly floated; it was hushed now, but it might re-waken. I went on: neither band nor bell music came to meet me; another sound replaced it, a sound like a strong tide, a great flow, deepening as I proceeded. Light broke, movement gathered, chimes pealed—to what was I coming? Entering on the level of a Grande Place, I found myself, with the suddenness of magic, plunged amidst a gay, living, joyous crowd.

Villette is one blaze, one broad illumination; the whole world seems abroad; moonlight and heaven are banished: the town, by her own flambeaux, beholds her own splendour—gay dresses, grand equipages, fine horses and gallant riders throng the bright streets. I see even scores of masks. It is a strange scene, stranger than dreams. But where is the park?—I ought to be near it. In the midst of this glare the park must be shadowy and calm—there, at least, are neither torches, lamps, nor crowd?

I was asking this question when an open carriage passed me filled with known faces. Through the deep throng it could pass but slowly; the spirited horses fretted in their curbed ardour. I saw the occupants of that carriage well: me they could not see, or, at least, not know, folded close in my large shawl, screened with my straw hat (in that motley crowd no dress was noticeably strange). I saw the Count de Bassompierre; I saw my godmother, handsomely apparelled, comely and cheerful; I saw, too, Paulina Mary, compassed with the triple halo of her beauty, her youth, and her happiness. In looking on her countenance of joy, and eyes of festal light, one scarce remembered to note the gala elegance of what she wore; I know only that the drapery floating about her was all white and light and bridal; seated opposite to her I saw Graham Bretton; it was in looking up at him her aspect had caught its lustre—the light repeated in her eyes beamed first out of his.

It gave me strange pleasure to follow these friends viewlessly, and I did follow them, as I thought, to the park. I watched them alight (carriages were inadmissible) amidst new and unanticipated splendours. Lo! the iron gateway, between the stone columns, was spanned by a flaming arch built of massed stars; and, following them cautiously beneath that arch, where were they, and where was I?

In a land of enchantment, a garden most gorgeous, a plain sprinkled with coloured meteors, a forest with sparks of purple and ruby and golden fire gemming the foliage; a region, not of trees and shadow, but of strangest architectural wealth—of altar and of temple, of pyramid, obelisk, and sphinx: incredible to say, the wonders and the symbols of Egypt teemed throughout the park of Villette.”

It hardly needs saying of course that the eponymous city of Villette is actually Brussels. One of the features of the park which also appears in the novel is the great bandstand where Charlotte would have seen concerts performed. A ‘kiosk’ as Lucy Snowe refers to it. That kiosk is still standing today, and concerts are still held there:

Walking down the Rue Royale away from the park and Palace you soon come to another grand building – and one that Charlotte Brontë came to know very well. Today it is the spectacular Cortinthia Grand Hotel Astoria Brussels, a five star hotel complete with top hat wearing concierge on the door. 

During 1842 and 1843, when Charlotte lived nearby at the Pensionnat Heger, it was the Hotel Cluysenaar and renting an apartment within it was Dr Thomas Weelwright. His five children attended the Pensionnat Heger and for a while lived there, alongside Charlotte and Emily, before later returning to live in their father’s opulent apartment. Foremost among these girls was Laetitia Wheelwright, who became a close Brussels friend and confidante of Charlotte Brontë.

The Hotel Cluysenaar inspired the Hotel Crecy in Villette, the location of the grand apartments owned by the Count De Bassompierre and his enigmatic daughter Paulina. Did Charlotte enjoy grand parties with the Wheelwrights just as Lucy attended grand parties with the Bassompierres? It seems likely.

Perhaps my favourite spot in Brussels was the Grand Place. Locals call it the most beautiful square in the world, and they may just be right. Surrounded by its incredible buildings is like stepping back in time, and it’s easy to imagine Charlotte Brontë looking in awe on these buildings she must have seen and known.

I recommend Brussels to all Brontë fans, there are still plenty of Brontë related sights left to see, although many, alas, have been lost to redevelopment of the city. I aim to expand upon my talk, “Doubt, Defiance and Devotion: Faith and the Brontës” and release it soon as an ebook, so keep your eyes on this site for more details of that. Once again thanks to all in the Brussels Brontë Group, and thanks to you, dear reader, for all your support and encouragement. I hope to see you next week for another new Brontë blog post, and of course please remember to raise a glass in memory of Anne Brontë on Wednesday, on the 176th anniversary of her passing.

