Branwell Brontë’s Creation
A fascinating new novel telling the story of Branwell Brontë the son of a parson and the brilliant, tormented brother to the famous sisters. A moving novel, exploring class divisions and the frustrations of love, set in Broughton-in-Furness and the Yorkshire of the 19th century.
In Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë tells the story of a governess rebelling against the cold place society has marked out for her. In Branwell Brontë’s Creation, the story of Charlotte’s own brother, Branwell, who likewise inhabited a cold, cold place, rebelled and suffered for it, is told. Charming, tormented, brilliant, Branwell came to be dismissed by many as a wastrel. It is a story based on truth, brilliantly fictionalised. Branwell, in loving simple Milly, loves not wisely but too well. She cannot begin to enter into the reality and complexity of his life, and becomes increasingly a kind of fiction to him yet love it is. A moving, lyrical, important novel, set in Broughton-in-Furness and the bleak but magical Yorkshire of the 19th century.
From Chapter 21
“Her?” said Branwell shakily. He froze at Parker’s words. The long pregnancy was suddenly a living thing. Yet so soon dead. He held on to Milly’s hand. She still sobbed softly. He shrank away from himself in a kind of guilty misery, at the knowledge that his baby was dead. His little daughter was dead! But where was she now? He didn’t dare think just then what Parker had done with her.
“She lived but minutes,” said Parker, in a low unfeeling tone. “I’ve laid her out i’ there. I’ve swaddled her.” He nodded to a second bedroom.
Leaving Milly, Branwell took a lighted candle from the dresser next door. Just for an instant as he did so, the candlelight flickered on the wooden bangle Michael had made for Milly, which lay on the top. It was a beautiful shining thing. What it represented now though, made him wince. Struggling to calm his nerves he went to the second bedroom. The door was open. Through it he saw the pitch black nothingness of night. Cautious and fearful, he stepped quietly into the darkness.
Such light the candle offered was thin and vaporous, disappearing then glowing again, as if searching. Compared to the rest of the house, the room smelt oddly fresh, with a peculiar scent of spring. The air was light and clean. He moved the candle around the room, peering about, though he dared not imagine what he searched for.
A linen box stood in a corner. Branwell’s heart pounded. On top of it he made out a tiny bundle of what looked like some wrapped up linen. He stumbled closer, then stood for a moment trembling, weak with sadness. The candle shook in his hand. He could not cope with the feelings that flooded his mind; they burst from his skin in sweat. He steadied himself against the wall.
After several agonising moments, he moved in further. It was just a tiny bundle … A tiny, tiny bundle … Some wrapped up bread perhaps … Yes, people kept bread wrapped up like that in Haworth … He gripped the candle, bending over to look. For a moment he felt as if his body had turned to stone. He feared to look any further, yet his fingers went before him, touching and opening the cloth. A sweet and gentle fragrance issued from inside. Little by little he parted the cloth, till his fingers touched the bony head of his child! Just now he didn’t want to see, only to feel! The soft tenderness of her lips kissed the tips of his fingers. He ran them across the fragile tiny nose and the soft closed eyes. The top of the head was covered in what felt like cotton grass. His limbs trembled. Moving forward, he dared to look closer.
A vivid and evocative portrait of the lost Brontë brother, a lyrical account of the family, landscape and era that made this tormented man what he was, conspire to make a magical novel. Branwell talks, suffers, loves – the sisters fret, the moor lives and breathes – we believe every word of it – and rightly so. Poet Bardsley has done her research, come up with fresh and convincing insights into Branwell’s short, tragic life, and transmuted it into an admirable piece of literature.
Fay Weldon
“It takes a stigma to beat a dogma”, goes the old saw. Quite where myths fit into this hierarchy of intransigence is unclear, but there are many myths about the Brontës as any eavesdropper at the Brontë Parsonage Museum at Haworth can testify. Some progress has been made in recent years on weakening the ‘Saintly Charlotte’ stereotype, so carefully created by Mrs Gaskell (and Charlotte herself). Even the mad parson Patrick Brontë, who burnt his wife’s dresses and fired his pistol at the Church tower, is being transmuted into a socially progressive thinker and caring father.
But Branwell carries the stigma of the feckless and wayward son who squandered his talent in self-pity, drink and drugs, and brought the family to its knees. “The least said about him, poor lad, the better,” wrote Mrs Gaskell. On the blurb on a CD of the poems of his sisters purchased recently, the same old canard is paraded, that the worthless Branwell took to drink and drugs. Yet this is the lad who inspired his sisters to write stories in the first place; who had eighteen of his poems published before his sisters did; whose translation of the Odes of Horace impressed the great Hartley Coleridge; and whose recently published prose works fill three volumes!
Now “Poor, brilliant, gay, moody, moping, wildly excitable, miserable Brontë” (Francis Grundy in 1879) has a champion at last. In Wendy Bardsley’s new novel, the stereotype becomes a person. Here we have a thinking, feeling, dreaming and passionate lad, let loose on the world, who finds a woman to love. Rarely have I found a writer so immured in the characters of the Brontë family and their friends. And not just Branwell. Emily, Charlotte, Anne, Patrick, all have their distinctive and credible personalities. Authentic personalities – Bardsley knows her Brontës well, and their lives, their home, their times. John Brown, the sexton grumbling at all the grave stones he has to prepare; the rustic Michael and his knowledge of making paint pigments from plants; the many other characters that stick in the memory. Hartley Coleridge is a treasure.
Wendy’s characterisation is superb. Her storytelling too. Unputdownable.
Bob Duckett
UK Editor, Brontë Studies; Editor Brother in the Shadow: Stories & Sketches by Branwell Brontë (1988);
Hon. Publications Secretary, Brontë Society.