After I watched To Walk Invisible, written and directed by Sally Wainwright, I got a brief case of Brontë fever, so I read a biography of Emily Brontë  and a biography of Charlotte Brontë which made me want to watch To Walk Invisible again. If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it.
   The story tracks a few years in the lives of the family from the time Charlotte is recovering from a hopeless infatuation with a married man, to the death of Branwell. Branwell is brilliantly played by Adam Nagaitis, and his slow self-destruction is a major part of the story, In fact, some reviewers have complained that there is too much Branwell in a film that is supposed to be about the Brontë sisters. Perhaps so, but the misery of the family during Branwell's fatal slide into addiction is an integral part of the story. Charlotte biographer Claire Harman notes that the sisters knew that Branwell, being the only boy, was the favourite of his father.  In the film, the girls look at their father with silent resignation when he expresses, yet again, his hope that Branwell will pull himself together. Branwell had the freedom to pursue many careers; he squandered all his chances. 
   Charlotte seethes with resentment at the restrictions placed on her by society, and Anne is worried about their precarious financial future.

   Later in the story, Charlotte, curious about Emily's writing,  sneaks into her room while Emily is out walking on the moors. She rummages around and finds a book of poetry which she opens and starts to read. Stunned by the power and beauty of Emily's verse, she sinks down on the bed, still reading. Behind her  the sun streams through the window and lights up a large amber hair comb on the back of her head. I do wonder if this is a symbolic reference to the flame sequence at the beginning of the story.
   The house used in the filming is a replica of the original Brontë house, which was significantly altered after Rev. Patrick Brontë's death. As shown at the top of this post, the house faced the church graveyard and backed onto the moors--a grim surrounding, and yet the sisters hated living anywhere else, and whenever they had to leave home to earn money teaching, they suffered acute emotional and often physical distress.
   The camera captures the streaks of the thick oil paint on the doors, the mud in the courtyard, the large flagstones in the hallway, which hurt Aunt Branwell's feet to walk upon.  (Aunt Branwell is dead by the time of the movie but it is her legacy to the girls which made it possible for them to publish their book of poetry).
  Rev. Brontë's study, where he spent most of his time, is across the hall from the dining room where the girls wrote and walked and talked at night, after he went to bed. In a world before central heating, the interior doors are usually kept closed. It is a household full of secrets and unspoken feelings. 

For months the family endured the misery of living with an alcoholic and opium addict who was often psychologically and even physically abusive. There was no escaping the situation, and no way of solving it, either.
  In one scene, the doctor comes after Branwell has had an episode of delirium tremens, and sits and talks to the Rev. Bronte in his study. The camera slowly pans across the door, looking in on the conversation from the hallway. The technique reminds me of the way Ang Lee also framed some conversations in Sense & Sensibility, showing Eleanor and her mother in their tiny cottage, while Eleanor talks about their reduced circumstances.

   What little narration there is in the film is through the device of Charlotte Brontë writing to her friend Ellen Nussey, who we do not meet until almost the end of the story. The rest of the exposition is mostly given to Emily and Anne. Anne explains to Emily why Branwell was fired from his tutoring job, and Emily explains to Anne that Charlotte was eating her heart out over her old teacher, Monsieur Heger. But mostly, the family circumstances and their relationships between the siblings are shown, rather than told.
   There is also the sweet, awkward interplay between Charlotte and her father's curate, who later became her husband.
    There are so many wonderful scenes: Emily's furious anger at Charlotte when she discovers Charlotte has been through her things in her bedroom, contrasted with her compassion for Branwell.

   In one scene, it is Sunday morning and Branwell is staggering up the street after delivering a note to a friend, begging him for some gin. The church bells are ringing. The three sisters, of course, exit the house and start walking down the hill to church, carrying their prayer books. They see Branwell. It's a humiliating  moment.
​   They are going to a house of worship, their father is the spiritual leader of the village and now they are reminded of the hopeless reality of their family situation. All of Haworth, of course, knows about the shortcomings of the minister's son. 
   Charlotte looks at him and then resolutely looks away. Anne looks pained and hurt. They pass him, continuing their walk, but then Emily stops, and goes back to help him struggle home.
   Another realistic detail here: when the girls walk outside, the hems of their skirts brush the wet pavement and get dirty and muddy. You can see it on Anne's blue skirt in the photo above. They have to pick their skirts and petticoats up to go up and down stairs without tripping. Charlotte always seems to run impatiently up the stairs with her skirts in her hands and Emily sometimes tucks her skirt up when she is working outside in the courtyard. (I recently read that the medical discovery that germs, particularly tuberculosis germs, could be picked up from the sidewalk, is what led to the shortening of women's skirts to ankle height at the turn of the last century.)

