News and Events

Patron Reception - "No Soft Nonsense: Presenting the Bold Anne Brontë"

Thursday, October 22
4:00 - 6:00 PM (EDT)
Patron Reception
Christine Nelson,
Drue Heinz Curator of Literary and Historical Manuscripts,
Morgan Library & Museum

Christine Nelson is the Drue Heinz Curator of Literary and Historical Manuscripts at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York. She curated the Morgan's 2016 exhibition Charlotte Brontë: An Independent Will, a collaboration with the Brontë Parsonage Museum and the National Portrait Gallery, London, as well as the current installation No Soft Nonsense: Anne Brontë at 200, and edited the Morgan's online edition of its holdings of Anne Brontë's literary manuscripts. She is the author, most recently, of The Magic of Handwriting (TASCHEN, 2018), a commentary on The Little Prince (Folio Society, 2017), and The Brontës: A Family Writes (Scala, 2016).

After Anne Brontë (1820–1849) published a pseudonymous novel featuring graphic depictions of addiction and domestic abuse, one reviewer accused the author of harboring "a morbid love for the coarse, not to say the brutal." She issued a written retort: "If I can gain the public ear at all, I would rather whisper a few wholesome truths therein than much soft nonsense."

Join Christine Nelson, the Drue Heinz Curator of Literary and Historical Manuscripts at the Morgan Library & Museum, for an illustrated talk marking the bicentenary of Anne Brontë's birth. With highlights from the Morgan's collection of Brontëana, one of the finest in the world, Christine will offer a fresh look at the Brontë sibling often misrepresented as the mildest of them all.

Watercolor portrait of Anne Brontë by Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855), 17 June 1834. Image courtesy of the Brontë Society.