• By
  • Stephen Fidler

Real Time Brussels Weekend Literary Supplement

What does Newt Gingrich have in common with Emily and Charlotte Brontë? They all came to Brussels to complete their education.

As we reported in January, Mr. Gingrich lived here in down-at-heel Anderlecht in 1969-70. You can’t now see where Charlotte and Emily stayed in 1842: the street on which they lived was the now-demolished rue Isabelle–or rue d’Isabelle–near the Place Royale. Charlotte became infatuated with her teacher and returned in 1843 to stay for a year. Her experiences there inform her novels, particularly Villette.


Now, a long-forgotten artifact of Charlotte’s stay in Brussels has turned up in Belgium, uncovered by scholar and Brontë expert Brian Bracken. The manuscript–the first piece of homework written by Charlotte for her teacher, Constantin Heger–had been lost since the First World War. She called it L’Ingratitude.

Her piece is published here in the original French (with some errors) and in English in the London Review of Books, together with an essay by Mr. Bracken on its significance:

‘L’Ingratitude’ turned up in the course of my research for a biography of Constantin Heger, who taught Emily and Charlotte Brontë French during their time in Brussels and with whom Charlotte fell in love. I’d been trying to find out about his brother Vital, a sales representative for the royal carpet factory in Tournai and decided to look through the catalogue of the Musée royal de Mariemont for any mention of him–its eclectic holdings include carpets–and found a reference to a manuscript by Charlotte Brontë about a rat. It turned out to be the first piece of French homework Charlotte had written for Heger, lost since the First World War.

There is also a podcast of Gillian Anderson reading the salutary tale of an ungrateful son.