As regular readers and subscribers to this blog will know, I was lucky enough to be in Brussels last week giving a talk to the very knowledgeable Brussels Brontë Group. It was great to talk to so many enthusiastic Brontë fans from Europe and beyond, and it was wonderful to be able to follow in the footsteps of Charlotte and Emily Brontë.

Emily Brontë was in Brussels in 1842 and Charlotte was there in 1842 and 1843. Much of Brussels has changed and expanded since those days but there are still tantalising glimpses of the cobbled streets and buildings that the Brontës would have known, many of which found their way into Charlotte’s novels The Professor and Villette. Today’s post is a picture heavy one as I reveal some of these places via pictures taken on my mobile phone’s camera.

I was lucky enough to stay on the Rue Royale, in the old town’s Royal quarter and just a short hop from the location of the building that brought Charlotte and Emily to Belgium: the Pensionnat Heger school.

The school stood at the foot of a series of steps guarded by a statue of General Belliard, a hero of the Belgian fight for independence just a few years before the Brontës arrived in the newly formed country of Belgium. Here is this statue today, and here are the Belliard steps the Brontë sisters would have walked down as they first made their way to the school.

Alas, the school itself and the street it stood on are no longer there, victims to the modernisation of Brussels, but this BNP Paribas building marks the spot where the Pensionnat Heger stood.

There are two plaques nearby bearing tribute to Charlotte and Emily Brontë, but they are not at eye level and are easily missed.

It is a short walk from here to the beautiful and imposing St. Gudula’s Cathedral. Charlotte Brontë was certainly no fan of Catholicism or its followers, a subject I touched on in my Brussels talk about the Brontës and their faith, and yet remarkably she went to confession at the cathedral and made Lucy Snowe do the same in Villette. On 1st September 1843 Charlotte wrote to Emily to tell her what had happened:

‘An odd whim came into my head. In a solitary part of the Cathedral six or seven people still remained kneeling by the confessionals. In two confessionals I saw a priest. I felt as if I did not care what I did, provided it was not absolutely wrong, and that it served to vary my life and yield a moment’s interest. I took a fancy to change myself into a Catholic and go and make a real confession to see what it was like. Knowing me as you do, you will think this odd, but when people are by themselves they have singular fancies… I actually did confess – a real confession… I think you had better not tell Papa of this. He will not understand that it was only a freak, and will perhaps think I am going to turn Catholic.’

I will return to the Rue Royale now, and a picture I took of it last Sunday shortly before heading to the Midi station for the Eurostar back to London. 

It was on this very street in November 1843 that Charlotte Brontë saw Queen Victoria, and we again turn to a letter that Charlotte wrote to her sister Emily Brontë:

“You ask about Queen Victoria’s visit to Brussels. I saw for her an instant flashing through the Rue Royale in a carriage and six, surrounded by soldiers. She was laughing and talking very gaily. She looked a little stout, vivacious lady, very plainly dressed, not much dignity or pretension about her. The Belgians liked her very much on the whole. They say she enlivened the sombre court of King Leopold, which is usually as gloomy as a conventicle.”

This is particularly relevant, as this week the roles were reversed: our present Queen made a visit to the birthplace of Charlotte Brontë. Camilla, the Queen Consort, was in Bradford as part of their UK City Of Culture celebrations, and it was wonderful to see that she paid a visit to the Brontë birthplace in Thornton:

By all accounts Her Majesty was both charming and charmed. I was charmed in a different way this week when I received in the post from Belgium a wonderful package from talented artist and calligrapher Marina Saegerman. Marina sent me a Brontë calendar and a collection of Brontë poems with accompanying artwork, all of which were breathtakingly beautiful! Thank you so much Marina, I know you are a keen reader of this blog and thank you too for your kind words about my talk in Brussels last week.

We will leave the Brontës in Brussels for now, but I will have more pictures and lots more about their time there in next week’s Brontë blog post – along with news of how you can gain access to the information contained in my lecture if you weren’t there (or even if you were). I hope you can join me here next week, until then ‘au revoir.’

Charlotte and Emily Brontë travelled to Brussels, Belgium in early 1842. It was a moment which shaped their lives to come, and which would change the course of literary history. I made my first visit to this fine city this week, and I’m travelling back to Yorkshire as I type this.

I was lucky enough to be invited to Brussels to present a talk to the Brussels Brontë Group headed by Helen MacEwan, who herself has written a fine biography of Winifred Gerin and a brilliant volume entitled The Brontës In Brussels amidst other work.

