UK’s Dr. Juliet Barker on the Brontë Sisters & Classic Novels

The Learning Curve Juliet Barker

[00:00:00] Alisha Searcy: Welcome back to the Learning Curve podcast. I’m your co-host, Alisha Thomas Searcy, and I have a guest co-host in with me today. Excited to have Helen Baxendale. Welcome back to the show.

[00:00:36] Helen Baxendale: Always good to be with you, Alisha, and looking forward to today’s episode.

[00:00:40] Alisha Searcy: Yeah, it’s gonna be fun. And so, of course, before we get to our guest of the day, we’re, we’ve gotta talk about stories in the news.

[00:00:49] I would love to hear what you’re reading and what you’ve come across this week.

[00:00:53] Helen Baxendale: Yeah. Well, Alisha, I, the story I was looking at this week is by a interesting young policy commentator called Daniel Buck, who I think has just recently joined the A EI, and it’s a story published by the Fordham Institute, somewhat provocatively titled No one actually likes high expectations, but notwithstanding the kind of provocation and the heading, I think it’s a very interesting and quite.

[00:01:18] Well argued piece that notwithstanding all the rhetoric around, you know, high standards, academic excellence and, and so on and so forth. In practice, actually, when you look at what occurs in schools, how parents behave, how children, you know, are kind of incentivized, we’re actually not living up to that rhetoric by and large in most cases.

[00:01:40] And that a lot of the stuff that goes on in schools is sort of busy work rather than really. Intellectually substantive work and that, you know, you can be somewhat cynical in terms of how incentives in schools are constructed for every individual in the, in the whole complex. So, you know, the kids like not being pushed because it makes their life easier.

[00:01:59] Teachers find it, you know, more straight. Forward not to insist on really challenging assessment and parents like to hear that their child is doing really well and getting an A, whether that a actually equates to really robust academic progress or not. And so part of this is also a broader structural story too, in the way that state standards, state testing and so on have.

[00:02:23] Been denuded in recent years. We still have periodic sort of checks on this that I guess are the real scorecard in the form of nap assessments and so on, where nearly every state with a couple of heroic exceptions in the, in the south of Louisiana and Mississippi have been recording, you know, sort of diminishing outcomes on fourth and eighth grade reading and mathematics.

[00:02:44] Mm. But by and large, you know, state testing regimes have showed post COVID not a lot of change. Or if anything, they’ve been recalibrated to show some progress. Even though, you know, sort of the underlying realities may, may not in fact reflect that. So it’s a piece certainly worth reading. It’s not an easy read.

[00:03:02] I think all of us feel like we’re being kind of held to account here. But I would recommend it to our listeners. I think Mr. Buck has a pretty solid point here based on, on what I’ve observed at all levels in recent years.

[00:03:16] Alisha Searcy: No, that’s really good and I’m so glad you brought up that story. Mine is related to it, but I think this whole conversation about.

[00:03:24] Accountability, which I’m deeply passionate about, and it feels like one of the most nerdy things you could be passionate about in education, but it’s so important, right? When you talk about expectations, what we want our kids to know and learn and be able to do, and it feels like it’s un-American frankly, to see these standards be watered down, the expectations to be watered down.

[00:03:49] You mentioned how. A lot across the state when you talk about their particular assessments. In some cases it appears that there’s improvement. In other cases it’s not, and I would say. Using Georgia as an example where I am. Yeah. In some places scores have gone up, but it’s because the standards have gone down.

[00:04:08] Mm-hmm. And instead of telling parents the truth, telling educators the truth about where our students perform, we’d rather. Weaken the standards, and that’s obviously the opposite of having high expectations and believing the kids regardless of their background, where they live in the country or in the city or the rural areas or wherever, or the color of their skin that they can learn at high levels.

[00:04:34] It’s a real challenge. So I’m, I’m glad you brought that article forth. I need to read it myself. I came across it, but need to make sure I read it and keep this conversation going. And to that point, as I mentioned, my story is related to that. My story is about a woman named Peggy Carr, who I had never heard of, but she is a 35 year veteran of the United States Department of Education, who essentially lost her job.

[00:05:03] A very important one. By the way, she was the commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which as we know is where they handle the NAP test and the nation’s report card, as we know. You mentioned that a few minutes ago, and so I wanna read just a couple of pieces in this story because I can.

[00:05:22] Properly, effectively tell this woman’s story without reading directly. And so it says, Peggy Carr’s last day on the job came so abruptly that she only had time to grab a few personal photos and her coat before a security officer escorted her out of her office into a chilly February afternoon. She still doesn’t know why she was summarily dismissed as commissioner of NCES where she helped build na.

[00:05:48] Into the Influential Nation’s report card. NCS is the federal government’s third largest statistical agency after the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, running it for three and a half years was the capstone of cars, 35 year career at the education department. And so really important story, it goes on to talk about her experience, talking to folks from dos, which we’ve all heard about.

