A Field-Guide to the Brontës’ Literary Universe

In late May of 2022, the COVID pandemic was not completely over, but many countries, including the United Kingdom, starting lifting restrictions on travel.

2022年5月下旬，新冠疫情尚未完全结束，但包括英国在内的许多国家开始取消旅行限制。

And so, after a transatlantic flight and a LNER train, in what felt like a state of liberation, I found myself in Yorkshire in late May, striding across the high moors and exulting in the lowland valley’s late spring blooms of bluebells, cowslips, and fields of bright yellow meadow buttercups.

就这样，在经历了跨大西洋飞行和 LNER 火车之后，我感觉自己处于一种解放的状态，五月下旬，我发现自己来到了约克郡，大步穿过高高的荒原，为低地山谷晚春盛开的风铃草、黄花九轮草和亮黄色草地毛茛的田野而欣喜若狂。

Although there is always an element of cosplay in visiting preserved landscapes (and the Yorkshire Dales and North York Moors National Parks are particularly welcome versions of them), the force of the spring bloom that May shook my carefully tended irony, and I simply marveled at the late spring eruption.

虽然参观保存完好的风景总是有角色扮演的元素（约克郡山谷和北约克沼泽国家公园是其中特别受欢迎的版本），但五月春天绽放的力量动摇了我精心照料的讽刺，我只是对晚春的爆发感到惊叹。

I thought of the spring blooms at Lowood in Jane Eyre , and more generally of the novels of the Brontë sisters, who had lived in the West Riding of Yorkshire and whose novels had accompanied me from my pre-teen years through graduate school and on to a professional life in the academy as a Victorianist.

我想起了《简·爱》中洛伍德的春天的花朵，更广泛地想起了勃朗特姐妹的小说，她们住在约克郡的西区，她们的小说伴随着我从青少年时期到研究生院，一直到在学院作为维多利亚时代作家的职业生涯。

What was clear to me in that post-COVID spring was that the landscape in which the Brontës lived shaped their experience of the natural world and lent specificity to their narratives.

在新冠疫情后的那个春天，我清楚地意识到，勃朗特姐妹生活的风景塑造了他们对自然世界的体验，并赋予了他们叙事的特殊性。

A specificity that demanded what I thought of as a kind of field-guide to the novels—what the Victorians called a “flora,” and which in the book excerpted here, I call a botany.

这种特殊性需要我所认为的小说实地指南——维多利亚时代的人称之为“植物区系”，在本书中摘录的内容我称之为植物学。

From Lucasta Miller’s compelling The Brontë Myth (2001) I was aware that the Brontës had been subject to a process of mythologizing that Charlotte herself initiated and which began in earnest after all of the sisters’ deaths.

从卢卡斯塔·米勒引人注目的《勃朗特神话》（2001）中，我意识到勃朗特姐妹一直受到夏洛特本人发起的神话化过程的影响，这一过程在所有姐妹去世后才真正开始。

In a famously florid description of the Brontë parsonage, Elizabeth Gaskell in her Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) described it as

伊丽莎白·加斯克尔 (Elizabeth Gaskell) 在她的《夏洛特·勃朗特传》 (1857) 中对勃朗特牧师住宅进行了著名的华丽描述，将其描述为

a place where neither flowers nor vegetables would flourish…where the snow lay long and late on the moors, stretching bleakly and barely…and where often, on autumn or winter nights, the four winds of heaven seemed to meet and merge and rage together.

一个鲜花和蔬菜都不会茂盛的地方……荒原上的积雪又长又晚，荒凉而勉强地延伸……而且，在秋天或冬天的夜晚，天堂的四风似乎经常相遇，融合在一起，一起肆虐。

Gaskell’s biography gave rise to the persistent conflation of the Brontës with the moors as a metonym for bleakness—and the sense that nothing flourished in that inhospitable place, least of all love, where Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë famously lived most of their short tuberculosis-ridden lives.

加斯凯尔的传记引起了勃朗特姐妹与荒原的持续混为一谈，作为荒凉的转喻——以及一种感觉，在这个荒凉的地方，一切都不繁荣，尤其是爱情，众所周知，夏洛特、艾米丽和安妮·勃朗特在那里度过了他们短暂的肺结核一生的大部分时间。

That served a particular kind of narrative, but it will come as no surprise to those who know the moorland habitat that plants of many kinds grow there.

这服务于一种特殊的叙事，但对于那些了解沼泽地栖息地的人来说，这里生长着多种植物也就不足为奇了。

And anyone who has read the novels and poetry of the famous sisters knows that the common names of plants are often invoked, and sometimes even anchor a telling scene.

读过著名姐妹的小说和诗歌的人都知道，植物的俗名经常被引用，有时甚至会成为一个生动的场景。

The landscape in which the Brontës lived shaped their experience of the natural world and lent specificity to their narratives.

勃朗特姐妹居住的风景塑造了她们对自然世界的体验，并赋予她们的叙述以特殊性。

We can surmise, for instance, from the novels that the Brontë sisters knew the wild primrose— Primula vulgaris, pictured above/at left—and we know that Charlotte painted a watercolor of the primrose (alongside other adept if dutiful renditions of violets, roses, and morning glories).

