Samantha Ellis – Take Courage: Anne Bronte and the Art of Life

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Anne Brontë, Book Review, Feminism, Samantha Ellis, Take Courage: Anne Brontë and the Art of Life

A sisterly fight for the youngest, overlooked Brontë

I confess, with some shame, that the youngest Brontë, Anne, is the one I have never explored. Clearly, I surrendered to the fake news floating around for nearly 200 years which dismissed Anne as being lesser than her more respected siblings, Emily and Charlotte.

Anne has been championed in more modern times for her more realistic, less romantic, heroines, as the sister who more clearly reflected the way society was weighted against women, and, moreover who explored a journey towards independence for her heroines, a self-actualisation free from the lures of ‘the Byronic romantic hero’ which renders Emily’s and Charlotte’s books so very alluring to impressionable minds.

Anne might just be the writer for the woman wanting to make a journey out of myth.

And Ellis is a perfectly placed writer to explore this territory.

Anne by Charlotte 1834

I adored Ellis’ first book, How to be a Heroine, which engagingly, intelligently, passionately, thoughtfully and entertainingly explored the various ‘heroines’ of literature whom female readers might internalise as aspirational role models. This was, and is, a book a strongly recommend to all of my literary minded sisters, as a feisty book which provokes much enjoyable debate. And THIS book will be another, and is certainly heading me over to explore Anne’s two novels.

Ellis writes exactly the kind of literary non-fiction which I most enjoy. Forget dry, cerebral, academic theory, which pins its subject matter like a chloroformed butterfly, so that it will never fly again. Without losing any ability to analyse, or being any less intelligent in analysis, what Samantha Ellis brings is dynamism, a whole-hearted, gut-felt, lively intellect engagement with her material. Literature MATTERS to her, it is a living thing, and she observes the flying butterfly of a book, a life, a society on the wing, and observes herself observing it, rather than pretending a book, a life, a society are something outside our observation. The observer is always also having subjective responses.

Anne by Branwell

Ellis takes (of course she does!) an interesting approach to her analysis of Anne, her life and her books. Rather than a linear approach, she looks at the seminal influences on Anne, with a chapter devoted to each influencing person. And also chapters devoted to the central characters of her two novels, Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall – there must, surely, always be a kind of symbiotic relationship between a writer and their creations. The writer (well, the depth writer, anyway) will create characters from their own ‘stuff’, but what is also happening is that written character is also potential, offering an ability for writer (and reader) to have something fed back to them, by the imaginative invention.

And I was pleased to discover (so Ellis, so Anne!) that the positive influence of less obvious individuals were allowed to take their places in Anne’s formative sun – not only her missing mother, Maria, who died in Anne’s infancy, but Aunt Elizabeth Branwell, Maria’s older sister, who moved from her beloved Cornwall to be the motherly presence in the Haworth household. Tabby, who served the family all her life, also provided stability and love. The often harshly vilified father, Patrick, is also shown to be far more positively formative, with his commitment to education, and a strong sense of class inequality, and its unjustiice.

…when we have to do with vice and vicious characters, I maintain it is better to depict them as they really are than as they would wish to appear. To represent a bad thing in its least offensive light is doubtless the most agreeable course for a writer of fiction to pursue; but is it the most honest, or the safest? Is it better to reveal the snares and pitfalls of life to the young and thoughtless traveller, or to cover them with branches and flowers?  Anne Brontë, preface to Tenant of Wildfell Hall

It must be said that the person Ellis is most censorious of is the best known, most successful sister – Charlotte, and her proper champions, Mrs Gaskell and Ellen Nussey. It was Charlotte who prevented, initially, the re-publication of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall after Anne’s death. In writing a realistic novel about alcoholism and about violence within marriage, Anne had written too modern, too truthful a book. And one, moreover, ‘unfeminine’ The book was considered by some, coarse, because it showed truth, and held a mirror up to society. Charlotte rather presented the sanitised image of the youngest sister, shy and sweet, and what the youngest actually wrote, conflicted with the docile image :

Wildfell Hall it hardly appears to me desirable to preserve. The choice of subject in that work is a mistake, it was too little consonant with the character, tastes and ideas of the gentle, retiring inexperienced writer. Charlotte Brontë

At this time of course Charlotte is a literary sensation. There is no doubt she loved her sister, but it seems she may have found it easier to love the idea of a weak, ineffectual angel (possibly an unhealed loss of her eldest sister, Maria, who it seems WAS that child), but found a more tough-minded, truth, rather than romantic illusion, facing sister, too tough a prospect. A more modern, psychologically driven analysis also has to wonder about any role played by sibling rivalry. Despite being seen by some as ‘coarse’, BECAUSE it did not romanticise, Wildfell Hall did sell well, on first publication.

It seems even more poignant than getting her age wrong on the original inscription, that her status, in her own right, was omitted

Samantha Ellis, in offering us a wonderfully complex, interesting person, challenging-of-pre-conceptions writer, in her Anne Brontë biography, does the reader a service by clearly indicating where she is ‘imagining’ from her own perspective how Anne might have felt, or thought this and that, with also backing up some of her assumptions by textual evidence from the books, from social history documents of the times, as well as Bronte-and-friends letters and other documents

I am satisfied that if a book is a good one, it is so whatever the sex of the author may be. All novels are or should be written for both men and women to read, and I am at a loss to conceive how a man should permit himself to write anything that would be really disgraceful to a woman, or why a woman should be censured for writing anything that would be proper and becoming for a man Anne Brontë, preface to Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Woven into the book, in a way I find wonderful, is a kind of life-story, journey, of Ellis as artist and woman. This is a harking back to her first book ‘How to Be A Heroine’ as she uses Anne’s writing, Anne’s complex, struggling heroines, Agnes and Helen, to help her reflect on her own journey. Reminding me (who needs no such reminder) of the power of literature to shape lives. We learn and are inspired by a multiplicity of stories – our own, those of others we know personally, also figures in our own times on world stages, figures from other times – but, also, the inspiration of imagination itself, and that most ancient, and most potent of teachers – story.