[00:06:16] Elon Musk’s, you know, department that he created that essentially fired a whole lot of really important people who helped to run our government. And as you read this, and it’s a pretty long story, but as you read it, it says, I quote, it was chaotic. She’s talking about working with Doge. Betis would tell us what Doge wanted.

[00:06:36] We would run to get it done, and then things might change the next day. You need to cut more. I need to understand more about what this contract does or what that contact. Does. It goes on to say the questions kept coming. It was like playing telephone tag. When you have complicated data collections and you’re trying to explain it, car said, Betis would sometimes not understand what my managers or I would were saying about what we would cut or could not.

[00:07:00] There was this translation problem, and so the story goes on, talks about the awful experience of she’s getting ready for a four o’clock zoom call with her staff at three 50. The security officer walks in to tell her that he’s there. To escort her out because she has been let go. There was an email that appeared an hour before in her email to tell her this.

[00:07:23] So aside from the fact that this was a woman of color who had just released some NA scores the week before there, I think we all have noticed that people of color, women, other folks who are seen to be quote unquote DEI hires were the people who lost their jobs. And so this story is about that, but it is also about the fact that.

[00:07:48] You have really important work happening at the federal government, particularly when you talk about NA scores and being able to track and other statistics, how students are performing. You know, what schools need, all the way down to how Title one geographies are mapped out in the country. Such important work, and I think this administration, I’m not making this political.

[00:08:10] But this administration doesn’t seem to understand how government actually works and is making these drastic draconian changes. I think all of us could agree that there are some changes that need to happen in government. There’s no question about that. But not in a way that it’s draconian and, and is taking away really critical work.

[00:08:30] And in this case, you’re talking about keeping data. And so that’s my story. It’s from the Inger report. It’s called Suddenly Sacked Former Education Stats. Chief describes her final days under Doge, and it’s written by Jill Che. But we’re in a moment in this country where. I think it’s so important for us to know how students are performing, and so we have to have those high expectations.

[00:08:53] We have to have the right assessments in place, and then when we get the assessments, we have to know what to do with the information so that we can make sure our students are learning at high levels.

[00:09:03] Helen Baxendale: Yes, I, I very much endorse that idea that, you know, we have to know what time it is and that. You know, there are a lot of people who’ve criticized the sort of accountability push that characterized the Post No Child Left Behind Era.

[00:09:17] And even at the state level in the nineties, a lot of states introduced standards and testing and so on and Sure. You know, have these in themselves necessarily. Resulted in universal improvement. No, but they’re necessary, if not sufficient condition, absent these periodic measures of progress, we have no idea where we are.

[00:09:39] Yeah. And so this is indeed a very troubling story. You know, quite apart from the, the human element. It worries me a great deal that such an important indicator as ape may be thrown into chaos like this.

[00:09:51] Alisha Searcy: Yes. And last thing I’ll say is even in June, the science scores were supposed to be released, but they were not.

[00:09:59] And so we’re in trouble. This is a big deal and we need this information. So more to come on that. So thank you for your story and so. We’ve got an exciting guest coming up. I’m looking forward to this. After our break, we have Dr. Juliette Barker. She is the acclaimed English biographer of the Bronte’s and Editor of the Bronte’s, A Life in Letters.

[00:10:33] Dr. Juliet Barker is an award-winning English historian and literary biographer. Her books include The Bronte’s, which won the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year Award, and was shortlisted for both the at and t Nonfiction Prize and the Marsh Biography Award. The Bronte’s A Life and Letters Wordsworth, A Life and Words Worth A Life In Letters.

[00:10:55] From 1983 to 1989, she was a curator and librarian of the Bronte Parsonage Museum. Dr. Barker is also an accomplished medieval historian and author of Corp Henry V and the battle that made England. Conquest, the English Kingdom of France 14 17, 14 50, and England Arise the people, the king and the great revolt of 1381.

[00:11:22] She’s a frequent contributor to newspapers and appears regularly on radio and television. In 1999, Dr. Barker was one of the youngest ever recipients of an honorary doctorate of letters awarded by the University of Bradford. And in 2001, she was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Barker was educated at Bradford Girls Grammar School in St.

[00:11:44] Anne’s College, Oxford University, where she obtained a doctorate in medieval history. Juliet, welcome to the show, and I should say to our listeners that you asked us to call you Juliet. Otherwise, we would’ve been calling you Dr. Barker. I’m very glad you’re not. Thank you. But welcome to the show. We’re very pleased to have you.

[00:12:02] Thank you. So you are the award-winning definitive biographer of the Bronte’s, the famous 19th century literary family associated with the village of Cow Worth and Yorkshire, England. The sisters Charlotte, Emily and Anne are among the most celebrated novelists in English literature. Would you offer our listeners a brief overview of the Bronte’s and why they remain such timelessly important literary figures?

[00:12:31] Juliet Barker: I think there’s several reasons really. The books themselves are so powerful. They still speak to us today just as much as they spoke to people in their own time. And so they’re sort of timeless in that sense. And they’re really powerfully written too. And I think also we forget now just how scandalous.

