The Taste of Sorrow (A novel of the Brontës) - a must-read!

Patrick Brontë, father of Charlotte, Emily, Anne, et al, remembered his Irish father working in fields, so poor that he had to suck on a pebble to keep his mouth from going dry..."That is the taste of sorrows: the hard necessary pebble in your mouth."

The whole of The Taste of Sorrow (aka Charlotte & Emily in the U.S.) by Jude Morgan is like that.  Poetic, layered, and somber, until the sun breaks in at the end with Charlotte's marriage to Arthur Bell Nicholls, her father's curate and fellow Irishman.  Despite Charlotte dying less than a year after she was married, I was so happy that the poor woman finally tasted something other than the sorrow that weighted her down for most of her life.

The Taste of Sorrow is not just the best book I've read this year, it's one of the best books I've ever read.  I'm a fan of both Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, as well as Elizabeth Gaskell's fabulous The Life of Charlotte Brontë, and know well the story of the talented by doomed Brontë family.  The mother from Cornwall who died an agonizing early death, leaving five young daughters and one young son.  The Old Testament father whose eccentricities both nourished and starved his children, both mentally and physically. The deaths of the two oldest girls at a school that Charlotte Brontë would immortalize and condemn for the ages as Lowood School in Jane Eyre.  The childhoods of the four remaining children who escaped into fantasy worlds that they documented in miniature books.  The drunken debauchery of the golden boy, Branwell.  The silent stoicism of the reclusive Emily.  The determination of shy Anne.  And the grit, gumption, and sheer chutzpah of Charlotte.

Morgan's book doesn't really reveal anything I hadn't already read in bios about the Brontës, but his writing makes the story new and fresh and heart-breaking all over again.  My copy has an endorsement by Hilary Mantel on the cover, which is appropriate because The Taste of Sorrow really reminded me a lot of Wolf Hall.  Mostly in present tense, often stream-of-consciousness, but not in a hard-to-understand way, and frequent use of free indirect discourse.  I loved how in a single paragraph, Morgan could convey the four points of view of Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne, enabling the reader to feel the tension and alliances and baggage between the four.

My favorite part was when Charlotte, Emily, and Anne were working on their first three novels, and would write at night in the dining room.  Pacing around the table, reading aloud, rewriting...the three weird sisters, concocting their literary magic.  I also really enjoyed hearing about Charlotte's first meeting with Elizabeth Gaskell and their friendship.

I didn't intend to finish the novel and post about it on Charlotte's birthday, so imagine my delight when I realized that Charlotte Brontë was born 198 years ago today, April 21!

Final note - here is a great blog post entitled The Secret Life of Jude Morgan.  Like the blogger who wrote this piece, I struggle with understanding Morgan's lack of notoriety.  His historical fiction is some of the very best around.  Here's my review of Passion, his novel about the Romantic poets and their women.

The Taste of Sorrow is one of my books on my 2014 Historical Fiction Challenge and the 2014 TBR Pile Challenge.

Travelogue: Haworth

Last June, my then 16-year old daughter, Sarah, and I took a trip to Dublin-Shrewsbury-Stratford-Haworth-Whitby-Edinburgh. We had a wonderful time but somehow the travelogues got swallowed by Shakespeare postings and I realized that it was high time that Haworth was addressed properly.

Much as I loved visiting the Bronte Parsonage Museum, the Black Bull, the White Lion, and the rest of the town of Haworth, the part that I loved the most was escaping the narrow, stony town and walking on the moors up to Bronte Falls.

We had just one night in Haworth, arriving by train into Keighley about mid-day and then catching a taxi up to Haworth. After we checked into our B&B, we visited the Black Bull, where Branwell worked hard on drinking himself to death, and took loads of pictures while waiting for lunch.

Here's are our favorites from the pub:







After lunch, we scurried over to the Parsonage and spent a glorious couple of hours going through all the rooms. I've read for years about what a tiny person Charlotte was, but seeing her actual clothes really drove home that point. It was also a real treat to see the tiny books that Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne made as children. The Museum store was jam packed with goodies and we ended up getting a couple of posters--a portrait of Emily and a water color of Top Withins.

