The mysteries of the least known Brontë sister
September 20, 2016 12:01 AM   Subscribe

 
"How wide is an average coffin? Would it be a lot less wide in 1848, owing to like, smaller people and bad nutrition? Is sixteen inches really very narrow? "

Ha ha! I can answer part of this! An able seaman on a British ship of the line in 1812 was allotted 19" width for his hammock. American ships allowed 18". Seaman were strong but not terrifically well-nourished. So 16" seems narrowish for a coffin, but not crazy narrow.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 12:24 AM on September 20, 2016 [10 favorites]


Ars longa, locellum angustum
posted by Segundus at 1:51 AM on September 20, 2016 [2 favorites]


Wow, a fascinating article and with a (spoiler!) satisfying ending for once! Like the author I definitely grew up under the spell of the Brontes, and to be honest have never left it. But I was always a Charlotte fan, and was scared of Emily. Again, growing up, I still am, and find Wuthering Heights a very fearful book, while Jane Eyre is an old friend.

I heartily recommend The Bronte Myth, by Lucasta Miller, mentioned in the article. It explains really well how, and why the myth began to develop (started by Charlotte in a bid to protect her sister from society seeing her as 'not quite right' and then by Mrs Gaskell trying to protect Charlotte from exactly the same thing) and how it has been subject to the vagaries of various cultural and lit crit trends (psychoanalysis, spiritualism, New Criticism etc) with critics blindly scribbling their own prejudices and psychoses over the text. Ironically, (or not, since they are female) the Brontes have been written on much more than they have themselves written, and as the article shows there is still the need to see them as 'not quite right' and some how make them 'right' again by providing the definitive interpretation of their life and work.

For my part, whenever anyone mentions the mystery of the Brontes, I always feel the need to mention Mr Bronte's library. As with other writers, everyone seems to forget that great authors were also great readers. We know very little of Emily's life, but her writings are completely understandable and interpretable when we consider what she and her sisters read - a lot of Scott, Wordsworth, Coleridge, almost certainly Byron and George Sand, possibly Balzac, Richardson, the many, many Gothic stories in Blackwood's magazine and so on. I personally find this very comforting, and it brings Emily closer to me, to imagine that her life (somewhat like mine) was very much a life of the mind, and involved an awful lot of books.
posted by low_horrible_immoral at 1:58 AM on September 20, 2016 [14 favorites]


An interesting article indeed. I like to think of the Bronte sisters as the Kardashians of their day. I actually live about a mile from Anne's grave in Scarborough, which has a typo on it...
posted by Monkeymoo at 2:58 AM on September 20, 2016 [1 favorite]


Long may the Brontës evade their pursuers and keep their secrets their own. No fan am I of trying to capture by detail the histories of artists to "understand" or "humanize" them. The constant demand for definition through cataloging and categorizing is a sickness of our nature that does the arts no favors. The desire for resolution of complexity runs counter to the resonating dissonance that is the hallmark of great art.

It isn't something I worry much about though since the personal histories of the writers of Wuthering Heights, Villette, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall aren't alone going to be enough to fully explain their books.
posted by gusottertrout at 4:14 AM on September 20, 2016 [1 favorite]


An able seaman on a British ship of the line in 1812 was allotted 19" width for his hammock.
But seaman slept in shifts. Half of the crew was on watch, so a sleeping seaman enjoyed a luxurious 38" of shoulder room.
posted by chrchr at 6:12 AM on September 20, 2016 [1 favorite]


What a fun read! Thank you for the post!!
posted by Dressed to Kill at 9:42 AM on September 20, 2016


I've been doing a fair amount of (scholarly) writing about the Brontes over the past few years, and it really is instructive to see just how little we know about the sisters, other than Charlotte--in very large part, as the article points out, thanks to Charlotte. Juliet Barker* has been most successful in rescuing the family from their "Gothic" reputation, especially the father, Patrick Bronte--also a published novelist (Jane's first encounter with Rochester is actually lifted straight from one of her father's novels!) and poet--who has been shafted since the nineteenth century.

*--although I have to say that the subtitle to the rev. ed. misleadingly Gothics things up again
posted by thomas j wise at 11:09 AM on September 20, 2016 [3 favorites]


Thanks for sharing. I'm not a huge fan of their writing, but I love it when people take the time to track down the source of possibly exaggerated stories. Amazing to think that so long after her death that they were able to speak to people and get an answer.
posted by gilsonal at 11:06 PM on September 20, 2016


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