00:02:27.560Yeah. So before we talk about your book, I was just hoping you could explain a bit about who
00:02:32.580the Brontes were. Three of them are known as published authors, but there were other siblings
00:02:38.180as well. Can you explain who was this family? Who are these people?
00:02:41.820So the Bronte family lived in early 19th century Yorkshire in England. They were initially anyway,
00:02:48.880There were six children. There were six children of Patrick and Maria Bronte. Patrick was a vicar, so there were six children. In descending order of age, there was Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte Bronte, the famous author Charlotte Bronte, Branwell Bronte, who was the only boy of the six siblings, Emily Bronte, the famous author of Wuthering Heights, and Anne Bronte, who wrote two novels herself.
00:03:16.620She was the youngest when she was the baby. The mother, Maria Bronte, died when Charlotte Bronte
00:03:22.220was about five years old, leaving the six children without a mother. And very soon,
00:03:28.200maybe a few years later, three or four years later, the two older sisters died, Maria and
00:03:32.940Elizabeth. The children lived in a, they lived a sort of a very imaginative life together. They
00:03:41.640told stories together, they wrote stories, they played, they learned together, and created these
00:03:48.080entire universes together, this whole imaginative world, which is very, it's sort of celebrated.
00:03:54.540They wrote little books for themselves the size of postage stamps, trying to recreate the
00:03:59.520typescript writing. So the writing is extremely tiny and hard to read. As they became young adults,
00:04:06.160They all tried to go out in the world and earn a living with mostly disastrous consequences because none of them really flourished away from home.
00:04:17.140At a certain point, the three sisters decided to write, to publish a volume of poems together.
00:04:26.820Emily was acknowledged to be the best poet of them, but the three of them published this book of poetry to universal neglect.
00:04:34.340Nobody cared or liked their poems. At the same time, Branwell, who also fancied himself something of an artist, something of a poet, something of a writer, but didn't have the kind of the application, didn't have the steadfast kind of ability to apply himself, started to become addicted to various substances and started kind of living a very chaotic, self-destructive life.
00:04:57.300The three sisters decided that it's partly like an artistic decision, but also partly a decision of survival that they needed to write novels because their home where they lived was entailed to their father's job.
00:05:14.120He was a vicar and they lived in a parsonage.
00:05:16.460But when he died, they would be, you know, out on the streets and had shown very little ability to earn a living otherwise.
00:05:24.880So they wrote their very famous novels. Very soon thereafter, because their lives were very short, three of the four remaining siblings died in a terrible, terrible nine-month period. So first Branwell at around the age of 29, 30, 31. They were all around that age. Then Emily and then Anne.
00:05:42.160and leaving Charlotte at the age of 33, having survived five siblings, her mother, and by that
00:05:49.560time also her mother's sister, who was the aunt who had come to live with them to take care of
00:05:54.600them. And at age 33 or thereabouts, she was unmarried, as they all were, considered unattractive
00:06:02.400by the standards of her day, and a spinster, obviously. And she had, at that point, to look
00:06:10.440forward to a life very much on her own with her father, you know, with whom she had shared a
00:06:15.500certain closeness, but not the sort of closeness she had with her siblings. And she had to kind of
00:06:19.600face this future of terrible grief, loneliness, and there was every reason to believe that she
00:06:26.020would spend the rest of her life alone. She managed to continue writing and being creative
00:06:31.580through this period of grief. And she even managed at the very end of her life, which was still in
00:06:35.98030s, to marry. So the life of this family kind of begins with a death and ends with a death,
00:06:43.360at least in my writing of them, but encompasses so much. It encompasses creativity. It encompasses
00:06:48.920beautiful sibling relationships, which hold with them all the kind of the messiness of family
00:06:55.980relationships. There's jealousy. There's anger. There's disappointment. There's deep love and care.
00:07:31.500they're sort of helping each other get better in their writing, like a little writer's group
00:07:36.680almost. Yes. That's very insightful of you to say. I think I was very enchanted by that idea
00:07:43.860that they had within their home, the perfect critics and support for their writing. Who among
00:07:49.800us can say that? I mean, who among us writers can say that? They were completely, I think,
00:07:55.000at least in my understanding of them, my interpretation of them, transparent to each
00:07:59.380other. They had the ability to share everything about their natures and their thoughts and their
00:08:04.580imaginings and desires and hopes and dreams with each other, especially the sisters.
