OUR GUEST AUTHOR TODAY IS MARLENE WAGMAN-GELLER, WHO IS SHARING CHAPTER ONE OF HER NOVEL, 'A ROOM OF THEIR OWN' #RWRTeamBlog #ReadWriteRepeat
- Eva Bielby
- 10 hours ago
- 10 min read
PREFACE: A Room of
Their Own: Women’s
Home–Museums
Revealed
“Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story.” –Homer
The word museum originated from the ancient Greek word that denoted “place of the muses.” The nine Muses were the offspring of Zeus–who wasn’t?–and Mnemosyne, the Goddess of Memory. Indeed, museums are the repositories of memories, of ancient civilization, of the apogee of artistry.
Everyone has heard of the major museums whose stories are as intriguing as the works they display: Paris’s Louvre, London’s National Gallery, New York’s the Metropolitan. Between the three iconic institutions, twenty million visitors walk their halls, approximately the same number as people living in Beijing. But what about the galleries that do not display canvasses that bear the signatures of The Old Masters such as Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Picasso?
Curiosity about the daily lives of the famous draws us to the places they called home. A Room of Their Own is an investigation into museums, (sometimes referred to as memory museums), dedicated to fascinating women whose lives left indelible fingerprints on history. As these landmarks are situated in their subjects’ homes, rather than passively gazing at paintings with accompanying brass plaques, visitors undergo a more intimate experience. Upon entering their thresholds, one encounters a three-dimensional
diary with artifacts that comprised their everyday lives: furniture, photographs, and letters. Even the most mundane of objects takes on a magical realism, as they were the possessions of ladies of legend. The rooms where its residents lived serve as a confessional; there they laughed, mourned, created, (and, in Lizzie Borden’s case, killed). For those with a nod to the mystical, the ghostly chatelaines serve as guides. House-museums are Piped-Pipers to the curious. Walking where historic figures once tread presents the opportunity to hear the scratching of Emily Brontë’s quill in her Haworth Parsonage, hear an aria in Edith Piaf’s Parisienne apartment, imagine the iridescent blue of radium that doubled as Marie Curie’s nightlight. Whether the homes be humble or haute, all double as biographer. Betsy Ross’s miniscule dwelling in Philadelphia, and Marjorie Merriweather Post’s opulent estate, Hillwood in Washington, D.C., are equally compelling. The closest we can come to time travel–the closest we can come to a séance–is entering what was once the ladies’ private place. Their spirits hover over the heads of their guests and whisper, “We were here. We mattered.”
Where one travels on vacation is as autobiographically revealing as home décor. Some ski the slopes of Switzerland; some lather suntan lotion on Hawaii beaches; those with an adventurous-slash-suicidal bent run with the bulls in Pamplona. But for those who enjoy communing with the ghosts of yesteryear, the best way to do so is head to the locales that helped define those who went before. The rarified atmosphere retains the memory of the writers who searched for the mot juste, arm-wrestled their muse. In Florence, we can enter Elizabeth Barret Browning’s bedroom where she penned her poems; in Nairobi, we can visit the farm and country that inspired Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa; in Wellington, we can scrutinize Katherine Mansfield’s belongings.
Although most women’s home museums are situated in the United States, other countries also have shrines to the ladies who left legacies: England, Canada, Mexico, Holland, Poland, Germany, Switzerland, New Zealand, France, the Dominican Republic, and Kenya. When visiting these locales, these are must see landmarks.
A further method of obtaining a peephole into the past is by gazing out the widows of historic homes; each chapter ends with The Window of Her World. Geographical locale and gardens play an integral part of one’s psychological DNA. When Isabella Stewart Gardner looked out her window, her view was of the courtyard that housed gems of civilization such as a Renaissance Venetian canal-scape, an ancient Roman sculpture garden, and a medieval European cloister. Surrounding the treasures are rotating flower displays–depending on the month–orchids in the winter, hanging nasturtiums in the spring. Isabella’s mantra: “the best of everything.”
In the Coyoacán suburb of Mexico City, Frida Kahlo lived in the Casa Azul whose backyard was as colorful as the walls of her home. She filled her garden with her menagerie of pets–her surrogate children. The makeshift zoo held monkeys, a deer, and several Xoloitzcuintli, (hairless dogs). From her courtyard, her tequila imbibing parrot squawked, “No me pasa la cruda;” “the English version, I can’t get over this hangover.” Visits to the Kahlos invariably proved a boredom-buster.
By touring storied addresses, tourists experience off-the-beaten path destinations that double as magical mystery tours. Whether we love or loathe the women, walking in their shoes makes for a better understanding of their legacy. While traditional galleries allow us to gaze upon well-known canvasses, the thrill is nevertheless a passive experience. In contrast, stepping over the threshold of a famed resident allows for an up close and personal encounter.
