A Study of the Thorp Green Poems of Anne Bronte: Poetic Artistry as a Cure for Her Nostalgia

Abstract

Among the Bronte Sisters, Anne Bronte is the least studied, and the bulk of literary scholarship is on her novels. Most of the critics agree on the fact that her literary production is autobiographical. Taking my cue from the existing scholarship on Anne Bronte, I will study the poems Anne wrote when she was employed as a governess in Thorp Green by the Robinsons between 1840 and 1845. Highly influenced by the romantic poets preceding her, she shared her emotions in her poems. As her biographers (Gerin, Chitham, Langland) also noted, she felt excluded and lonely, especially at the start of her employment in Thorp Green, and she was able to visit her family only on Christmas and two weeks in June each year, which led her to develop a longing for her home and her family. An exhaustive study of her Thorp Green poems displays that she dislikes being there, experiences homesickness, and longs for the past days. With the exception of Gondal and religious poems written at that time span, she expresses her loneliness, solitude, and feelings of melancholy in the poems. When her homesickness heightened, she found solace in her memories and turned her feelings of longing into poetic creation. She either draws on her memories about her home in Haworth or uses objects in nature, such as a flower or a scenery as memorative signs to trigger her memories. According to sociologist Svetlana Boym, nostalgia can be "a poetic creation, an individual mechanism of survival, a countercultural practice, a poison, or a cure" (Boym 18). In this study, I will read Anne Bronte's Thorp Green Poems through the prism of theories of nostalgia, and argue that she wrote poems in order to deal with her nostalgia, for which her poetic creation becomes a cure.