00:08:08.980And so, yes, they would, you know, famously kind of every night talk about the development of their
00:08:14.340stories and they would walk around. I think it was walking around the table and they, you know,
00:08:18.560it was like, it was like a, like a little, little, little walking course they would do. And as they
00:08:23.620walked, I think that kind of maybe freed their imagination a little bit to talk through what
00:08:27.220they've been writing. And that literary fellowship is extraordinary. You know, some of us have
00:08:33.480writing groups or we have readers, but you know, they're not people who are necessarily engaged in
00:08:37.500a daily basis with us when we write. And I don't mean also to suggest that because they had to
00:08:42.260write novels in order to possibly survive, that they wouldn't have written them otherwise. It's
00:08:46.440possible. You know, I think both Emily, I'm sorry, both Anne and Charlotte had definite ambitions to
00:08:53.180write novels. And obviously all three of them had the talent and the genius to write them.
00:08:58.620Emily very much did not want to write a novel. She did not want to have her name out in the world.
00:09:03.720She did not want to share the beautiful kind of flowering of her inner world with anybody outside
00:09:10.120the family. She was extremely private and just had very little interest in fame or the social
00:09:16.140world out there. So it's extremely likely, at least as I understand it, that she would not
00:09:20.520have written the novel had she not been pushed by charlotte primarily and also their you know
00:09:25.620their very their straightened circumstances to do something you know to do something oh there's the
00:09:30.700kitty so they published their books under pseudonyms right they used male pseudonyms can
00:09:37.060you talk about that but they use because they use the same surname so it was like we're all men but
00:09:42.000we're also siblings like they didn't so they made that connection clear right yes yes i think at
00:09:47.660least, you know, I have to, I have to couch everything with saying that the research that
00:09:52.120I did for this book, because it took me more than 10 years to write is itself 10 years old.
00:09:56.480So sometimes it can be confusing for me to remember where it is the true story end and
00:10:00.960my own interpretation or my creative work begin. But certainly they wanted pseudonyms. They wanted
00:10:06.120to protect themselves. They want to protect their privacy, which is a really important aspect of
00:10:10.920this. It wasn't just that they wanted to see their books in the world and therefore had to
00:10:14.820adopt male names or at least gender kind of inconclusive names, but they also very much
00:10:21.120wanted privacy. And Emily was kind of the, the, the, the, uh, spur to that. She, she insisted
00:10:26.340on having that, that barrier between herself and the world out there that no one would know who
00:10:32.380they were, but it was also a very practical requirement that if they wanted to publish
00:10:37.020their books, which were not kind of polite drawing room comedies, they were, they were
00:10:42.640something of a different order. If they wanted to publish those books, they would have to hide
00:10:48.500their femaleness to a certain extent. Yeah. I find it interesting that they were doing that,1.00
00:10:54.080but yet they didn't hide their connection to one another.
00:10:57.220Yes. Well, I think they were very canny in that regard. I think they recognized that there was
00:11:02.040possibly some positive publicity to result from the idea of three related people publishing at
00:11:10.600the same time. It would be the same thing these days. If each book was, each author was, you know,
00:11:15.640equivalently regarded or celebrated, it would be, it would be a sensation, wouldn't it? And I think
00:11:20.240that's what they were hoping for. They certainly were hoping for that possibly when they published
00:11:23.880their book of poems together. I think they sold four copies that didn't, it didn't get them any
00:11:29.420renown whatsoever, but you know, it was, they were, you know, country people. They, they were
00:11:35.320sophisticated though, in certain ways. And I think they, they correctly understood that this would
00:11:39.840create a kind of, if it reached the public, it would create a certain amount of interest. And
00:11:45.360they were, they were correct. Yeah. So can you talk about what that was like when their book?
