TY - JOUR
AU - Pouliot,, Amber
AB - Abstract The 1861 sale of the Brontës’ personal effects sent relic hunters scrambling to collect the material remains of the famous family. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the collection, preservation, and veneration of relics, particularly those associated with a writer’s private, domestic life, were important aspects of literary celebrity culture and commemoration, and both the Brontë Society and the original Brontë Museum were established to collect material remains. Yet when Virginia Woolf visited the museum in 1904, she viewed Charlotte Brontë’s clothing, shoes, and accessories with considerable unease. Anticipating the concerns of the literary establishment, Woolf feared that access to Brontë’s material remains would encourage the domestic cult which had formed around her following the publication of Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857). She feared it would diminish the importance of Brontë’s writing by privileging a narrative of domestic rather than literary labour. This essay considers the creative-critical intervention of Serena Partridge’s ‘Accessories’ (2016), a collection of newly created pseudo-relics of Charlotte Brontë, framed by semi-fictional narratives that dramatize the construction, use, and significance of her personal possessions. I argue that ‘Accessories’ and biographical fiction are analogous modes of engaging with Brontë’s legacy. They respond to the anxieties articulated by Woolf through the fabrication – both literal and literary – of new pseudo-relics that (rather than emphasizing Brontë’s perceived conventional, domestic femininity) enable multiple interpretive possibilities while simultaneously acknowledging the contingent nature of our understanding of her experience. 2016 to 2020 marks the bicentenaries of the births of Charlotte, Emily, Anne, and Branwell Brontë, and commemorations have ranged from conferences to public lectures, film screenings, theatricals, musical compositions, art installations, and the more predictable biographies, editorials, and scholarly essays. This article considers Serena Partridge’s 2016 ‘Accessories’ collection, produced as part of the Brontë Parsonage Museum’s official bicentenary programming. Partridge’s creative-critical response to Charlotte Brontë’s legacy addresses a question that has perplexed readers and writers since Elizabeth Gaskell indirectly posed it in The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857): how to reconcile the ‘two parallel currents [of] her life as Currer Bell, the author; [and] . . . Charlotte Brontë, the woman’?1 How does one make sense of the relationship between lived experience and creativity when approaching an author who famously transmuted her experiences into the material of her fiction? How should we remember Charlotte Brontë? Partridge’s work interrogates the process of memorialization itself, drawing attention to the way that Brontë’s legacies, domestic and literary, have been shaped not just through historical research and recovery but through active myth-making. Her approach, however, is unlike those of many critics engaged in the dissection of Brontë mythography and the exposure of its distortions, from May Sinclair’s humble determination to ‘clear . . . away some of the rubbish that has gathered round’ the family, to Lucasta Miller’s impatience with the ‘apocryphal stories and fantastical claims’ that have ‘littered’ the historical record, to my own recent work on how inter-war myths of incestuous entanglement undermined the Brontës as writers.2 Instead, ‘Accessories’ celebrates the generative potentialities of myth, uncertainty, and outright fabrication – a decision that proved controversial in the context of an author museum. Historically, Brontë’s biography has been viewed as the interpretive key to her writing, and as early as 1905 Henry James complained that romantic constructions of the sisters’ domestic experience distorted understandings of their work. ‘The personal position of the three sisters’, he explained: had been marked . . . with so sharp an accent that this accent has become for us the very tone of their united production. It covers and supplants their matter, their spirit, their style, their talent, their taste; it embodies, really, the most complete intellectual muddle[.]3 In 1904, Virginia Woolf proposed that heritage culture and literary tourism intensified this ‘intellectual muddle’ by exposing Brontë’s non-literary material remains to the world and thereby privileging a narrative of domestic misery that obscured her literary legacy.4 Material remains, Woolf acknowledged, have an historical, documentary value that enjoins their conservation. Yet, as Lucasta Miller notes, even facts ‘can become mythic through the way in which they are packaged and perceived’, and Woolf understood better than many the power of domestic relics to flatten, fix, and deaden.5 More than a century later, textile artist Serena Partridge’s ‘Accessories’ proposes a third way. Inspired by Brontë’s ink-stained glove in the Parsonage Museum’s archives, a relic suggestive of Brontë’s literary labour as well as the feminine modesty Gaskell took pains to establish, Partridge produced a collection of new objects – all accessories, or items of dress – designed to resemble things that Brontë might have made and worn.6 I have termed these objects pseudo-relics. Unlike fakes and forgeries, these art objects announce their counterfactuality in ways both subtle (for example, through the incorporation of modern materials unavailable in the nineteenth century) and overt (through official signage). Encased in the museum alongside things the historical Brontë owned, and interpreted with fictitious labels that narrativize their histories, Partridge’s ‘Accessories’ are intended momentarily to catch the viewer off guard and inspire confidence in their authenticity. The term pseudo-relics then encompasses both the objects’ counterfactuality and their ability to temporarily elicit the same kind of affective response as authentic relics by appropriating the museum aesthetic. ‘Accessories’ not only explores the rich and suggestive connections between writing and needlecraft, artistry and domesticity. It combines the media of fiction and textile art to create new domestic objects that encourage new ways of understanding the connections between Brontë’s writing and biography. More challengingly, it invites visitors to examine their assumptions about the ‘facts’ encountered in museum settings and to see curatorial decisions and even corroborated historical narratives as ideologically inflected. But perhaps most importantly, ‘Accessories’ unites the so-called parallel currents of Brontë’s life into a single, integrated stream capacious enough to accommodate the co-constitutive relationship between her domestic experience – which included embroidery, knitting, and the making of cuffs and collars – and her work as a writer. As we shall see, however, visitor responses, which ranged from credulous to indignant, lend credence to Woolf’s fears and speak to the enduring difficulty of disrupting entrenched ways of understanding Brontë’s legacy and the role of the author museum.7 1.‘PRECIOUS DUST’ AND PALLID OBJECTS: VIRGINIA WOOLF, ELIZABETH GASKELL, AND THE INTERPRETIVE LIMITATIONS OF BRONTË RELICS On visiting Haworth in November 1904, the 22-year-old Woolf expressed profound ambivalence about the project of literary tourism and the ways in which material remains (things, buildings, and landscapes) mediate relationships between author, text, and reader. Elements of Woolf’s account model those of other early visitors including, crucially, Elizabeth Gaskell: beginning her journey across the moors, through the uninspiring industrial town of Keighley, and up the steep ascent to Haworth Parsonage. The meanings that Woolf ascribes to the landscape are the very keynotes of Gaskell’s biography: Brontë’s purity, the importance of her domestic experience as daughter, sister, and wife, and her fortitude in the face of family tragedy. And yet Woolf’s narrative is fraught with anxiety about literary tourism’s ability to distort literary and biographical interpretations. The uneasy coexistence in Woolf’s essay of commonplaces about Brontë’s relationship to her material world, allegorical interpretations (in the style of Gaskell) of the spaces she once inhabited, and doubts about the motivations of visitors and tourism’s effects on Brontë’s legacy signals to the reader that this narrative is anything but straightforward. Instead, her essay might be read as a performative or meta-travelogue. It models what were, by Woolf’s time, some of the expected, sentimental responses to Brontë Country and Brontë relics in order to problematize them. So far, so familiar; critics including Lucasta Miller, Pamela Corpron Parker, Christine Alexander, Nicola Watson, Maria Frawley, Alison Booth and Deborah Wynne have documented Gaskell’s role in establishing Brontë Country as an international tourist destination. However, less attention has been paid to the specific ways in which Gaskell’s ‘parallel currents’ – her division of her subject’s life into the domestic and literary – contributed to the development of parallel and distinct touristic practices, focused on different sites and motivated by different desires. Wynne’s account of tourism during the 50 years separating Gaskell and Woolf gestures toward this bifurcation, when she observes that ‘Gaskell’s biography ensured’ that Brontë was understood in both ‘the domestic context of her family’ and in ‘the context of her native habitat’.8 However, Wynne’s summary of the textual history of Brontë tourism – her tongue-in-cheek claim that ‘Charlotte Brontë haunted Victorians in the nicest possible way, for most literary pilgrimages to Haworth appeared to have been undertaken in the hope of encountering a ladylike and melancholy spirit in the vicinity of the parsonage’9 – implies a uniform way of imagining Brontë’s ghostly legacy that is at odds with the testimonies of early pilgrims. By contrast, I argue that Woolf was less troubled by literary tourism as such (which she goes some way toward defending in the article) than by the specific ways in which Gaskell’s parallel biographical currents divided Brontë tourism. Gaskell’s insistence on Brontë’s ‘divided’ ‘existence’ (258), following her entry into the literary marketplace, meant that pilgrims who desired contact with the writer, Currer Bell, sought the wild landscapes associated with her novels and poetry, while those who wished to mourn the death and commemorate the suffering of the woman, Charlotte Brontë, sought the parsonage, the Brontë Museum, and the Church of St Michael and All Angels – the very spaces Woolf tours in her assumed role as the ‘sentimental traveller’.10 For example, Gaskell’s emphasis on the importance of ‘the glorious wild moors, which . . . they loved so passionately’ (40), and identification of real-life counterparts of the novels’ fictional sites,11 seem to have inspired touristic responses like those of J. A. Erskine Stuart, who peopled the neighbourhoods of Birstall and Gomersal with the ghosts of characters from Shirley (1849), and J. Ramsden, who identified landscapes and natural features where the Brontës’ literary influence might still linger.12 In such guidebooks the inspirational quality of Brontë Country (what Halliwell Sutcliffe terms ‘the spirit of the moors’) is considered to be still alive and accessible for the pilgrim with literary ambitions.13 Unsurprisingly, much nineteenth-century commemorative poetry, written to celebrate the genius of the Brontës, imagines them not within the confines of parsonage, church, or school room, but revelling in the natural world.14 In contrast, Thomas Wemyss Reid called for the Church of St Michael and All Angels to be recognized as ‘the one great memorial in stone of one of the noblest and most touching stories connected with our English literature’, not because of the site’s literary significance but because it contained ‘the precious dust’ of the Brontë sisters, whose ‘lives were nobler than their books’.15 Reid’s conviction that the sisters deserved greater recognition for their lives than for their writing, and that their most fitting memorial was a site intimately connected with faith and bereavement, recalls Gaskell’s portrait of Charlotte, weeping for her dead siblings yet striving ‘for strength to say, “It is the Lord! let Him do what seemeth to Him good”’ (282). Gaskell’s influence is also evident in Marion Harland’s commendation of the Brontë Museum for assembling a collection of domestic relics that commemorated ‘Charlotte Brontë at Home—not . . . the eminent novelist’.16 Gaskell’s parallel currents gave rise to a form of literary tourism preoccupied with seemingly mundane domestic objects and largely divorced from literary appreciation, and Woolf takes aim at this materialism. This is perhaps most overt when Woolf comically materializes Brontë’s ghost; instead of a transcendent muse who guides pilgrims to rich sources of inspiration, Woolf presents a bedraggled shopper, ‘trotting along the streets in her thin mantle, hustled into the gutter by more burly passers-by’, her purchases and ‘thin mantle’ destined to become relics that pilgrims like Harland and Woolf would view so differently within the museum context. Woolf affirms the value of literary tourism if it sheds light on an author’s work, and reassures readers that indeed they have ‘[t]his justification’ ‘for a pilgrimage to the home and country of Charlotte Brontë’.17 In other words, it is possible for literary tourism to enhance interpretation. As Christine Alexander glosses, it is possible to approach the parsonage and the domestic objects once surrounding the Brontës as ‘a material frame necessary for the production of literature: a space that helped define the inner selves of its writing inhabitants and that became a necessary part of their creative life’.18 But Woolf performs for her readers the dangers of seeking to understand the Brontës and their writing through contact with material remains. In a travelogue heaped with things – shoes, dresses, pictures, letters, tombstones, pubs, and parsonages – Woolf never mentions a single poem or novel, an omission that allows her to demonstrate materialism’s power to distract and divert us from the authors, whose writing is (or should be) our only excuse for interest in the things they left behind. Woolf’s cautious approach to literary tourism and author museums was more sophisticated than that of many of her contemporaries, who flocked to Haworth after reading Gaskell’s biography. Acts of literary tourism are underpinned by a number of assumptions, expectations, and desires: among them that the spaces and things of realist texts have real-life referents; that visiting, inspecting, and touching these originating things allows one to enter the imaginative space of the text and prolong the experience; and that relics and places might function as conduits between author and reader.19 As Watson notes, ‘[t]he experience is perhaps most powerfully compounded if the place of composition and fictional setting coincide’, as they often do for Brontë and her siblings.20 In part, desire for contact with the Brontës’ material world was an expression of nineteenth-century celebrity culture, which developed alongside a range of new print media that transformed authors into literary commodities available for public consumption. These included ‘memoirs, guidebooks, periodicals, and maps focusing on Britain’s literary heritage’, the popular homes and haunts genre, as well as ‘exposés, photo essays, and gossip columns’ that fed the public’s desire for increasingly intimate knowledge of the private lives of celebrity authors.21 The nineteenth century was also a time of widespread interest in historic preservation, and collecting was central to the Brontë Society’s mission. Formed in 1893, it sought to promote and commemorate the Brontës’ legacy through the ‘preservation of artefacts of whatever nature of the Brontë family’ and to give them a permanent home.22 In 1895, the year the National Trust was formed and Carlyle’s House opened as a museum, the Brontë Society established its museum (the one Woolf visited) above the Yorkshire Penny Bank in Haworth, drawing 10,000 visitors that summer.23 However, as Woolf observes, the affective power of Brontë relics also owed much to Gaskell, who stoked readerly desire for contact with material remains, sometimes through rhetorically subtle techniques. As Lyn Pykett acknowledges, ‘Victorian novelists in particular were preoccupied with the signifying power of things’, and Gaskell’s novelistic account of her subject’s tragic life fully exploited the allegorical possibilities of Brontë’s material world.24 She imbued Brontë’s home, the food she ate, and her personal possessions with symbolic significance. To take but one example, potatoes are never just potatoes. When Gaskell claims, on the now-discredited testimony of her ‘informant’, that the Brontë children were ‘spiritless’ because ‘they had nothing but potatoes for their dinner’ (40–41), potatoes become shorthand for Patrick’s alleged shortcomings as a father, for his inability to nourish his children physically or emotionally. When Mary Taylor likens the adolescent Brontës to ‘growing potatoes in a cellar’ (81), her simile evokes four children immured in a lonely, prison-like parsonage, compelled to ‘make out’ stories to lend interest to their otherwise sad and monotonous lives. This reinforces Gaskell’s