Brontë Anne - The Bronte cabinet: three lives in nine objects

Copyright 2015 by Deborah Lutz

All rights reserved

First Edition

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Book design by Brooke Koven
Production managers: Louise Mattarelliano

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Lutz, Deborah.

The Bront cabinet : three lives in nine objects / Deborah Lutz. First edition.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-0-393-24008-5 (hardcover)

1. Bront, Charlotte, 1816-1855. 2. Bront, Emily, 1818-1848. 3. Bront, Anne, 1820-1849. 4. Women authors, English19th centuryBiography. 5. SistersEnglandYorkshireBiography. I. Title.

PR4168.L88 2015

823'.809dc23

[B]

2014046935

ISBN 978-0-393-24673-5 (e-book)

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
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Praise for

THE BRONT CABINET

[Lutz] is both fabulously erudite and refreshingly willing to tackle the trashier end of the literary spectrum.... Her incisive, beguiling prose... [and] frankness about her own fascination... makes this wonderfully fresh and insightful biography simultaneously an act of resurrection and of mourning.

Samantha Ellis, Times Literary Supplement (UK)

Fresh and enlightening.... This book is an exceptionally intimate study of the three sisters, through it we look into the most private corners of the parsonage.... Faultlessly researched and evocatively written.

Rachel Trethewey, Independent (UK)

The Bront Cabinet does not fail to deliver, offering vivid interpretations of the lives and the works of these strange and fascinating sisters.... As strange and mesmerizing as the sisters themselves.

Paula Byrne, London Times

Bront aficionados will enjoy the deft interweaving of artifact, biography and literature, but the greatest pleasure is the expanding chain of associations Lutz creates in each chapter.... An engaging read for fans of the Bront sisters, of course, but also anyone interested in material culture, the Victorian era and the history of everyday livesespecially womens lives.

Patricia Hagen, Star Tribune

This is a fine book, rich, immersive and illuminating, glowing with the life of the Bronts and their wild genius.

Shahidha Bari, Times Higher Education

The Bront Cabinet is full of illuminating and original insights, bringing aspects of the Bronts lives into sharp focus for the first time.

Mark Bostridge, Literary Review (UK)

A passionate, intelligent and stylish book. Deborah Lutz works a kind of magic around the Bronts possessions and evokes their lives, works and legacies more vividly than ever. A brilliantly original study that all Bront lovers will want to read.

Claire Harman, author of Charlotte Bront: A Fiery Heart

The most mundane object carries a lifetime of experience within it. Daily life, and the objects of daily living, can speak to us, if we are willing to listen. Deborah Lutz has listened to what the Bronts possessions tell us, and produced an original, enlightening and acute reading of these original, enlightening and acute womens writings.

Judith Flanders, author of The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens London

Deborah Lutzs engaging new study... allows us to feel the texture of the Bronts experience.... 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.

Lucasta Miller, Guardian

What an impressive web of detail, housed within compact and elegant sentences! This jeweled bookan act of intricate divinationbrings the Bronts to life by performing a magical investigation of the objects surrounding them. Deborah Lutz exercises a dowsers wondrous rigor; with erudition, deep feeling, and an almost mystical sense of an inanimate objects communicativeness, she pioneers a new way of looking at detritus and keepsakes, and a new way of writing biography.

Wayne Koestenbaum, author of My 1980s & Other Essays

Fresh and novel.... Reading this sensitive inquiry into the Bronts objects, and the family members who were so very close to them, allows the many who love the sisters writings to partake, even if from afar, in the special lives of these fascinating and brilliant women. Its literary archeology par excellence .

Tom Lavoie, Shelf Awareness

A fascinating book on treating our most treasured objects with care and loving attention.... Fans of the fiction of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne will love this imaginative book which provides access to their lives and creations through nine objects.... In a time when our technological toys are taking us away from the material world, we need to reverse that trend and reverence our things.

Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, Spirituality and Practice

Lutz takes a new approach at looking at the Bront sisters... and creates a new and fresh view of this creative family. A must read for any fan of the Bront sisters.

Grand Forks Herald

For Tony and Pamela

Every spirit passing through the world fingers the tangible and mars the mutable, and finally has come to look and not to buy. As shoes are worn and hassocks are sat upon... finally everything is left where it was and the spirit passes on.

MARILYNNE ROBINSON, Housekeeping

The world is so full of a number of things
Im sure we should all be as happy as kings.

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, HAPPY THOUGHT

T HE STRANGE BED in Emily Bronts Wuthering Heights has always haunted me. We read about Catherine Earnshaws large oak case before we know anything about her. A wooden box entered via sliding panels, it has cutout squares near the top that resemble coach windows, as if one might crawl in to travel somewhere. The cabinet, its own little private room within a room, encloses a window and its ledge, where Catherine long ago stacked her small library and scratched her name into the paint. She once read there, scribbling her diary in the margins of her books.

As one who favors reading in bed, I find this oak box charged with meaning, especially when encountered while settled in my own, the lamp a circle of warmth carved out of the late-night darkness. Just as the wardrobe in C. S. Lewiss The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is moved through by the children until the layers of fur coats become flakes of snow and tree branches, the bed opens into other worlds, the plenitude of the imagination. Heathcliff believes in this capability too; he gets into the dead Catherines box believing he can find her. He perishes there himself, and the novel hints that the bed provides a portal to another sphere, the one of ghosts.

There are few books Id rather carry me late into the night than Jane Eyre , Wuthering Heights , and Villette , few books whose worlds Id rather crawl into and inhabit. I have even felt, somehow, known by their heroines, as if they might recognize me when I enter their spheres. I move around in those rooms with Jane or Lucy, sit in the antechamber of Bertha Masons prison, and also peer with wonder as the candlelight plays over the doors of a great cabinet oppositewhose front, divided into twelve panels, bore in grim design, the heads of the twelve apostles, each inclosed in its separate panel as in a frame. My intimacy with these books has led me, like so many others, to want to come closer to their authors. So alive are these novels that I wish I could resurrect the Bronts themselves, their daily living and breathing, their material presence.