00:11:50.440So first of all, I believe Branwell was because he was the only boy. He was the one who's like,
00:11:55.120Hey, I have these books. Maybe you should publish them. They're totally written by men. Like he was
00:11:58.880the liaison to publishing, right? Oh, no. Oh, no, not at all. No, no, no, no, no, no. Charlotte was
00:12:05.380driving force. She was a driving force behind this. It was her idea. She's the one who approached
00:12:13.300the publishers kind of famously. Once they were rejected, she would cross out the name of the
00:12:20.000publisher and write a new one on the envelope, which obviously did not show a lot of sophistication,
00:12:25.920that gesture. But she was a driving force. And when a publisher expressed interest in
00:12:32.760Emily and Anne's books, because the book that went out with this first effort was a book of
00:12:40.840Charlotte's, which was not a very good book. It was called The Professor. And that was only
00:12:44.640published much later when she became famous. It was not really worth publishing at that stage.
00:12:49.180But a publisher did express interest in Emily and Anne's books. Charlotte was not happy with the
00:12:56.260offer, you know, the publication offer. But Emily and Anne were like, okay, we'll take it,
00:13:01.300And that publisher did not treat those books with the respect that they deserved.
00:13:06.560And Emily, I'm sorry, then Charlotte kept persisting.
00:13:09.360She wrote then Jane Eyre and found her own publisher for that.
00:13:12.500But still they were published at the same time, even though they had separate publishers.
00:13:16.360And the publisher who published Jane Eyre was much more respectful, much more aware of the brilliance of his author and her potential also to write additional books and treated her manuscript with much more care.
00:13:31.300But yes, no, it was it was her that, you know, Branwell intercepted some proofs that they were to read.
00:13:38.220And it was there his first concrete, you know, revelation that his sisters had published a book.
00:13:45.500I'm sorry, this is the poems. And he took the this manuscript, which he had been excluded from and and kind of strew it all over the house.
00:13:53.580He was very upset because, you know, he assumed that a book, you know, publication, I'm sorry, he assumed that correspondence coming from a publisher would have to be addressed to him, even if it was addressed plainly to his sister.
00:14:06.560Anyway, so, yeah, he was aware of their publication and very distressed by it because he had not been included, right?
00:14:13.640As the only boy that was his right, he believed, to be included in this sort of endeavor, yeah.
00:14:18.260So I promise we are going to talk about, we are going to talk about your book, but first
00:14:22.900I'm just curious to know what was your, do you remember when you first encountered the
00:14:46.300And so many of them encountered Jane Eyre in childhood. And, you know, with Jane Eyre, you start with a character that you can identify with, perhaps especially if you're a bookish girl, right? Because she's in the very first scene, she is sort of hiding, if I'm remembering correctly, sort of hiding in a window seat, reading a book, right?
00:15:04.600when when when she's but she's there's so much in that book which is so exciting for a young person
00:15:10.440but also for an older person it's there's adventure there's injustice there's her the
00:15:16.120wonderful character of jane right there's the the voices on the wind there's the house fires there's
00:15:22.240the the woman in the attic there's romance there's misunderstanding and this incredible character of
00:15:28.200jane who even though she is not conventionally attractive very much like her author even though
00:15:34.200she's small and insignificant, very much like her author. She insists on her dignity. She insists
00:15:41.400that she is worthy of respect. She is worthy of being treated with the same consideration as
00:15:48.980a beautiful lady of, you know, upper class lady. She expects to be treated in a certain way and0.60
00:15:57.300demands it. And that's, you know, it's a very, it's a very moving book in that way. And her
00:16:02.680character is very, it's very engrossing, I think. And, and I, yeah, so I love that book. I don't
00:16:09.000think I read Wuthering Heights until I was an adult. It's not really a children's book. If you
00:16:14.420think about it, it's a very dark and brutal book, very much unlike the, the, the Hollywood depictions
00:16:21.600of Wuthering Heights. It's a very brutal and, and disturbing book. And I don't think I read
00:16:28.180Anne's two books until much later. Yeah. So it was Jane Eyre that brought me to the Brontes,
00:16:34.780as it did many people, I think. And so this leads me into asking you about your book. So what was
00:16:42.440the first spark of an idea that you wanted to retell their stories in a different way?
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