   The attention to detail, as for example, the use of natural light and candles and oil lamps, creates such a feeling of authenticity. One pet peeve of mine with period dramas is that women are always shown with their sewing, but they are stitching away with only a few inches of thread on their needle, which is ridiculous. In To Walk Invisible we see the endless daily household chores carried out by  the arthritic old housekeeper Tabby and a young female servant.
​   Emily makes the bread for the family, kneading the dough in a way which makes it obvious you wouldn't want to get on her bad side. Anne sits and chats with her, idly brushing flour off the rim of a ceramic canister as she talks. 

   Little details. Again, Emily is in the kitchen, writing a journal entry in the miniscule handwriting the Brontë siblings used for their private writing. We see a close up of her rough and dirty fingernails. She's been snacking on berries. There's someone at the front door. She gets up to answer it, but as she approaches the door, Anne comes out of the dining room. Anne goes to the door, and Emily--who assiduously avoided contact with anyone outside the family-- swiftly steps behind the door so whoever it is will not see her. Nothing is said about it, that's just the way Emily is. ​ 
​   I think all the actresses do a wonderful job of showing the contrasting personalities of the sisters.

 Anne is the gentle mediator in the sometimes fraught relationship between Emily and her older sister Charlotte.
  Charlotte appears to do the least amount of housework. (Apparently in real life she did lend a hand with  sweeping and stove-blacking when Tabby was too ill to work). After Branwell has started a fire in his room, Anne is down on her knees, scrubbing the woodwork, Emily is picking up the empty bottles, and Charlotte is sitting and looking at her brother's papers and books--the least grimy job.
   After Branwell's death, Tabby, Emily and Anne perform the ritual of washing the body. Charlotte sits downstairs in the dining room, weeping, Her father, who for years did not even dine with his children, sits weeping in another room.

   There are two endings to the story: one is when Charlotte's friend Ellen Nussey arrives to visit the family and goes walking on the moors with the sisters. They see a sundog, or parhelion, in the sky. Ellen tells the sisters, it is you, you are the three suns. This incident apparently really happened, as recalled by Ellen Nussey, (although actress Chloe Pirrie, who played Emily, did not seem to be aware of that in this interview.) It was not, in other words, dreamt up by the director. This dramatic moment would ordinarily be a closing scene, but it is followed by the death of Branwell, and then, we are told in screen titles about the death of Emily and Anne. The camera pans and moves from the past to modern day and we see the people coming to pay homage to the Brontës at the parsonage-house-turned-museum, a cinematic transition some viewers have found jarring. In my case it is more a feeling of disappointment that the engrossing story is over. But one can watch it again, and I have and will.

Jane Austen died on this day, 202 years ago, in rented rooms in Winchester, attended by her loving sister Cassandra and under the care of a well-respected local physician.
    Her death was lamented by her friends and family at the time, and we still mourn today for the premature loss of an extraordinary individual and a transcendentally gifted artist.
    We Janeites tend to be very proprietorial about "our Jane," responding with indignation to her critics, and in the case of her death, wishing that there was something more that could have been done. But Dr. Helena Kelly takes this proprietorial attitude to new heights. As I have previously noted, she tends to discount and dismiss any other interpretation of Austen's life and work but her own. And by dismiss, I mean that she calls Austen's own relatives liars and fibbers who didn't understand Austen nearly so well as she does.
     Dr. Kelly suggests that Austen "may" have been killed by her physician with a drug overdose. "She was, I think it's fairly clear, killed with kindness." She further suggests that Austen might not even been fatally ill.
    The nature of her illness was unknown at the time, and various diagnoses have been put forth subsequently. Medicine was of course very limited in those days, but although her "medical attendant" Dr. Lyford was unacquainted with x-rays, CAT-scans and blood tests, he was very well acquainted with death, and I suggest that he could recognize its approach. Shortly before Austen's passing, her brother James wrote to his son to say "Mr. Lyford has candidly told us that her case is desperate... with such a pulse it was impossible for any person to last long."
    After Austen's death, Cassandra described her sister's final days and hours in letters to her nieces and others. Everyone involved in Austen's care, and Austen herself, wrote that she experienced little severe pain during the course of her long illness, except near the very end, when she struggled and was restless. Cassandra, undoubtedly wanting to provide relief, asked her if she felt pain and if so, where, but Austen was unable to articulate an answer. "She was seized again with the same faintness, which was followed by the sufferings she could not describe." Dr. Lyford was summoned and "applied something to give her ease."

   Thereafter, Austen was "in a state of quiet insensibility" until her death.
​  Dr. Kelly, recounting this scene in her book, Jane Austen: the Secret Radical, warns us that we ought not to take Cassandra's version at face value for "this kind of text is always suspect. Lies cluster to death like flies." Kelly declares that it is not a foregone conclusion that Austen's malady was fatal or that her end was near: ​"We may have to consider the --frankly horrifying--possibility that Jane's illness wouldn't, on its own, have proved fatal, or not so soon, that it might have been the drugs, and only the drugs, that killed her."

