Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | 823.809 LUT | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Stillwater Public Library | 823.809 LUT | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
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.
Author Notes
Deborah Lutz is the Thruston B. Morton Endowed Chair of English at the University of Louisville. She has published four books, most recently The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects and Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture. She is the editor of the Norton Critical Editions of Jane Eyre and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and the recipient of an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Applying "thing theory" to the lives and literary legacy of the Brontës, Lutz (Pleasure Bound) skillfully uses the titular nine objects to explore the relationship between the sisters' world and their fiction. For instance, the miniscule volumes in which the Brontë sisters and their brother, Branwell, recorded their juvenilia (fantasies set in the worlds of Angria and Gondal), prompts discussion of the dearness of printed books in the early 19th century and the consolation that so many Brontë characters find in reading and owning books. A sampler made by Anne, meanwhile, is tied to the many types of needlework and knitting by which Brontë heroines contribute to their households. A chapter on each sister's portable writing desk as a "personal space safeguarding secrets" contrasts Charlotte (who craved affection) with Emily (who was "deeply reserved"). Lutz bolsters her observations with abundant references to the Brontës' novels, poetry, and letters, proving especially insightful on Wuthering Heights. She muses on Emily's special relationship with the nearby moors (in connection with Branwell's walking stick), and on the imagery of death and the afterlife that laces the novel (elaborated from locks of the Brontës' hair kept as death mementos). Lutz commends Emily for her "visceral engagement with her subject matter," and the same could be said of Lutz in this illuminating biographical study. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Lutz (Pleasure Bound, 2011) explores the lives of the Brontë sisters through nine of their household possessions. These are wonderfully resonant objects: among them, a writing desk (especially important for securing some privacy in a crowded house), the brass collar worn by the Brontës' dog (Keeper, who was a favorite of Emily's), books (paper was scarce, so books were very precious), and a cane (to go out walking across the awe-inspiring, windy moors). Lutz brilliantly contextualizes these quotidian items, showing how and when they make appearances in the women's writing, and vividly capturing their daily lives and personalities. Emily and Charlotte's relationship, in particular that of collaborators at odds is touchingly brought to life. Brontë fans, as well as those interested generally in Victorian life, will be especially entertained, as Lutz does draw cultural and economic connections to their material objects. Readers interested in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women writers will also be satisfied as Lutz traces links to both the predecessors and inheritors of the Brontë legacy: Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf.--Grant, Sarah Copyright 2015 Booklist
Guardian Review
An engaging study sheds new light on the siblings by examining the material remnants of their lives Do we really need another book about the Brontes? Few English writers have been more intensely biographised than Charlotte, Emily and Anne, and since Juliet Barker's monumental The Brontes of 1995, the historical facts about literature's most famous family have been placed on record, seemingly definitively. The "three weird sisters", as Ted Hughes once called them, have been stripped of their accretion of myth; what more is there to be said? Deborah Lutz's engaging new study proves that there is indeed room for fresh perspectives. Her highly personal voyage through the sisters' lives, works and times is less a straight biography than an act of necromancy that allows us to feel the texture of the Brontes' experience, both inner and outer. She pulls off the hardest trick in literary biography: to make us feel that we know the subjects intimately, and, simultaneously, to make the familiar strange and remind us of the space that separates us from the dead. It is not surprising that Lutz is so alive to the paradoxes and emotional nuances involved in recovering past lives. Her previous book, Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture, is a study of the 19th-century habit of memorialising the dead, when mourning was an almost sensual act, expressed through touching and owning physical objects associated with lost loved ones. Literary historical scholarship is of itself, perhaps, an academically sanctioned form of ancestor worship in our own society; few, however, approach the texts they study with Lutz's feeling for material culture. Among the illustrations in this book is a photograph of a lock cut from the hair of the Brontes' mother, Maria, who died of cancer in 1821, leaving her husband with five small children to bring up. As a result, the bereaved Patrick Bronte -- a clergyman of limited means -- sent his daughters to a charity boarding school, where the two eldest, Maria and Elizabeth, fell ill. Both died. Charlotte never fully recovered from the experience, which she later transmuted into Jane Eyre, with its nightmarish portrayal of Lowood school. As Lutz puts it, the Bronte children "never stopped trying to find in the act of writing a means to overcome death". Their mother's auburn hair fragment is startlingly vivid. Seeing it shows, poignantly, how things can sometimes do what words cannot when it comes to bringing back the dead. Lutz builds her thematic narrative around physical objects connected with the Brontes, all of which have their own tales to tell. Best known are the tiny books they made as children, full of stories that gave Charlotte's biographer Elizabeth Gaskell the impression of creative excitement carried almost to insanity. Here we are introduced to these miniature texts in the flesh. Made from cut-up fragments of waste paper, some printed with advertisements, and sewn with brown yarn, they inspire Lutz to make a detour into social and economic history; we learn how a tax on paper, not repealed until 