The Private Worlds of Charlotte Brontë and Octavia E. Butler
Behind The Huntington Library’s glass cases, the layers of motherhood, career, friendship, family, and loss are revealed in personal objects.
LOS ANGELES — Each neighborhood of Los Angeles is a world unto itself. Although The Huntington Library, Art Museum, & Botanical Gardens is not an incorporated community, one does get the feeling of being on another planet when strolling its 207 acres. But what constitutes a “world?” As The Huntington’s exhibition Stories from the Library: From Brontë to Butler illustrates, a single person and her possessions can encompass their own reality, especially for those who build worlds for a living.
In the show, the inner lives of important women writers are depicted through their personal effects. The objects on display range in date from the Victorian-era novelist Charlotte Brontë to 20th-century science fiction author Octavia E. Butler. Not only are the items varied in years, but in topic as well: An 1819 letter from English author Mary Shelley describing the pain of losing a child lies feet away from the 20th-century prose of Butler and Eve Babitz.
Butler and Babitz were both based in California, and this local geography is a particular focus of the exhibition.
“We are always interested in trying to represent the range of perspectives writing about and in Southern California — in journalism as well as literature and the performing arts,” The Huntington’s senior curator of literary collections, Dr. Karla Nielsen, told Hyperallergic.
This is the second iteration of Stories from the Library, a series that takes one item from the main hall of The Huntington Library (now closed for renovation) and builds an entire exhibition around it.
“The focal object of this exhibition is one of Octavia E. Butler’s notebooks,” The Huntington’s assistant curator of literary collections, Sarah Francis, explains. “Her collection [at The Huntington] consists of about 400 archival boxes and 200 notebooks kept over the course of her life, in which she’s writing everything from snippets of dialogue for a book to letters to her agent, or writing to herself very journalistically and doing what today we would call ‘manifesting.’”
Visitors can read a specific manifestation Butler wrote and underlined at the top of her notebook page: “Speak well, and tell a good story.”
Butler grew up adjacent to The Huntington, in a working-class Pasadena household shaped by de facto segregation. The dystopias she so often constructed were based on the Los Angeles she observed. Published in 1993, Parable of the Sower, a seminal text of the city’s literature, shows LA ravaged by climate change, socioeconomic disparity, and deceitful first responders in none other than the year 2024. Clearly, Butler was a writer whose intuition could be trusted.
A great number of readers believe they know writers intimately after reading their articles, books, or poems. However, as evidenced by Stories from the Library, readers only get a small glimpse of a writer’s world in their published work. Behind The Huntington’s glass cases, the layers of motherhood, career, friendship, family, and loss are revealed in private objects. Mary Shelley’s 1819 letter, for example, in which she shares the death of her second child within a year, opens a new window into the author’s grief.
“Being able to see somebody's words in their own handwriting can be really impactful. In the instance of the Mary Shelley letter, I think her pain comes through really clearly when you see the way she's writing it,” said Francis. “It feels frantic.”
Kinship is likewise revealed in other documents on view: A letter from Charlotte Brontë to her most frequent correspondent, Ellen Nussey, demonstrates their bond, while a diary entry of playwright Velina Hasu Houston expresses the acute devastation of her mother’s passing. Relationships — be they romantic, platonic, or familial — colored these women’s lives, as did the process of working itself. In one case, that coloring was literal: A red hat owned by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Patt Morrison is still flecked with paint droplets from when the now-disgraced Prince Andrew sprayed the press with paint during his 1984 visit to Los Angeles.
To heighten the sensory aspect of the exhibition, Francis also compiled a Spotify playlist featuring songwriting greats such as Joan Baez and Aimee Mann. The inclusion of the Buffalo Springfield song “Rock & Roll Woman” (1967) is a nod to Eve Babitz, who designed the ethereal collage cover art for the very album that features the folk-rock hit.
The late Babitz originally pursued the visual arts, a passion that never dissipated. Her love for the Southern California sprawl, which imbues the prose of her 1977 essay collection Slow Days, Fast Company, is just as evident in the images taken with her Brownie camera, positioned next to Patt Morrison’s press pass. One can see a palm-tree-lined street as Babitz saw it: romantically. Captured in black and white, Babitz’s world is enhanced. Such humanizing moments are what the curators aimed for.
As Francis puts it, “If anybody feels a point of connection to anyone in the show, I feel like it's a job well done.”
Stories from the Library: From Brontë to Butler continues at The Huntington (1151 Oxford Road San Marino, CA) through June 15.