    Was Austen in fact merely quite ill and not at death's door? Based on the description left to us, I believe she was dying. Literature is actually filled with descriptions of "final death throes" and "final struggles." It is a well-documented fact that death is often preceded with an acute period of restlessness. The following explanation from a hospice website exactly parallels what Cassandra wrote:
Shortly before death some people become restless, agitated and confused, however, they are usually unable to tell us why. This is known as terminal restlessness and it often occurs within the last few days of life and affects nearly half of all people who are dying.
   There may be a variety of causes for this and sometimes sedative drugs are needed. A calm, quiet and stress-reduced   environment, with reassurance from those who are close to the person, can often help to relieve this symptom.
​    I witnessed this phenomenon myself during the recent death of a family member who chose to die at home. Cassandra's description strikes me, based on my experience, as exceedingly accurate, down to the detail of the dying person lying in an awkward position, despite one's best efforts to help them get comfortable.  After our relative spent an miserably restless night, trying to climb out of bed when he could no longer support himself, we anxiously called the hospice care team. The nurse came and explained that this was a sign that the end was coming. Fortunately, the restlessness soon subsidized, and my relative passed away less than 24 hours later.
    Seeing your loved one thrash about murmuring on their death bed is a harrowing experience and naturally you would want to ease their suffering with  pain medication. But it does not follow that whatever dose Austen received was entirely responsible for the stillness which followed the period of restlessness--again this is a natural part of the dying process.
   I see nothing suspicious about Austen's end and no reason to assume, as Dr. Kelly suggests, that Austen's "depressed respiration" at the end was due to an opiate overdose and not Cheyne-Stokes breathing, which is another extremely common and widely-reported harbinger of approaching death.
    It would be charitable to lay Dr. Kelly's eagerness to accuse others of a crime, where no crime occurred, to her respect for Austen and her wish, which we all share, that she had been as long-lived as the rest of her family.

You do a podcast with the kind, lovely, bubbly Kristin, talking about  Jane Austen, and she asks if you have a blog, and you say, "Yes, but I seldom post," and it doesn't even occur to you -- not for a whole week -- to blog about the podcast. It's my favourite Jane Austen podcast, "First Impressions" and I really had a great time.
We talked about inspiration, being self-published authors, how to drop historical information into the narrative (exposition) without being obvious about it, and more! 
​
https://firstimpressionspodcast.podbean.com/e/ep-36-writing-jane-austen-fan-fiction-with-lona-manning/

  For the last four years, my husband and I have been in China at Christmastime. I opened up the trunk that holds our Christmas decorations after an absence of four years, and pulled out the familiar, and the half-forgotten, ornaments for a Canadian Christmas. We've got a turkey and cranberry jelly and all the trimmings that were not available to us back in China.
  People ask me, "are you happy to be home?" and the answer is, I miss China and my life there and my friends. A lot. I miss the crazy, bustling streets and the little children in their grandparents' arms and watching all of the changes of a developing economy.
  Although Christmas is just another working day in China, we had lots of Christmas joy and wonderful experiences. We forced students to sing the 12 Days of Christmas, Ross was Santa Claus, and we ate dumplings in an unheated school cafeteria instead of Christmas dinner and we were perfectly happy.
  Of course we knew we were living in a dictatorship. But compared to the bad old days of Mao and the Cultural Revolution, China had made so much progress in terms of individual liberty. We hoped that it would continue to do so, since the benefits were apparent and obvious. 

  But during my last year in China, I noticed a change in the atmosphere. The central government was asserting itself more and more. Communist-red slogans and public art blossomed on every other street corner (see example below). My school put up big red banners, extolling the so-called socialist virtues. As you can see, these virtues are Good Things that have nothing in particular to do with Socialism, most especially the virtue of "democracy." 

    And now, for the first time I can recall, Canadians are being cast as the Bad Guys in an international dispute. Up to now, Canadians were welcomed everywhere because we're 'not Americans.' This will have an impact on the numbers of Canadians interesting in going to teach in China; though how great of a one remains to be seen.
  I am no longer able to teach in China because I'm over 60. That regulation in itself has cut off a significant number of people who would gladly work in China as a post-career adventure. The news that China is incarcerating as many as a million of its own Muslim citizens in re-education camps and stepping up the persecution of Christians will also cause more people to give China a pass. That's a big loss for all concerned and I hope the pendulum swings back to opening-up and modernization.
  I wouldn't trade my time in China for anything and no matter what you hear about China, remember that the government is one thing and the amazing, kind, wonderful people of China are something else again.