While some view museums as a repository for the dustbins of the past, watched over by guards who prefer patrons adopt the code of omertà, galleries can provide high drama. One of the greatest whodunnits? occurred in Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. In 1990, two thieves, dressed as police officers, tied up the guards and made off with Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Manet masterpieces. The stolen items represent a $500 million loss and despite a ten-million-dollar reward, the theft remains the greatest unsolved mystery of the art world. When gazing at the empty frames that once held storied canvases, one can hear Isabella’s cries emanating from the Mount Auburn Cemetery at the desecration of her former home.
Historical homes oftentimes serve as an essential backdrop to their owners’ accomplishments. After Jane Austen left her childhood rectory in Hampshire, she did not write again until she secured a permanent address in Chawton House. Weary of her nomadic existence, when her brother offered her the use of one of his residences, a delighted Jane wrote, “Our Chawton home when complete, will all other houses beat.” Leonard Woolf philosophized, “What cuts the deepest channels in our lives are the different houses in which we live.” His wife Virginia concurred, “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”
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Chapter 1
Quiet Earth
“My home is humble and unattractive to strangers, but to me it contains what I shall find
nowhere else in the world-the affection which brothers and sisters feel for each other.”
–Charlotte Brontë
Brontë Parsonage Museum (opened 1928)
Historic houses reverberate with secrets, and one is how an isolated parsonage on a windswept moor produced the passion that birthed two immortal love stories. To enter the confessional of the original weird sisters–Emily Jane, Charlotte, and Anne–one can journey to the Brontë Parsonage Museum, a British literary shrine second only to Stratford-on-Avon.
Environment shapes destiny, a theory made manifest by visiting Haworth in Yorkshire, a village encased in amber. The timeless landscape fertilized the imagination of the Brontë sisters who were as linked to one another as paper-doll cutouts. Charlotte described her hometown to her publisher, George Smith, as “a strange, uncivilized little place.” Walking the cobbled streets, one can visualize the sisters standing at the original wooden post-office counter to send out their manuscripts–though their gender made their aspirations far-fetched. In The Black Bull Inn, their brother, Patrick, who went by his middle name Branwell, downed endless bottles of stout. A far different local establishment is St. Michael’s and All Angels Church where the Reverend Patrick Brontë preached from his pulpit.
The patriarch of the parsonage had moved from Ireland to attend Cambridge where he changed his surname from Brunty to Brontë, which is Greek for thunder. He fell in love with the Cornish-born Maria Branwell who teasingly called him “My dear saucy Pat.” Their hope was for lives of “eternal felicity.” Two factors that marred their courtship: he proposed in a crumbling abbey and her bridal veil disappeared in a shipwreck. Seven years after their marriage, Patrick declared, “Providence has called me to labour in His vineyard at Haworth.” In 1820, the Brontës moved to their new residence where Gothic gloom emanated from the ancient tombstones in the neighboring church. A year and a half later, the cemetery had another headstone with the passing of Maria. On her deathbed, she cried out, “Oh God my poor children!” Four years later, the family’s two oldest children, Maria and Elizabeth, died at ages ten and eleven from the Dickensian conditions at the Cowan Bridge School in Lancashire that served as a model for Jane Eyre’s hated Lowood.
Isolated in a parsonage bookmarked by a cemetery and the moors, the children turned to the world of imagination. Their world of make-believe had begun when Patrick gave his son toy soldiers. The playthings have long disappeared; what remains is the prose and poems they composed in miniscule letters in tiny booklets that relayed adventures in the fantasy lands of Angria and Gondal. The Brontë Parsonage offered $610,000 for one of these juvenilia but was outbid by the French. Cut from a different cloth than his free-spirited offspring, each evening at nine Patrick retired from his study. After knocking on his children’s doors to tell them to mind the time, he climbed the stairs and wound his grandfather clock.
The siblings understood that upon their father’s passing they would lose their home and financial support. Branwell tried his hand as a portrait painter and as a railroad employee though both endeavors proved unsuccessful. He lost his job as a tutor when he had an affair with his student’s mother. His sisters became governesses, one of the few options available to a clergyman’s daughters. Charlotte confided to her diary of her charges who she viewed as semi-feral, “The apathy and the hyperbolic & most asinine stupidity of these fat-headed oafs.”
As much as Haworth alienated the women, it proved their Pied Piper. Charlotte recalled of their reunion, “The highest stimulus, as well as the liveliest pleasure we had known from childhood upwards, lay in attempts at literary composition. We had very early cherished the dream of one day becoming authors. This dream, never relinquished even when distance divided and absorbing tasks occupied us, now suddenly acquired strength and consistency; it took the character of a resolve.” A letter Charlotte sent to Poet Laureate Robert Southey, asking consideration of her poems, received the response that while she had the faculty of verse, “Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be.”
In 1846, the sisters published their poems under the pseudonyms Currer, (Charlotte), Ellis, (Emily), and Acton, (Anne) Bell. As only two copies sold, Charlotte convinced her sisters to turn to fiction. Emily’s Heathcliff was the archetypal bad boy, though his consuming devotion to Catherine pardoned his sins. Charlotte’s Bertha Rochester proved unforgettable as the mad woman in the attic. Sylvia Plath, in her poem, “Wuthering Heights,” stated they “wrote…in a house redolent with ghosts.”
As the only son, the family’s hopes had been focused on Branwell, whose fragile self-esteem further eroded at his sisters’ success. At age thirty-one, ill from gin and opium, he succumbed to tuberculosis. Of her brother’s passing, Charlotte wrote, "I do not weep from a sense of bereavement–there is no prop withdrawn, no consolation torn away, no dear companion lost–but for the wreck of talent, the ruin of promise, the untimely, dreary extinction of what might have been a burning and a shining light." A short time later, after refusing all medical treatment, Emily perished from the same disease. Gravely ill with the affliction that had carried off her brother and sister, Anne left for Scarborough to end her days by the sea. Anne is the only Brontë not interred in Haworth. In a letter, Charlotte poured out her grief, "I let Anne go to God, and felt He had a right to her. I could hardly let Emily go. I wanted to hold her back then, and I want her back now. Anne, from her childhood, seemed preparing for an early death. They are both gone, and so is poor Branwell, and Papa has now me only -- the weakest, puniest, least promising of his six children. Why life is so blank, brief and bitter I do not know.”
Upon occasion, Charlotte ventured to London where she socialized with famous authors. William Makepeace Thackeray called her “a very austere little person,” and one evening took pains to avoid “the She Author.” He assumed what troubled Charlotte was she did not feel attractive enough to catch a man. She stood four feet ten inches tall with unsightly teeth, many missing.
And then, dear reader, she married him. Charlotte wed her father’s curate, the Irish-born Arthur Bell Nicholls who she had previously rejected. Nine months later, during her pregnancy, she passed away, likely due to hyperemesis gravidarum. The museum has a white baby bonnet that Charlotte’s friend, a Miss Wooler, made for the impending birth. In his old age, Patrick Brontë, almost blind, had outlived his wife and six children. He remained in Haworth, cared for by his son-in-law.
The Brontë Parsonage: The entrance hall opens to the stairway where, on the first landing, the Barraclough grandfather clock ticks away the hours. The kitchen conjures yesteryear when the Brontë brood gathered around the fire entranced by their housekeeper Tabby Aykroyd’s tales of the Yorkshire moors. When Emily took over housekeeping duties, the aroma of fresh baked bread filled the air. The furniture and utensils that belonged to the family remain, as if awaiting their return.
Ghosts hover in Charlotte’s bedroom. Maria Brontë passed away there, likely from uterine cancer, in 1821 at thirty-eight-years-old. After his wife’s passing, Patrick moved across the hall. The room’s last occupant was Charlotte who died in 1855. The Reverend had lived through Luddite and Chartist violence; as a result, every morning he fired a bullet across the graveyard. Branwell, after allegedly setting fire to his bed
in an alcoholic stupor, took to sharing his father’s bedroom. Branwell died there ruing he had “done nothing either great or good.” The Brontë family lost its last member when Patrick took his last breath at age eighty-four.
The dining room was where the sisters wrote on their mahogany table, sharing inkwells and tea. When tired from sitting, their ritual was to walk around the table, discussing their ideas for Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, Emily’s Wuthering Heights, and Anne’s Agnes Grey. In the back of the room is the couch on which Emily died. After losing her sisters, Charlotte walked alone. A servant, Martha Brown, recalled, “My heart aches to hear Miss Brontë walking, walking on alone.”
In 2022, a book made by thirteen-year-old Charlotte entitled, A Book of Rhymes, returned to the parsonage after a century. On the reverse of the title page, Charlotte offered a modest disclaimer: “The following are attempts at rhyming of an inferior nature it must be acknowledged, but they are nevertheless my best.” The price for the miniature book was hefty: $1.25 million.
Upon exiting the Brontë Parsonage Museum, visitors can either look to the back of the house and imagine Anne, Charlotte, Emily, and Branwell wandering the moors. To those who gaze upon the cemetery, one can recall the final words of Wuthering Heights, “I listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.”
The Window of Her World: The moors reminded Charlotte of Anne and Emily. After their passing, the purple heather was no longer a source of comfort, of escape.
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COMING SOON: On Sunday, 12th October, we are delighted to welcome guest author, Susan Sage, who is sharing an excerpt from her novel, 'SILVER LADY - Travels Along The River Road'.
