Bronte's Mistress

by Finola Austin

  “Come here.” Sir Edward walked to the stern and stared toward the shore.

  It was early enough in our time together that I did as he said and barely even resented it.

  “Isn’t it beautiful?” he asked, once I was next to him.

  I nodded, although the French coast was a haze to me, a dark and ragged scar across a watercolor awash with dancing whites and blues. There was a stronger gust of wind. My hair took on a will of its own, Medusa-like, and wrapped around my throat.

  I struggled to free myself, and the page I had written on—my first feeble attempt at honesty—escaped my hand. Like a bird, it settled on the railing before fluttering to the water, which was darker when you looked deep into it rather than toward the horizon.

  I glanced at Sir Edward. He hadn’t noticed.

  My words would be bleeding into the sea. But perhaps they had been foolish anyway. What had I been thinking? What could writing it all down possibly achieve?

  There were women from here to England, crying over curtain fabric, scolding their children, and aching for change and love or, at least, excitement. And most, if not all, of them would be disappointed. Their fate and mine was too common to be the stuff of tragedy.

  And do I even have it in me? I wondered, as Sir Edward pulled me close, smothering me against his chest.

  Could I risk failure, rejection, and indifference?

  Imbue our tale with dignity?

  Live it over and over, line by line, and word for word?

  And what fresh agony, to suffer through it all again, and find: I was not clever enough; I was not good enough; I was not Charlotte.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I WAS ALONE IN my Brooklyn apartment when I discovered Lydia Robinson, although she wasn’t named.

  Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), the first great Brontë biography, had been on my bookshelf and “to read” list for an embarrassingly long time. While studying for my master’s in nineteenth-century literature at the University of Oxford, I’d seen this biography cited time and again for its importance in establishing the “Brontë Myth.” I’d just shipped my books across the Atlantic and made a promise to myself: It was time to read what I should have read then.

  Near the end of volume 1, I found Lydia and Branwell, introduced by Gaskell with the (now very apt) sentence, “The story must be told.” What followed was a cutting character assassination. The wife of Branwell’s employer was described as a “wretched woman, who not only survives, but passes about in the gay circles of London society, as a vivacious, well-dressed, flourishing widow.” She was “bold and hardened,” a “profligate woman, who had tempted [Branwell] into the deep disgrace of deadly crime.” She had even “made love” to him in the presence of her children.

  What fascinated me was the gender reversal Gaskell drew readers’ attention to. In this case, “the man became the victim,” she wrote, equating the alcoholic, opium addict Branwell with the naive (and eventually ruined) maidens we find in many Victorian novels. Ultimately she suggested that the unnamed Lydia was responsible not only for Branwell’s demise but for all the Brontë siblings’ premature deaths.

  I closed the book and, buzzing, turned to my laptop. My first “research” was chaotic. I found Gaskell had retracted her allegations and removed them from future editions, after being contacted by Lydia Robinson’s (now Lady Scott’s) lawyers. I’d been lucky that my second-hand paperback had been based on the original version. There was scholarly debate about whether the affair had happened at all. But most important, I learned that no one else had written the novel I was aching to write—no one else had even suggested that the affair could have happened without Lydia being the adulterous monster Gaskell made her out to be.

  I had my project. I’d write a novel inspired by the themes of the work of the Brontë sisters, especially Charlotte—women’s lack of choices, a feeling of being trapped, passion bubbling beneath the surface—but my novel would have a heroine that a Brontë novel hadn’t seen before: older, richer, and sexually experienced, with children of her own.

  So began two years of research and writing that transformed my apartment into a murder detective’s bulletin board and, later, took me home to the UK to search for traces of Lydia in the country I’d left behind.

  CONFESSIONS

  So, what’s true? I’m going to approach this a little differently with a series of confessions about what’s not.

