
The Shape of Emily’s Coffin: The mysteries of the least known Brontë sister - prismatic
https://thehairpin.com/the-shape-of-emilys-coffin-8e8b83b26ad#.kpti7xrcy
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fern12
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.

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Chris2048
Wouldn't that leave terrible scarring?

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fern12
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.

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zik
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.

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XparXnoiAx
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.

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stupidcar
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.

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flukus
> breadth

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

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PuffinBlue
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.

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

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facepalm
So many words...

