Serena Partridge’s ‘Accessories’: Fabricating Uncertainty in the Brontë Parsonage Museum

Abstract

Abstract The 1861 sale of the Brontës’ personal effects sent relic hunters scrambling to collect the material remains of the famous family. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the collection, preservation, and veneration of relics, particularly those associated with a writer’s private, domestic life, were important aspects of literary celebrity culture and commemoration, and both the Brontë Society and the original Brontë Museum were established to collect material remains. Yet when Virginia Woolf visited the museum in 1904, she viewed Charlotte Brontë’s clothing, shoes, and accessories with considerable unease. Anticipating the concerns of the literary establishment, Woolf feared that access to Brontë’s material remains would encourage the domestic cult which had formed around her following the publication of Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857). She feared it would diminish the importance of Brontë’s writing by privileging a narrative of domestic rather than literary labour. This essay considers the creative-critical intervention of Serena Partridge’s ‘Accessories’ (2016), a collection of newly created pseudo-relics of Charlotte Brontë, framed by semi-fictional narratives that dramatize the construction, use, and significance of her personal possessions. I argue that ‘Accessories’ and biographical fiction are analogous modes of engaging with Brontë’s legacy. They respond to the anxieties articulated by Woolf through the fabrication – both literal and literary – of new pseudo-relics that (rather than emphasizing Brontë’s perceived conventional, domestic femininity) enable multiple interpretive possibilities while simultaneously acknowledging the contingent nature of our understanding of her experience.