[00:12:50] The books were when they were first published because they defied all expectations of the sort of writing that women were supposed to write. So from the very beginning, they sort of caused controversy and they attracted attention. But it’s the power and the passion of the writing that has continued to entrance people.

[00:13:08] But I think also. It’s impossible to avoid the fact that how on Earth did such ordinary and inverted commas. Girls spinster, daughters of a Parson living in a remote corner of England managed to who lived completely. Unobtrusive or ordinary lives. How on earth did they manage to write about such characters as scandalous characters?

[00:13:34] As as Heathcliff and Rochester and Arthur Huntingdon? And I think for me, that’s the central thing that really interests me and makes the books themselves even more interesting.

[00:13:46] Helen Baxendale: So thanks Juliet. I, I think my next question perhaps is a prompt for you to expand a little on that fascinating question, but I wondered if you could tell us a little bit about the father figure, Patrick Bronte, who was, as you said, an Irish Anglican minister.

[00:14:01] Uh. Fathered not only the literary sisters, but also Branwell, his only son. Could you tell us a little bit about Patrick’s background, his wife, his religious and intellectual interests, and in particular, the close-knit upbringing and education that his daughters received, which as you hinted at, perhaps served as the wellspring for their remarkable creativity.

[00:14:23] Juliet Barker: I don’t think there would’ve been the Bronte sisters, as the writers we know today, had it not been for their father, Patrick Bronte. He was an extraordinary man. He came from a very, very poor background in Ireland. What’s Northern Ireland now? And he dragged himself up by the bootstraps. He at 16 years old, he was clever.

[00:14:44] But have no money. The family was impoverished. They were tenant farmers. He set up at 16 years old, he set up his own school to teach local pupils, which was an extraordinary thing to do. And he was taken up by Thomas t, who was a local landowner and a an important person in the area who recognized his potential and persuaded him that he ought to go to Cambridge University.

[00:15:08] Now, if you imagine going to Cambridge University. You had to do all your exams in Latin. You had to be able to have a tremendous amount of knowledge, and he not only acquired all that knowledge, but he went to Cambridge at the age of 25 when most students there were 17 or 18, and he had 10 pounds in his pocket.

[00:15:29] He went through the whole university by winning prizes, which financed his studies, and he was taken up by evangelicals like William Wilberforce and people like that became his patrons and ensure that he had a career in the Church of England, which was really important to him. But his initial poverty and the fact that he never had any income of his own is a crucial factor in how the Bronte’s sisters whole family.

[00:15:57] They always knew that the moment that their father died, they’d all be evicted from their family home. They would have nowhere else to go. He had no money to offer them or leave them, and they would have to earn their own livings, and it’s a real burden. Because particularly for girls at that time, there was only the option really, if you are a respectable and inverted daughter of a clergyman, you either become a companion of a rich lady or you become a governors or teacher, and that was the path that they all chose to do because Patrick himself was passionate about education and what was really different about him to most.

[00:16:36] Ministers of that time was that he believed in educating his daughters as well as his son, and he did do that. He taught them personally, gave them a huge amount of reading that was completely, it was completely off the wall in many ways. It wasn’t the conventional learning by wrote that was the way that you were taught.

[00:16:57] In girls’ schools, they were caught to read magazine articles and erudite articles about explorers, about geography, about history, and they were then told to rewrite these stories in their own words. So from a very early age. They had this induction into how to write and induction into the great world of history, architecture, art.

[00:17:25] They were all passionate about art, and it was a way of keeping them as a family, not only engaged, but also inspired their work later on. And it’s the main reason why they didn’t realize that the books they eventually wrote were so scandalous because. They’d always been writing about such things, and they had invented an imaginary kingdom that the four of them shared from a very early age.

[00:17:53] Before they could write, they were acting out plays about characters, toy soldiers that they took and made their own. And the extraordinary thing about the Brontes is that this imaginary world. Which is not something that’s completely uncommon in Victorian times. Their passion for it continued right into adulthood.

[00:18:12] And Emily, for instance, was still writing about Gondal just before she wrote her imaginary Kingdom before she wrote Withing Heights. And the first thing she did as soon she finished writing Withing Heights was go back to Gondal.

[00:18:24] Alisha Searcy: Hmm. I would love to talk about Charlotte for just a moment. Quote, self-improvement with Charlotte’s goal.

[00:18:30] You write in the Bronte’s, not only in the formal attainments, but in cultivating her taste. She was the eldest daughter, a novelist and poet who is best known for her novel, Jane Ayer. So would you talk to us about Charlotte, her personality, her intellectual interest, and how her family relationship shaped her literary works?

[00:18:51] Juliet Barker: I think one of the fascinating things about Charlotte Bronte is that we always see her as being the eldest daughter and the one who had all the responsibilities of being the eldest daughter, but in fact, she was the third child of Patrick and Mariah Bronte, but her two older sisters, Mariah and Elizabeth, died as children as a result of going to the clergy daughter school, where in common with many of the other girls there.