1860, pushed up the price and necessitated recycling. Lutz's narrative mode wheels and soars in a series of fascinating digressions. The samplers made by the Bronte girls, for example, along with Charlotte's wooden workbox (it still contains some of its contents, including buttons, a measuring tape and thread), prompt an exploration of sewing as a social practice, and of its emotional meaning for women at the time. The Bronte novels contain frequent freighted references to needlework, and the contradictory feelings it inspired. When Jane Eyre makes her famous speech on gender equality -- "Women feel as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do" -- she angrily complains of the "stagnation" of a life devoted to "embroidering bags". Yet sewing was not always seen as oppressive; it was creative too, not just as an activity but as a meaningful female mode of exchange. Charlotte often sewed presents for her friend Ellen Nussey, including a pair of fancy slippers; in Villette, her fictional counterpart Lucy Snowe signals her romantic attachment to Paul Emanuel by making him a decorative watch-guard (such beaded or embroidered strips, as Lutz explains, were often used instead of a metal chain to attach the watch to a gentleman's clothing). Sewing could symbolise emotional -- indeed bodily -- intimacy; but it could also be a protective shield. By burying herself in her "work", a woman could avoid conversing in drawing-rooms with people she did not want to talk to. Unlike her more sociable sister, Emily never made any significant friend outside her family. According to one acquaintance, quoted here, she "never showed regard to any human creature; all her love was reserved for animals". As one would expect from the author of Wuthering Heights -- which notoriously includes a brutal scene in which puppies are casually hanged -- she was not, however, sentimental in her approach to dogs, cats, birds and other species. When her adored dog Keeper disobediently lay on the bed, she pummelled his face with her fists until his eyes swelled so much that he could barely see. Emily had a cruel, proto-Darwinian vision of human relations, which she saw as a reflection of the animal kingdom. Lutz moves effortlessly from critical-philosophical analysis of Emily's writings to the nitty-gritty of canine biography. Keeper's collar -- a somewhat uncomfortable-looking brass circlet, proudly engraved with "The Rev P Bronte, Haworth" -- prompts an investigation into Victorian attitudes to pets. But what breed was he? Lutz decides he must have been a mix of bulldog, terrier and mastiff. As one would expect, Lutz is particularly insightful on the material aspects of writing. Private letters as well as literary manuscripts feature here, such as the desperate love letters Charlotte wrote to the Belgian teacher who taught her when she attended a school in Brussels, and with whom she became infatuated. He tore them up and threw them away, but his suspicious wife retrieved them from the wastepaper basket and stitched the fragments together, with the result that the wounded-looking documents have survived for posterity. Another key item is Emily's portable writing-desk in which, in the autumn of 1845, Charlotte made the momentous discovery of a poetry manuscript, which not only convinced her of Emily's genius, but galvanised her literary ambitions for herself and her sisters, ultimately prompting them into publication. Had Charlotte not rifled through Emily's desk, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights might never have been written. First told to the public by Charlotte in the brief "Biographical Notice" of her sisters she published in 1850, this is one of the most famous anecdotes in the Bronte story; told in a new way, which stresses the physicality of Charlotte's act of intrusion into Emily's private space, it takes on new life. Lutz has a rare capacity for imaginative empathy and so fine a nose for detail that she even revels in the smell of some of the Bronte-related artefacts she has encountered. All lovers of the Brontes should read this book. It will perhaps mean most to those who already have some prior knowledge of the sisters' lives and works, but it is equally capable of whetting the appetites of those coming to them for the first time. * Lucasta Miller is the author of The Bronte Myth, published by Vintage. To order The Bronte Cabinet for [pound]17.99 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over [pound]10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of [pound]1.99. - Lucasta Miller.
Library Journal Review
Scholar and Brontë fan Lutz (English, Long Island Univ., Pleasure Bound: Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticism) brings a haptic approach to this fantastic example of "thing theory," or material culture. The nine objects the author examines and analyzes each get a dedicated chapter: some are straightforward, such as "Tiny Books," which describe the little volumes that the Brontë sisters-Emily, Charlotte, and Anne-and brother Branwell made out of scraps and remnants and composed stories for; others, such as "Fugitive Letters," discuss the physical objects written and mailed by the sisters and also provide historical and cultural context about postal service of 19th-century England. Also included are meditations on "women's work" and the often clashing personalities of the sisters and the difficulties they faced finding work and getting published. Lutz's knowledge of the Brontës and the world in which they lived and died is impressive and vast, and although it's obvious she researched and read a lot, this study is never dull. VERDICT Lutz entertains and educates in equal measure in this fascinating and readable book. Brontë lovers, Victorian history buffs, literature libraries, and cultural anthropologists, both amateur and professional, will enjoy this title.-Liz French, Library Journal © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| List of Illustrations | p. xi |
| Acknowledgments | p. xiii |
| Preface: The Private Lives of Objects | p. xix |
| Chapter 1 Tiny Books | p. 1 |
| Chapter 2 Pillopatate | p. 35 |
| Chapter 3 Out Walking | p. 63 |
| Chapter 4 Keeper, Grasper, and Other Family Animals | p. 95 |
| Chapter 5 Fugitive Letters | p. 123 |
| Chapter 6 The Alchemy of Desks | p. 157 |
| Chapter 7 Death Made Material | p. 185 |
| Chapter 8 Memory Albums | p. 211 |
| Chapter 9 Migrant Relics | p. 237 |
| Notes | p. 257 |
| Further Reading | p. 295 |
| Index | p. 299 |
