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Emily Bronte Tea at the Norton Center
Name: Emily Bronte Tea at the Norton CenterDate: March 3, 2015Time: 2:00 PM - 4:00 PM ESTEvent Description:In celebration of the Aquila Theatre's upcoming performance of Wuthering Heights, take part in an afternoon tea in honor of author Emily Bronte. Historian and Elmwood Inn Fine Teas owner Bruce Richardson has spent much of his life exploring and chronicling the peculiar tea habits of the British Empire. If the pinky on your right hand begins to extend at the mere mention of the tea habits of George III, the tea things of Jane Austen, or the tea rooms of London, then you are in for an afternoon of delicious entertainment as he leads you through the tea-infused pages of Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.
Encountering a table laid for tea, characters in Victorian novels expected that their physical, social, and emotional needs would be filled as their thirst for tea was being satisfied. Writers such as Jane Austen, Lewis Carroll, and Charles Dickens, often used a tea setting to invite readers, like guests at the tea table, into the intimate spaces of their novels.
By placing a scene of consuming tea early in Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë offered her readers a way of entering the story in a familiar fashion. But later, tea created boundaries between characters, rather than erasing them, and the tea table highlighted delineations of social class and separations between host and guest—all the tensions that made for good reading in a Victorian page-turner!
Bruce Richardson is the author of 14 books on the subject of tea. He serves as contributing editor for TeaTime magazine, tea master for the Boston tea Party Ships & Museum, and he is a frequent speaker at tea and museum events across North America. Richardson is the owner of Elmwood Inn Fine Teas, a nationally-known tea brand with headquarters in Danville. Bruce will autograph copies of A Social history of Tea and The Great Tea Rooms of Britain at the conclusion of the talk.
