Sisters Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë, pictured here with their lesser-known sibling, ENERGY-BEAM BRONTË.
Charlotte Brontë: “No mockery in this world ever sounds to me so hollow as that of being told to cultivate happiness. What does such advice mean? Happiness is not a potato, to be planted in mould, and tilled with manure. Happiness is a glory shining far down upon us out of Heaven. She is a divine dew which the soul, on certain of its summer mornings, feels dropping upon it from the amaranth bloom and golden fruitage of Paradise.”
Emily Brontë: “I have dreamt in my life, dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they have gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the color of my mind.”
Anne Brontë: “There is always a ‘but’ in this imperfect world.”
ENERGY BEAM BRONTË: MMMMZEEEEP MMMMZZZZZZOOORP
Charlotte Brontë: “I can be on guard against my enemies, but God deliver me from my friends!”
Emily Brontë: “I gave him my heart, and he took and pinched it to death; and flung it back to me.
Anne Brontë: “He that dares not grasp the thorn should never crave the rose.”
ENERGY BEAM BRONTË: ZZZZZZEEP TRANSMISSION INITIATED ZZZZZZOOOPP
Charlotte Brontë: “Novelists should never allow themselves to weary of the study of real life.”
Emily Brontë: “Having leveled my palace, don’t erect a hovel and complacently admire your own charity in giving me that for a home.”
Anne Brontë: “Keep both heart and hand in your own possession, till you see good reason to part with them; and if such an occasion should never present itself, comfort your mind with this reflection: that, though in single life your joys may not be very many, your sorrows, at least, will not be more than you can bear.”
ENERGY BEAM BRONTË: GLEEEEEEEEEOOORP ZZZZZZZ
Tags: artwork, energy beam bronte, the brontes, YES I KNOW IT’S BRANWELL
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“Forgotten” is a strong term for an author whose work played every time a cassette tape was rewound.
brb, off to legally change my name to energy beam bronte
Have you read the bonkers bio of Branwell Bronte by Daphne DuMaurier? SO! MUCH! INFIDELITY! And then the alcoholism/tuberculosis sets in.
Branwell Bronte Bio Bonkers, Sources Claim
“BOFFO!” says Variety.
I stumbled upon it at Powell’s recently and my mind was so blown at its very existence I have not been able to crack it open yet. But SO EXCITED.
…what. *throws self at NYPL website*
My thought exactly. Just checked out the ebook!
One likes to think that whenever the Brontes fancied adventure, Energy Beam would do her Star Trek bit and transport them to Angria and Gondal.
I really want there to be other things tagged “YES I KNOW IT’S BRANWELL”, but I honestly can’t come up with anything else. Was there maybe a L’Engle character named Branwell in the one where Meg’s pregnant and Charles Wallace is hanging out with a unicorn and Welsh immigrants?
I think there’s a Branwen and a Brandon and a Branzillo. Oooohhhhh, that book.
And Zylle, Zillah, Zillie. All related.
Fluffy-pink-hearts at A Swiftly Tilting Planet.
In retrospect, aSTP probably was good preparation for reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
I thought when I learned more history that book would make more sense, but it… doesn’t.
I was definitely one of those kids who read lots of things that were at my reading level but were a higher life experience/maturity level than I had yet attained…. Which meant that much of what I read, I was just assuming that certain things I didn’t understand made perfect sense somehow,I just didn’t understand yet.
I wonder how much of the time I was just…. wrong.
That’s how I felt about the farandolae in A Wind in the Door.
OMG, I remember the farandolae as such annoying little fuckers.
I have read and reread Wrinkle in Time a LOT (easily double digits). I have even re-read Swiftly Tilting Planet a number of times, although not recently. I think I read Wind in the Door about three times. I may need to reread it when I get home, though, just to see if they really were as obnoxious as I’m remembering.
I really wish that farandolae was one of the fake answers in AP Bio tests, because afterwards scores could come with a little note, just going ‘…really?’
That one was kind of my favorite out of those three, though I couldn’t readily tell you why. I agree Sporos was annoying, but I was enchanted by the farandolae otherwise. And I loved the cherubim.
… Was there a whole thing about how artists painted the cherubim as chubby babies but they were, instead, actually dragons?
I have no idea how much of aSTP and aWitD I have accurately remembered, and how much I have misremembered, and since we currently live in The Future I realize I could easily google at least some of these things, but somehow trying to recreate what happened from these half-memories seems much more satisfying.
Charles Wallace thinks it’s a dragon before they get a good look at it, but it’s actually an enormous spherical being of many wings and scales and eyes. It is A Cherubim, because it’s obviously too plural to be simply a cherub. It has a Greek name (Proginoskes?) and Meg calls it Progo. I think it’s a thousand years old or something, meaning it’s only a child, and it has a…tutor?…who’s a very, very tall skinny non-human person. Where did any of this come from? WHO KNOWS, but I found it entirely compelling.
