I’m sorry that I couldn’t bring you a Brontë blog post last week. Very sadly my beautiful mother died last Tuesday aged 88. It’s a personal tragedy that I know many of you will have experienced, and since then I’ve been in a whirlwind of organising people and the events and bureaucracies that follow a death in the family.
At times like these I have found solace in my wonderful wife Yvette and the support of family and friends. It’s a tragedy the Brontës encountered much earlier in life of course – Maria Brontë, mother of the six Brontë siblings, died far too young – when Anne Brontë was just one year old.
Charlotte Brontë was five at the time, and she only came to know the woman her mother had been through a series of letters presented to her by her father in her adulthood. She described the moment thus:
“It was strange now to peruse for the first time the records of a mind whence my own sprang – and most strange – and at once sad and sweet to find that mind of a truly fine, pure and elevated order. They were written to papa before they were married – there is a rectitude, a refinement, a constancy, a modesty, a sense, a gentleness about them indescribable. I wished she had lived and that I had known her.”
I was very lucky to have known my mother for over half a century, and she could not have been more loving or more supportive. She came with me on one of my first visits to Haworth when I was 18. Here we are outside what is now the Cabinet of Curiosities, but what was then the Old Apothecary.
I hope you can join me next week for another new Brontë blog post, and if any of you are going through a similar experience at the moment – keep going.