[00:19:18] They got tuberculosis, tb, and died, which was traumatic for the entire family, but I think most traumatic for Charlotte because from being a middle child, she suddenly became the eldest one, and I think she felt that burden throughout her life. She certainly felt the burden of. The importance. She loved educating herself, but she felt the burden of earning her own income and of been going out into the world.

[00:19:47] It was really important that she could earn her own living, and she wasn’t prepared to just sort of marry a rich man, but not that a rich man would’ve asked her to marry him, but. That was the other option really, for someone of her rank. She had a peculiar position within the family, and I think it did affect her character and certainly her elders, sister’s deaths absolutely traumatized her.

[00:20:10] And of course, they appear in the figure of Helen Burns in Jane Eyre, the girl who is so badly treated at the school. And in fact, some of Charlotte’s contemporaries recognized her portrayal. Of Mr. Brockel Hurst and the school that the girl that Jane Air went to as a, being a depiction of the school that Charlotte went to where her older sisters died.

[00:20:34] Charlotte and Emily had both been sent to the same school, but they came home and survived. But as I say, that traumatized them. That also this passion for education, and it’s not just, it’s a passion for literature, for reading, anything they could get their hands on. Their father also encouraged them to go to art galleries.

[00:20:52] He paid outta his very meager salary. He paid for them all to have music lessons. So the arts were really, really important to them. And when Charlotte eventually went to a, what we would call now a dame school with a lot of other girls. She astounded them by her. What she did know and what she didn’t know.

[00:21:11] She didn’t know her lists of of grammar. She didn’t know her lists of places, but she knew all the history of these places. She knew where they were on the map, and she was so engaged by it. That was what kept her going. That was her passion in life, and I think it continued throughout her entire life. But for Charlotte, there was always this conflict between her.

[00:21:34] Absorption in the imaginary world that she and Bramwell created together called Angrier with the heroes of angrier and her desperate need to appear normal and to want to be accepted in society too. And so there’s that clash in her character again, that she wants to be two things that really don’t fit together.

[00:21:58] So she’s, she’s a, she’s a conflicted character in many ways and she, she always called herself, she looks, described herself as being stunted in growth. She was very short. I know the feeling, but she depicted herself in a little drawing in a letter that she sent to Ellen Nussey, her friend, who was beautiful as this sort of dwarfish woman with a big head, and it’s really unkind, but it’s Charlotte’s own depiction of herself.

[00:22:22] And she always thought nobody would ever love her because she was so. Insignificant and ugly. And again, you can see how that feeds into her portrayal of Jane Eyre later on in life. So those are the sorts of things that fed into it. But her, I think what we tend to forget now again, is that the three sisters not only lived together, but they wrote together.

[00:22:48] They sat down together every evening once they decided that they were going to write books for publication, because that was a possible way out of having to be governors and teachers jobs, which they absolutely hated and were very unhappy doing. The possibility of publishing successful novels was a way out of that.

[00:23:07] And so they would sit down each evening and they would write. They would read to each other what they’d written, and that support system from her siblings was absolutely critical to the way that she wrote in and in later life, after her sisters died, because within nine months she lost Bramwell, who’d been her writing partner since childhood.

[00:23:29] She lost Emily and then Anne all within nine months, and she then became the sole living child of Patrick Bronte. So she felt that responsibility heavily too.

[00:23:42] Helen Baxendale: Juliet, could you tell us a little bit more about Charlotte’s, I think most famous novel, Jane Air, which interestingly was published under a pseudonym, Abel, and subsequently, has become a classic of English literature.

[00:23:56] Follows the pons heroine. That also contains very interesting social criticism and sort of a strong sense of morality. So if you could share with us a brief plot overview and then discuss some of its more resonant themes, that would be wonderful.

[00:24:12] Juliet Barker: Plot overview. It’s about a small child who’s a rebellious child, just as Charlotte’s had always been as well.

[00:24:19] And it’s a, a rebellious child who is abandoned by her family, sent away to a horrible school because she stands up to being bullied. Basically, and she stands up to being bullied at the school as well and has a hard time of it at the school, but learns eventually through a friend, Helen Burns, but also a teacher there, how to control her passions and how to appear more normal as Charlotte wished to do as herself.

[00:24:48] And then she goes out into the world as a governess. And what shocked contemporaries was the fact that. She applied for a post as a governess, having finished her schooling and is employed by Mr. Rochester, a man who has a mad wife locked up in the attic, but who then proceeds to flirt with her and also to, well, ba.

[00:25:10] Basically in the end, he asks her to marry him. She’s fallen in love with him, but then finds out about the mad wife in the attic, and so she rejects him. She runs away. So the morality is all there in that rejection of her passionate love because it’s wrong. She then is wooed by a rather sinister figure called Gin Rivers, who was uh, going out to be a missionary in India, and he’d like her to go with him, but she’d have to be his wife if he was going.

