"As much as I favor the idea of inanimate things having lives concealed from us, I still feel that an object's meaning – its slumbering life – comes from our own desires and passions, the shadows we let play over it. All such theories have their roots, I believe, in ancient faiths. The body parts of saints, their clothing, and the objects they had touched exuded oils, perfumes, miracles, and healing. They could suddenly bleed, cry, levitate, or gain weight in a desire to not be moved. Matter, for Catholic believers in the Middle Ages, was fertile, 'maternal, labile, percolating, forever tossing up grass, wood, horses, bees, sand, or metal,' as the historian Caroline Walker Bynum explains. Spontaneous generation and spontaneous combustion – ancient notions that animate bodies could emerge from nonliving substances or could suddenly disappear altogether – still had currency in the nineteenth century. So did 'animal magnetism,' the belief in a fluid that permeated everything and that allowed objects (and people) to influence each other, even from afar. Certain gems could ward off the 'evil eye,' and 'touchpieces,' often of slate and worn around the neck as jewelry, carried the healing qualities thought to reside in the touch of the monarch. Objects had agency in British law. Belongings that had caused an individual's death were accursed or had to be given up to God, which meant forfeiting them to the church or the Crown to be converted for pious uses, a practice called 'deodand.' The custom in Scotland when a fisherman had fallen out of a boat and drowned, of beaching it, cursing it, and leaving it to decay apart from its 'innocent' mates, continued up until at least the early twentieth century.
"Since things are mute, their interpretation leaves much latitude for conjecture. Writing about the belongings of authors one greatly admires, as I do in this book, can be fraught with the dangers of 'over-reading.' Too much of oneself can be projected into the silence, making history personally nostalgic. All biography takes these risks, especially when little is known about a subject, as is the case with Emily Brontë. Lucasta Miller, in The Brontë Myth, explores how the Brontë sisters have been construed according to different agendas and the concerns of varied ages. With these myths born of Brontë love in mind, I sometimes had to laugh at my own zealousness. Poring over an artifact, I found myself wondering if some scratch in the wood of, say, Emily's desk box, formed words or initials. Was this a message from the dead, or just the results of a bump into a table? I felt like a detective looking for clues, traces of evidence, even bodily fluids. But here no crime had been committed.
"Can we let objects speak on their own? Probably not even the metaphysicians of objects would think this possible. What I set out to do here is place each object in its cultural setting and in the moments of the everyday lives of the Brontës. I coax out what the thing might have 'witnessed,' how it colored its human settings. This has meant covering some well-worn biographical ground – a whole library could be filled with books published on the Brontës, many of them so excellent that one feels there need be no more. I speculate at times, but I also take care not to overlay these objects with too much intensity of my own. Through the 'eyes' of thread, paper, wood, jet, hair, bone, brass, fur, frond, leather, velvet, and ash, new corners and even rooms of these Victorian women's lives light up for us. There has been little writing on most of these artifacts, on some not a jot. I find these things and their Victorian mates wholly beguiling. I wish with all my heart that they would step forth and speak, maybe even rise from the page. If they unlock themselves only a little – are brought to voice – then my task has been accomplished."