construction of Haworth’s isolation as both psychologically distressing and creatively enabling. And later, when discussing Brontë’s creative ‘possession’ during the writing process, Gaskell describes her subject ‘breaking off in the full flow of interest and inspiration in her writing, [to] carefully cut out the specks in the potatoes’ (234) for their aged servant, Tabby. Now potatoes signify family loyalty, self-abnegation, and feminine fastidiousness. They assure readers that Brontë’s literary career never interfered with her domestic duties, that of the two parallel currents, the domestic was strongest. These may seem to be minor details, but collectively they indicate how persistently Gaskell elided the distinction between subject and object and between subject and environment. She rooted Brontë so completely in her local and domestic context that, by 1904, Woolf could claim with justice that Gaskell was responsible for the impression that ‘Haworth expresses the Brontës; the Brontës express Haworth; they fit like a snail to its shell’.25 Anticipating the way author museums utilize relics to construct biographical narratives of their subjects, and pair these relics with textual interpretations, Gaskell’s biography assembles a collection of significant objects, landscapes, and built structures to construct a biographical narrative about Brontë and her family. She assumes the role of a docent, guiding readers through Brontë Country and the parsonage, identifying objects that support her construction of Charlotte as a woman who honoured domestic obligations before putting pen to paper. It is unsurprising, then, that early visitors wanted to see, touch, and, if possible, possess and spirit away Brontë’s material remains, particularly those associated with her private, domestic existence. Nor is it surprising that the Brontë Society sought to keep Brontë’s memory alive through the collection and display of her personal effects, which drew tourists in their thousands. By contrast, Woolf regards the museum as a site of death and decay, deeming its contents ‘rather a pallid and inanimate collection of objects’. For her, the empty dresses and shoes fail to reanimate Charlotte Brontë as an author or even as a multidimensional person. Instead, this ‘mausoleum’ signifies the irretrievable absence or loss of the real woman who once inhabited it. Although admittedly moved by the case containing ‘the little personal relics, the dresses and shoes of the dead woman’, Woolf questions the propriety of exposing these things, which came into intimate contact with the body that once owned them, to public view. Her own gaze feels intrusive, ‘hardly . . . reverent’. If, in the presence of her personal effects, ‘Charlotte Brontë the woman comes to life’, it is at the expense of Charlotte Brontë the author, for ‘one forgets the chiefly memorable fact that she was a great writer’.26 For Woolf, relics dangerously fetishized Brontë’s role as dutiful daughter, sister, and wife. They completed and validated the narrative privileged by Gaskell and consolidated through decades of literary pilgrimage, and foreclosed other equally valid narratives which might privilege Charlotte’s ambition, her professionalism, and her creative, literary life. Woolf’s use of the term ‘mausoleum’ is suggestive, potentially signifying more than the museum’s function as a container for the relics of the dead or site of collective mourning. It hints at the ways in which author museums, influenced by ‘the ideologies of those who turned them into memorial sites’, can be complicit in killing the woman author.27 It might also allude to the funereal resonances of the last lines of Gaskell’s biography, itself the first official memorial to Charlotte Brontë: ‘To that Public I commit the memory of Charlotte Brontë’ (429). As Wynne observes, ‘“Commit” is an interesting choice of verb, a performative that is associated with burial rites’, as well as with legacies that can be bequeathed and inherited.28 Woolf is perhaps implying that the author museum cannot revivify a person already interred, memorialized, and committed to the public by Gaskell, who so masterfully and, for years, definitively shaped her subject’s legacy. ‘An effort’, Woolf writes: ought to be made to keep things out of these mausoleums, but the choice often lies between them and destruction, so that we must be grateful for the care which has preserved much that is, under any circumstances, of deep interest.29 Woolf acknowledges the potential of Brontë’s domestic relics to enrich our understanding of her experience. Yet because of the accretion of myth following Gaskell, they are always at risk of being viewed in prescriptive ways. Ironically, even Woolf’s sense of the interpretive limitations of Brontë relics is profoundly influenced by Gaskell’s construction of their domestic and moral significance. Take, for instance, Woolf’s complaint, in A Room of One’s Own (1929), that in Jane Eyre (1847), Brontë: left her story, to which her entire devotion was due, to attend to some personal grievance. She remembered that she had been starved of her proper due of experience—she had been made to stagnate in a parsonage mending stockings when she wanted to wander free over the world. Her imagination swerved from indignation and we feel it swerve.30 Of course, Brontë longed to see the world, enjoy ‘the society of clever people’, and become ‘forever known’ as an author.31 And biographies like Harland’s Charlotte Brontë at Home demonstrate the power of Brontë’s assembled shoes and dresses to eclipse her boundless ambition, her rejection of a life confined to ‘making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags’.32 Relics were capable of rooting this woman, who travelled to Belgium, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, London and the Lake District, within a narrow geographical and domestic context, making her ‘fit like a snail to its shell’. Yet Woolf’s imaginative reconstruction of Brontë’s domestic frustration – her reference to Brontë leaving her story, and use of the words ‘starved’ and ‘stagnate’ – leads us back to Gaskell’s potatoes: to the gnawing hunger of the child, to Brontë’s adolescent stagnation in the parsonage, and to the interruptions she faced while writing. Viewed through Gaskell’s biographical framework, it is unsurprising that Woolf defined Brontë’s needlecraft as domestic drudgery, that she could not imagine an item of clothing or piece of embroidery signifying mobility, despite the fact that Brontë and her friends exchanged patterns, accessories, and needlework along with the letters that scholars now study for insight into her life and work. If even sophisticated cultural commentators like Woolf are prone to viewing Brontë’s material remains in prescriptive or limiting ways, how can museums balance the competing claims of conservation with the need to disrupt deeply entrenched preconceptions about Brontë’s legacy? For much of the twentieth century, professional literary critics shared Woolf’s scepticism and ‘parted company with tourism, museums, and even biography’.33 But in contrast to Woolf’s fear that material remains were dangerously relevant, capable of eclipsing Brontë’s literary life, the New Critics found them irrelevant to the work of interpretation. Although now a focus of sustained scholarly activity, literary tourism has long been viewed as a guilty pleasure among academics. The ‘co-existence of academic textual studies with tourism is thoroughly uneasy’, Watson writes, ‘not to say almost contraband, in a critical climate still inflected by New Criticism and . . . the version of post-structuralism . . . which proclaims the death of the author and the nothingness outside the text’.34 And despite the ‘material turn’ taken by Victorian studies over the last 15 years, scholars including Booth and Easley echo Woolf’s concerns about the way author museums and domestic relics can distract attention from women’s authorship and put undue emphasis on their domestic personae.35 If there is agreement that Brontë’s domestic artefacts have interpretive value, we are seemingly no closer to resolving the problem Woolf articulated, no closer to reconciling those parallel currents of domestic life and literature. 