Interview with Jane Satterfield
by Elizabeth Knapp
The Badass Brontës by Jane Satterfield (Diode Editions, 2023)
Book Description:
In blazing poems of biography and reinvention, Jane Satterfield’s The Badass Brontës explores the lives and afterlives of sisters Emily, Charlotte, and Anne, “hellbent/at books & candle-lit” and the inspiration for readers and writers as far-ranging as Kate Bush and Sylvia Plath. A Yorkshire cleric’s daughters forced to break into publishing by masquerading as men, here they burn brightly as themselves in poems that range from life narratives and lyric elegies to witty inquiries into the sisters’ status as popular culture avatars. Here you’ll find a poem in the form of an Internet quiz that reveals which Brontë you most resemble, a look at the tattoos a modern-day Emily might have worn, the title poem in which the sisters stride forward as action heroes, and a poem on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s real-life attempt to summon Charlotte’s ghost in a séance.
Elsewhere, Satterfield’s vision looks to the crises of our own age. In a sequence about desire and women’s choices, Emily is reimagined as an apprentice hedge witch encountering the medicinals of “Eve’s herbs,” a pupil tutored in the secrets that they harbor; meanwhile, Charlotte faces the primal trauma that robbed the sisters of their mother when she confronts the reality of her own fatal pregnancy. Here are treasures galore: from poems that reflect Emily’s status as a proto-environmentalist whose rescued hawk Nero is a source of joy and grief, to further channelings of the Brontë sisters’ sensitivity to fragile landscapes and the more-than-human world. For longtime Brontë fans and newcomers alike, The Badass Brontës is a poetic tour-de-force that remixes and reinvents the lives, afterlives, and creative achievements of three extraordinary women whose influence continues to be felt.
What was the inspiration/motivation for writing a collection of poems about the Brontë sisters? Were there any earlier poetry collections that served as models for the book?
On one hand, the book’s an expression of Brontë fandom that goes back as far as the day I saw the memorial to Charlotte, Emily, and Anne in Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner during the summer I spent in England with my mother’s father (a retired steelworker charged with entertaining a seven-year-old child), so definitely stanning. But I also wanted to investigate the way they remain figures of fascination for readers world-wide—isn’t there something magical in the concept of three ferociously creative sisters who initially collaborate on fantastical tales, refuse to jettison their imaginative lives, and then grow into artists with distinct but complementary visions, posing as men to publish the gothic inflected, spellbinding novels we remember them by.
But the sisters really came alive for me during a year when I was living in the UK. Walking moorland trails gave me a feel for the landscapes they immortalized in print. Also, I visited the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, Yorkshire.i Once I saw the rooms where the sisters lived and wrote—the kitchen where Emily jotted down poems while baking bread—I knew I’d write a Brontë book with the ever-elusive Emily as the star. More recently, other factors—including environmental catastrophe and the threat to personal autonomy—spurred me on.
As for models, several books offered important lessons in biography and reinvention. Lucie Brock-Broido’s The Master Letters, Natasha Tretheway’s Belloq’s Ophelia, Nicole Cooley’s The Afflicted Girls, Tyehimba Jess’ leadbelly, and Shara McCallum’s No Ruined Stone are beautifully researched and seamlessly voiced collections. Carol Ann Duffy’s The World’s Wife, Jo Shapcott’s dramatic monologues that reanimate the world of Robert and Elizabeth Browning, A.E. Stallings’ recreations of Greek mythological figures, and Simon Armitage’s dramatic monologues (particularly those about Branwell Brontë) were helpful guides as I wrestled with the challenge of crafting idiomatic speech to bring the sisters into a contemporary context. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the Davids—St. John and Yezzi—monologists of differing visions who write syntactically rich and dizzyingly vivid narratives that cut to the white-hot core of their characters’ psychic dramas.
The poems so effectively balance biographical and imaginary details about the Brontës. How conscious of that balance were you when you were writing the poems? What strategies did you use to maintain that balance as you were working on the book?
Thanks so much! Since I also write creative nonfiction, I think a lot about fidelity to facts. Beside the site visit, I did archival research at the New York Public Library to get a close-up view of Emily’s poems and other artifacts; I devoured a ton of Brontë-related scholarship. I love the idea of literary detective work.
But I didn’t want to simply recreate a static timeline of well-documented biographical events—I thought of the book as a dialogue with Brontë biographical material and texts. Taking this approach made it easier to conjure the sisters as dynamic characters whose experiences and ideas connect to the present day. The growing threat to women’s reproductive autonomy led me to imagine a three-part prose poem about how these issues might have played out in the Brontë’s time. The first section imagines Tabby, the family’s servant, teaching Emily about medicinal herbs (something generations of women have done), but there's no record of anything like this actually taking place. Charlotte did really die of severe morning sickness and so, in this case, I drew on letters—her own and one penned by a confidante that suggests medical action should have been taken to save Charlotte’s life. Anne was a year and a half old when her mother died tragically; it’s uncertain whether of uterine cancer or, possibly, a lingering post-partum infection. I couldn’t have made the imaginative leaps without a working knowledge of the family’s biographies and a sense of their cultural context—all the details necessary for world-building.
