The Bronte Cabinet: three lives in nine objectsBy Deborah Lutz
W.W. Norton & Company, 2015. 310 pages. Nonfiction
The story of the Bront's is told through the things they wore, stitched, wrote on and inscribed at the parsonage in Haworth. From Charlotte's writing desk and the manuscripts it contained to the brass collar worn by Emily's dog, Keeper, each object opens a window onto the sisters' world, their fiction and the Victorian era. By unfolding the histories of the things they used, the chapters form a chronological biography of the family. A walking stick evokes Emily's solitary hikes on the moors and the stormy heath--itself a character in Wuthering Heights. Charlotte's bracelet containing Anne and Emily's intertwined hair gives voice to her grief over their deaths. These possessions pull us into their daily lives: the imaginary kingdoms of their childhood writing, their time as governesses and their stubborn efforts to make a mark on the world.
It's been awhile since I've read any of the novels of the Bronte sisters, but this fascinating biography of them, expressed through the personal items they created and owned, threw a wonderful light on them, pulling in quotes from their novels and setting them in the context of the late Romantic/ early Victorian England. I was inspired by what I learned of their lives, as well as the interesting information about Victorian men and women in general. It was a case where the footnotes were just about as interesting as the text (for example, I learned that Charles Dickens, when his cat died, turned it's paw into a letter opener!). Having studied archaeology, the study of people's lives through objects is something that I find really fascinating, and Deborah Lutz does a thorough and page-turningly good job.
If you like The Bronte Cabinet, you might also like:
By Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
Alfred A. Knopf, 2001. 501 pages. Nonfiction
They began their existence as everyday objects, but in the hands of award-winning historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, fourteen domestic items from preindustrial America-ranging from a linen tablecloth to an unfinished sock-relinquish their stories and offer profound insights into our history.
In an age when even meals are rarely made from scratch, homespun easily acquires the glow of nostalgia. The objects Ulrich investigates unravel those simplified illusions, revealing important clues to the culture and people who made them. Ulrich uses an Indian basket to explore the uneasy coexistence of native and colonial Americans. A piece of silk embroidery reveals racial and class distinctions, and two old spinning wheels illuminate the connections between colonial cloth-making and war. Pulling these divergent threads together, Ulrich demonstrates how early Americans made, used, sold, and saved textiles in order to assert their identities, shape relationships, and create history.
By Rebecca Mead
Crown Publishers, 2014. 293 pages. Nonfiction
Rebecca Mead was a young woman in an English coastal town when she first read George Eliot's Middlemarch , regarded by many as the greatest English novel. After gaining admission to Oxford, and moving to the United States to become a journalist, through several love affairs, then marriage and family, Mead read and reread Middlemarch . The novel, which Virginia Woolf famously described as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people," offered Mead something that modern life and literature did not.
In this wise and revealing work of biography, reporting, and memoir, Rebecca Mead leads us into the life that the book made for her, as well as the many lives the novel has led since it was written. Employing a structure that deftly mirrors that of the novel, My Life in Middlemarch takes the themes of Eliot's masterpiece--the complexity of love, the meaning of marriage, the foundations of morality, and the drama of aspiration and failure--and brings them into our world. Offering both a fascinating reading of Eliot's biography and an exploration of the way aspects of Mead's life uncannily echo that of Eliot herself, My Life in Middlemarch is for every ardent lover of literature who cares about why we read books, and how they read us.
By Marian Veevers
Pegasus Books, 2018. 380 pages. Nonfiction
An intimate portrait of Jane Austen, Dorothy Wordsworth, and their world--two women torn between revolutionary ideas and fierce conservatism, artistic creativity and emotional upheavals.
The lives of Dorothy Wordsworth and Jane Austen have never been examined together before. Born just four years apart, they came from the same class of landed gentry with clergymen for fathers (who both died young); with friends, family and many interests in common. Living in Georgian England, they navigated strict social conventions and new ideals, and were influenced by Dorothy's brother, the Romantic poet William Wordsworth, and his coterie. They were supremely talented writers yet often lacked the necessary peace of mind in their search for self-expression. Neither ever married.
Jane and Dorothy uses each life to illuminate the other. For both women, financial security was paramount and whereas Jane Austen hoped to achieve this through her writing, rather than being dependent on her family, Dorothy made the opposite choice and put her creative powers to the use of her brilliant brother with whom she lived all her adult life.
Though neither path would bring lasting fulfillment and independence, both women's mark on literary culture is undeniable. This probing book reveals a crucial missing piece to the puzzle of Dorothy and William's relationship and addresses enduring myths surrounding the one man who seems to have stolen Jane's heart, only to break it . . .
MGB
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