Through Belgian Eyes: Charlotte Brontë's Troubled Brussels Legacy by Helen MacEwan (review)

Between February 1842 and January 1844, Charlotte Brontë lived, studied, and worked at the Pensionnat de Demoiselles Heger-Parent, in Brussels. Much has been written about the impact of this continental sojourn on Brontë's literary development, which is especially evident in her two Belgian novels, The Professor (her first-written novel, completed in 1846 but published posthumously in 1857) and Villette (1853). There has also been a great deal of (often salacious) speculation regarding the nature of Brontë's relationship with Constantin Heger, her literary professor and the husband of her employer, Zoë Heger. Helen MacEwan's engaging and informative new book, Through Belgian Eyes: Charlotte Brontë's Troubled Brussels Legacy, offers readers something entirely original, redirecting our focus to consider Charlotte's impact on Brussels and the Belgians, tracing her reception from the first French translations of her novels, in the mid-nineteenth century, to the present day.

MacEwan's book will, of course, be of interest to Brontë fans and scholars, as well as those with a more general interest in the family, especially now during their bicentenaries from 2016–2020. Written in an accessible style and featuring a timeline of Brontë's reception in Belgium (including translations of her novels, the publication dates of influential biographies, and the release dates of film adaptations), it will be useful to undergraduates and postgraduates studying Brontë and her literary legacy. But it includes so much fresh material that it will also be immensely useful to scholars researching and teaching the Brontës. Through Belgian Eyes also offers a fascinating history of Brussels in its own right, focusing on the period of Brontë's residence but extending from 1830, when Belgium gained its independence from the Netherlands, to the present. For this reason, the book will appeal to readers with even a general interest in the long nineteenth century or in Belgian history and culture. Over fourteen chapters, an introduction, and conclusion, MacEwan paints a remarkably vivid picture of Brussels society, covering such varied topics as its religious expression and fondness for pageantry, its rigidly stratified class system and extremes of wealth and poverty, its political climate and expressions of patriotism, and its national character and cultural productions.

Among its many virtues, MacEwan's book is richly illustrated. It features more than seventy images, ranging from landscapes and cityscapes to pictures of citizens in Belgian national dress, portraits and photographs of prominent people, maps, reproductions of paintings, and illustrations of many streets and buildings that are no longer in existence due to a relentless process of urban development and renewal. As MacEwan demonstrates, the Brussels of today would be nearly unrecognizable to the Brontës; the Pensionnat Heger-Parent, the Rue Isabelle, the Protestant Cemetery, and many of the streets that Charlotte and Emily traversed have all been razed in order to make way for new building projects, a process that has become known as "Bruxellisation."

In addition to making it possible for readers to visualize the Brontës' Brussels, MacEwan puts Brontë's descriptions of Belgian life into context, and in this way, disrupts entrenched understandings of her relationship with Brussels and portrayal of its customs and people. Brontë's acerbic descriptions of Belgium in her novels and letters home, her insistence that the national character was cold, selfish, slow-witted, and prone to deceit, have often been dismissed as narrow-minded prejudice. More charitably, they have been read in terms of her personal unhappiness and homesickness while in Brussels and her depression on returning home to find Heger cold and uncommunicative. MacEwan enriches our understanding by placing Brontë's observations in the context of other writers, including William Makepeace Thackeray, Lord Byron, and Charles Baudelaire, who mocked the little capital in similar terms. Brontë's insistence that Villette is a city of spies—a claim that might strike modern readers as farfetched and bigoted—finds some justification in MacEwan's discussion of...