[00:25:41] To take a woman. So it was a very cold proposal and not the absolute antithesis of what Rochester was. And she rejects him too and sets up her own little school and then arrives at the very end of the story. Am I allowed to spoil the ending of the story? There’s a major fire at Thornfield Hall. The mad wife in the attic is, is killed in the fire.

[00:26:06] Rochester goes in to try and save her. That’s his moral duty. So he’s becomes recovered, as it were, as a human being. But he falls and he is blinded and also injured as well. So Jane EY gets her man, but it’s a man who is humbled physically. And mentally too. But the great line out of Jane Eyre is when she says to him that he can’t ignore her.

[00:26:34] She, the, the fact that she may be poor, she may be plain, but her soul is as great as his, and that’s, that’s sort of. Is the summary of the book really that although she is small and and insignificant and poor, she has the right to be treated as a proper individual in her own right, and she stands up for that throughout her life.

[00:26:58] Alisha Searcy: These sisters are quite interesting. Juliet, I love to talk about Emily. Now. Emily was the fifth of six Bronte siblings and best known for her novel Withering Heights. She’s described as shy, strong-willed, and having a deep love of nature and animals, and she spent most of her life at home. Helping with household chores, playing piano and reading.

[00:27:21] Could you talk more about Emily’s personality on some of her intellectual interest and how her life experiences shaped her writing?

[00:27:29] Juliet Barker: Yes. I think the really interesting thing about Emily is that her life experiences did not affect her writing or shape her writing in any way, shape or form. Charlotte and Anne both wrote about their experiences as governors and teachers in their writings because they were wanted to appear before the public in that sort of role.

[00:27:52] Emily, who had also been a teacher for six months in a school, which she left telling the girls that she preferred the dog to any of them. She refused to submit to that sort of thing at all. She spent about 18, I think it’s about 12 months, no, it’s nine months. She spent in Brussels with her sister.

[00:28:10] Charlotte arranged for ’em to go to Brussels to improve their French so they could set up their own little school. She was an exceptional pupil. Ms. Rege, Charlotte’s teacher said that she had a greater mind than Charlotte and thought she, she would’ve gone far. But you can read Withering Heights, you can read Emily’s letters and diary papers, and you would never know what impact.

[00:28:36] Either being a teacher or going to Brussels has had, it’s just completely ignored. Whereas for Charlotte, those experiences were fundamental to her writing, particularly in her later novels. I think so Emily. Is the one who is always seen as the strong one, because that’s how Charlotte describes her. She was strong and fierce and fearless, as well as fierce, passionate about late nature and as you said, and about animals.

[00:29:04] But she couldn’t cope with being away from home because of. Being away from home meant that her mental capacities were preoccupied with her studies being a teacher, and were then later on with doing her studies in Brussels, and it meant she couldn’t absorb herself as she had always done in her imaginary world of Gole.

[00:29:26] Gole was everything to her. It was Gole that shaped Emily as a person. It’s unlike her brother and sisters, uh, kingdom angrier Gole that she co-wrote with Anne. A woman’s kingdom, a queendom. It’s a queendom ruled by a queen who is capricious and beautiful and has loads of lovers and whatever, and she’s totally absorbed by that.

[00:29:53] And when she can’t have the time to be writing and absorbed in it, a lot of her poetry, if not most of her poetry is inspired by the Gondal stories. When she can’t do that, she becomes physically ill. And that’s when she has to come home. And so being at home, being the housekeeper, the ity of it, mundanity of it all is important because although her hands were busy, her head was free and her heart was free.

[00:30:23] To think and write about Gondal. And this is why Withering Heights, I think is such a remarkable book and such a, you can’t place it in any particular genre really. And the reason is because it is a continuation of her Gondal stories that she’d been writing since childhood. And she, unlike Charlotte and Ann, never broke away from Gondal, withering Heights is very much setting gondal.

[00:30:46] Helen Baxendale: Juliet, could you expand a little bit on Weathering Heights, which I believe was Emily’s only novel and again, also published under a pseudonym Ellis Bell. So focuses on two Lander Gentry families that live on the we West Yorkshire Moores, and particularly those families relationship with the foster son Heathcliff.

[00:31:06] Could you give us a little bit of a Tracey of the plot and then again tell us a little bit about its enduring themes.

[00:31:14] Juliet Barker: Just to say also that the three sisters chose the pseudonyms Kura Ellis and Acton Bell, not because they wanted to appear as men, but because they thought that women’s fiction was judged in a certain way by critics, so they felt it was important not to appear before the public as women, Emily flatly refused to have their real names appear anyway, so they chose to use these pseudonyms, which were deliberately chosen to be.

[00:31:39] Possibly male, possibly female. So that was a deliberate choice. The plot of Withering Heights is basically two families, one wealthy and very refined. The other not so wealthy farming family basically, who are certainly not as refined as the other family. Heathcliff comes into the story as a boy who’s picked up in Liverpool at the docks at Liverpool, and brought home by the Ern Shaw family.