2.SERENA PARTRIDGE’S ‘ACCESSORIES’ AND THE INTERPRETIVE POSSIBILITIES OF ART AND FICTION IN THE AUTHOR MUSEUM The Brontë Museum has of course changed dramatically since Woolf’s visit, moving to its present site at Haworth Parsonage in 1928. As of 2013, the museum’s interior has been fully restored ‘[u]sing historical and scientific analysis produced by academics at the University of Lincoln, and referencing contemporary sources including watercolours and letters by the Brontës’.36 The emphasis is on authenticity and historical accuracy rather than sentimental author worship, and relics have been painstakingly researched and reinterpreted in their appropriate contexts. However, the museum’s division into two distinct parts spatially re-inscribes Gaskell’s parallel currents.37 Much of the original house is staged to look as if the Brontës have just vacated it in advance of the tourist’s entrance, with open workboxes on the dining room table and Patrick’s nightgown laid out on his bed. Despite barrier cords and interpretive texts signalling the museum environment, this staging heightens both the impression of trespassing in a private space and the uncanny sensation that the Brontës might return at any moment. In contrast, the gabled extension, built by Patrick’s successor, Reverend Wade, in 1878, features display cases filled with manuscripts, letters, drawings, and editions of their novels in greater profusion than their domestic relics. As early as 1933, in the comedic prologue to Charlotte Brontë: A Play in Three Acts, Rachel Ferguson dramatized affective differences in touristic encounters with differently staged areas of the museum. Ferguson’s fictional tourists draw a clear distinction between exhibit rooms, filled with objects in cases, and the partially furnished rooms, like the dining room, which were ‘kind of more homey’.38 The terms used to describe how these furnished spaces facilitate ghostly encounters with the dead family echo Alison Booth’s construction of the relationship between privacy and the uncanny in the author museum, and seem to confirm Woolf’s fears that relics distracted visitors from Brontë’s literary achievement.39 Ferguson’s tourists describe how ‘the rooms swarmed with those dead girls. One caught oneself hoping, praying, that their life might take a turn to happiness, and then one suddenly remembered they had been gone nearly a hundred years’.40 That some twenty-first-century museum visitors continue to seek the ghosts of the Brontës – or at least a more intimate connection with them than that afforded by their writing – is indicated by the fact that a séance was held as recently as 2006 and private after-hours tours allow visitors to inspect and even handle some of the family’s possessions.41 Despite significant changes to the tourist experience over the hundred years since Woolf’s visit, Brontë relics still seem capable of evoking death and tragedy in a way that eclipses other interpretive possibilities. Somewhat counterintuitively, Serena Partridge’s ‘Accessories’ takes up this challenge by offering art and fiction as interpretive tools with the power to disrupt entrenched readings of Brontë’s material remains and merge the so-called parallel currents of her literary and domestic life. Partridge’s collection of tiny, hand-stitched pseudo-relics – comprising two leather boots, a night cap embroidered with constellations, a handful of paper doll shoes and miniature storybook, a pair of gloves embroidered with maps of Burlington and Flamborough, a pocket handkerchief edged with lace from Brussels, a pair of mourning shoes, and a silk stocking – are all newly fabricated items. In an interview, Partridge describes them as ‘personal objects’, ‘items worn on or carried close to the body’. Like other items in the museum, such as the cuffs and collars or the tea caddy Brontë quilled as a present for Ellen Nussey, they are presented as products of feminine domestic labour. If authentic, they would be the very relics most avidly sought after by Victorian souvenir hunters, and those viewed with the most suspicion by Woolf. Made from reclaimed materials, they are deliberately designed to resemble other museum acquisitions and are accompanied with mock museum labels that testify to a false provenance and implicate Brontë in their construction. Executed on a 2/3rd scale, they are too small to be authentic relics, but their size gestures both to the tiny books of Brontë’s juvenilia as well as to her tiny body and to the diminutive mittens, slippers, and bonnets occupying neighbouring display cases in her former bedroom. As if to make them yet more difficult to distinguish from the real thing, some items are marked with the proprietary Brontë Parsonage Museum stamp. Yet ‘Accessories’ is accompanied by a wall panel announcing them as new art objects, part of an installation intended to ‘blur the boundaries between fact and fiction, while questioning sources of history and what we believe to be true’.42 The installation is intended to provoke uncertainty and destabilize the viewer, to momentarily take her in and then reveal the ‘truth’ that these are not authentic relics. Free from the pervading aura of domestic tragedy that seems to adhere to Brontë relics in the wake of Gaskell’s Life and the development of the ‘Brontë myth’, these new art objects work to unseat visitors’ certainties about Brontë’s experience and to encourage a reconceptualization of the relationship between her life and literature. In this way, Partridge challenges our faith in museums, archives, and relics as the ‘sources of history’. She fosters a productive uncertainty that invites viewers to question what is actually knowable about the Brontës and whether relics, real or invented, can offer us any certainties. Combining fact and fiction with material and textual components, which are arranged to form a narrative arc – moving chronologically from Brontë’s childhood, through the tedium and frustrations of her adolescence, to her literary success and bereaved maturity – Partridge’s pseudo-relics resemble another longstanding form of creative-critical engagement with the Brontës: biographical fiction and drama. Partridge somewhat resists this comparison, however, explaining: I don’t really see the labels as works of fiction. The labels are mostly “facts” (or common myths) pulled together from a variety of sources. I have then created an imaginary item in response to these facts. I see the item as fictional but the labels less so. The fictional part of the labels are the lines that refer very directly to the objects in front of the viewer, but largely based on things I have read. For example, that governesses were fearful of their desks being ransacked by their charges . . . The labels speculate and join dots, perhaps misleadingly? Perhaps in the way an early curator or biographer may have done, before more facts come to light or because it makes for a good story.43 Informed by archival research and a programme of reading that included Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë, Juliet Barker’s The Brontës, and Deborah Lutz’s The Brontë Cabinet, Partridge’s pseudo-relics and the labels that accompany them might be thought of as a literal manifestation of Barthes’ formulation of the text as a tissue.44 Partridge associates the complex interplay of fact and fiction animating her work with other modes of constructing narratives about historical people, including biographical museums which, as Booth acknowledges, ‘lend themselves to narrative readings’.45 But biographical fiction and drama about the Brontës operates in much the same way. Beginning in the interwar period, almost simultaneously with the opening of the Brontë Parsonage Museum, novelists and playwrights began to approach the dim places or lacunae in the Brontë story as opportunities to write into the void and explore the counterfactual possibilities of their lives in new works of drama and fiction.46 Like Partridge, these authors often embedded references to real relics within their texts, using them as complex carriers of meaning and as symbols of uncertainty that emphasize the contingent, fragmented nature of the historical record and our inability to recover the ‘truth’ of an historical person’s existence. For instance, in her biographical drama, Ferguson probes our uncertainties about the nature of Brontë’s relationship with Monsieur Heger, her married literary instructor, through the introduction of a well-known collection of literary relics: the infamous Brontë/Heger correspondence. Published in 1913, these letters revealed to the world Brontë’s overwhelming desire for connection with Heger and her intense emotional suffering during his periods of epistolary silence. But for Ferguson, they still leave unresolved the question of whether Brontë was in love with him. Although her Charlotte frankly discusses the content of the letters, which she describes as ‘begging, reproachful, imploring for even a line’, she is unable to answer the question: ‘were these letters love-letters?’