I received this as a digital copy for review purposes from the publisher via NetGalley

Take Courage Amazon UK
Take Courage Amazon USA

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Samantha Ellis – How To Be A Heroine

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Book Review, Books about Books, Feminism, How To Be A Heroine, Samantha Ellis

Fiction which writes our own inner scripts, and how we choose to live

Samantha Ellis is a British playwright whose family background is Jewish Iraqi. Her heritage has informed her writing and a search for her own identity which both acknowledges cultural and historical roots and seeks to escape from it by forging her own unique contribution, free from the expectations of that close-knit culture.

In this wonderful book, “How To Be A Heroine : Or What I’ve Leaned From Reading Too Much” , which must delight any voracious reader, and most specifically, any voracious female reader, she explores, with wit, humour, intelligence and creativity, not to mention a fine style, a trawl through literary creations who shaped her, whom she adored, was annoyed by, betrayed by, inspired by.

We all need role models to aspire to, or, as Ellis suggests, to help form ourselves, or partially model ourselves on. Intriguingly in this book, she suggests the models for many of us may be in literature, where we receive ideas of how to live, who we might be

Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon doing some Wuthering

The genesis of the book came from a passionately argued conversation with a friend. Tempestuous and dramatic, in search of a great passionate love, Ellis realised she had internalised Cathy from Wuthering Heights as a role model, whilst her friend argued for the cool, rational and realistic Jane Eyre, for her integrity and refusal to be anyone’s victim.

This sets Ellis on a wonderful journey from the classics of children’s literature, through to great and modern classic writing, and she demonstrates her eclectic, unsnobby reading tastes by even finding some positive lessons to learn from the heroines of Jilly Cooper and Jacqueline Susann! The dynamic she tussles with, over and over, is love, and work – and the validation (or lack of it) for female creativity, the female artist. There is both a personal story going on here, and a wider story about how literature helps us shape our place in the world. Her final literary heroine is Scheherazade, from 1001 nights, who offers inspiration both in her transformation over her relationship and as a storyteller, as an artist :

No writer is writing me a better journey. No writer is guiding me through my misunderstandings and muddles and wrong turns to reach my happy ending. And then I realise I am the writer. I don’t mean because I write. I mean because we all write our own lives. Scheherazade’s greatest piece of storytelling is not the stories she tells, but the story she lives

Ellis combines serious intent, with wonderful wit, panache, and whilst taking her journey seriously, has great droll fun at her own expense – and that of her heroines.

Finally rethinking her relationship to Cathy Earnshaw and Jane Eyre, she says, thinking of the Haworth moor hike with a friend which started the journey of this book :

The brilliant sunshine was very Jane weather, I thought; pleasant clear and rational. It would have rained for Cathy, there would have been thunder and lightning. And (said a small, but firm Jane voice) we would have shivered and eaten soggy sandwiches hunched under the hoods of our waterproofs

The book contains a useful index and a bibliography of all the texts.

      Vivien Leigh in optimistic spirit : After all… tomorrow is another day.

I found this a wonderful, layered book, about many things – the writer herself; the creative impulse; the growth of child into adult; literature, and the joys of fiction; changing attitudes to fiction, and its value; the changing attitudes towards women, as reflected in fiction, especially women’s attitudes to themselves and their aspirations; the different ways in which we might analyse literature, from a pre-and post-feminist perspective. Not to mention the enduring subtext by which we still so often define ourselves in relationship with men, the tug between love and work, the perceptions of marriage and motherhood.

I recommend this book enthusiastically, and will no doubt revisit the texts I know, and explore the ones I don’t

As a post-script: Part of the enjoyment of this book is the imaginative argument the reader may have with the author about the MISSED heroines, as each reader perhaps considers `and which literary characters influenced ME?’ The one I wanted to thrust upon Ellis, who crossly loved and was also hugely angered by Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Princess, was the much more feisty, proto-Pantheistic Mary from Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden. Definitely one of MY early heroines!

Along the way, her books and writers examined, range far and wide from Marilyn French, The Women’s Room, Lucy Honeychurch in E.M.Forster’s A Room With a View, Hardy’s Tess, Austen’s Lizzie Bennett, Louise May Alcott’s March girls, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Princess, Hans Anderson’s Little Mermaid, The Sleeping Beauty, Jane Eyre, Nancy in Dickens’ Oliver Twist, Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls, Flora Poste in Stella Gibbons Cold Comfort Farm, Scarlett and Melanie from Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind, Salinger’s Frannie. Jilly Cooper’s bonk busters, Erica Jong, Germaine Greer, Lily Briscoe and Mrs Ramsay from Woolf’s To The Lighthouse.

And more. Many more. She is nothing if not broad church in her potential heroines!

How To Be A Heroine Amazon UK
How To Be A Heroine Amazon USA