Title:  Walking with Anne Brontë: Insights and Reflections
Author:  Tim Whittome
Publisher: Xlibris
ISBN: 978-1-6698-7822-3
Pages: 678
Genre: Historical Essays / Biography
Interviewed by:  Aaron Washington
Read Author Interview

PBR:  What was the inspiration for the story?
Anne Brontë has always been unfairly regarded as less talented than her more famous sisters and the “gentleness” of her reputation has been viewed in both a positive and a negative light. Thankfully, Anne was never abrupt that we know of and so being “gentle” would have been viewed as a positive quality at the time. Unfortunately, it was also regarded as insignificant, and Charlotte didn’t help to dispel this when she wrote in her 1850 “Biographical Notice” of her sisters that her youngest sister had a “nun-like veil” that kept her mind and feelings largely hidden. Several of us take Charlotte to task in our essays.

In recent years and even decades, though, Anne has been recognized for having a “core of steel” in the more sympathetic words of Brontë biographer Juliet Barker. By viewing Anne’s life through the prism of her undoubted “gentleness” (as Charlotte Brontë’s friend Ellen Nussey said of her, and which we see as a virtue) and through that of the “core of steel” that runs through her two novels and poetry inspired us, we found the inspiration needed to put together this book as a celebration of Anne’s character and literary power.

PBR:  What is the key theme and/or message in the book?
That Charlotte and Emily were geniuses and that their sister Anne was with them in a literary respect but very different from them in terms of how we view the motivation and educational purpose of her work. In other words, we have no intention of staging a coup or of knocking Charlotte and Emily off their literary “thrones” but rather to add a third “throne” for Anne so that she gets the respect and notice she deserves. Reviewers so far of Walking with Anne Brontë have acknowledged this purpose.

Anne’s psychological awareness, ability to balance motivations, and capacity to understand her characters are distinguishing marks of her writing. Charlotte understood these things as well which places the eldest and youngest of the adult surviving siblings on a similar literary plane, but Anne saw an educational purpose in her writing that I am not sure Charlotte recognized as important in her own writing for all her keen psychological intuition. It is fair to say that Emily saw no educational purpose in her writing at all—a different form of genius is manifest there. Anne’s genius comes from the aligning of authorial purpose with the ability of the reader to understand it clearly.

PBR:   What do you hope your readers take away from this book?
I hope that readers take away the view that Anne Brontë was as great a talent as Charlotte or Emily and that she deserves to be held in much the same regard as her two sisters are. Elizabeth Langland said of Anne that she deserved to be placed “with them” (her sisters) but viewed as “unlike them.” Her first biographer, Winifred Gérin, spoke of Anne being seated on an “oaken stool” if not on a throne. While she meant to be kind in saying this, those of us who have contributed essays for Walking with Anne have wanted to be kinder still and would argue that Anne does belong on a literary throne alongside those already deservedly in place for her two sisters.

PBR:  What is the significance of the title?
Charlotte Brontë once spoke of the need for an author to sometimes “walk invisible.” Over the course of literary history, neither Emily nor Charlotte has ended up walking invisible or unnoted, but Anne certainly has. This aspect became an important guiding inspiration as our book was coming together, but the starting point was the fact that Anne, in common with her siblings, liked to walk. I tasked my writers and I to take imaginary “walks” with Anne and then come back and discuss with our readers what they had learned for Anne was fundamentally an educator and she viewed her writing as a means for her to convey the truth of her experiences as she viewed them.

PBR:  Tell us about the process for coming up with the cover.
I was intrigued by how our cover artist georgë kear had set up her Emily In Gondal artist website to showcase her very personalized impressions of the Brontë sisters in moody and dramatic settings alike. Although georgë is mostly aligned with interpreting Emily, she did contribute an artistic design for a page of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall—a new illustrated version to mark the bicentenary of Anne’s birth in 2020.

