Where There's Muck, There's Bras by Kate Fox

Author:Kate Fox [Fox, Kate]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Do you think, because I am poor, plain, obscure and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! I have as much soul as you and full as much heart. And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me as it is now for me to leave you. I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh – it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God’s feet, equal – as we are.

The Brontës’ story is so familiar it has passed into myth, and I’m meant to be writing about forgotten women here, but it is still worth recounting as it highlights the context for so many other important voices. The sisters were born to Maria and Patrick, an Irish curate who preached in a small village in Bradford. They had six children – five daughters and a son. Shortly after moving to Haworth, when Charlotte was five, Emily three and Anne not yet two, their mother Maria died, possibly of uterine cancer. Her sister, Aunt Branwell, came to help look after them and stayed with the family for the rest of her life. More tragedy struck the Brontës when the eldest sister, also called Maria, and second daughter Elizabeth contracted tuberculosis in the unsanitary conditions at Cowan Bridge, the boarding school where lots of Yorkshire clergy sent their children, and they died in 1825 at the ages of just ten and eleven. Young Charlotte and Emily were brought back home from the school and the three remaining girls and their brother developed the intense imaginary life that would become their training ground as writers.

Legendarily, they began imagining their own fictional worlds (thanks again, Margaret Cavendish), filled with soldiers and battles and romances, writing them down in tiny books in cramped handwriting. Charlotte and Branwell had the land of Angria, Emily and Anne had Gondal. Alongside the landscape of the moors outside their house, these imagined worlds became more important to them than their real lives. But real life and the need to earn a living interrupted their escapist alternative universes. After disastrous forays into the world of being governess for exploitative employers and horrible children (summed up in one letter by her plea, ‘Am I to spend the rest of my life in this wretched bondage?’ teaching ‘these fat headed oafs’. She was no Maria von Trapp …), Charlotte formulated a plan: they would set up their own school so they could be their own bosses. Their father agreed to send her and Emily to school in Brussels so they could brush up on their teaching skills. Charlotte fell in love with their teacher, Monsieur Heger, (which eventually led to her book The Professor) and Emily got fed up and came home early. Meanwhile, Anne and Branwell took teaching jobs for

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