All in the group made me and my wife feel very welcome, so I never experienced the deep melancholy which frequently descended upon Charlotte Brontë in the city and which led to her novels The Professor and Villette. I gave a talk on Saturday morning, the subject of which was: “Doubt, Defiance and Devotion: Faith and the Brontës.” I’m pleased to say that the talk seemed to be well received, and there was an international audience of very  knowledgeable Brontë lovers, including people who had travelled from Ukraine and the United States.

Also giving a talk on the day was Dr. Charlotte Jones of Oxford University, and I have to say that I really enjoyed her presentation on “Some Untamed Ferocity: The Brontës Among The Moderns.” It was a fascinating look at how three 20th Century writers, Stella Gibbons, May Sinclair and Virginia Woolf wrote about the Brontë sisters and their works.

There will be much more on my talk in coming posts, and on the Brussels and Charlotte and Emily’s time there. I visited many sites associated with the Brontës, including the site of the Pensionnat Heger school, the park featured in Villette and the Catholic cathedral where both Charlotte Brontë and her fictional creation Lucy Snowe went to confession. Here’s a short video I made at the beautiful cathedral.

Here too is Lucy Snowe’s account of it:

‘One evening – and I was not delirious: I was in my sane mind, I got up – I dressed myself, weak and shaking. The solitude and the stillness of the long dormitory could not be borne any longer; the ghastly white beds were turning into spectres – the coronal of each became a death’s-head, huge and sun-bleached – dead dreams of an elder world and mightier race lay frozen in their wide gaping eyeholes. That evening more firmly than ever fastened into my soul the conviction that Fate was of stone, and Hope a false idol – blind, bloodless, and of granite core. I felt, too, that the trial God had appointed me was gaining its climax, and must now be turned by my own hands, hot, feeble, trembling as they were. It rained still, and blew; but with more clemency, I thought, than it had poured and raged all day. Twilight was falling, and I deemed its influence pitiful; from the lattice I saw coming night-clouds trailing low like banners drooping. It seemed to me that at this hour there was affection and sorrow in Heaven above for all pain suffered on earth beneath; the weight of my dreadful dream became alleviated – that insufferable thought of being no more loved – no more owned, half-yielded to hope of the contrary – I was sure this hope would shine clearer if I got out from under this house-roof, which was crushing as the slab of a tomb, and went outside the city to a certain quiet hill, a long way distant in the fields. Covered with a cloak (I could not be delirious, for I had sense and recollection to put on warm clothing), forth I set. The bells of a church arrested me in passing; they seemed to call me in to the salut, and I went in. Any solemn rite, any spectacle of sincere worship, any opening for appeal to God was as welcome to me then as bread to one in extremity of want. I knelt down with others on the stone pavement. It was an old solemn church, its pervading gloom not gilded but purpled by light shed through stained glass.

Few worshippers were assembled, and, the salut over, half of them departed. I discovered soon that those left remained to confess. I did not stir. Carefully every door of the church was shut; a holy quiet sank upon, and a solemn shade gathered about us. After a space, breathless and spent in prayer, a penitent approached the confessional. I watched. She whispered her avowal; her shrift was whispered back; she returned consoled. Another went, and another. A pale lady, kneeling near me, said in a low, kind voice: – “Go you now, I am not quite prepared.”

Mechanically obedient, I rose and went. I knew what I was about; my mind had run over the intent with lightning-speed. To take this step could not make me more wretched than I was; it might soothe me.

The priest within the confessional never turned his eyes to regard me; he only quietly inclined his ear to my lips. He might be a good man, but this duty had become to him a sort of form: he went through it with the phlegm of custom. I hesitated; of the formula of confession I was ignorant: instead of commencing, then, with the prelude usual, I said: – “Mon père, je suis Protestante.”

He directly turned. He was not a native priest: of that class, the cast of physiognomy is, almost invariably, grovelling: I saw by his profile and brow he was a Frenchman; though grey and advanced in years, he did not, I think, lack feeling or intelligence. He inquired, not unkindly, why, being a Protestant, I came to him?

I said I was perishing for a word of advice or an accent of comfort. I had been living for some weeks quite alone; I had been ill; I had a pressure of affliction on my mind of which it would hardly any longer endure the weight.

“Was it a sin, a crime?” he inquired, somewhat startled. I reassured him on this point, and, as well as I could, I showed him the mere outline of my experience.

He looked thoughtful, surprised, puzzled. “You take me unawares,” said he. “I have not had such a case as yours before: ordinarily we know our routine, and are prepared; but this makes a great break in the common course of confession. I am hardly furnished with counsel fitting the circumstances.”