[00:32:08] But he is treated extremely well. He’s, he’s treated very well by the man who brings him home, but then. The man’s son takes over the family farm after his father’s death, and he is then turned into basically treated like dirt. He, he’s basically a slave in the farm. He’s not allowed an education. He’s beaten, he’s maltreated and that sort of forms his character and he sets out then.

[00:32:33] To revenge himself on the family. It’s a story about revenge. People often depict it as a love story and a particularly a love story between Heathcliff and Kathy. The two members of the Ern Shaw household up on the mos, living a rough and ready life up there, and it’s Heath Cliff’s revenge on that family for treating him so badly.

[00:32:57] And his revenge on Kathy too for marrying. Not him, but a richer and more educated man. So that’s the story in a nutshell. What’s interesting about it is that it’s not a love affair between Heathcliff and Kathy. They are two sides of the same coin. That’s what she says herself. They can’t live with each other.

[00:33:18] They can’t live without each other, so they destroy each other. The one. Love affair. That is a true love affair in that story is right at the end when the next generation fall in love. And what’s key to that moment, and I love this bit, is the fact that. The young Kathy teaches her and Shaw how to read, and she’s there at breakfast sticking prim roses in his porridge and she’s teaching him how to read.

[00:33:47] And I think that that is a real love story, but it’s not, what’s the general impression of the book is? I love that.

[00:33:56] Alisha Searcy: So we’ve talked about Charlotte, we’ve talked about Emily, and now it’s time to talk about Anne Bronte, who was the youngest member of the Bronte family and lived much of her life with her family in Howorth.

[00:34:10] She published a book of poems with her sisters in two novels. So can you talk about Anne’s character, her traits, her interests, and how her relationships with her better known sisters shaped her writing, if at all, and literary reputation.

[00:34:25] Juliet Barker: I think Anne is probably, this is an awful thing to say, the nicest of the three brachy sisters. She’s the one you would’ve liked to have met most. I think the most normal of them. She was the youngest child, the youngest of the six. She was a baby in arms when her mother died, she was brought up by the aunt, her, the mother’s sister who came to live with them and. The others looked after her, the ch, the other siblings looked after her, so she had a much more protected life than the older siblings like Charlotte.

[00:34:59] And in particular, she wasn’t as affected by the deaths of those two elder sisters, which is so critical in the older children’s lives. So she’s a much more normal person, but she. Also, people always say, because Charlotte said, oh, you know, treated her as herself. She was always a baby that she, she looked after her and you know, I don’t think she’ll be able to cope being a governess and all this sort of thing.

[00:35:21] When she goes off to be a governess. Ann was the one who stuck it out for five years as a governess because she needed to earn the money so that her siblings could stay at home or do whatever else they needed to do. And she had that iron Core, which I think is quite extraordinary. And when you read her.

[00:35:40] Books, I think that comes across in spades. Everybody remembers Jane Eyre as being the first plain heroine to be met in a, a novel. Agnes Gray Ann’s book was written before Jane Eyre and Agnes Gray. Is the first plane heroine to be appear in a published book. She also, when the tenet of Weill Hall, it’s quite similar in many ways, to weathering heights and was always the peacemaker between the two sort of harder characters, Emily and Charlotte.

[00:36:16] And it was she who. Allowed the book of poems to be published, first of all by bringing out her own volume of poems when Charlotte discovered Emily’s poems that were supposed to be secret and insisted on publishing them. So Anne is the sort of peacemaker throughout the whole family. So she’s an interesting person from that point of view as well.

[00:36:37] But as I say, I, I do think she had this core of steel of a very moral woman as well, who like Charlotte saw. The evils of that were going on in society, how women were treated in society, how a moral society was, despite all the Victorian sort of embellishments that were supposed to make you a moral society.

[00:37:01] And I think that Anne spoke out against that and most powerfully. Very powerfully in Agnes Gray where she depicts the horrors of being a governess to a family that are just out of control. But they were based on a family that Anne herself had taught and also in the tenant of Wealth for Hall, which is a, an extraordinary book.

[00:37:23] Has been overlooked for many, many years. Everybody always said, oh, Jane Eyre Withering Heights. And nobody really talked about the pent of Weill Hall. And that’s a great shame. And it has become more recently because it’s been taken up by feminist authors and literary people. It has become, I think, taken its deserved place in English literature.

[00:37:43] Helen Baxendale: Juliet, that’s a fascinating discursion on Agnes Gray in particular. And you mentioned the tenet of Weill Hall. Would you just say a little bit more about that and why you think it is starting to take its appropriate place in the cannon and, and, and some of its key themes?

[00:37:57] Juliet Barker: When Charlotte found out that, that Anne was writing this book, she said it was a book that should never have been written.

[00:38:03] She thought that it was a subject that was totally un suited to Anne’s character and her, her morality. But Anne, again, this core of steel insisted on writing this book. And some people think that it’s a version of Withering Heights, but placing it in a moral context. ’cause Withering Heights is totally amoral and it’s not realistic in that sense.