. Unable to classify the nature of this relationship that consumed her thoughts and energies for years, Brontë simply replies: ‘I don’t know. I don’t know. I was his pupil. He was—my master’.47 Contrary to Amber Regis’s claim that ‘Ferguson draws upon the authority of Brontë biography and edition’ in contrast to her sceptical treatment of domestic relics (which, as Regis observes, are often presented as unreliable repositories of biographical stories), Ferguson uses the letter as a potent symbol for the unknowability of the Brontë family.48 For Ferguson, not only domestic relics or those with an uncertain provenance but even authenticated literary remains – including the family’s correspondence and recorded speech – fail to capture and transmit to posterity a complete or definitive picture of their experience. Like these early fictional biographers, then, Partridge’s ‘Accessories’ asks visitors to consider how much of what we accept as historical fact is merely a pastiche of fact, myth, and speculation. As part of Tracy Chevalier’s Bicentenary Exhibition, ‘Charlotte Great and Small’, which she curated as the museum’s 2016 creative partner, Partridge’s ‘Accessories’ were designed to respond to the theme of ‘the contrast between Charlotte’s constricted life and her huge ambition’, a theme which seems, in some respects, to reinstate Gaskell’s parallel currents and pit the greatness of the literary against the perceived smallness of the domestic.49 Significantly, Partridge’s work was exhibited alongside that of other textile artists, including Denise Salway, the Knitting Witch, who knitted a tableau of Jane Eyre, and Tamar Stone, who created ‘The Brontë Bed’, a miniature bedstead, covered in quilts which form ‘a sort of book of their domestic lives’.50 Textiles held in the Parsonage Museum’s archive have been a rich source of inspiration to women artists, whose creative-critical interventions tend playfully to blur the boundaries between fact and fiction in order to reconsider how the Brontës have been memorialized. Textiles likewise featured in Turner Prize nominee Cornelia Parker’s 2006 exhibition, ‘Brontëan Abstracts’, the success of which inaugurated the Parsonage Museum’s Contemporary Arts programme. Parker’s photographs magnify details including the holes in Charlotte’s pincushion to ‘explore marks left unconsciously’, drawing attention to the fact that the physical condition and even the survival of relics is often a matter of chance.51 In contrast, Teresa Whitfield’s ink drawing, ‘Charlotte Brontë’s Shawl’ (2011) (Figure 1), repairs the chance damage caused to the original artefact by age and improper storage (Figure 2) in order to offer the viewer what she describes as a more ‘authentic’ encounter.52 Whitfield’s understanding of her role as that of a creative ‘conservator’, whose work advances the aims of the museum, might be profitably applied to Partridge, who recontextualizes and re-constellates connections between Brontë’s lived experience, material world, and writing and whose work might similarly be described as creatively curatorial. Figure 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Teresa Whitfield, ‘Charlotte Brontë’s Shawl’. 2011, ink on paper. Reproduced with permission of the artist. Figure 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Teresa Whitfield, ‘Charlotte Brontë’s Shawl’. 2011, ink on paper. Reproduced with permission of the artist. Figure 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Charlotte Brontë’s Spanish lace veil, in the collection of the Brontë Parsonage Museum. Photographed by Teresa Whitfield in 2011. Figure 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Charlotte Brontë’s Spanish lace veil, in the collection of the Brontë Parsonage Museum. Photographed by Teresa Whitfield in 2011. As a textile artist, Partridge was immediately drawn to items of dress and needlework in the museum’s collection, creating new work (while claiming ‘Charlotte had a direct hand’ in its construction) that ‘demonstrate[s] how proficient Charlotte was in needlework, but suggest[s] that her great imagination took over tasks that may have been considered too mundane’.53 Unlike Gaskell, who claimed that Charlotte privileged domestic tasks over her writing, Partridge’s creative-critical intervention more accurately captures Brontë’s ambivalent relationship with needlework as well as with the ‘duties’ that were expected of her more generally as a woman. For instance, the label accompanying ‘Doll’s miniatures’ (Figure 3) identifies the paper doll shoes, gloves, and storybook as items produced in 1839, when Brontë was a governess in the home of Mrs Sidgwick of Stonegappe: ‘Unhappy in her role, Charlotte complains in a letter to Emily that ‘…she [Mrs Sidgwick] overwhelms me with oceans of needlework; yards of cambric to hem, muslin nightcaps to make, and, above all things, dolls to dress’’.54 However, other pieces, such as the nightcap, embroidered with a fantasy scene of a somnambulist under a night sky and rendered in glow-in-the-dark thread (Figures 4a and 4b), or the gloves stitched with maps (Figure 5a), seem not only to foreshadow elements of Charlotte’s mature fiction, but to render needlework a vehicle to express her ambition and imagination, analogous but not inferior to her writing. Figure 3. Open in new tabDownload slide Serena Partridge, `Doll’s miniatures. Charlotte Brontë. 1839’. 2016, paper, ink, graphite, cotton, lace, seed beads. SP3. Photographed by David Chalmers. Figure 3. Open in new tabDownload slide Serena Partridge, `Doll’s miniatures. Charlotte Brontë. 1839’. 2016, paper, ink, graphite, cotton, lace, seed beads. SP3. Photographed by David Chalmers. Figure 4 Open in new tabDownload slide a, b, and c. Details of Serena Partridge, ‘Night cap. Charlotte Brontë. 1831’. 2016, cotton, lace, thread. Hand-sewn. SP2. Photographed by David Chalmers. Figure 4 Open in new tabDownload slide a, b, and c. Details of Serena Partridge, ‘Night cap. Charlotte Brontë. 1831’. 2016, cotton, lace, thread. Hand-sewn. SP2. Photographed by David Chalmers. Figure 5 Open in new tabDownload slide a, b. Details of Serena Partridge, ‘Pair of gloves, embroidered with a map of Burlington and Flamborough. Mary Taylor and Charlotte Brontë. 1839’. 2016, leather, silk thread. Hand-sewn. SP4. Photographed by David Chalmers. Figure 5 Open in new tabDownload slide a, b. Details of Serena Partridge, ‘Pair of gloves, embroidered with a map of Burlington and Flamborough. Mary Taylor and Charlotte Brontë. 1839’. 2016, leather, silk thread. Hand-sewn. SP4. Photographed by David Chalmers. Like other Victorian women writers, including Gaskell herself – and unlike her father, husband, and brother, who had private studies – Brontë composed her novels and poetry in the house proper, amid the teacups and mending, and subject to the interruptions of her family, servants, and guests. Gaskell acknowledges as much when describing Brontë preparing potatoes while writing Jane Eyre. But Brontë’s relationship with needlework and other types of domestic labour was complex and its significance is contested. When Gaskell claims that ‘[t]he delicate long fingers had a peculiar fineness of sensation, which was one reason why all her handiwork, of whatever kind – writing, sewing, knitting – was so clear in its minuteness’ (74), she elides the distinction between writing and sewing, making them equally important extensions of Brontë’s ladylike domestic persona. This conflation of writing and sewing under the term ‘handiwork’ ignores the content of Brontë’s writing, focusing instead on its aesthetic appearance and classifying it as a feminine accomplishment rather than a vocation. Gaskell’s statement also seems, problematically, to gloss over Charlotte’s indignation at being forced into sewing at Stonegappe and Jane’s frustration at being relegated to mending stockings and embroidering bags instead of leading a more fulfilling public life. Brontë often represents sewing as drudgery for her female characters. In Shirley, for instance, Caroline Helstone is forced to learn Hortense’s precise and time-consuming method of darning stockings. Desultorily working on the same pair for two years, ‘[s]he did a few rows every day, by way of penance for the expiation of her sins: they were a grievous burden to her; she would much have liked to put them in the fire’.55 Sewing also has negative connotations in Brontë’s two Belgian novels. Frances Henri, in The Professor (1857), is an impoverished, downtrodden, precariously employed teacher of ‘needlework, or netting, or lace-mending, or some such flimsy art’, as her future lover dismissively describes her labour. In Villette (1853), the child Polly injures herself while attempting to hem a handkerchief, and while the trail of blood grimly attests to her willingness to endure pain in order to prove her worth as a woman, Tim Dolin suggests that the: image of her pricking her fingers with a needle and leaving a trail of tiny points of blood on the handkerchief is not an image of the genteel married woman, . . . but one that would have immediately suggested to its contemporary