Proms Extra: Charlotte Brontë: Gregory Tate talks to Joanne Harris & Claire Harman
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 19 July 2016
⏱️ 20 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Marking the bicentenary of Charlotte Brontë’s birth, Claire Harman, her biographer and Yorkshire-born novelist and author of ‘Chocolat’ Joanne Harris discuss her life and work. The discussion is presented by Dr Gregory Tate from the University of St Andrews who teaches Brontë's work and was recorded earlier as a free audience event held at the Imperial College Union. For more details go to the Proms website.
Gregory Tate is one of the New Generation Thinkers selected by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council in a scheme to find academics interested in turning their research into radio.
Charlotte Brontë: A Life by Claire Harman is out now.
The most recent novel published by Joanne Harris is called Different Class.
The Brontë Society Anniversary Conference takes place in Manchester from August 19th to the 21st.
For information about a series of exhibitions at the Haworth Parsonage in Yorkshire, the National Portrait Gallery, the National Media Museum in Bradford go to the website of The Brontë Society. https://www.bronte.org.uk/whats-on/news/149/bronte200
Producer: Torquil MacLeod.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps |
| 0:21.2 | it. It's a long time ago, right? It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream |
| 0:26.1 | van plays music when it's out of ice cream. Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds. This year, |
| 0:32.9 | lovers of Victorian literature are celebrating the bicentenary of the birth of Charlotte Bronte. |
| 0:43.3 | Born in rural Yorkshire in 1816, Bronte, alongside her younger sisters, Emily and Anne, |
| 0:49.3 | would go on to become one of the most popular, innovative and controversial novelists of the 19th century. |
| 0:54.1 | Joining me to discuss Charlotte Bronte's life and work are her biographer Claire Harmon and another Yorkshire-born novelist, the author of Chocolar, Joanne Harris. |
| 1:04.4 | Can we start with Charlotte Bronte's family? |
| 1:07.8 | How did her relationship with her family, do you think, particularly her relationship with her sisters, affect her writing, Claire? |
| 1:14.6 | Very much so, because they were a family who stuck together like glue in their parsonage and didn't function terribly effectively outside it, but they were incredibly fond of each other and very, they shared everything |
| 1:29.0 | the children did, the three sisters and their brother, Branwell, and built up an imaginative |
| 1:34.5 | world that was incredibly sustaining for them and that it was kind of everything they needed. |
| 1:41.0 | I mean, they had almost everything they needed right at home, each other and their imaginations. What was that imaginative world like that they created together? |
| 1:50.0 | Weird. Weird and fervid and almost limitless, because even from a very young age, |
| 1:56.5 | the Bronte's sisters and Branwell had, they read a lot of newspapers, they were very interested |
| 2:03.1 | in topical affairs and they sort of imaginatively riffed on all that stuff in a very sophisticated |
| 2:07.6 | way. I mean, these were not realistic stories, unlike the adult works. These were very |
| 2:12.4 | fantastical, imaginative, adventurous, sexy, you know, wicked characters. |
| 2:20.5 | And it was... |
| 2:22.2 | They wrote down a lot of these stories, but they also talked through them. |
| 2:25.6 | So it was a sort of world that they partly inhabited. |
| 2:28.8 | And it was like a parallel universe full of Bronteeness. |
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