[00:38:24] But the tenant, Anne, was extraordinarily brave in what she said about it. It’s about a woman who basically leaves her husband, not because he’s abusing her. He was, but because he started to abuse their child and there was no way she was going to let him do that, so she leaves him, which was an extraordinary thing to do in that time.

[00:38:46] She goes off with the child, she earns her own living. As an artist, and then she goes back to this awful man who’s been so abusive when he’s dying and stays with him until he dies. And then at the end she argues with him, well, she tries to redeem him. And she very powerfully describes to him that he’s not fated to go to hell.

[00:39:13] He can be saved himself if he repents the idea of universal salvation, it was a doctrine that was forbidden in the Church of England for anybody to preach. Patrick Bronte believed it. Charlotte believed it. Helen Burns in Jane Air does it, but it’s Anne in the tenant who props it in great detail. But I think the most extraordinary thing about it as well is that right at the end, she’d already met someone else who she’s going to marry, who is a good man, of course, but that what he wants to marry her, but she refuses and doesn’t won’t at the time she, in the end proposes marriage to him.

[00:39:51] Now, how often do you get that in a Victorian novel? It’s extraordinary, isn’t it? So it flies in the face of many normal CLOs of Victorian fiction, and it’s a very powerful book. Sounds like it.

[00:40:07] Alisha Searcy: So my last question before I turn it over to Helen, you said, I quote, having outlived all of his six children as well as his wife and sister-in-law, all but one of whom laying the same vault.

[00:40:19] You write in the Brontes that Patrick returned alone to the parsonage. End quote. Emily died in 1848 at age 30 and died. In 1849 at age 29, and Charlotte died in 1855. At age 38, all very young. Would you talk about the tragedies and deaths within this very talented literary family as well as what happened to Branwell, the only son who was a painter and a writer?

[00:40:48] Juliet Barker: Yes. It’s to us, it’s shocking that they all died so young. But we know from the statistics of Howeth at that time that the average age at death in, in Howeth was 25. So in fact, apart from the two eldest daughters, every member of the family outlived the normal age of death. Wow. Cholera and diptheria and typhus were rife in the village because it was a, a wool.

[00:41:16] It was a, in fact, it was a township, not a village where they did the wool combing and that spread the disease and caused great po. Well, it caused great swats of the population to die, and there were regular outbreaks of it. Bramwell himself probably caught his TB in the village because he was the one who mixed in the village, most of all.

[00:41:36] But Bramwell is a really interesting figure. He. Has always been ignored, really, and treated as just a waste draw. In fact, he was the one who, from the very start, was the founder, the leader, the innovator in all their childhood games. He was the one who started them off doing the little plays. He then turned these into little books, which you can still see at the passage today if you go and see them.

[00:42:02] Little books that they wrote about the characters that then turned into very long books about those characters. He drove the narrative of the storylines of each of them, and he is very much the inspiration of. So much of what they sisters would be writing about. And he sets the tone as well for their childhood writings, which is the thing that scandalized Victorian society because it is amoral and it is, you know, they all ha, all the men have mistresses and you know, it’s not something that happens normally in Howeth, in, and particularly not in a parsonage, but it makes it a much more exotic kind of society.

[00:42:43] But Bramwell was also one of these people who. If you think about the sisters, probably the only talent they had was to write. Bramwell had many other talents. He was also a brilliant conversationalist. He was a really good artist, though some people dispute that now, and he was a good poet as well. His work was judged by contemporary.

[00:43:06] Published poets and judged to be good. So he had all these avenues open to him, and in, in many ways, he sort of dissipated his talents because he couldn’t concentrate on one. He, um, he, he had too many talents to concentrate on them and. He, like his sisters, knew that he would have to work to earn his living, and he wanted desperately to be a professional artist.

[00:43:32] He couldn’t afford to go to the Royal Academy. He wanted desperately, even more so to be a published poet. It doesn’t pay, but he had, long before his sisters had a word in print, Bramwell was publishing his poems in local newspapers, and he was the one who came up with the idea of writing novels as a way of earning a living that would keep the family together in the parsonage without them having to go out and work.

[00:44:00] His tragedy was that he then fell in love with a woman who was unfortunately the mother of his pupil. A house near York and she basically led him up the garden path and actually was undoubtedly flattered by the tensions of a young man. And when that all fell apart, when Bramwell just gave up, basically he just took to drink.

[00:44:26] He tried so many different careers. Either not succeeded or actually actively failed at each career. And so he just took to drink and dr. And eventually he, as I say, he caught TB and died. But the other great tragedy of that was that his TB was then passed on in the household, first of all to Emily and then to Anne.

[00:44:49] So he infected his sisters. Charlotte probably got a dose of it as well, but from symptoms that she had displayed later. But she survived the only one of the siblings to survive. So story’s a very tragic one, but it’s, it’s important that you don’t ignore the contribution that he made to their lives and to their writing that this childhood writing that Charlotte calls the apprenticeship in writing.

