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Charlotte Bronte Throws Shade
Quote of the day, October 21st
The Secret History of Jane Eyre: How Charlotte Bronte Wrote Her Masterpiece, John Pfordresher, 2017: W. W. Norton & Company
The Bronte children, Branwell, Charlotte, Emily and Anne, were a family of creative geniuses. As young children, they devoted themselves to building worlds of fiction through prose, poetry and drawing. Charlotte was very shy and relished time alone in her creative world.
As a young woman, in 1846 and 1847, she spent some time visiting old friends from school. One of those friends, Amelia Walker, lived in a large family estate. She had become an example of how money and status causes a person to become insincere and mindlessly vain. It’s easy to imagine Charlotte, quiet and thoughtful, from a humble home, feeling uncomfortable mingling with society at the Walker’s grand house. Charlotte wrote to her close friend, Ellen Nussey about it in January 1847 :
“As to society I don’t understand much about it — … It seemed to me a very strange, complicated affair indeed — wherein Nature is turned upside down — … Eternal and tedious botheration is their notion of happiness — sensible pursuits their ennui.”
I gave a mental snigger reading the phrase ‘eternal and tedious botheration’ as it so clearly describes the mentality of people…
