The Shape of Emily’s Coffin: The mysteries of the least known Brontë sister | Hacker News Reader

The Shape of Emily’s Coffin: The mysteries of the least known Brontë sister

thehairpin.com

63 pointsprismatic12 comments

Thank you for posting this. My favorite story of Emily Bronte has always been the one where she was bitten by a dog, and then proceeded to calmly cauterize her own wound with a hot iron poker. As a fellow middle child who was also overshadowed by an older sister, I've always admired her.

Wouldn't that leave terrible scarring?

I imagine so. It's ironic, because in a flash, she did an ultimate act of self-preservation by cauterizing her wound, yet she was also anorexic, which I think is anything but self-preservation.

That was interesting right up until the end - and then it was infuriating. Having established that she was indeed '16" broad' and theorised that this was just because people were smaller then the author completely fails to try to establish whether that's true. Even though she's in a place with coffin size records of the era and could easily have checked it.

If you read to the end, it has this nice quote about the coffin size from a primary source:

I eventually found a transcript of the coffin maker’s book. Here it is, in his own words: “Emlea Jane Bronty. Died Dec 19th 1848 in the 30 year of hir Age. Coffen 5ft 7” long 16” broad.”

Note that the measurement there matches the body size, not the outside of the coffin with the wood included.

I think his/her point was that you could look at other coffin records from the same era and see if 16" breadth was about average or not for women of the same age and height.

> breadth

Oh, that type of broad. I was thinking the english slang term for a woman and was all kinds of confused.

Is "broad" not North American informal? Seems like you would be unlikely to find it used to refer to a woman in 19th century English record keeping.

"Popsy" would more liekly have been used?

Or, for that matter, in record keeping in any other country in any era.

I think you're right. English people are the only ones I regularly hear using the term today though.

So many words...

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