例如，我们可以从小说中推测，勃朗特姐妹知道野生报春花——报春花，如上图/左图——而且我们知道夏洛特画了一幅报春花水彩画（还有其他娴熟而尽责的紫罗兰、玫瑰和牵牛花的表现）。

Late in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights , Catherine Linton sidles up to Hareton and teases him by “sticking primroses in his plate of porridge.” It’s a comic turn away from the dead-on seriousness of the references to primroses that follows the first-Catherine’s death in childbirth—the day after Catherine Earnshaw’s funeral, the weather turns foul, silencing the larks, blackening the early spring leaves, and burying “the primroses and crocuses” under “wintry drifts.”

在艾米莉·勃朗特的《呼啸山庄》的后期，凯瑟琳·林顿悄悄靠近哈里顿，“在他的粥盘里塞了报春花”来取笑他。这是一个滑稽的转变，与第一任凯瑟琳因难产而死后对报春花的严肃认真的态度不同——凯瑟琳·恩肖葬礼后的第二天，天气变坏，百灵鸟安静下来，早春的叶子变黑，并将“报春花和番红花”埋在“寒冷的积雪”下。

Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey , which was originally published in a three-volume edition with Wuthering Heights in 1847, also references (as Anne wrote) “that familiar flower,” but hers is strikingly different from Emily’s.

安妮·勃朗特的《艾格尼丝·格雷》最初于 1847 年与《呼啸山庄》一起以三卷本形式出版，书中也提到了（正如安妮所写）“那朵熟悉的花”，但她的花与艾米丽的花截然不同。

Agnes Grey centers an early scene of courtship between Agnes and Mr. Weston, who—seeking to comfort the affronted governess—gathers from “high up between the twisted roots of an oak, three lovely primroses.” The novel signals Agnes’ virtue and ideal mind through her more rational appreciation of nature, as she turns away from a scene of flirtation to “botanise and entomologise amongst the green banks.”

艾格尼丝·格雷以艾格尼丝和韦斯顿先生早期求爱的场景为中心，韦斯顿先生为了安慰这位被冒犯的家庭女教师，从“高高的一棵橡树扭曲的根部之间”采集了三朵可爱的报春花。小说通过艾格尼丝对自然更加理性的欣赏来展现她的美德和理想心灵，她从调情的场景转向“在绿色的河岸中进行植物学和昆虫学研究”。

To be clear: that the three authors knew the primrose did not indicate a particularly deep or specialized knowledge of the natural world.

需要明确的是：三位作者知道报春花并不表明他们对自然世界有特别深刻或专业的知识。

In 1597 the English herbalist John Gerard had described and drew several primroses for The Herball; or Generall Historie of Plants.

1597 年，英国草药学家约翰·杰拉德 (John Gerard) 为《草药》描述并绘制了几朵报春花；或植物通史。

But if you haven’t yourself seen a wild primrose lately, it doesn’t much help when reading Wuthering Heights or Agnes Grey to know that the wild primrose was, as Anne Pratt, the nineteenth-century author of The Language of Flowers says, “so common a flower as to need no description.”

但如果你最近没有见过野生报春花，那么在阅读《呼啸山庄》或《艾格尼丝·格雷》时，即使你知道野生报春花正如十九世纪《花语》作者安妮·普拉特所说，“是一种如此普通的花，无需描述”，那也没什么帮助。

As the literary critic and philosopher Elaine Scarry has compellingly written, flowers are the most “imaginable” of objects because they are the most beautiful.

正如文学评论家和哲学家伊莱恩·斯卡里（Elaine Scarry）令人信服地写道，花朵是最“想象”的物体，因为它们是最美丽的。

But if you don’t know this so-called common flower, your imagining of it tends to short-circuit.

但如果你不认识这种所谓的普通花，你对它的想象就容易短路。

The botanical illustration of Primula vulgaris brings us closer to the primrose’s pale-yellow bell-shaped flowers, its bright green leaves that are often evocatively described as tongue shaped.

报春花的植物学插图让我们更接近报春花的淡黄色钟形花朵，其鲜绿色的叶子通常被描述为舌形。

And although a keystroke can bring up an array of photographs of the common flower, we are living through a time when nature seems increasingly distant and endangered, even as it has never seemed more visually accessible.

尽管按一下按键就可以调出一系列常见花朵的照片，但我们正生活在一个自然似乎越来越遥远和濒临灭绝的时代，尽管它似乎从未像现在这样在视觉上更容易接近。

Despite a dizzying capacity to search up images and books about plants, many of us are increasingly alienated from the knowledge of the natural world that was common in the Victorian period.

尽管搜索有关植物的图像和书籍的能力令人眼花缭乱，但我们中的许多人却越来越疏远维多利亚时期常见的自然世界知识。

Perhaps it takes a field of meadow buttercups, and a hillside dotted with bluebells leading up beyond the tree line to a bleak moor, to remind us that we need to work to imagine flowers.

也许需要一片草地毛茛花田和一片点缀着风信子的山坡，一直延伸到林线之外的荒凉沼泽，才能提醒我们需要努力想象花朵。

And in so doing, to better understand the classic novels whose force often depends upon them.

这样做，可以更好地理解那些其力量往往取决于它们的经典小说。

From A Brontë Botany: Flora in the Classic Novels of the Brontë Sisters by Amy M.

摘自《勃朗特植物学：勃朗特姐妹经典小说中的植物》作者：Amy M.

King, illustrated by Tugce Okay.

《国王》，图格塞·奥卡绘制。

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Available from Andrews McMeel Publishing.

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