Mother Nature got her rainstorm out of the way while we were in the Museum, so afterwards we decided to hike up to Bronte Falls before dinner. The road to the trail was fairly empty, and the trail was absolutely empty except for two groups of hikers that we met on the way down. I have no idea whether that is common or not--I had sort of assumed that the trail would be choked with Bronte fans paying homage, but we pretty much had the moors to ourselves on a fresh, beautiful June evening.

We ended the day with a dinner at The White Lion where we were both so tired we were practically falling asleep in our soup. Next day, we visited the church--all but Anne are buried in a vault below the church--and the graveyard where we saw headstone after headstone that marked the passing of a very short life. Only a few were for people who lived to old age--most were in their 20's or younger.

Haworth was definitely a pilgrimage that will remain vivid in my mind for a long, long time. As we were riding in the taxi up from Keighley, I mentioned how it felt like we were going back in time as the roads became cobbled and the streets narrowed. Sarah ended up wearing her glasses instead of contacts while we were there because the wood smoke from the chimneys stung her eyes. The parsonage, church and graveyard, Black Bull, and White Lion are all at the top of town--all the streets slope down from them, but the moors beckon you up out of the town. It truly is a remarkable feeling, that feeling of the hills calling to you to leave the smokey town and walk in the fresh air on the top of the world.

Final note - will someone please tell me who stole the "th" from Keighley? I fancy myself pretty good with the British pronunciation of place names, but I made a fool of myself at the train station in Stratford when I insisted that we wanted to go to Keighley (pronounced, I thought, "Keeley"). The woman selling the tickets kept on asking if I wanted to go to "Keithley" and finally I just pointed to the place on the map, and she said, "yes, Keithley!"

For the record, here is the station sign...no "th"!



Here are more pictures of this wonderful little town in beautiful Yorkshire where some of the finest literature in the English language was written. Everyone we encountered was friendly and helped to make our time there thoroughly enjoyable.

Daphne

One thing I've noticed that's a bit different about my blog than other book-oriented bloggers is that most others tell you about books after they've read them, but I tend to want to blog most at the beginning or mid-way through.

Today's post is no different.

Last night I started Daphne, by Justine Picardie. I'm only about a third of the way into it and it's fantastic.

Daphne, at this point anyway, is a modern Rebecca story in which the timid, self-conscious heroine, when she's not obsessing about her much older husband's first wife, explores Daphne du Maurier's own obsession with Branwell Bronte and whether he actually penned or at least had more influence on Wuthering Heights and/or Jane Eyre than scholars give him credit for. Picardie, in alternating chapters, lets the unnamed heroine, Daphne du Maurier, and a Bronte scholar named Symington tell their stories while they explore Branwell's life. Symington's and du Maurier's stories are set in 1957, and the unnamed heroine's is contemporary, which adds a delicious layer of complexity to the whole novel.

I love literary mysteries, and this particular topic is near to my heart. Like the unnamed heroine, I loved du Maurier as a teenager and read most of her books and stories. I love the Brontes, and am fascinated by Branwell after reading du Maurier's bio of him, The Infernal World of Branwell Bronte, which was recently reissued with Picardie providing the introduction. And I'm interested in du Maurier herself, not just her life and work as a popular writer, but her family. Her grandfather, George du Maurier, did illustrations for some of Elizabeth Gaskell's works--I'm still trying to find a good source of them--and I've wanted to read his immensely popular novel, Trilby, for years now.

In addition to the planets aligning for me with regards to subject matter, Picardie is an excellent writer. The change in pov between characters is perfect--each has his/her own voice--and their stories are well-balanced with enough interconnecting threads for there to be a fully integrated whole.

Finally, the dust jacket art is superb. I love the photo of Menabilly (Daphne's home and model for Manderley of Rebecca), and of course, the bottom photo shows a woman holding a red umbrella, which is the recurring scary image in du Maurier's story, "Don't Look Now." Very nicely done!

Can't wait to get back to this excellent book.