Brontë Parsonage

I spent the morning in the parsonage museum. Though I had seen some of the exhibits in New York several years ago, it was definitely very different seeing them in the rooms where the family actually lived. I'm too tired to post much tonight—it was hot today, and I tried, mostly successfully, to walk a little on the footpath behind the parsonage and through the field full of sheep beyond.

This was something I hadn't seen before and I found it very moving: Charlotte Brontë's wedding bonnet and veil.

She was such a complicated person; brilliant, yes, but petty and self-righteous and occasionally dishonest. She was an artist, who turned her tragic family history into literature, but also used it as kind of a performance when her growing fame brought her into contact with women she admired and wanted to impress. (Maybe it eased her crippling shyness and consciousness of how physically unattractive she was. People described her as a strange small woman with missing teeth and tiny hands. Most of them didn't really like her.)

Her friends and her father were disapproving of her decision to marry her father's curate when she was 38 years old, but it actually gives me more sympathy for her, when so many of her actions inspired an active dislike. To have lost all of her siblings, to find herself alone in the parsonage except for her father, and to have this chance. Why wouldn't she take it?

And she was apparently quite happy, but died less than a year later from pregnancy complications in the room where I saw this bonnet this morning.