Charlotte Bronte's Umbrella

For more information about Susan Calder's books, or to purchase please visit Susan's 

Books We Love Author Page.

This is my first appearance on the Books We Love Insider Blog. I thank BWL for the opportunity to write a monthly post. I like blogging, but tend to let it lapse, largely because I feel no one is listening.
However, I’ve had one blogging experience where my post made a connection across the world.

It began when I was visiting my Aunt Edith in rural New Brunswick. During our chat, I told her I was planning a trip to Britain in the fall. She reminded me that she had lived in England until age four, when she immigrated with her parents to St. Andrews, NB.

“My family’s from Oxenhope,” she added.

“Where’s that?”

“Near Haworth, West Yorkshire, where the Brontes lived,” she said. “You must know of them.”

Of course, I did. Charlotte Bronte, author of the classic novel Jane Eyre; Emily, author of Wuthering Heights and their literary siblings, Anne and Branwell. Dark stories of passion, set on the moors.

“I have an umbrella that was owned by Charlotte,” Aunt Edith said.

“Charlotte Bronte?” I sat up straight. “You do?”

Aunt Edith explained that the Bronte housekeeper came into possession of the umbrella, or more accurately a parasol. She passed it down to someone who gave it to Edith’s Auntie Eleanor, in Oxenhope. In the mid-twentieth century, Eleanor gave it to Edith’s sister, who lived in Rhode Island, USA. After her sister died in 2004, Edith inherited it. The umbrella was currently at Edith’s grandson’s house. He had been working to get it into the Bronte Parsonage Museum in Haworth, UK.

“The umbrella belongs in Haworth,” Aunt Edith said. “I want it to go home.”

"How do they know it was really Charlotte’s?” I asked of the parasol that had passed through so many hands.

“The museum has the knob missing from the top,” Aunt Edith said. “It matches.”

Over the years, Aunt Edith had been in contact with Bronte Parsonage Museum. When a friend of hers was travelling to London, UK, he offered to bring the umbrella there. The museum curator was so eager to get it he planned a special trip to London to pick it up. Unfortunately, someone mentioned this to British customs, which refused to let the umbrella into the country because its handle was made from material that is now banned—ivory.

Intrigued by this story of the illustrious umbrella’s journey to a Canadian fishing village, I wrote a blog post about my visit with my aunt and her troubles with returning the artifact to its home. A few days later, I received an email from a Bronte Parsonage Museum staff person. My post had appeared in their Google Alert for anything remotely connected to the Brontes. She said they had read my account with fascination and remembered the case clearly. The person who was dealing with it at their end left shortly afterwards and their correspondence with Aunt Edith lapsed. They were now keen to revive it. Could I put them in contact with my aunt?

I emailed Aunt Edith, who told me that our conversation had prompted her to have the umbrella re-examined by a local expert. He determined the handle material was bone, not ivory. This kind of bone is not a banned or restricted animal substance, which means that the parasol could enter the UK without a CITES* license. (*Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora).

I gave the Bronte museum Aunt Edith’s email address. The staff person thanked me for my helpful post, adding that, without it, the parasol would have been forgotten. They arranged for Aunt Edith to have the umbrella shipped to the Bronte Parsonage Museum. I still subscribe to the museum’s newsletter. One of these days I hope to visit the parasol owned by Charlotte and my aunt.

I expect that Charlotte Bronte’s umbrella would have made the journey home to Haworth eventually, but I was glad to be part of its story.

                                            Aunt Edith, who celebrated her 100th birthday last August 

You can also meet Susan on her website and Amazon.com Author Page

      

In Defense of 19th Century Women by Karla Stover

     Three years ago, a woman named Kat Callahan posted an article which said, "Your Childhood Pal, Anne of Green Gables, Was Probably Queer." My research could be wrong, but this may be the same "Kat" who is or was a Canadian radio personality. Two years later, a woman named Heather Hogan wrote that Anne "was obviously bisexual."

     At first, when I read the articles, I was disgusted. Then I dismissed them thinking, oh brother, because Lucy Maud Montgomery came from a different time, and statements such as these require a careful look at female relationships in the late Victorian era.

     According to Carroll Smith Rosenberg, who was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship for Humanities, "The female friendship of the 19th century, the long-lived, intimate loving friendship between two women, is an excellent example of the type of historical phenomena which most historians know something about, which few have thought much about, and which virtually no one has written about."

