The Life of Charlotte Brontë — Volume 2Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn
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The Life of Charlotte Brontë — Volume 2
Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn
Brontë, Charlotte, 1816-1855; Novelists, English -- 19th century -- Biography
"I don't know that I ever saw a spot more exquisitely clean; the
most dainty place for that I ever saw. To be sure, the life is like
clock-work. No one comes to the house; nothing disturbs the deep repose;
hardly a voice is heard; you catch the ticking of the clock in the
kitchen, or the buzzing of a fly in the parlour, all over the house.
Miss Brontë sits alone in her parlour; breakfasting with her father in
his study at nine o'clock. She helps in the housework; for one of their
servants, Tabby, is nearly ninety, and the other only a girl. Then I
accompanied her in her walks on the sweeping moors the heather-bloom
had been blighted by a thunder-storm a day or two before, and was all
of a livid brown colour, instead of the blaze of purple glory it ought
to have been. Oh those high, wild, desolate moors, up above the whole
world, and the very realms of silence! Home to dinner at two. Mr. Brontë
has his dinner sent into him. All the small table arrangements had the
same dainty simplicity about them. Then we rested, and talked over the
clear, bright fire; it is a cold country, and the fires were a pretty
warm dancing light all over the house. The parlour had been evidently
refurnished within the last few years, since Miss Brontë's success has
enabled her to have a little more money to spend. Everything fits into,
and is in harmony with, the idea of a country parsonage, possessed by
people of very moderate means. The prevailing colour of the room is
crimson, to make a warm setting for the cold grey landscape without.
There is her likeness by Richmond, and an engraving from Lawrence's
picture of Thackeray; and two recesses, on each side of the high,
narrow, old-fashioned mantelpiece, filled with books,--books given to
her; books she has bought, and which tell of her individual pursuits and
tastes; NOT standard books.
"She cannot see well, and does little beside knitting. The way she
weakened her eyesight was this: When she was sixteen or seventeen, she
wanted much to draw; and she copied niminipimini copper-plate engravings
out of annuals, ('stippling,' don't the artists call it?) every
little point put in, till at the end of six months she had produced
an exquisitely faithful copy of the engraving. She wanted to learn to
express her ideas by drawing. After she had tried to DRAW stories, and
not succeeded, she took the better mode of writing; but in so small a
hand, that it is almost impossible to decipher what she wrote at this
time.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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