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osprey_archerLike most of Daphne Du Maurier’s books, The Infernal World of Branwell Bronte is a gripping read, and as a work of literature I enjoyed it very much. As a biography, it’s marred by Du Maurier’s willingness to extrapolate wildly from Branwell’s fiction to his life.
Although Branwell, unlike his sisters, never published anything, in his youth he wrote an extraordinary amount in what he and Charlotte called their “infernal world”: a huge outpouring of stories and poetry set in their fictional country of Angria. This world, Du Maurier suggests, became Branwell’s coping mechanism, a retreat from an increasingly disappointing reality, until at last that reality grew so miserable that the infernal world no longer offered an escape. Thereafter Branwell’s rapid decline into alcoholism and death.
The break came when Branwell was abruptly fired from his post as tutor in the Robinson household. The classic explanation has been that Branwell was carrying on an affair with Mrs. Robinson (pause for Simon & Garfunkle), but Du Maurier thinks that the affair was probably entirely one-sided, if it existed at all. Perhaps Branwell fell for Mrs. Robinson, and worked up his unrequited crush into a tragic tale of thwarted mutual passion as a salve to his amour propre after he lost his job.
Or indeed, maybe the crush never existed: maybe Branwell was just romancing up an excuse to explain why he had been fired yet again. Once he told the lie, he couldn’t back out without losing face, so he had to keep repeating it; and perhaps, Du Maurier suggests, he came to believe the story he made up. At the end of his life, she believes, he was truly losing contact with reality.
Du Maurier’s theory is that Branwell’s drinking, which the Brontes saw as the root of his problem, was in fact an attempt at self-medication. Certainly the letters she quotes show that he was deeply depressed for the last few years of his life, and Du Maurier thinks that Patrick Bronte may have seen the seeds of nervous trouble much earlier than that. She further argues that perhaps Branwell had epilepsy, and either epilepsy and nervous trouble (which were considered related in the 19th century anyway) would explain Patrick Bronte’s unusual step in teaching a promising son entirely at home rather than sending him to school.
In fact, it struck me as I was reading that the Bronte daughters had many of the advantages that usually accrued to sons. Branwell was taught at home, while the girls were sent to school. Branwell had no money, while the girls all inherited legacies from their Aunt Branwell. She expected the gifted Branwell would make his own way, while the girls might need a competency to keep them after their father died. But in fact, had Patrick Bronte died, Branwell would have had to live on his sisters’ charity, as Jane Austen and countless other women lived on their brothers’.
If Branwell had also gone to school—if he had the same modest competency put by—if he, metaphorically, had the same “room of his own” that his sisters did—might he too have published a novel? Du Maurier doesn’t argue that he was as talented as the others, but perhaps he could have survived to be the other other other Bronte, instead of the drunken afterthought.
Although Branwell, unlike his sisters, never published anything, in his youth he wrote an extraordinary amount in what he and Charlotte called their “infernal world”: a huge outpouring of stories and poetry set in their fictional country of Angria. This world, Du Maurier suggests, became Branwell’s coping mechanism, a retreat from an increasingly disappointing reality, until at last that reality grew so miserable that the infernal world no longer offered an escape. Thereafter Branwell’s rapid decline into alcoholism and death.
The break came when Branwell was abruptly fired from his post as tutor in the Robinson household. The classic explanation has been that Branwell was carrying on an affair with Mrs. Robinson (pause for Simon & Garfunkle), but Du Maurier thinks that the affair was probably entirely one-sided, if it existed at all. Perhaps Branwell fell for Mrs. Robinson, and worked up his unrequited crush into a tragic tale of thwarted mutual passion as a salve to his amour propre after he lost his job.
Or indeed, maybe the crush never existed: maybe Branwell was just romancing up an excuse to explain why he had been fired yet again. Once he told the lie, he couldn’t back out without losing face, so he had to keep repeating it; and perhaps, Du Maurier suggests, he came to believe the story he made up. At the end of his life, she believes, he was truly losing contact with reality.
Du Maurier’s theory is that Branwell’s drinking, which the Brontes saw as the root of his problem, was in fact an attempt at self-medication. Certainly the letters she quotes show that he was deeply depressed for the last few years of his life, and Du Maurier thinks that Patrick Bronte may have seen the seeds of nervous trouble much earlier than that. She further argues that perhaps Branwell had epilepsy, and either epilepsy and nervous trouble (which were considered related in the 19th century anyway) would explain Patrick Bronte’s unusual step in teaching a promising son entirely at home rather than sending him to school.
In fact, it struck me as I was reading that the Bronte daughters had many of the advantages that usually accrued to sons. Branwell was taught at home, while the girls were sent to school. Branwell had no money, while the girls all inherited legacies from their Aunt Branwell. She expected the gifted Branwell would make his own way, while the girls might need a competency to keep them after their father died. But in fact, had Patrick Bronte died, Branwell would have had to live on his sisters’ charity, as Jane Austen and countless other women lived on their brothers’.
If Branwell had also gone to school—if he had the same modest competency put by—if he, metaphorically, had the same “room of his own” that his sisters did—might he too have published a novel? Du Maurier doesn’t argue that he was as talented as the others, but perhaps he could have survived to be the other other other Bronte, instead of the drunken afterthought.
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Date: 2025-01-10 04:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-01-13 02:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-01-10 07:29 pm (UTC)This is a ghost story. It is a story about werewolves, and things that go bump in the night. It is a story of an ill-fated land, the pathless moors of Northern England so well chronicled in Wuthering Heights. And it is the story of a real family whose destiny it is to deal with this darkly glamorous and dangerous world.
When young Emily Brontë helps a wounded man she finds at the foot of an ancient pagan shrine in the remote Yorkshire moors, her life becomes contentiously entwined with his. He is Alcuin Curzon, embittered member of a sect working to eradicate the resurgent plague of lycanthropy in Europe and northern England.
But Emily’s father, curate of the Haworth village church, is responsible for having unwittingly brought a demonic werewolf god to Yorkshire forty years ago—and it is taking possession of Emily’s beloved but foolish and dissolute brother. Curzon must regard Emily’s family as a dire threat.
In spite of being at deadly odds, Emily and Curzon find themselves thrown together in fighting werewolves, confronting pagan gods, even saving each other from the lures of moorland demons. And in a final battle that sweeps from the haunted village of Haworth to a monstrous shrine far out on the moors, the two of them must be reluctant allies against an ancient power that seems likely to take their souls as well as their lives.
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Date: 2025-01-11 05:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-01-13 02:19 pm (UTC)