readers the figure of the suffering needlewoman, a symbolic figure for the mid-Victorians of the woman on the verge of prostitution.56 If there are instances of Brontë’s female characters enjoying sewing or the results of their needlework, as when Lucy Snowe delights in rediscovering the pincushion she made for Mrs Bretton years later at their home in Villette, it is clear that Brontë herself valued writing above sewing. On the other hand, these examples demonstrate that needlework and Brontë’s domestic duties more generally were rich sources of literary inspiration, something Woolf fails to acknowledge in either ‘Haworth, November 1904’ or A Room of One’s Own. Partridge’s ‘Accessories’ performs important interpretive work by stitching together these two sides of Brontë’s life, encouraging visitors to see her domestic and literary experiences not as two parallel currents but elements of an integrated life. More radically, Partridge’s work challenges the still-current notion that embroidery is an inferior art form, or handicraft, and that women’s needlework from the nineteenth century falls easily into the categories of miserable low-waged labour, family-imposed drudgery, or superficial accomplishment. While historians including Rozsika Parker, Maria Quirk, and Chloe Flower have done much to recuperate nineteenth-century needlework, illuminating the artistry, professionalism, and radicalism of its female practitioners, Partridge herself has ‘encountered a dismissiveness’ of her work ‘when it has actually been very meticulously laboured over’.57 Partridge’s use of intertextuality allows her to animate her embroidered objects with the same preoccupations, values, and desires articulated in Brontë’s letters, mature fiction and poetry. In doing so, Partridge does not suggest that Brontë found the same artistic fulfilment in needlework that she did in writing, nor that her needlework and literature are comparable as works of art; rather, that Charlotte’s genius could express itself in a variety of media and that it is worth looking more closely at the shoes, dresses, mittens, and caps she created, embellished, and left behind. Woolf was rightly suspicious of the kind of sentimental and uncritical devotion that reimagined Brontë as a proto-Angel in the House, rooted in her domestic (and regional) context and more concerned with meeting her family’s day-to-day needs than her publisher’s deadlines. But ‘Accessories’ unexpectedly subverts this prescriptive way of reading Brontë’s life by embedding themes of travel, imaginative exploration, and rebellion in such stereotypically feminine domestic artefacts as doll accessories and ladies’ gloves. Discussing the theme of travel in her collection, Partridge explained ‘I was very inspired to read about Mary Taylor’s wide travels and emigration to New Zealand and how this may have inspired Charlotte . . . I find the amount of travel Charlotte did quite astonishing, especially for the period’.58 Within the framework of Partridge’s counterfactual world, Brontë’s stitches become a vehicle for ‘self’-expression as well as mobility, allowing her to map, both spatially and metaphorically, her experiences, desires, and personal development. This is especially evident in the ‘Night cap’ (Figure 4a) and ‘Pair of gloves, embroidered with a map of Burlington and Flamborough’ (Figure 5a). The night cap’s label announces that ‘Charlotte stitched this glow-in-the-dark’ cap while studying at Roe Head, and Partridge’s decision to incorporate glow-in-the-dark thread makes it one of the pseudo-relics most easily identified as contemporary art.59 Yet the contrast between the cap’s sedate, monochrome character by day and its luminosity by night (Figure 4c) – when ‘several winter constellations and a sleepwalker, wandering high upon castle turrets’ are visible – richly alludes to Brontë’s enduring personal and literary investment in the idea of the divided self, or the necessity for women especially to supress their feelings and desires in order to appear more conventionally feminine. As Gaskell had recounted, while at Roe Head, Charlotte struggled to subdue her imagination in order to get through the work of the day and conform to school discipline, but at night and in moments of solitude, her mind was free to wander back to the infernal imaginary world of Angria. Years later in 1837, Brontë responded to Poet Laureate Robert Southey’s famously discouraging advice – ‘Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life: & it ought not to be’ – by reassuring him, ‘I carefully avoid every appearance of pre-occupation and eccentricity . . . I have endeavoured not only attentively to observe all the duties a woman ought to fulfil but to feel deeply interested in them – I don’t always succeed for sometimes when I am teaching, and sewing I’d far rather be reading or writing – but I try to deny myself’.60 Brontë’s anxious cultivation of a conventionally feminine exterior to mask her turbulent inner life might have influenced Gaskell’s formulation of the parallel currents, but Partridge’s embroidered somnambulist knits these identities together. The female figure on the cap, wandering on the battlements with wild hair, appearing as if at risk of losing her moorings and floating away, also seems to allude to Jane Eyre, although not in any direct way. It evokes Jane’s internal monologue from the battlements of Thornfield Hall, where, looking ‘out afar over sequestered field and hill’, she longs ‘for a power of vision which might overpass that limit; which might reach the busy world, towns, regions full of life I had heard of but never seen’.61 Simultaneously and more ominously, it evokes Bertha Rochester’s suicidal leap from the roof of Thornfield Hall, a response to her prolonged incarceration for behaviour deemed dangerously unfeminine. The figure of the somnambulist thus seems pregnant with possibility, capable of representing a desire for wider horizons as well as the danger, for women, of overstepping society’s boundaries and suffering a great fall. The resemblance of Partridge’s cap to another in the museum’s collections, the tiny, white cap embroidered by Miss Wooler for Brontë’s unborn child, is also striking; for the visitor aware of this additional resonance, Partridge’s cap might evoke Brontë’s embryonic genius and the possibilities held within her even as a young, imaginative girl. Although fabricated in every sense of the word, Partridge’s cap sheds light on Brontë’s experience and potentialities in rich and unexpected ways. Partridge’s ‘Gloves’ similarly signal a desire for broader horizons: a desire achieved first through embroidery, then through travel, and finally through the transmutation of experience into fiction. According to its label: As schoolgirls Mary and her sister Martha were instructed by their mother to stitch all over their new gloves to make them wear longer. Mary stitched onto these gloves during her own trip to the region and gifted them to Charlotte prior to her visit. Charlotte added personal landmarks including Easton House, where she stayed with the Hudsons, and a symbol on Bessingby Hill, where she experienced her first glimpse of the sea.62 Compelled by her mother to stitch over her gloves in order to strengthen them, Mary Taylor – the fearless, unconventional, feminist friend Brontë met at Roe Head – transforms an exercise in domestic thrift into an act of feminine trailblazing, albeit on a small scale, creating a kind of roadmap that encourages her more timid friend to travel and see the world. For museum visitors familiar with Shirley, the gloves might also evoke a conversation between Caroline Helstone and little Rose Yorke, who is commonly believed to have been modelled on Taylor. Rose expresses her desire to travel, explaining ‘I cannot live always in Briarfield. The whole world is not very large compared with creation: I must see the outside of our own round planet at least’. She renounces a life like Caroline’s, immured at home: ‘I am resolved that my life shall be a life: not a black trance like the toad’s buried in marble; nor a long, slow death like yours in Briarfield Rectory’.63 Almost immediately after this revelation, Rose is commanded by her mother to ‘Sit down, and do a line of marking’ on her sampler.64 Within the framework of Partridge’s counterfactual world, Mary/Rose’s stitching becomes the vehicle for quiet subversion. Brontë went to Burlington (now Bridlington) on Mary’s recommendation, just as she later followed Mary’s example by studying abroad in Brussels. Partridge ingeniously enacts this pattern of Mary leading and Charlotte following at the level of the object itself, with Mary stitching first and Charlotte palimpsestically stitching her own record of travel on top. For initiated viewers, this is perhaps most evident