[00:45:16] Which turned them all into novelists.

[00:45:19] Helen Baxendale: Juliet, thank you. This has been a fascinating conversation, really illuminated. Certainly for me, and I’m sure for our listeners, why the Bronte sisters in particular, but let’s not neglect Branwell, as you say, remain such renowned literary figures. This is a question we often close with, but I wonder if you could speak.

[00:45:37] Briefly about why you think their works continue to resonate and what sort of 21st Century readers might, might learn from their novels and poems. And then if you would be kind enough to close for us with a short reading from your biography of the Bronte, that would be wonderful.

[00:45:55] Juliet Barker: I think the books will continue to live on.

[00:45:58] I think for me, the power of Jane Eyre was summed up when I was working at the parsonage. We had an elderly Chinese scholar lady came to work in the library. She was wearing a man’s suit. She looked at me and I said, how do you know about Jane Eyre? And she said, Jane to me is a sister. That’s, it’s the identification that the reader has with the heroine Jane Eyre.

[00:46:24] You can all identify with her struggles, with her personal strength, with her refusal to be bowed. And in fact, that’s a theme that goes through Charlottes of the novels too, and. Through S two with Ring Heights, you have to set on one side because it’s not like anything else and it is so different, but the power and the passion of the books are unmistakable and you really, they draw you in sometimes reluctantly, I think, but they do.

[00:46:53] So they are wonderful, wonderful books and I would harshly recommend them. And if you haven’t read The Tent of WA for Hall, I strongly recommend that you do that as well. It’s very difficult to pick out a paragraph, particularly the one I’ve picked out is describing events in 1846, which is when Patrick Bronte, the father, went to Manchester to have the cataracts removed from his eyes because he was going blind and he was a great reader.

[00:47:22] Obviously his job depended on being able to read as well, and he had this operation to have his cataracts removed without any anesthetic. And he was quite an elderly man by this stage. Charlotte went with him to look after him, and he was confined for a month in a dark room with bandages over his eyes for that time, and Leach is being applied and a nurse on and waiting, but.

[00:47:47] Charlotte and her role here, that’s so key. So the paragraph is, while Patrick lay quietly in his darkened room waiting and praying for the restoration of his sight, Charlotte found herself with time on her hands. The nurse was efficient and despite her previous fears about the housekeeping, there was little for Charlotte to do.

[00:48:07] She couldn’t even cheer her father by talking to him. For initially, Patrick was to speak and be spoken to as little as possible. She, herself was suffering from a raging toothache, which had troubled her on and off for over a month. It flared up again as soon as she got to Manchester and added sleepless nights to her already long and weary.

[00:48:29] Some days, Charlotte took refuge as she had always done in her imagination. She began to write Jane Eyre.

[00:48:38] Helen Baxendale: What a wonderful way to finish.

[00:48:40] Alisha Searcy: Yes. Thank you so much, Juliet. This has been absolutely wonderful and fascinating. Learned so much. And it’s always fun to learn about powerful women. Mm-hmm. Absolutely.

[00:48:53] And literature and in the world. So thank you so much for joining us and for sharing your great knowledge and perspective with us.

[00:49:00] Juliet Barker: You’re very welcome. Thank you for asking me.

[00:49:15] Alisha Searcy: Wow, Helen. That was really great. She was fantastic.

[00:49:19] Helen Baxendale: Yeah. Another one of these really fascinating women of letters we had Dr. Paula Burn on, who is a similarly fascinating kind of English biographer of prominent female. Novelists and Dr. Barker was no exception to that pattern. There was a really engaging interview expounding, I guess, key themes of the novels, but then putting them in a much broader and interesting historical and kind of social context. So I, I loved it.

[00:49:46] Alisha Searcy: Yes, indeed. Well, we appreciate you joining us. Before we go, we’ve gotta do our tweet of the week. It comes from Andrew Rotherham, and it says, you really should read Stephen Wilson’s new book, more on that via an edgy wonk post linked below. But if you didn’t or won’t, perhaps the next best thing is listening to him on this podcast.

[00:50:08] With Jed Wallace and me also links below, so make sure you check that out. I think everyone knows that we’ve had Steven Wilson on this show and what a great, provocative interview that was. Make sure you check out that tweet. Join us next week. We’ll have my longtime friend, Jim Blue, who is a co-founder of the Defense of Freedom Institute.

[00:50:28] That should be a very interesting conversation. Well, Helen, it has been wonderful to co-host with you. Thanks for joining us today.

[00:50:35] Helen Baxendale: Thanks, Alisha. Always good to be with you and looking forward to next week’s episode.

[00:50:40] Alisha Searcy: Great, and we look forward to having you on again soon. Take care. Hey, this is Alisha.

[00:50:45] Thank you for listening to the Learning Curve. If you’d like to support the podcast further, we invite you to donate at pioneerinstitute.org/donations.