Past Events

Friday 1 April to Sunday 3 April 2011 Annual Brontë Weekend

This was the fifth consecutive Brontë weekend organised by our Group. Two academic lectures formed the centrepiece of the weekend's events. In the morning Professor Valerie Sanders looked at Fatherhood and the Brontës. Her presentation was followed in the afternoon by Professor Philip Riley’s talk Not just a pretty face: physiognomy, phrenology and the novels of the Brontë sisters. The day ended with a get-together of members in one of the taverns on Grand’Place. On Sunday two guided walks were offered to cater for ever-growing interest in our special historical tours. This was followed by lunch and our informal AGM, which concluded this splendid weekend.

See our reports on the weekend on our Blog entries for 14 April 2011 (report and photos seperately):

Friday 23 April to Sunday 25 April 2010 Annual Brontë Weekend

This was the fourth consecutive Brontë weekend organised by our Group.
On Friday we kicked off with an informal buffet supper followed by a quiz on the Brontës' lives, the theme of the weekend.  On Saturday we invited two speakers; in the morning Prof. Angus Easson gave a talk On the Brussels trail: Elizabeth Gaskell and The Life of Charlotte Brontë and in the afternoon we listened to Dr. Sandro Jung of Ghent University on the subject of Curiosity in Villette. What has now become a tradition, our guided walk in Brussels was organised on Sunday, followed by a meeting for members.

Breaking the Frame: the Narrators of Wuthering Heights. A talk by Nicholas Marsh, editor of Palgrave Macmillan's Analysing Texts series and author of many books in the series, including the study of Wuthering Heights.

Nicholas Marsh is also the author of the popular How to Begin Studying English Literature. His talk examined the ways in which the narrators in Wuthering Heights, though unreliable, biased and with only a partial view of the events related, are in fact used by Emily Brontë to make the novel more powerful.

See our Blog entry for 28 February 2010:
http://brusselsbronte.blogspot.com/2010/02/breaking-bronte-mould.html

A significant aspect of Villette is the way the enigmatic narrator, Lucy Snowe, often addresses a fictitious reader, and Maureen Peeck argued that Lucy's character is partly realised by means of her relationship with this reader.

See our Blog entry for 25 October 2009:
http://brusselsbronte.blogspot.com/2009/10/are-you-anybody-miss-snowe.html

Friday 24 April - Sunday 26 April 2009: Annual Brontë weekend

Our third annual weekend of events focused on Emily Brontë. The weekend kicked off with a concert by Veronica Metz of the Celtic band Anois who sang Emily Brontë's poems set to music by the band ahead of her concert in Haworth later in the year. Novelist Stevie Davies spoke on Emily Brontë and the Mother World and socio-linguist Philip Riley on the Brontës' use of language in a talk entitled The Brontë sisters' "strong language". As always, we organised a guided walk around Brontë places in Brussels, while Eric Ruijssenaars led an additional excursion to Brussels cemeteries to search for the graves of the Brontës' friends Martha Taylor and Julia Wheelwright.

See our Blog entry for 28 April 2009:
http://brusselsbronte.blogspot.com/2009/04/brussels-bronte-group-weekend-2009.html

Other reports on the weekend:
http://brusselsbronte.blogspot.com/2009/05/brussels-bronte-group-lectures-25-april.html
http://brusselsbronte.blogspot.com/2009/05/new-cemetery-excursion.html

18 October 2008: Talk

What Everyone Knows about Wuthering Heights: the novel and its adaptations. Talk by Dr Patsy Stoneman, Emeritus Reader in English at the University of Hull, at Facultés Universitaires Saint-Louis, Bld. du Jardin Botanique/Kruidtuinlaan 43, 1000 Brussels.

Dr Patsy Stoneman examined the assumption that even people who haven't read Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights think they know what it is "about", mostly from films. She compared extracts from film adaptations of the novel (e.g. the 1939 film with Laurence Olivier, the 1970 film with Timothy Dalton and the 1991 one with Ralph Fiennes) with the corresponding passages from the novel, showing for example that the films give us answers to what in the novel remain questions.

For the second year running we organised a weekend of events to mark the anniversary of Charlotte Brontë's birthday. It opened with a meeting in Waterstone's bookstore with writers Robert Barnard, Eric Ruijssenaars, Maureen Peeck and Derek Blyth. The Bibliothèque des Riches Claires, assisted by our Group, organised an exhibition and one-day conference on Les Soeurs Brontë à Bruxelles at which Robert Barnard and Eric Ruijssenaars spoke alongside Brussels historians and the Héger descendant Paul Héger. We also repeated our very popular guided walk around Brontë places in Brussels.