in the figure of a tiny ship embroidered on the inside wrist of one of the gloves (Figure 5b). This detail is taken from a sketch that the real Brontë made at the end of a letter to Ellen Nussey, written on 6 March 1843, when she was working in Brussels; the full image features a grotesque caricature of herself, waving across the English Channel at Ellen and a male suitor. This other part of the illustration, Charlotte’s self-caricature, appears as if defiantly scrawled on the corner of Partridge’s ‘Pocket handkerchief’ (Figure 6), the next item in the collection. Visitors familiar with the originating letter will be aware that Brontë compared what she saw as her stunted unattractiveness with Ellen’s more conventional beauty. When this graffito appears on a handkerchief ‘trimmed with Brussels lace believed to have been given to Charlotte by Madame Heger’, the wife of the man for whom, according to Partridge, ‘Charlotte developed an unrequited passion’, it might be read as an act of defiance, as Brontë’s assertion of herself as a rival for Monsieur’s affections despite being poor, plain, and little.65 Partridge’s work offers no easy answers, but encourages viewers to sift through their catalogue of Brontëan knowledge, some of which was gleaned on their perambulations through the museum, and to consider what possibilities these reconfigured fragments might offer us. Figure 6. Open in new tabDownload slide Serena Partridge, `Pocket handkerchief. Charlotte Brontë. 1843’. 2016, cotton, ink, thread, Brussels lace. Hand-sewn. SP5. Photographed by David Chalmers. Figure 6. Open in new tabDownload slide Serena Partridge, `Pocket handkerchief. Charlotte Brontë. 1843’. 2016, cotton, ink, thread, Brussels lace. Hand-sewn. SP5. Photographed by David Chalmers. Coda Despite the beautiful execution, meticulous planning and research, and richly suggestive qualities of ‘Accessories’, the collection elicited mixed responses from visitors, many of whom did not engage with the textual components and therefore mistook Partridge’s creative work for authentic relics. According to the results of a recent survey on the Contemporary Arts programme, ‘[o]nly 3 of 26 surveyed realised [the] work [‘Accessories’] was a new commission prior to leaving [the] room’ and ‘[n]one of the 26 read the label within the case which made it clear that the work was a new commission’. While all respondents commented on the high quality of ‘Accessories’ as art, many expressed confusion and annoyance. Post-reveal, 5 visitors responded positively, while the ‘remainder felt “duped” or misled, stating their original purpose was to see real, authentic objects’; respondents expressed discomfort (“I’m not 100% comfortable with that in the context of this room”), embarrassment (“You feel quite foolish! It need[s] to be clear that it’s a representation”), and a conviction that art and fiction have no place in the author museum (“Walking through this door I would expect to see genuine artefacts”). On the other hand, the fact that the shoes and gloves ‘caused the greatest visible and verbal confusion and amazement’ testifies to Partridge’s intimate understanding of Brontë’s life, and to her success in creating works of art that appear to visitors to capture some truth about Brontë’s experience, albeit through artistic and fictitious means. Partridge undoubtedly achieved her aim, which was to inspire uncertainty and encourage visitors to question what they accept as ‘facts’ presented within the museum, but it is clear that some resented her efforts to challenge the way they consume history in what they take for granted as an authenticating space. What Partridge’s ‘Accessories’ offers visitors is the opportunity to reconsider Brontë’s creative labour as both literary and domestic. It recombines scraps of the Brontë story, including literature, literary criticism, and biography, in new and unexpected constellations. Partridge’s process responds to Woolf’s fears about the limited interpretive scope offered by access to Brontë’s relics, but it also subverts the dichotomy that Gaskell established: the parallel currents of Brontë’s life as a writer and as a woman. Partridge insists that they coexist as parts of an integrated life. While her art searches out lacunae and probes some of the most difficult to resolve questions in Brontë studies, Partridge also refuses to supply easy answers to fill these voids. Instead, she highlights them, creating, for instance, the tiny boot (Figure 7a) covered with needle pricks in the shape of a rose (Figure 7b) – a haunting afterimage of what Brontë might have altered or removed from an ‘original’ artefact. Alluding to the story that Patrick burned his children’s coloured boots because they offended his sense of modesty – an accusation he denied but that has persisted as part of the Brontë myth – Partridge explained that: Figure 7 Open in new tabDownload slide a, b. Details of Serena Partridge, `Child’s boots. c. 1820’. 2016, leather, silk ribbon, threads. Hand-sewn. SP1. Photographed by David Chalmers. Figure 7 Open in new tabDownload slide a, b. Details of Serena Partridge, `Child’s boots. c. 1820’. 2016, leather, silk ribbon, threads. Hand-sewn. SP1. Photographed by David Chalmers. Even with the salvaged boots I am trying to imply that Charlotte ‘may’ have unpicked the embroidered roses to leave a single rose for simplicity (and therefore make them acceptable to her father). On the other hand, I am also suggesting that Martha Wright [Mrs Brontë’s nurse and Gaskell’s informant] may have obtained the boots at a later date and singed them herself to give authenticity to her story about Mr Brontë.66 The coloured boots may well be apocryphal. If they existed, they are now lost. Partridge’s work playfully resurrects them, but implies that even if we had the authentic relics, we would be no nearer to knowing what really happened and no closer to answering the mystery we expect the boots to resolve: what kind of father was Patrick Brontë, really? Partridge’s fabrication – both literal and literary – of new pseudo-relics enables multiple interpretive possibilities and encourages creative thinking about the connection between Brontë’s life and writing, while simultaneously acknowledging the contingent nature of what we accept as biographical fact. Her contribution to Brontë reception is the subversive suggestion that myth-making and other creative responses to Brontë’s legacy are not necessarily distractions from her literary achievement. They might instead be approached as a critical lens that helps us better understand the processes by which Charlotte Brontë has been privately commemorated (through literary tourism or collecting, for instance) and officially memorialized in biographies, editions, and the museum. And yet Woolf’s warning about the dangerous allure of Brontë relics should be taken seriously. After all, Partridge’s ‘Mourning shoes’ (Figure 8), accompanied by a museum label explaining that they were embroidered by Charlotte with the hair of her deceased sister, Emily, very nearly gave rise to a new Brontë myth that quickly went viral when a Twitter user tweeted a photo of the shoes along with the commentary ‘No matter how goth you think you are, you aren’t Charlotte “I repaired my mourning shoes with the hair of my dead siblings” Bronte’. The story was retweeted nearly 16,000 times and reported as fact by The Metro and The Poke, necessitating Partridge’s intervention to set the record straight. After 160 years of scholarship on the life and literature of Charlotte Brontë, the Brontë myth remains intractable, impossible to uproot. Partridge’s creative-critical reconfigurations of fact, myth, and literature, I suggest, reclaim Brontë mythmaking as an important part of her commemoration. Figure 8. Open in new tabDownload slide ‘Serena Partridge, `Mourning shoes. Charlotte Brontë. 1850’. 2016, leather, silk, human hair. Hand-sewn. SP6. Photographed by David Chalmers. Figure 8. Open in new tabDownload slide ‘Serena Partridge, `Mourning shoes. Charlotte Brontë. 1850’. 2016, leather, silk, human hair. Hand-sewn. SP6. Photographed by David Chalmers. DISCLOSURE STATEMENT No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. Footnotes 1 " Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë, ed. by Elisabeth Jay (London: Penguin, 1997), pp. 258–59. Further references to this edition appear parenthetically in the text. 2 " May Sinclair, The Three Brontës (London: Hutchinson & Co., Ltd., 1911), p. 14. Lucasta Miller, The Brontë Myth (New York, NY: Random House, 2001; repr. 2005), p. xiii. Amber Pouliot, “‘Swallow it”: Imagining Incest in Inter-war Writing on the Brontës’, Brontë Studies, 44 (2019), 136–48. 3 " Henry James, ‘The Lesson of Balzac’, in The Question of Our Speech and The Lesson of Balzac: Two Lectures (Boston, MA & New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin, 1905), pp. 55–116 (p. 64). 