I think facts help adaptations feel grounded, ring true. When I envisioned the sisters as spellcasters rewilding the landscape, I needed to be conscious of the larger than human world—the moorland geographical features, the flora and fauna. In other poems, I paid attention to the nuances of the sisters’ voices as I encountered them through their novels and poems, as well as the traces of personal writing they left behind—the letters and diary entries that provide a window into their domestic routines and daily life. Looking at digital images of the sisters’ samplers or drawings of their pet menagerie also offered glimpses into their personalities—but from that point, you’re just going on intuition. Of course, the personae we adopt are always extensions of ourselves—sometimes less, sometimes more.
The poems also consider the Brontë sisters within the context of contemporary society and culture, and as such, they become relatable characters, as in “Emily, Inked.” How do you see them as being literary figures ahead of their time?
I’m so glad you mentioned “Emily, Inked.” Emily was a skilled visual artist—the watercolor of her rescued merlin, Nero, is delicately colored and vividly renders shades of plumage. Many of her poetry manuscripts are edged with doodles or quirky marginalia. And much of the poetry she wrote from late adolescence through adulthood brings to life the imagine world of Gondal that she and Anne created in childhood. So this was a fun poem to write, the kind of poem that leaps off a “What if?” And interestingly, Frances O’Connor’s recent film starring Sex Education’s Emma Mackey brings to life an Emily who sports a tattoo that reads “Freedom in Thought.”
The sisters also speak to a familiar paradox: seemingly reserved within the roles in which they were cast, resisting the gendered restrictions of their time, yet wildly outspoken in their creative work. They wrote about ambition, grief, domestic abuse; they understood how economic systems disempower workers, and how the law is used to create inequality. It’s easy to imagine the Brontës as isolated geniuses, but they were deeply immersed in the issues of their day. In fact, their home was perched at the top of a village humming with factories that polluted nearby streams, so they were living at the literal forefront of the Industrial Revolution, documenting a changing world. And their writing reflects an abiding concern for the nonhuman world—all of which makes them freshly relevant for our time.
Another striking aspect of The Badass Brontës is its wide-ranging use of poetic forms, such as the villanelle, sestina, epistle, prose, persona, and ekphrastic poem. Do you find that certain forms lend themselves to certain subjects (or vice versa)?
Yes, I totally agree! By its nature, a project book needs variety, so that became an incentive to experiment. The villanelle’s rhyming structure and repeating refrains seemed a perfect form to capture flash mob recreations of Kate Bush’s video performance of “Wuthering Heights.” An added plus: poems with set stanza patterns can be time-savers—you have a template to follow that guides you—often in unexpected ways—to shape a poem’s content and music. Same with poetic genres—they provide a way of framing your field of vision, of managing a poem’s scope. This was the case with Conrad Atkinson’s striking drawing “Emily Brontë’s Shopping Trolley”: it gave me springboard to imagining an Emily who indulges in a bit of free-wheeling, post-quarantine shopping—something I might not have thought of otherwise.
How did you go about structuring the book? What techniques did you use to determine the poems’ placement and organization?
It seemed essential that the book’s dramatic arc begin and end with Emily’s voice. Though the arc isn’t strictly chronological, poems about the sisters’ early life do appear early on to give a sense of their sibling relationships; they also reveal core traits of the socially engaged writers they’d become. Beyond that, I shuffled poems in an associative arc to flesh out the project’s main threads: the biographically driven monologues, the reinventions and environmental strand, and poems that explore the sisters’ afterlives in popular culture.
And the hat tip here goes to my partner, Ned Balbo—who, unlike me—writes primarily (though not exclusively) in form and meter, composes and records songs, and has a refined ear for the sonic features that make or break a poem. His work is rich in its historical and topical range; it’s underscored, too, by concern for the environment. He’s also written formidable and empathetic narrative sequences about the complexities of his life as an adoptee, exploring the varied (and often colliding) perspectives of family members. We talked a lot about sequencing, about which poem subjects best advance the book’s narrative, and where particular poems became overloaded with factual detail. I’m beyond fortunate to have a generous reader who gives such good advice.
What drew you to the book’s cover image, and why did you select it? And what was it like working with Diode Editions, the press that published the book?
Thanks for giving me the chance to talk about so many aspects of The Badass Brontës. The cover image, “Sinking In,” is by Kelly Louise Judd (a Missouri-based artist and illustrator who goes by the name of Swanbones on Etsy). Her work feels neo-Victorian in its of use of color as well as its imagery—floral, botanical, filled with woodland creatures. I see it as flirtatious, grounded, and wild all at once—a perfect metaphor for Emily’s spirit. Diode is terrific to work with: they have a fantastic stable of aesthetically diverse writers deeply engaged with the issues of our time. Fun fact: Judd’s work also adorns the cover of my press mate Sally Rosen Kindred’s arresting book Where the Wolf. In a poetic landscape rich with work deeply deserving to make it to print, mine was a quirky project, for sure. I’m so grateful the book found a good home.
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iThe Brontë Parsonage Museum is a site of literary pilgrimage immortalized in Virginia Woolf’s first published essay, “Haworth, 1904” and in the handful of poems Sylvia Plath wrote in the wake of her 1956 visit with her new husband, Ted Hughes.