Deborah Lutz's (Pleasure Bound) fresh and novel The Brontë Cabinet examines in detail the private lives of nine objects owned and used by the Brontës--Emily, Charlotte and Anne--in order to reveal the "secret existence" the possessions held for them and how they influenced the sisters' writings: "New corners and even rooms of these Victorian women's lives light up for us." Lutz places each object "in its cultural setting and in the moments of the everyday lives of the Brontës."
The intriguingly titled chapter "The Alchemy of Desks" is about the sisters' portable writing desks, covered with ink stains. Emily called hers a desk box, and inside it were pieces of chalk, fragments of lace, an empty cardboard box marked with her initials, EJB. Each leftover, "no matter how enigmatic and insignificant, seems to shine out with meaning." In "Tiny Books," Lutz discusses the books the sisters created as teenagers by folding down pieces of paper and sewing them together to form "a rudimentary booklet of 16 pages, about the size of a matchbook," that they filled with words written in the tiniest of scripts. In addition to numerous household duties they were expected to perform, the sisters spent hours dealing with the "swatches and cloth fragments they stitched, turned and hemmed." Lutz sees their products as "physical monuments to the business of their days," during which they could mentally compose their poems and novels. She's very good at drawing upon passages from their writings to illuminate better the significance of these objects: "In [Anne Brontë's] Agnes Grey the sisters Agnes and Mary pass many happy hours 'sitting at our [needle]work by the fire.' "
All members of the Brontë family were serious walkers; examining their brother Branwell's walking stick, Lutz reflects upon how much Emily loved to walk the moors of Haworth, just as much as Wuthering Heights's Catherine Earnshaw did. Dog collars, the family's hair samples ("death made material"), memory albums and "migrant relics" or mementos associated with the Brontë family and its environs are some other things Lutz discusses. "Whether or not they are authentic," Lutz observes, "they represent the deep attention the Brontë story still elicits."
She reiterates that Parson Brontë was not a wealthy man and the family did everything they could to scrimp and save. She recounts with sadness the deaths of each sister and other Brontë relatives, and then the selling off of their meager items in local auctions; how lucky it is that even these few items survived. Reading this sensitive inquiry into the Brontë's objects, and the family members who were so very close to them, allows the many who love the sisters' writings to partake, even if from afar, in the special lives of these fascinating and brilliant women. It's literary archeology par excellence. Sylvia Plath, after a visit to the Brontë home, where she saw Emily's death couch, wrote: "They touched this, wore that, wrote here in a house redolent with ghosts." --Tom Lavoie, former publisher
Shelf Talker: Delve deeply into the world of the Brontë sisters as illuminated by some of their personal possessions.