Jane Satterfield’s new book, The Badass Brontës, was released on March 8th, 2023. Here, she responds to questions about her book and her writing process. Jane Satterfield’s poem, “Errand Hanging with Emily Brontë,” appears in Volume 72.1.
Can you tell me the story of your forthcoming book? When did you start working on it? What were some of your preoccupations as you were writing it?
Thanks for asking. The Badass Brontës started out in the mid-’90s with my pilgrimage to the Haworth Parsonage Museum in Yorkshire. I spent a year in nearby Staffordshire holed up in a tiny house poised at the foot of Peak District and the M-6 motorway, escaping smog by walking out into stunningly wild landscapes. I’d yet to publish a book, was unexpectedly pregnant, and felt both haunted and inspired by the lives of these three sisters—clergyman’s daughters and Byron fangirls—who kept a menagerie of cats, dogs, geese, as well as the hawk Emily rescued from the moors.
From childhood on they lived half in the real world and half in their heads—like me—writing poems or, in their case, also spinning tales of imaginary kingdoms filled with rakes, renegades, ruler queens, and suffragettes, determined to be taken seriously as novelists and masking their identities with male pseudonyms. They scraped a living as teachers and governesses and kept their creative spirit alive despite the limitations of gender and economics.
When I saw the ink-stained dining table where they gathered in the evenings to work on their novels, I knew right away I’d write a biographical sequence with Emily as the star.
When I finally started the project years later, I saw more and more parallels between the sisters’ historical moment and our own. Their work pushed back against societal restrictions but also documented the geology and botany of the Yorkshire moors and dales. They were proto-environmentalists who recognized the need for social and political healing of all kinds.
How did you know when you had a complete collection on your hands?
A project book can become a bit of black hole pulling everything in—it’s tempting to keep on writing poem after poem forever! I had various strands to balance—historical poems, poems of biographical re-invention, and poems that explore the way the sisters live on as feminist icons in pop culture. But in the last year or so, newer poems began to drift farther from Brontë storylines, so it became much easier to step back and sequence these varied strands into a finished arc.
Is there a poem(/story/essay/passage) you feel is a good representative of the collection as a whole, or do you have a current favorite? Can you describe one of those poems or quote us a couple of lines?
The title poem is definitely a favorite! The book moves between playful re-inventions of the sisters, explorations of their legacy, and history-based dramatic monologues. This poem has elements of all three angles: Emily, Charlotte, and Anne are re-imagined as modern-day superheroes, striding across the moors in thunder-and-lightning print dresses.
…Beguiling cocktails?
They can’t even. Their laughter sets the house
abuzz as any hive. They go commando when
they can, in town or on the primrose path.
I’m curious about some logistics: How about the ordering of the book—its organization, or choosing the first poem or the last poem? What about the cover art?
The book begins in our historical tipping point of warming seasons—of literally reading Emily’s poems on a cliff overlooking Long Island Sound from the Connecticut side. It ends with a poem spoken by Charlotte in the wake of Emily’s death from TB as she encounters words that a teen-aged Emily scribbled long before in the family almanac. It seemed important to end with Emily’s voice.
I’m grateful that Diode was open to cover suggestions: I’d been thinking about archival images of Emily’s poems or drawings, but also wanted something maybe less literal that captured the resonance of her character and interests. Kelly Louise Judd is an amazing artist and illustrator whose work feels neo-Victorian, folkloric, fabular…I love the way this image—called “Sinking In”—has a kind of flirtatious groundedness.
What are you excited about related to the book or your own work? Anything special you’re working on now or next?
I’ve been working between two somewhat related projects: a collection of eco-poems and a collection of lyric essays about place and the body politic. Both respond to the larger-than-human world—particularly the plants and animals in my own ecotone. The very different requirements of poetry and prose offer radically different spaces in which to lament ecological devastation or celebrate the many wonders of this amazing planet we inhabit. This feels like a powerful outgrowth of working with Emily and her sisters whose own environmental awareness was expressed in the language of their time but no less deeply felt—and it’s another way of keeping their legacy and presence close.
Do you have a favorite beverage to drink while writing? Or perhaps a favorite spot to write?
The Badass Brontës was fueled by film adaptions, long walks, countless cups of Yorkshire Gold tea, the occasional dirty chai (a drink I imagine would have appealed to Charlotte’s sensibility), as well Emily’s poems as brought to life by the Yorkshire-based folk group The Unthanks. Their uncannily gorgeous settings of Emily’s texts were performed on her own piano which is still on display in the Brontë Parsonage Museum and still sounds beautiful in the recordings.