Reviews and Notices

Charles Lemon subtitles his collection 'The best from one hundred years of the Transactions of the Bronte Society'. As every reader of this will know, Transactions has always been the publication where scholarly discussion of the Bronte works is promoted, but it has also tried to be a broad church, with pieces on new discoveries and acquisitions, contributions by non-specialists (medical, topographical, historical and so on), personal tributes, reviews of the many adaptations of the novels (plays, television serials, musicals, operas) and some coverage of Society matters. Charles Lemon's selection offers us a delightful stroll through backnumbers, and since he introduces each item himself it is, like most Society walks, an extremely well-conducted one. Sometimes, because of juxtaposition, we can forget we are walking not only through the fields of Bronte scholarship but also through the years: Butler Wood's eloquent paean to the Haworth moorlands seems to bring a snappish rebuke from the next article, Lady Wilson's: 'I got quickly tired of the insistence of these ... writers on the character of the country which surrounds Haworth.' In fact, however, seventeen years separates these pieces, so no rebuke can have been intended. If rebuke had been called for, however, Lady Wilson was clearly the one to give it. Her plea for the governess-employing classes involved so much trouble for the Society's powers-that-be that the letters about her remained for decades in a file closed to ordinary library readers. Rambling through the years as we do, we start noticing how attitudes on all sorts of matters have changed. To take just one example: Patrick Bronte in the early essays gets a very poor press. Butler Wood speaks of his 'indifference to the society of the children and his generally eccentric habits'; Dorothy]. Cooper mentions as fact 'the semi-Calvinist creed at home', while Donald Hopewell says that 'For Patrick Bronte the ministry was a means of livelihood and not even his most fervent admirers could accuse him of an excess of spirituality.' Ivy Holgate even has him withdrawing 'from his neighbours and fellowcreatures, emerging only to perform his ministerial duties.' How emphatically the whirligig of time