Connection with Banagher features in new book about Brontë family

Let me in: The Brontës in Bricks and Mortar by Ann Dinsdale and Sharon Wright takes us on a fascinating odyssey through the key dwellings of this family’s history.

Not only are we invited to visit the actual buildings through pictures and text on the pages, but we are also treated to anecdotes and stories about the Brontës, their extended families, friends, and neighbours.

‘If walls could talk,’ is an overused idiom, but in this book, they do. From County Down to Cornwall, through numerous locations in England, and back full circle to Banagher in Offaly, we are spectators of the Brontë story, not only through their literary prowess, but from the bricks and mortar they lived within.

An avid fan from an early age, having read all of their novels in my early teens, my shelves also include many biographies and books about the Brontës. In UCD, for a history degree, my thesis was: ‘Emily Brontë, a romantic imagination.’ Having visited a number of the landmarks mentioned in Dinsdale and Wright’s treatise, including, like them, a tour of Roe Head by John Harris, I thought I knew everything there was to know about this enigmatic family. I was wrong.

That Patrick was prone to writing verse I was aware, but not that he was a published poet. Nor that his ‘larger-than-life’ father, Hugh, was a noted storyteller and may have been descendant from an ancient Irish bard, Pádraig Ó Prontaigh. Hugh Prunty drew people from far and wide to “listen by the light of the corn kiln.” Was it from Hugh then, and possibly Pádraig, that his granddaughters inherited their talent for weaving a tale?

Patrick crossed the Irish Sea in 1802 and was only to return home once more. Why did he leave Ireland so far behind? Was it because of his humble beginnings, so different from those of his future wife in bustling Chapel Street in Penzance? Or was it because of a scandal that closed the public school he had run for five years? These are just some of the questions raised. Why were Patrick’s mother and sisters never written about, and Aunt Branwell portrayed as a dour battleaxe, not the Penzance belle she really was?

What I love is the conversational tone, the personal touch. The authors are writing in the present day about incidents that happened two hundred years ago, yet they are standing in the places where these events occurred. They embarked on an extraordinary journey, travelling all over Ireland and England to bring us this tome.

A coffee-table edition, the book is filled with beautiful images and engaging content. It is intended for display, but is so much more than that - informative, entertaining, charismatic, and tragic, just like the Brontës and their writings. Containing a cast of characters, spanning two centuries, the stories are told from the point of view of the abodes they inhabited. What’s more the authors are reliable narrators.

Ann Dinsdale is Principal Curator of the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth and an expert on Brontë manuscripts; Sharon Wright, award-winning journalist, is also a biographer of Maria Brontë, and editor of the Brontë Society Gazette. They are both passionate about their subject, as is evident in their prose, and take turns, writing forty-one alternative chapters - one for every building. Two further chapters were written by guest contributors. We are presented with not only the well-known establishments, but these “indefatigable sleuths” have managed to trace those “that defeated earlier biographers,” as confirmed in the foreword by the esteemed Brontë biographer Rebecca Fraser.

Expecting a discussion on architecture, in mainly technical language, I was not prepared to be moved, even to tears sometimes, by these walls, which are indeed “saturated with stories.” Patrick looking back at the “cramped house in Thornton with great fondness,” at a time when his wife and six children were still living. His delight at the opening of a Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge, to which he escorted his two eldest with pride in July 1824. Heartbreak and grief a year later when they were sent home suffering from consumption, to die within a few weeks. A description of Anne’s trip to London when she was twenty-eight, “tasting a life suddenly within her grasp.” A year later, she was dead. The portrayals of Branwell reduced to drink and drugs, his heart broken by unrequited love, convinced he was a failure in art and literature. Yet, 177 years later, our authors “crossed Trafalgar Square to prove him wrong.” His portraits of his sisters are displayed in the National Portrait Gallery and rank among the top five with the public. Postcards of Branwell’s portraits of his sisters are bestsellers in the gift shop.

This publication is a must for Brontë aficionados and for casual connoisseurs. All of you will surely learn something new, or something old in a new way. If not, at least you will have spent a few hours in the scenic surroundings of Ireland and England. From the fields of Ulster to the Yorkshire Moors; Cambridge College library where Patrick first signed his name, Brontë, to a coffin shop in Haworth; from the heights of glamour to Branwell’s dens of debauchery, we are captivated.

That there are many “cuckoo-in-the-nest” and “mad women in the attic” tales is not surprising, subjects “fabulous for fiction, cruel in real life.”

Let Me In, the title begs, and this, the text does. 'The Brontës in Bricks and Mortar' opens many doors for the reader to pass through, and unlike Charlotte on a visit to Elizabeth Gaskell, we will not be found hiding behind the curtains. It was first launched in Haworth, beside the Brontë Parsonage Museum on the August 3, at the Brontë Birthplace, Thornton on August 12 and again in Hill House aka Charlotte’s Way, Banagher, on August 16, where the story ends.

Copies of Let Me In -The Brontës in Bricks and Mortar are available at Paul Flynn’s News Agency and Household Goods Store on Main Street, Banagher or from The Martello Tower pop-up Bookshop organized by James Scully, at 085 710 7569 or jsmeelick@gmail.com for €25 each.