4 " Virginia Woolf, ‘Haworth, November 1904’, in Early Visitors to Haworth: From Ellen Nussey to Virginia Woolf, ed. by Charles Lemon (Haworth: The Brontë Society, 1996), pp. 124–27 (p. 125). 5 " Miller, The Brontë Myth, p. xiii. 6 " I am grateful to Serena Partridge, who allowed me to interview her by email between 2016 and 2017. Quotations from Partridge that are not from the wall panel or museum labels are from an email of 4 February 2017. 7 " I am grateful to Lauren Livesey, Audience Development Officer at the Brontë Parsonage Museum, who shared visitor responses to Partridge’s ‘Accessories’. 8 " Deborah Wynne, ‘The “Charlotte” Cult: Writing the Literary Pilgrimage, from Gaskell to Woolf’, in Charlotte Brontë: Legacies and Afterlives, ed. by Amber K. Regis and Deborah Wynne (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), pp. 43–58 (p. 47). 9 " Wynne, ‘The “Charlotte” Cult’, p. 49. 10 " Woolf, ‘Haworth’, p. 125. 11 " For instance, in volume 1, chapter 6, she identifies geographical areas near Brontë’s second, more congenial school at Roe Head as the originals of locations in Shirley (1849). 12 " See J. A. Erskine Stuart, The Literary Shrines of Yorkshire: The Literary Pilgrim in the Dales (London: Longmans, 1892), p. 53, and J. Ramsden, The Brontë Homeland: Or Misrepresentations Rectified (London: Roxburghe Press, 1897), pp. 18–19. 13 " Halliwell Sutcliffe, By Moor and Fell: Landscapes and Lang-Settle Lore from West Yorkshire (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1899). 14 " Amber Pouliot, ‘Reading the Revenant in Charlotte Brontë’s Literary Afterlives: Charting the Path from the “Silent Country” to the Séance’, in Charlotte Brontë: Legacies and Afterlives, ed. by Amber K. Regis and Deborah Wynne, pp. 96–115. 15 " Thomas Wemyss Reid, ‘Haworth Church’, The Times, 24 December 1878, p. 8. 16 " Marion Harland, Charlotte Brontë at Home (New York, NY, & London: The Knickerbocker Press, 1899), p. 265. 17 " Woolf, ‘Haworth’, p. 124. 18 " Christine Alexander, ‘Myth and Memory: Reading the Brontë Parsonage’, in Writers’ Houses and the Making of Memory, ed. by Harald Hendrix (New York, NY: Routledge, 2008), pp. 93–110 (pp. 93–94). 19 " See Nicola J. Watson’s ‘Introduction’ in The Literary Tourist: Readers and Places in Romantic and Victorian Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 1–20, and Alison Booth’s ‘Introduction’ in Homes and Haunts: Touring Writers’ Shrines and Countries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 1–18. 20 " Watson, The Literary Tourist, p. 3. 21 " Pamela Corpron Parker, ‘Elizabeth Gaskell and Literary Tourism’, in Literary Tourism and Nineteenth-Century Culture, ed. by Nicola J. Watson (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 128–38. 22 " Ann Dinsdale, Sarah Laycock, and Julie Akhurst, Brontë Relics: A Collection History (Haworth: The Brontë Society, 2012), p. 4. 23 " ‘About Us – Our History’, The Brontë Society <https://www.bronte.org.uk/about-us/our-history> [accessed 5 April 2019]. 24 " Lyn Pykett, ‘The Material Turn in Victorian Studies’, Literature Compass, 1 (2003), 1–5 (p. 1). 25 " Woolf, ‘Haworth’, pp. 124–25. 26 " Woolf, ‘Haworth’, p. 126. 27 " Harald Hendrix, ‘Writers’ Houses as Media of Expression and Remembrance: From Self-Fashioning to Cultural Memory’, in Writers’ Houses and the Making of Memory, ed. by Harald Hendrix (New York, NY: Routledge, 2008), pp. 1–11, (p. 5). 28 " Wynne, ‘The “Charlotte” Cult’, p. 45. 29 " Woolf, ‘Haworth’, p. 126. 30 " Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1929; first Harvest edition, 1989), p. 73. 31 " Lyndall Gordon, Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life (New York, NY: Norton, 1994, first American edition 1995), pp. 174, 63. 32 " Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, ed. by Margaret Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 109. 33 " Booth, Homes and Haunts, p. 1. 34 " Watson, The Literary Tourist, p. 6. 35 " The ‘material turn’ is currently reshaping Brontë studies. On the significance of literary tourism and relics see Watson’s The Literary Tourist (2006) and Literary Tourism and Nineteenth-Century Culture (2009), and Deborah Lutz’s The Brontë Cabinet (2015). On the significance of objects in Jane Eyre see Elaine Freedgood’s The Ideas in Things (2006) and Christine Alexander’s and Sara L Pearson’s Celebrating Charlotte Brontë (2016). 36 " Jenna Holmes, Press Release: ‘January 2013 will see the first major redecoration scheme in 25 years for Haworth Parsonage, once home to the world’s most famous literary family, the Brontës, and now one of the UK’s top tourist attractions’. 37 " I am grateful to my Fall 2017 Women’s Literature class and to Emily Goplen, in particular, for this observation. 38 " Rachel Ferguson, Charlotte Brontë: A Play in Three Acts (London: Ernest Benn, 1933), p. 15. 39 " Booth, Homes and Haunts, p. 17. 40 " Ferguson, Charlotte Brontë, p. 21. 41 " Cornelia Parker and novelist Justine Picardie recorded a séance at the museum as part of Parker’s exhibition, ‘Brontëan Abstracts’. 42 " Partridge, Wall Panel, Brontë Parsonage Museum. 43 " Partridge, email correspondence, 2017. 44 " Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, trans. by Stephen Heath, in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch (New York, NY, and London: Norton, 2001), pp. 1466–70. 45 " Booth, Homes and Haunts, p. 52. 46 " For the first full-length study of the interwar development of biographical fiction and drama about the Brontës, see Amber Pouliot, The Cultural Significance of the Brontës, c. 1910–1940 (2014), unpublished thesis. See also Amber Regis’s essay, ‘Charlotte Brontë on Stage: 1930s Biodrama and the Archive/Museum Performed’, in Charlotte Brontë: Legacies and Afterlives, which similarly stresses the contingency of the archive, but sustains a particular focus on how interwar dramatists approached the archive as editors, reshaping historical documents for dramatic purposes and questioning the authenticity of Brontë relics, pp. 116–41. 47 " Ferguson, Charlotte Brontë, p. 63. 48 " Regis, ‘Charlotte Brontë on Stage’, p. 131. 49 " ‘Contemporary Arts – 2016 – Charlotte Great and Small Exhibition’, Brontë Parsonage Museum <https://www.bronte.org.uk/contemporary-arts/charlotte-great-and-small> [accessed 14 June 2019]. 50 " ‘Artists in Haworth – Tamar Stone’, Brontë Parsonage Museum <https://www.bronte.org.uk/contemporary-arts/artists-in-haworth/tamar-stone> [accessed 14 June 2019]. 51 " ‘Artists in Haworth – Cornelia Parker’, Brontë Parsonage Museum <https://www.bronte.org.uk/contemporary-arts/artists-in-haworth/cornelia-parker> [accessed 14 June 2019]. 52 " I am grateful to Teresa Whitfield for sharing information about ‘Charlotte Brontë’s Shawl’ over a series of emails in 2017. 53 " Partridge, email correspondence, 2017. 54 " Partridge, Label 3, Brontë Parsonage Museum. 55 " Charlotte Brontë, Shirley, ed. by Herbert Rosengarten and Margaret Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 70. 56 " Tim Dolin, ‘Introduction’, in Charlotte Brontë, Villette (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. ix–xxxv (p. xxiv). 57 " Partridge, email correspondence, 2017. 58 " Partridge, email correspondence, 2017. See Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (London: IB Tauris, 2010); Maria Quirk, ‘Stitching Professionalism: Female-Run Embroidery Agencies and the Provision of Artistic Work for Women, 1870–1900’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 21 (2016), 184–204; and Chloe Flower, ‘Wilful Design: The Sampler in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 21 (2016), 301–321. 59 " Partridge, Label 2, Brontë Parsonage Museum. 60 " Robert Southey quoted in The Brontës: A Life in Letters, ed. by Juliet Barker (London: Viking, 1997), p. 47. Charlotte Brontë in The Brontës: A Life in Letters, p. 49. 61 " Brontë, Jane Eyre, p. 109. 62 " Partridge, Label 4, Brontë Parsonage Museum. 63 " Brontë, Shirley, p. 335. 64 " Brontë, Shirley, p. 337. 65 " Partridge, Label 5, Brontë Parsonage Museum. 66 " Partridge, email correspondence, 2017. On the possibly apocryphal story of Patrick burning his children’s coloured boots, see the first edition of Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë. Author notes " Independent Scholar © 2020 Leeds Trinity University This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Serena Partridge’s ‘Accessories’: Fabricating Uncertainty in the Brontë Parsonage Museum
JF - Journal of Victorian Culture
DO - 10.1093/jvcult/vcz030
DA - 2020-05-28
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/serena-partridge-s-accessories-fabricating-uncertainty-in-the-bront-9RPMDTOFa0
SP - 279
VL - 25
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -