Haworth, England
Genius can grow in barren soil
I am in the village of Haworth, Yorkshire.
A narrow and winding street, still cobbled
for its tourist effect, leads up to the parsonage, church, and cemetery known by literati around the world as Bronte territory.
I have been to the childhood home of
the Bronte Sisters many times. It is a pilgrimage for thousands of book lovers from countries as far away as Japan.
I like to think about the sisters, so
marked by family, by love, by illness and death, and genius, working here so quietly and then their big splash upon the London
literary scene, under pseudonyms: Currer, Acton, and Ellis Bronte.
For they did have love; their father
surely loved them, to allow them even the time and the paper to write their many books. Physical illness, not sexist
bias, was their greatest enemy, and they watched their mother and their siblings die in rapid succession of the lung diseases
that wasted so many Britons in centuries past.
The rooms are tiny, yet more of them
than I expected. Those who call this family poor have not studied the lives of other Victorian poor carefully.
They are middle-class, lower middle-class perhaps - though a clergyman was respected by all in his town, and respect counts
for something in a village.
The people who inhabited them were smaller
than ten or twelve year old children: the dresses on display and the handwriting in their diaries hint at dwarf-like figures.
I go back and look at the dress a second time, so diminuitive are they.
Like black people in the Caribbean,
I think perhaps they only came inside to eat, to clean, and to sleep; they roamed the fields and towns around them, making
goodwill and charitable visits, exploring the moors that characterizied Wuthering Heights.
The square shaped rooms downstairs
imply no brooding genius. The bedrooms upstairs give no further clues, and I am momentarily stunned by the
noise a group of Japanese tourists make as they descend upon this holy place.
The Japanese are fascinated by the idea
of women who walked the northern plains alone, the wind blowing through their hair, and who wanted also to accomplish
something brilliant all on their own. Three
legendary writers from one family, all sisters. Charlotte, Emily and Anne. Charlotte and Emily frequently referred
to as geniuses.
The Japanese also like redhaired
Anne of Green Gables, the storybook heroine of Canadian literature, because she is so opposite to them. Outspoken, rebellious, an
orphan with no family roots. It is the denied that is most charismatic.
I visit the cemetery before rejoining
my friends for tea and scones. What would British tourists would do without cream teas?
Yet I am not quite satisfied as I sit
in the church, thinking about the sermons they all endured.
The spirit has gone, from here, and
remains more in the hands of readers around the world.
