The Brussels Brontë Group organises meetings and events in Brussels throughout the year, including an annual weekend of events around the date of Charlotte Brontë’s birthday (21 April). We organise occasional Guided walks around Brontë places in Brussels. Our Reading group specialises in 19th century literature (not just the Brontës!).
Programme of events 2024-25
Registration essential for all events. To register, please use the Contact Form on this website.
Guided walk
Sunday 22 September at 10.00
This free walk is an event organised by Waterstones English bookshop, Brussels. Helen MacEwan will lead a walk around places connected with Charlotte and Emily Brontë’s stay in Brussels. It will start at 10.00 at a meeting point in Brussels and end around 12.00 at Waterstones, where you will have a chance to buy Helen’s books. To register, email Waterstones at . More information on Waterstones website, here.
Talks
Saturday 12 October 2024 (morning)
Université Saint-Louis, Rue du Marais 119, 1000 Brussels
Registration essential.
10.00 Talk by Joanne Wilcock: ‘In the Footsteps of the Brontës in the North of England’
Joanne Wilcock will give an illustrated presentation on places in the North of England with Brontë connections.
Joanne teaches French and Spanish at schools in Lancashire and is a Brontë enthusiast and blogger. She travels tirelessly to places with Brontë associations and is the author of two information-packed blogs, one on her ‘Travels with the Brontës’ and the other an account of her trip on the honeymoon trail of Charlotte Brontë and Arthur Bell Nicholls in Ireland.
11.30 Talk by Sara Zadrozny: ‘Examining landscape, weather and emotions in three Brontë novels’
The Brontës’ shared love of nature is ever-present in their work, but for them, landscape is not just a backdrop to events: on the contrary, the Brontës’ use of flora, fauna and weather is used to present feeling. This connection between mood and nature is evident in three of the Brontë novels but is used in differing ways.
For example, in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), a verdant garden becomes representative of female passion. In Wuthering Heights (1847), Emily Brontë displays the moors as an unbounded stage where love may exist beyond societal rules. For Anne Brontë, it is the kindness of the natural world that draws attention to ‘unnatural’ cruelty in the abusive human world, as illustrated in her work The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848).
In this talk, Sara will draw upon these three novels, aiming to show how the otherwise Realist fiction of the Brontë sisters adheres to earlier Romantic ideas of nature, and does so to communicate emotional responses to social injustices.
Sara Zadrozny researches and teaches Victorian Literature with a focus on gender, the body and the Gothic. She is a tutor at the Oxford University Department for Continuing Education where she teaches on the Brontës. Sara has published articles on Victorian attitudes towards ageing women and medicine in the nineteenth century. Currently, she is researching the Brontës’ presentation of wildness, bereavement and maternity.
Christmas lunch and entertainment
Saturday 7 December 2024 (date to be confirmed)
Presentations by members of the Brussels Brontë Group
Saturday 15 February 2025 (morning)
Registration essential.
10.00 Presentation by Stavroula Kremmydiotou on the supernatural in Brontë novels
Stavroula will give a presentation on the supernatural in the Brontë novels, focusing on the gothic element.
Ever since picking up a copy of Wuthering Heights, Stavroula has been a Brontë enthusiast and a Heathcliff advocate. She specialises in law of the sea but leaves shipwrecks to Monsieur Paul.
11.30 Presentation on Éleonore Desclee’s novel Charlotte in Love
Presentation of Éleonore Desclee’s novel Charlotte in Love (publication date September 2024), with readings from the book. The novel is in French but the presentation will be in English and the readings in English translation.
It’s Jeanne’s last year at school, and she and her classmates have been set a challenging project by a challenging new teacher. They must each read a literary classic of their own choice and write about it. Jeanne has no trouble in making her choice. It has to be Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, which has always been her favourite novel. But she hadn’t anticipated having to do the project with her classmate Alec. And she never imagined that a book could tell you so much about yourself.
This is Eléonore’s second book for teenagers and young adults. A few years ago she was excited to find out about the Brontës’ stay in Brussels, and she brings this into her new book about two teenagers at a Brussels school reading Jane Eyre.
Talks
Saturday 10 May 2025 (morning)
Registration essential.
10.00 Talk by Nick Holland: ‘Doubt, Defiance and Devotion – Faith and the Bronte sisters’
Nick Holland will look at the depictions of faith and religion in the novels of Charlotte, Emily and Anne and also in their lives and in Charlotte’s letters – including Charlotte’s encounters with Catholicism in Brussels.
Nick is well known for his books on various members of the Brontë family. He is the author of In Search of Anne Brontë, Emily Brontë – A Life in 20 poems and Aunt Branwell and the Brontë Legacy. A new book, about Charlotte Brontë and her best friend Ellen Nussey, is to be published in April 2025.
He is also the author of the blog In Search of Anne Brontë in which he writes weekly posts about the Brontës and their circle.
11.30 Talk by Charlotte Jones: “Some untamed ferocity”: The Brontës among the Moderns
One hundred years ago, in 1925, a group of writers were producing some of the most challenging, innovative and unprecedented novels ever written. But a curious thing about many of these modernists — including Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, May Sinclair, Jean Rhys and more — is that to explain how and why they wanted to ‘make it new’, they turned again and again to writers working almost a century earlier: Charlotte, Anne and Emily Brontë. In this talk, we’ll look at the extraordinary influence the Brontës cast through the twentieth century, from the modernists to later writers, such as Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.
Dr Charlotte Jones teaches at the University of Oxford, where she is a lecturer at St Hugh’s College and teaches for the Department for Continuing Education. One of the courses she is teaching is ‘Beyond the Pages: the Brontës in Context’, which looks at how the Brontës ‘navigated themes such as the supernatural, religion, female empowerment and sexual desire’.
Guided walk
Sunday 11 May 2025
10.00-12.00. Guided walk around Brontë places in Brussels in the Place Royale area. Registration essential. Fee: €10 per person, to be paid in advance.
Summer Lunch
Saturday 14 June 2025