The Brontës and Brussels

In the six years since it was started, the Brussels branch of the Brontë Society has provided a link for expats and non-English speakers alike to keep in touch with some of the most popular novelists of all time. The spin-off book group has been so successful it’s had to split into two to make room for everyone, while Brontë Society members here have carried out some remarkable original research themselves. 

And now Helen MacEwan, who founded the group in 2006, has written a book about it. We caught up with her in her office at the EU Commission to talk about what might seem like a minority interest but is in fact attracting more and more interest. The book, Down the Belliard Steps, was launched on Wednesday November 28 at Waterstones. 

What attracted you to the Brontës? 

At the age of 12 I read Jane Eyre, and I think that’s what got me into grown-up books and off Enid Blyton and whatever I was reading at that time. As with so many people who are fans of the Brontës, it’s a combination of the actual family, their life and their literature. It’s that combination which is irresistible, I think. With the Brontës, and especially with Charlotte, you feel as if you get to know her as a person because her novels are very autobiographical, especially Villette, which of course we’re particularly interested in, and also because we know so much about them, particularly Charlotte. That’s one of the fascinating things about her stay in Brussels: we know enough about her to feel we know about her time here. 

You were working in Spain, translating and teaching English, and then moved to take up a post at the Commission. That brings you to Brussels, which happens to be a Brontë city par excellence

Yes, I wasn’t actually thinking of that when I came here. Because Jane Eyre was the first book that made a big impression on me, I re-read Villette, which I hadn’t been much interested in the first time. Maybe I was too young; certainly I wasn’t as interested in Brussels, and re-reading it when I was in Brussels just made it absolutely fascinating. Then I went and read up more about her life here in Brussels and that’s when it all started. 

From the Brontë Society branch came the idea of a book group. Now, those are normally heavily weighted towards women, and towards contemporary, perhaps lighter novels. What on earth made you think people would be interested in a group concentrating on 19th-century literature? 

In Brussels everyone belongs to a book group. I wanted mine to be different. Of course I wasn’t sure how it would catch on, and like anything for the first month or so it was slow, but the fact that our Brontë group had caught on to such an extent meant we could easily find people who wanted to read 19th-century literature. For the past year we’ve had a second group, with about 12 people in each and even more on the mailing list. So there’s no shortage of people. 

What’s the typical profile of your members? 

The fascinating thing about the Brontës is there is no typical profile. I’ve been to meetings of the Jane Austen society, and there’s a certain type of… lady – men as well – middle-class and middle-aged. It’s not like that with the Brontës at all. I can’t generalise. One of the things that prompted me to write the book was, “what is it about the Brontës that attracts so many different people?”

A lot of them are not native English speakers, so they see it as an opportunity to read the English classics. They tend to be more interested even than native speakers. They’re amazingly well-read, compared with your average British person these days; they might even have more of an idea of our classics. There are about 20 percent who are British, American, Irish and so on, and the others are just very good speakers of English. 

Other than the book group, the society also organises various activities

The book group is really just a small part of what we do. We invite speakers, for example Brontë biographers (the last speaker was Lyndall Gordon, who wrote a book about Charlotte), and we’ve had some very prestigious people in the past. There seems to be a lot you can say because it’s a family, and so much has been written about and read into their work. There’s no shortage of people to invite, or new angles of approach. 

Our other main activity is guided walks. [Former Bulletin editor] Derek Blyth, for instance, in his book Brussels for Pleasure, has a Brontë walk around Place Royale, and although a lot of the Brontë places have disappeared – the Pensionnat where she studied is no longer standing – we’ve discovered there’s an awful lot you can tell people. There are still things to look at: there’s the Protestant church which is still exactly as it was, on Rue du Musée, and we have a wonderful map of then and now, where we can superimpose one map on the other, and I think it appeals to their imagination, the idea of this part of Brussels they didn’t know much about. 

I was a member of the book group for a time, and like many people I read Villette while trying to match the locations of the story up against the reality of Brussels today

People have a lot of fun with that. Some places are easy to identify. In Villette she changes all the place-names, quite mischievously, and you have to work out which place she’s talking about. The Royal Park is one of the main features of our walk, there’s a whole chapter in Villette where Lucy Snowe is wandering about in a drugged state listening to music. Some people have actually traced the concert that Charlotte went to that she uses in that scene. She also went to the Monnaie. Every outing she had in Brussels was used in her book, written ten years later. 

The group has also contributed some research of its own, including an attempt to track down the final resting place of Charlotte’s friend, who died and was buried here

I don’t want to say too much because that story is in the book. Yes, that was her best friend, who died of cholera at the age of 23. She was buried in the old Protestant cemetery that was closed in the 1870s. A lot of the graves were taken to the Brussels city cemetery in Evere. People in the group have done a lot of research on that. 

And someone also discovered a lost Brontë manuscript? 

That’s one of the most exciting things to happen to us since the group was started. That’s also gone into in some detail in the book. Basically it’s one of the first French essays she wrote as homework at the school. The manuscript was known about at the beginning of the 20th century, but then it just sort of dropped out of sight in about 1913. One of our members discovered it hidden away in the Mariemont museum in Wallonia. It had been there all that time and people just didn’t realise. Briefly, on one day last year, we made world headlines. 

The letters Charlotte wrote to M Heger, the head of the Pensionnat and the man she fell in love with, will be exhibited next year at the museum of letters and manuscripts in Brussels

We’re organising the centenary exhibition next year. In 1913 the Heger family finally, after about 60 years, donated the letters from Charlotte to M Heger, which had been in the family until then, to the British Library. All the people concerned, like M Heger and Charlotte’s widower, were by then dead. The Heger children were persuaded that it was time for the letters to go back to Britain, so in 1913 they were translated into English and published, and people realised the extent of Charlotte’s total obsession for her teacher. 

Two years after she left Brussels she still thinks of him day and night. He’s a married man with five children, and she’s pleading with him to write to her, which she says is the only thing that makes her life worth living. At first he encouraged her to write less often, and in the end he stops writing altogether. She was very depressed for a time but then she got over it, and wrote Jane Eyre. 

She probably carried on being in love with him for quite a long time. Villette was written ten years after she left Brussels, and she’s obviously either still in love with him or wanted to revisit it. Maybe that was her way of writing it out of her system. The Heger family always behaved very well, but Charlotte didn’t behave terribly well in return. In Villette she takes her revenge on his wife in particular by converting her into a completely different character. And possibly in Jane Eyre she got her revenge by making her mad and shutting her up in the attic. There’s a lot of M Heger in Mr Rochester, definitely. 

Details of coming events, including guided walks, social events and talks, can be found on the Brontë Society website: www.thebrusselsbrontegroup.org 

Reports on past events and news are on the group’s blog: www.brusselsbronte.blogspot.be 

Down the Belliard Steps: Discovering the Brontës in Brussels by Helen MacEwan is on sale at Sterling Books and Waterstones, both in Brussels, price €17.50