Weren’t the cherubim the floating balls of eyes and wings? And yes, we must agree never to google these kinds of questions or the internet wins.
freshwaterpearl has confirmed the balls of eyes and wings for us, but CW *thought* it was a dragon at first, which is either reasonable because large creatures with wings are plausibly dragons, or is batshit, because seriously, how many wings could a dragon possibly have. I haven’t yet decided how I feel about this, other than it’s Monday, and I would really rather devote the next half hour to thinking seriously about epistemology and semiotics as they relate to dragons, rather than doing my job. I don’t even really feel like my lack of knowledge about epistemology and semiotics is a problem here, and that’s probably a warning sign.
I like to think they looked basically like the cherubim in Narbonic, but I admit that Narbonic’s cherubim would be hard to mistake for dragons, so I’m probably wrong.
CW thought Progo was multiple dragons, or at least CW called Progo “dragons” when they first met.
(sorry sorry sorry am in the middle of re-reading the whole series due to having found these in my library’s used-book pile, they are literally in perfect condition, I think Many Waters had never been opened before Friday night)
Please do not be apologetic about helping me avoid Real Work with this crowdsourced version of L’Engle books.
Also, I have that version of Many Waters.
I had scrolled down to a point where I saw your words, and about the top quarter of the picture, and I was really waiting for a Pergo joke there …
Is that the edition of Many Waters with the amazing family tree in it?
Oh, yeah. Also, I read a lot of mysteries, where authors would stretch facts in order to make plots work. I also just liked books of facts as a child, and found The Book of Lists, by the Wallace/Wallechinsky family. Most of it was pretty accurate, but one of the authors (Amy Wallace? I can’t find a source online) was also part of a group of psychics, who contacted, say, Oscar Wilde to ask him what his ideal dinner party guests would be. So, in retrospect, all the information was probably suspect.
I think that I, too, owned that book. I probably proudly bought it at a library sale for $.50 (rather than a quarter, because it would have been hardcover).
I also treasured the copy of the Ancient Mysterious Phenomenon book that I checked out about a dozen times before I found it at one of the book sales. I only ever read the handful of full color illustrated pages about ley lines and Stonehenge, probably presented completely uncritically, because that was during my phase of TOTALLY wanting to be a druid.
This resulted in such SNs as “PentlandFirth” and “MyrddinsPrecint”. That latter one was supposed to be MyrrdinsPrecinct, (note the extra c), but I was also a bad speller, and by the time I’d noticed it, I already had a lot of posts on that message board…….
Well this has been a mortifying trip down memory lane.
Are we sure that’s not a Star Trek-style transporter? Maybe they’re taking turns beaming to Bognor Regis or somewhere for a holiday.
What’s everybody’s favorite Energy-Beam Brontë novel? I know it’s hokey as hell, but I’ve been fond of The Distress of Mistress de Strisse ever since I saw the ’87 BBC adaptation in eighth grade English class. Jenny Agutter made a fantastic Melissa, and no one has ever played VRRRRMMM BLORT-BLORT with as much subtlety and insight as Julian Sands.
*SPOILERS*
The climactic scene with the exploding control panel still makes me cry.
Also, I hear the Criterion Collection is currently remastering the 1967 version with Sir John Gielgud and Robot from Lost in Space . Look for the Blu-Ray soon!
But seriously, why does Branwell look like he’s being beamed aboard the Enterprise?
He’s negotiating a treaty between the Romulans and the Planet Where People Wear 1850s Clothes and Also Have Slightly Funny Foreheads.
According to wikimedia, Branwell painted the portrait and he painted himself out of it (and that explanation doesn’t really help, but that’s all I know)
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Painting_o…
I was hoping that Branwell had committed some unspeakably scandalous and vile deed that required a full-out damnatio memoriae 🙁
Actually if you look closely you can see the Klingon forehead ridges.
I was expecting something on Anne Brontë, but what I got was so much more
Little-known fact: Anne Brontë was actually half energy beam, and Charlotte only narrowly dissuaded her from naming her novel The Tenant of Gleepzorp Hall .
^100% a better title tho
You have exactly described my experience of many many books, as well as the video for Duran Duran's "Wild Boys".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M43wsiNBwmo
I revisited that video last year and it was a great relief to my childhood self to realize that although I failed to understand some adult things because they had a subtext requiring adult experience, I failed to understand other adult things because they MADE NO SENSE.
Just laughed so hard and so long that my (male) coworker came in to see what was so funny. He didn’t appreciate it nearly as much as I did. So I sent him the tag for all the Western Art History posts and sent him merrily on his way.
Thank you so much for this.
Thank you so much for this.