I first heard about Rachel Ferguson's novel with the intriguing title some years ago, but only recently got around to reading it.
The title is a little misleading: the Brontës appear only briefly in the book and then only in ghost form.
I found The Brontës Went to Woolworths to be of interest more for the connections and coincidences than for the characters and story.
The book, which was first published in 1931 and is set in the London of the time, features a bohemian, eccentric family consisting of a widowed woman and her three daughters. They all participate in an ongoing game in which they make up stories about and have imaginary relationships and conversations with real people they have never met.
This game and the effect that it has on their lives will be covered in a future article; first comes some miscellaneous material of interest.
The last name of the family in The Brontës Went to Woolworths is Carne. The three daughters are Deirdre, Katrine and Sheil.
All of these names have Celtic connections.
Carne is a name of Gaelic origin; it means a pile of stones or a cairn.
Deirdre is an Irish name; Katrine and Sheil are Scottish place names. The girls' father was born on the Isle of Skye.
The Celtic heritage might explain why the girls can see ghosts and their father could see nature spirits.
Ferguson is also a name of Gaelic origin, and ghosts appear in some of Rachel Ferguson's other books.
Like many other writers featured on here, May Sinclair for example, Rachel Ferguson was very interested in the Brontës and produced works about and/or inspired by them. She probably got the idea of siblings who share an imaginary world from Brontë biographies.
She wrote a three-act play about Charlotte Brontë in which the ghost of one of her sisters who died as a child appears.
She said something very interesting in her memoirs:
“A very odd coincidence in regard to it was that, having named my family ‘Carne’, I found out much later that the Brontë’s grandmother had been a Miss Carne...”
From We Were Amused
This refers to the Brontë girls' maternal grandmother Anne Carne, who came from Penzance. There are many people of Celtic origin in Cornwall.
Such coincidences are very common in the lives of fiction writers. Diana Wynne Jones for example thought that she had invented the plot for a book she was working on, but it turned out to be a local legend.
Deirdre Carne, who is the main narrator, says something that caught my attention right at the start of the book:
“A woman at one of mother’s parties once said to me, ‘Do you like reading?’ which smote us all to silence, for how could one tell her that books are like having a bath or sleeping, or eating bread – absolute necessities which one never thinks of in terms of appreciation. And we all sat waiting for her to say that she had so little time for reading, before ruling her right out for ever and ever...”
This is very similar to something I said in an article about L. M. Montgomery:
“For some people, reading and writing are as essential to life as food and drink and as normal and natural as breathing.”
It is very true that readers rarely find that they have much in common with non readers and often dismiss them from their minds, and that people who don't read much often use the lack of time as their main excuse. Several people have immediately said this to me when I told them that reading was my main interest.
This is yet another example of the way that many imaginative people, Stella Benson for example, and great readers see the real world and the people in it when they have given their allegiance elsewhere:
“Three years ago I was proposed to. I couldn’t accept the man, much as I liked him, because I was in love with Sherlock Holmes. For Holmes and his personality and brain I had a force of feeling which, for the time, converted living men to shadows.”
Many people in the real world do not know that they are competing with people in books; they do not understand that they are being compared with imaginary, often larger-than-life and idealised, characters, and found wanting.
Deirdre also says this:
“...it’s difficult for brilliant people to be tolerant. Their minds work too quickly, and none of us has a chance...”
This is very true. Some people with sharp minds do not suffer fools gladly; they become impatient with people who can't keep up with them and meet them on their level.
When Deirdre, who is a journalist, has a more than professional interest in someone but doesn't want her boss to know this, she uses reverse psychology to fool him:
“"Well, I want to meet Toddington," I said.
"D’you like him?"
“I adore him," I shouted. I discovered years ago that the best way to put people right off the scent is to tell the truth and nothing but the truth. It acts like a charm.“
This is very clever, and very true. Deirdre's double-bluff reminds me of the double-dealing secret agents in Rafael Sabatini's books who use a similar tactic to disarm their accusers when they are in danger of exposure.
Sabatini's heroes do not suffer fools gladly. In Venetian Masque (1934), double agent Marc-Antoine Villiers de Mellville echoes Deirdre's remark about brilliant people when he mentions:
“...the weariness of pointing out the obvious to dullards.”
This large-print edition of The Brontes Went to Woolworths has a very attractive cover:
