Sunday 12 September 2010

10.00: Guided walk around Brontë places in Brussels 

Literary weekend in London. Organised in coordination with the London branch of the Brontë Society. Guided walks around sites associated with Charlotte Brontë's stays in London and around Dickens' London.

Room P61, Facultés Universitaires Saint-Louis, Bld. du Jardin Botanique/Kruidtuinlaan 43, 1000 Brussels

Sue Lonoff is the editor and translator of Charlotte and Emily Brontë's "Belgian essays" – their French "devoirs" written under the direction of their Brussels teacher M. Heger, who was to be so important to Charlotte's personal and literary development.

Charlotte and Emily reacted very differently to Heger's teaching. Sue Lonoff will compare some of their essays and consider the influence of their Brussels studies on their future writings.

Sue Lonoff is a member of Harvard University's continuing education division. Apart from the Belgian Essays, her Brontë publications include Approaches to Teaching Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (co-editor), and she has also written on Wilkie Collins and Marguerite Yourcenar.

The father of the Brontës, Patrick, was born in Co. Down, Ireland, where he spent the first 25 years of his life before moving to England to study at Cambridge. These were years in which Europe and Ireland were convulsed by the effects of the American War of Independence, the French Revolution, the United Irishmen Rebellion and the French Invasion of Ireland. These ‘volcanic events’, as Thomas Carlyle termed them, form the background to Patrick Brontë’s development and maturing.

This talk will explore the nature of the circumstances of these formative years, often dealt with only briefly in biographies, and consider the possible effect they had on Patrick Brontë’s family and the implications for the remarkable novels created within the parsonage walls.

Brian Wilks, a former vice-president of the Brontë Society, has lectured widely in Europe and the United States. For ten years he convened an International Conference of Brontë Scholars at the University of Leeds where he lectured in Education, English Literature and Drama. He has published The Brontës of Haworth and other biographical works on the Brontë Family and on Jane Austen.  His special interest is the historical and social context in which the Brontë family’s writing developed.

Sunday 12 December 2010

Christmas lunch

Friday 1 April 2011 at 19.00:

Welcome event

Saturday 2 April 2011

Facultés Universitaires Saint-Louis

Valerie Sanders is Professor of English of the University of Hull, author of The Tragi-Comedy of Victorian Fatherhood and The Brother-Sister Culture in Nineteenth-Century Literature. She has written a life of Elizabeth Gaskell and is currently editing a volume of Margaret Oliphant's writings.

Philip Riley is Emeritus Professor of sociolinguistics at the University of Nancy and a former Director of the Centre de Recherches et d’Applications Pédagogiques en Langues. He has written and edited various books including Language, Culture and Identity

Sunday 3 April 2011

10.00: Guided walk around Brontë places in Brussels

Sunday 15 May 2011

10.00: Guided walk around Brontë places in Brussels

3-6 June 2011

As in previous years, Brussels Group members will travel to the Annual Brontë Society weekend of events in the Brontë village, Haworth (Yorkshire).

Sunday 19 June 2011

Annual summer lunch

We invite you to join our group specialising in 19th century English literature, for people who are interested in books by and about the Brontës and in the history and literature of the 19th century in general.

We want to return to the classics that have stood the test of time and also fill in our knowledge of the period by reading: 

• The Brontës and works relating to them (biography, criticism, modern novels inspired by the Brontës....)
• Jane Austen, Hardy, Dickens, George Eliot....
• Biography and history providing background to the 19^th century