The Invention of Charlotte Bronte

1850.  During a summer thunderstorm Elizabeth Gaskell travelled on a steam train through torrential rain.  She disembarked at Windemere in the Lake District to stay with aristocratic friends and it was there that she met the enigmatic Currer Bell, author of the literary sensation Jane Eyre.  

A lifelong friendship began and Elizabeth's cheerful extrovert personality helped to ease Charlotte's solitude and the strain of looking after her difficult father.  Elizabeth's own literary success and influence also aided Charlotte but you do get the impression that the famous Mrs Gaskell was a bit gossipy and always had one eye on opportunites for herself.  Arguably, it was her pushiness that enabled her to pull together her remarkable biography after Charlotte's death, cajoling Charlotte's friends and family into giving up their private correspondence, enlisting her own daughters in copying the letters out and finding the stamina to work long hours to complete the work.  Needless to say she also secured herself a good pay deal!  

The Invention of Charlotte Bronte has lots of interesting details but what I really loved was the description of Charlotte's wedding. 

On Friday 9th June a box tied shut with a cord came from a Halifax dressmaker.  Inside was a white muslin wedding dress and a lavender and silver silk 'going away' dress.  Chalotte, once so hungry for mail that she often read and responded to letters on the same day, knew as soon as she opened the box that that the material reality of her marriage would be in her hands.  She could not do it.

Charlotte, her husband-to-be and her father all became sick with nerves as the wedding date approached and on the evening before, cantankerous Patrick Bronte decided that he wouldn't be  attending and therefore would be unable to give her away.  Charlotte's friend and former teacher Margaret Wooler stepped in to give the bride away.  Ellen Nussey, Charlotte's close friend also attended and decorated the table with posies of wildflowers gathered by young servant, Martha.  Arthur Bell Nicholls walked over the moors to the church and Patrick finally decided to join them at the wedding breakfast.  

The parsonage had some modest decorations prior to the wedding as Arthur Bell Nicholls would live there with his new wife and a spare room is converted into a study for him. Graham Watson makes the poignant point that although Charlotte's husband and father both have a study 'the three great writers of that house' had to write wherever they could find a space.

I still don't think we have a definitive biography of Charlotte's life, we probably we need a biographer of the stature of Claire Tomalin.  However, I highly recommend this book.

Speak To Me Of Home

At this late hour, all across the Puerto Rican archipelago, all that was left was to close the hurricane shutters if you were lucky enough to have them, to hunker down against the growing breeze and greening sky.  With a great suction of wind, the storm was coming.

Absolutely no sign of my Yellow Queen hyacinths yet, but I did enjoy my new spring read Speak to Me of Home by Jeanine Cummins purchased from Lucky Hare a new independent book shop near my home town.

I loved some of the descriptive writing particularly in the early chapters of this book.  For example when 22 year old Daisy is flying through the streets of San Juan on her scooter:

She loved balancing on the scooter with both accelerator and brakes in the grip of her hand.  She began to crave the rough stickiness of the board beneath the soles of her shoes, the warm wind whipping her T-shirt against her body, drying the sweat from her neck even when the sun shone on her outstretched arms. She enjoyed the reasonable speed, the ease of the velocity, how quickly the city blocks went by beneath her wheels.  She listened to flashes of laughter and the boom bass of reggaeton while she flew modestly through the streets.

I suppose the problem with a three generation saga is that as a reader you are more invested in some parts of the story than others.  I really liked Daisy and her mother Ruth and their kind of role reversal in that Daisy rejects technology, rarely using her cell phone and social media whereas her mother has a constant online presence. In Ruth's kitchen all the ingredients to make a cake are transferred to visually pleasing containers and jars:

Even the cardboard egg carton was long gone, its inhabitants re-nestled into a pale-blue porcelain tray that photographed beautifully against the white countertops.  And while grown- up Daisy found this rehoming of products to be slightly ridiculous, even she could admit that the aesthetic result was strangely soothing ...

A deeper rift has developed between mother and daughter, too.  While Ruth has seemingly jettisoned her Puerto Rican ancestry showing little interest in the Spanish language and living and working in New York, Daisy has moved to San Juan and feels a deep affinity with the city.

I was less invested in Rafaela, the grandmother's story but I liked the fictional account of a true episode from her childood.  In the 1950's popular Mayor Felisa Rincon de Gautier wanted Puerto Rican children to experience the magic of snow at Christmas  and imported it by plane from New Hampshire a 'mantle of freezing slush beneath a hot blue sky.'

A sweeping story with a surprise at the end.  For me the best part was the opening chapters wiith a gathering storm and the vivid sensory descriptions of a the scooters and street life in San Juan.

Daisy remembered one woman in a red evening gown and glittering high heels gliding down avenida Ashford behind her date, who was wearing a tux.  The woman's black hair was pulled into a sleek side-part pony, and the gauzy trail of her gown fanned out behind her scooter like a crimson wing.

Has anyone read American Dirt?