     Historian Lilian Faderman who did look at same-sex relationships, wrote, " Men saw themselves as needing the assistance of other men to realize their great material passions, and they fostered “muscle values” and “rational values,” to the exclusion of women. Women, left to themselves outside of their household duties, found kindred spirits primarily in each other. They banded together and fostered “heart values.”

     The concept of separate spheres for men and women goes back to the ancient Greeks, however, it was emphasized during the Industrial Revolution. Piety, purity, domesticity and above all, submission were the woman's lot in life. "The world corrupts, Home should refine," wrote Mrs. William Parkes in 1829.

      Then there was the fact that in 1870, 1 in 200 women died in childbirth, the belief that "the pain of childbirth would make women love their children more."

     "During the 1800s, it was taboo to write negatively about pregnancy and childbirth because it was largely lauded as the most noble and valuable contribution of women to their husbands and to society" wrote blogger Maggie Maclean. The avoidance of pain during childbirth was seen as thwarting the will of God.

     In the post-Freudian perspectives of the 21st century, it is impossible to "decipher the complexities" of female friendships, particularly when these friendships were part of the romantic rhetoric of the time.

     Sarah Wister and Jeanne Musgrove met in 1849, when they were both teenagers, and though each married, they remained close throughout their lives. "Dear darling Sarah," Jeanne once wrote, "you are the joy of my life." "Dearest darling-- how incessantly I have thought of you," Sarah wrote on another occasion.

      In the 1890s, a Scottish physician sent out 500 surveys . Of the 190 women who responded 152 admitted that they did have sexual desires and 134 reported having had orgasms.

     And this brings us back to Anne Shirley, her bosom friend, Diana Barry, and a quote from Carroll Smith Rosenberg to wit, perhaps "there is (and was) room between homosexual and heterosexual relationship[s] for platonic friendships between women.

Book Cover Endorsementss, by Karla Stover

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Visit Karla Stover's Books We Love page for more on her books and to purchase.
 
I just finished reading Stephen King's book, Joyland. Brian Truitt provided a recommendation on it for USA Today. He called it "tight and engrossing. The Washington Post's Bill Sheehan called it,
". . .appealing coming-of-age tale that encompasses restless ghosts, serial murder, psychic phenomena and sexual initiation." Mr. Truitt has a book about the movie, Twilight available on Amazon. Sheehan has one about Peter Straub, a horror-fiction author. I guess that is supposed to make them experts but I will never take their reviews seriously, again. Joyland was a dull--308 pages with the above-mentioned "restless ghost" etc, making weak appearances on page 271.
     So I ask myself, does anyone read a book based on these blurbs? And who is responsible for providing them, the publisher or the author?
     The first thing I did (naturally) was Google. Here are some quotes from the website, Askmeafiller.com (CNN.com says websites should be italicized).

     "Most often its someone in the marketing department at the publishing house."

     "They are usually arranged side-by-side with pull quotes (blahs) by authors. These are usually people working in the same genre and often in the same publishing company."

     "packaging/marketing firms."

     And the saddest one:  
    
     "I once had a job, among other things, writing back cover copy for books. My official title was "marketing assistant," and I was completely unqualified to do such a thing. I was right out of college, I was writing blurbs for academic books in disciplines which I had never studied, and I often had no more than the introduction to go by. I'm sure my blurbs were often highly misleading. I apologize."

     Yikes!

     From this website, I went to Writersrelief.com. Here's what one author had to say:

     "I wrote critiques for them (well-known authors) and asked if they could kindly say this. They agreed. Saves them time/effort."

     More than one person on that website said they wrote their own endorsements.
     Back when I was a newspaper reporter, I interviewed an east coast news journalist whose name I've since forgotten but who had written a book and who was doing a signing tour. I asked her about book cover endorsements and she said they were very important to east coast publishers. I wonder if that still holds true, or if more people look to Amazon. My bet is Amazon.
     For my first nonfiction book on Tacoma history I asked a couple of local, well-known historians provided endorsements. For the second I didn't bother. My opinion is that an attractive cover is more important to potential reader/buyers that a quote from the Seattle Times. Jo Linsdell on Writersandauthors.info seems to agree.

     "With millions of books for readers to choose from," she wrote, "the first 'sales pitch' is the cover."
    
     Sometimes it seems as if the three-legged stool of writing--plot, place and people--are the least important things about a book, but not to readers and certainly not to me. Sometimes getting rich means finding those little gems in plain green covers that everyone else has over looked.