Of course, I had not expected he would be; but the mere relief of communication in an ear which was human and sentient, yet consecrated – the mere pouring out of some portion of long accumulating, long pent-up pain into a vessel whence it could not be again diffused – had done me good. I was already solaced.

“Must I go, father?” I asked of him as he sat silent.

“My daughter,” he said kindly – and I am sure he was a kind man: he had a compassionate eye – “for the present you had better go: but I assure you your words have struck me. Confession, like other things, is apt to become formal and trivial with habit. You have come and poured your heart out; a thing seldom done. I would fain think your case over, and take it with me to my oratory. Were you of our faith I should know what to say – a mind so tossed can find repose but in the bosom of retreat, and the punctual practice of piety. The world, it is well known, has no satisfaction for that class of natures. Holy men have bidden penitents like you to hasten their path upward by penance, self-denial, and difficult good works. Tears are given them here for meat and drink – bread of affliction and waters of affliction – their recompence comes hereafter. It is my own conviction that these impressions under which you are smarting are messengers from God to bring you back to the true Church. You were made for our faith: depend upon it our faith alone could heal and help you – Protestantism is altogether too dry, cold, prosaic for you. The further I look into this matter, the more plainly I see it is entirely out of the common order of things. On no account would I lose sight of you. Go, my daughter, for the present; but return to me again.”

I certainly hope to return to Brussels again, it was warm and the reception my wife and I received was equally warm. Thank you to all who came to my talk, and I hope all of you can join me next week for another new Brontë blog post, which will have a lot more on Brussels.

In my talk in Brussels next Saturday, “Doubt, Defiance and Devotion – Faith And The Brontë Sisters’, I will be looking at the religious attitudes of Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë, and the impact that faith had on their work. There’s also another Brontë with an enigmatic attitude to faith to consider, however, so in today’s new Brontë blog post we will be looking at Branwell Brontë and religion.

Branwell Brontë, as you probably know, was the only male among the six Brontë siblings born to Patrick and Maria. As such it would have been expected that he would become a future breadwinner for the family, and able to support his sisters if they were unable to find work, or suitably wealthy husbands, themselves. It was a lot of pressure to be placed on the shoulders of such an emotionally volatile man, and I’m sure we all know the demons Branwell battled with in his adult life.

Branwell would also have been expected to take a leading role as the only son of the parish priest, and this would have involved more than simply sitting in the Brontë pews during the Sunday services. We know that Branwell, like his sisters, was a teacher at the Haworth Sunday school founded by Patrick Brontë, and reports from pupils at the school show that he was, at least initially, a keen and diligent teacher.

In September 1833, Patrick Brontë sent a letter to his parishioners with a bold plan to enliven the church he served at. The letter read:

“I have spoken to several people concerning the organ. All seem desirous of having one if the money can be procured. Miss Branwell says she will subscribe five pounds, and some others have promised to give liberally. Mr Sunderland, the Keighley organist, says he will give his services gratis on the day of the opening of the organ, and, in general, the real friends of the church are desirous of having one. A player can also be readily procured.”

The player could easily be procured by Patrick because he had his own son in mind, and Branwell became a regular organist at Haworth church services. It was at least partly to help Branwell with his organ playing that Patrick bought and installed a second hand piano in his parsonage, although it was Emily and Anne Brontë who enjoyed playing it the most.

We can guess that as Branwell’s life became more chaotic, and as he became more a slave to his drink and drug addictions, his attendance at church would have become less frequent before ceasing altogether. Days spent in bars were infinitely more preferable to him than days spent in the pews, but at the very end of his life he showed that his faith still burned somewhere within him.

Sunday 24th September 1848 saw Branwell Brontë confined to his bed in Haworth Parsonage. He had been there, growing frailer and frailer for many weeks, and on this day his great friend, and village sexton, John Brown was by his bed.

Brown was about to leave this gloomy chamber to ring the bells summoning people to church but Branwell called out suddenly, ‘John, I’m dying!’ Patrick, Emily, Anne and Charlotte were called to his room. Charlotte later recalled the scene. Patrick prayed fervently, and Branwell at last whispered a word that had not escaped his lips for a decade: ‘amen’.With a Herculean effort he rose from the bed, embraced his father, and died. Branwell Brontë’s faith had been tested sorely, but at the final moment it brought him strength and solace.

You can find more details on my talk at this link: https://www.thebrusselsBrontëgroup.org/events/ If you can’t make it to Brussels, you can join me here next Sunday for another new Brontë blog post.