Frances Browner - Granny's Wonderful Chair

The writer of "Granny's Wonderful Chair" was a poet, and blind. That she was a poet the story tells on every page, but of her blindness it tells not a word. From beginning to end it is filled with pictures; each little tale has its own picturesque setting, its own vividly realised scenery. Her power of visualisation would be easy to understand had she become blind in the later years of her life, when the beauties of the physical world were impressed on her mind; but Frances Browne was blind from infancy. The pictures she gives us in her stories were created, in darkness, from material which came to her only through the words of others. In her work are no blurred lines or uncertainties, her drawing is done with a firm and vigorous hand. It would seem that the completeness of her calamity created, within her, that serenity of spirit which contrives the greatest triumphs in Life and in Art. Her endeavour was to realise the world independently of her own personal emotion and needs. She, who, out of her darkness and poverty, might have touched us so surely with her longing for her birthright of light, for her share of the world's good things, gives help and encouragement to the more fortunate.

In reading the very few details of her life we feel the stimulation as of watching one who, in a desperate fight, wins against great odds.

The odds against Frances Browne were heavy. She was born at Stranorlar, a mountain village in Donegal, on January 16, 1816. Her great-grandfather was a man of considerable property, which he squandered; and the younger generation would seem to have inherited nothing from its ancestor but his irresponsibility. Frances Browne's father was the village post-master, and she, the seventh in a family of twelve children, learning privation and endurance from the cradle. But no soil is the wrong one for genius. Whether or not hers would have developed more richly in more generous surroundings, it is difficult to say. The strong mind that could, in blindness and poverty, secure its own education, and win its way to the company of the best, the thoroughly equipped and well tended, gained a victory which genius alone made possible.

She was one of the elect, had no creative achievement crowned her triumph.

She tells us how she herself learned by heart the lessons which her brothers and sisters said aloud every evening, in readiness for the next day's school; and how she bribed them to read to her by doing their share of the household work.

When the usual bribe failed, she invented stories for them, and, in return for these, books were read to her which, while they seemed dull and uninteresting enough to the readers, built up for the eager listener those enchanted steps by which she was to climb into her intellectual kingdom.

Her habit was to say these lessons aloud at night, when every one else was asleep, to impress untiringly upon her memory the knowledge for which she persistently fought through the day.

There were no book-shops at Stranorlar, or within three counties of it, and had there been one, Frances Browne had no pennies for the luxury of books. But she had friends, and from those who were richer than herself in possession, she borrowed her tools. From the village teacher she learned French, in exchange for those lessons in grammar and geography which, her brothers and sisters had given away to her, in return for numberless wipings and scrubbings in the kitchen. Scott's novels marked an era in her mental life; and of Pope's Iliad – which she heard read when she was about fifteen – she says, "It was like the discovery of a new world, and effected a total change in my ideas and thoughts on the subject of poetry. There was at the time a considerable MS. of my own production in existence, which of course I regarded with some partiality; but Homer had awakened me, and in a fit of sovereign contempt I committed the whole to the flames. After Homer's the work that produced the greatest impression on my mind was Byron's 'Childe Harold.' The one had induced me to burn my first MS., the other made me resolve against verse-making in future."

Her first poem was written at the age of seven, but, after this resolve of her fifteenth year, she wrote no more for nearly ten years. Then, in 1840, when she was four and twenty, a volume of Irish Songs was read to her, and her own music reawakened. She wrote a poem called "The Songs of our Land." It was published in the "Irish Penny Journal," and can be found still in Duffy's "Ballad Poetry of Ireland." After this her poems grew apace: she wrote lyrics for the "Athenaeum," "Hood's Magazine," and "Lady Blessington's Keepsake." Her work was much appreciated, and her poems were reprinted in many of the contemporary journals.

She published a complete volume of poems in 1844, and a second volume in 1848 which she called "Lyrics and Miscellaneous Poems."

The first use to which she put her literary earnings, was the education of a sister, to be her reader and amanuensis. In Frances Browne's life each step was in the direction of her goal. From its beginning to its end the strong mind pressed unhesitatingly forward to its complete development, seeking the inner light more steadfastly for the absence of external vision.

Her income was a pension of £20, from the Royal Bounty Fund; and with this, for all security, she set out, in 1847, with her sister to Edinburgh, determined to make her own way in the literary world. At leaving her native land she says:

She quickly made friends in Edinburgh, won by her genius and character, in the circle which included Christopher North. Her industry was amazing: she wrote essays, reviews, leaders, lyrics, stories – indeed, she wrote anything she was asked to write, and under the pressure of her work her prose strengthened and developed. But all her energy could not make her rich. "The waters of her lot," she says, "were often troubled, though not by angels." Her own health interfered with her work, and, from the beginning, she out of her own poverty tried to relieve that of her mother.

In 1852 she moved to London, and here, by the gift of £100 from the Marquis of Lansdowne, she was for the time released from the pressure of daily necessity. She concentrated on a more important work than she had yet attempted, and wrote a novel which she called "My Share of the World."

It is written in the form of an autobiography of one Frederick Favoursham, a youthful straggler through journalism and tutorship, who wins nothing better, in the end, than a lonely possession of vast estates. But one realises fully, in this story, the strength of a mind whose endeavour is to probe the heart of things, and whose firm incisive expression translates precisely what the mind discovers.

There are in this work, and it is natural it should be so, one or two touches of self-revelation; the only ones, I think, which she, in all her writing, permitted herself. She makes her hero say of his mother – "Well I remember her old blue gown, her hands hard with rough work, het still girlish figure and small pale face, from which the bloom and the prettiness had gone so early; but the hard hand had, in its kindly pressure, the only genuine love I ever knew; the pale face looks yet on my sleep with a blessing, and the old gown has turned, in my dreams, to the radiant robe of an angel."

And the delicate sensitive character of Lucy, the heroine, reads like the expression of the writer's own personality: into it she has put a touch of romance. In all her work there is never a word of personal complaint, but the words she puts into the mouth of her hero, when Lucy commits suicide, must have been born of her own suffering: "When the burden outgrows the strength so far that moral as well as physical energies begin to fail, and there is no door but death's that will welcome our weariness, what remains but to creep into that quiet shelter? I think it had come to that with Lucy. Her days were threatened by a calamity, the most terrible in the list of human ills, which the wise Manetho, the last of the Egyptians, with his brave Pagan heart and large philosophy, thought good and sufficient warrant for a man's resigning his place on the earth."