I invited georgë to produce an appropriate theme for our book based on Anne as a “rising character” in Brontë scholarship. Georgë chose as her inspiration one of Anne’s own drawings of a girl watching the sunrise over the sea. Although she hadn’t yet seen the sea when she drew this in 1839, Anne as an artist could clearly imagine herself doing so and she conveys feelings of hope and youth. When she worked as a governess with the Robinson family the following year, she would join them on their family holidays every summer in Scarborough for the years that she was in their employ. This would have afforded her many opportunities to see the sun rising over the Scarborough sands and she would come to love both the town and the sea. She speaks beautifully of the effect of the sea, of the sunrise, and also of the sunset on her protagonist in Agnes Grey and in her poems such as “Lines Composed in a Wood on a Windy Day.”

For the frontispiece, georgë drew on the powerful symbolism of roses being handed around in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and we can see here that georgë has emerged with three roses in full bloom to additionally symbolize the presence of three sisters on a similar literary plane.

PBR:  What were the key challenges you faced when writing this book?
There are always challenges in being self-published because you have to be an expert not just in what you write about but also in how you want to make the public aware of what you have done. Xlibris fortunately has always been very patient with me as I am a perfectionist and I have always known that there would be many academics and other experts in the world of Brontë writing who would want to scrutinize everything written in our book. I wanted Walking with Anne to be as error-free and professional as possible, but while regular publishing and more popular authors will always have a team of readers and friends looking at their work for any errors, this isn’t always possible when you are unknown and self-publishing. Xlibris will always publish a great book if you want them to and those whom I have interacted with have been flexible enough to work generously with my heavy expectations. The hardest section to get right was probably the index!

PBR:   What was the highlight of writing this book?
It proved easy connecting with like minded Anne enthusiasts through Facebook groups on the Brontë family. I knew I had wanted to write about Anne for years and so I invited potential writers to join me in doing so. Reading their strong essays documenting their connection to Anne’s life and literary legacy was enlightening for me. My fellow scribes were invited to write essays of an academic or personal nature but with the overarching goal of highlighting the many facets of Anne Brontë’s personality and literary power that are worth celebrating. We strove for honesty and not hagiography and Anne wasn’t always her own best interpreter of her best interests. Charlotte fared better at publishing and liaising than Anne or Emily were and “going it alone” ended up damaging not just Anne’s best interests but also Emily’s as the two sisters landed themselves with an unscrupulous publisher.

PBR:   Are you working on anything at the present you would like to share with your readers about?
Yes, I am currently working on a full-color flagship version of the book which will be printed in a “coffee-table” format size of 8.5” x 11” and will contain full-color versions of the frontispiece and all interior photographs in the standard version of the book. It will be essentially the same text as the standard version which only had color for the cover but which was all greyscale inside. I felt that georgë kear’s frontispiece was too beautiful to leave in black-and-white and that among the other pictures in the book, it deserved a full-color treatment for maximum impact. This version of our book will be printed using glossy paper.

PBR:   Where do you draw inspiration from?
An interesting question. I draw inspiration from a lot of writers and historical figures, some of whom have traditionally been marginalized. My previous work, “Meeting” Anne Frank, for example, highlighted not just Anne Frank’s huge literary and personal impact but also brought her sister Margot out of the shadows to which she has so often been unfairly relegated in works on the Frank family. In ways similar to Anne Brontë, Margot has often been forgotten and justice demands that neither should walk invisible or unnoted.

Obviously, Anne Brontë has been a constant inspiration and not least for the psychological brilliance and realism of her writing. It feels as if you are listening to your therapist or your mother when you read Anne’s powerful writing. Her writing is incredibly modern as well as contextual to the expectations of her time. Anne was not an extremist, she valued the family as a building block of any healthy and functional society, and she focused her efforts in her writing on showcasing the errors that many parents fall into when they overindulge or neglect their children. Without realizing it, Anne has something interesting and relevant to say about the need for both helicopter and authoritative parenting techniques and she really has something to say on the divisive current topic of parental alienation.

Elsewhere, I am inspired by the father-daughter relationship of Otto and Anne Frank which I see echoes of in the current musical father-daughter singing duo of Mat and Savanna Shaw from Utah. This may be hard to explain but the ability of both father and daughter to be receptive to each other is very inspirational and healthy. This applies to both Anne and her father and to Savanna and her father.

I love Jane Austen and am a keen reader of children’s classical literature because I see so much of myself in some of the characters. Since I like “Annes” so much, maybe I should next write about Anne Shirley from Anne of Green Gables—much to instruct there in terms of how to connect with and raise adopted children.