  First, on the use of original texts. None of the letters in the novel are real. However, Branwell’s poems in Chapter 3 and in the letters dated 1st August 1845 and 2nd June 1846 are his. Anne Brontë’s characterization of Lydia in the letter referenced in Chapter 1 is from her novel Agnes Grey (1847), which I also quote in the Epilogue. Charlotte Brontë’s dialogue in Chapter 10 borrows a line (“There’s little joy in life for me”) from her devastating poem “On the Death of Anne Brontë” (1849), which she wrote in response to her youngest sister’s death. Lydia also paraphrases one of the most famous passages in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) in the same chapter, in her impassioned speech to her daughter Mary. Lydia says, “We have as much passion as men do and full as much heart,” and Jane, “I have as much soul as you—and full as much heart!” In Chapter 19, Lydia fears that Charlotte and Sir Edward’s wife will set fire to her bed, evoking Bertha Mason, the “madwoman in the attic,” in Charlotte’s most famous novel.

  Meanwhile, Branwell’s question to Lydia in Chapter 3—“Have you never felt that there is, or ought to be, something of you beyond you?”—is indebted to Cathy’s famous plea to Nelly in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847): “I cannot express it; but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is or should be an existence of yours beyond you.” And Lydia’s fear of being haunted by Edmund and Catherine in Chapter 20 mirrors the narrator Lockwood’s paranormal experiences when sleeping at Wuthering Heights.

  Eighteen letters written by Lydia to her business agent in 1847 and 1848 survive in the archives at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth. From these I took her sign-off, “Yours very truly,” in the letters from her throughout my novel.

  Second, there is no evidence the Robinson family owned a horse named Patroclus, but every other character in my novel, whether human or animal, is real. I started with secondary accounts—including biographies of the Brontës by Lynne Reed Banks, Juliet Barker, Edward Chitham, Daphne du Maurier, and more—but soon moved on to primary sources.

  Digitized census records were key for understanding the Robinsons, their servants, and their neighbors and led to my solving many mysteries. I discovered, for instance, that the Sewells—assumed to be husband and wife by other Brontë enthusiasts, including Daphne du Maurier in her The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë (1961)—were in fact siblings. In my novel, for clarity, the sister is referred to as “Miss Sewell,” although as housekeeper, she was known as “Mrs.”

  Supplementing the census information was an incredible and improbable resource—over sixty years of journals recording “births, marriages, deaths and sundries” in the Great and Little Ouseburn area, kept by local carpenter George Whitehead (1823–1913). These were published in 1990 as Victorian Ouseburn: George Whitehead’s Journal, thanks to the scholarship and fund-raising efforts of the late local historian Helier Hibbs and his army of volunteers. Whitehead’s blunt entries helped me establish the roles of various Thorp Green servants, not all of whom made it into the final draft of the novel (there were so many Williams and Ann[e]s). But he also at times had a flair for the dramatic. Of the younger Lydia’s elopement, for instance, he wrote: “Miss Lydia Robinson made her exit with Henry Roxby (a playactor) Monday morning, Oct 20th. They went to Gretna Green and got married that night. She was a fortnight turned 20 years that day. A bad job 1845.”

  Third, there is no evidence the Robinsons were suffering from financial difficulties. I was lucky enough to be able to look through the account book mentioned in Chapters 9, 15, and 16 of my novel (this is also in the
archives at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth), and the numbers seemed healthy, although I don’t pretend to be an expert on nineteenth-century finances.

  Edmund’s gambling was suggested to me by his love of horses, attested by Anne Brontë’s depiction of the Murray family in Agnes Grey (1847) and by the life of Edmund and Lydia’s son, Ned. A keen hunter, Ned died at only thirty-seven years old, along with several other sportsmen, two ferrymen, and several horses, in a ferry accident at Newby Park in Yorkshire, which received attention across national and sporting press.

  The family’s other problems and tragedies are all real. Georgiana died. The younger Lydia eloped. Bessy was sued for breach of promise by a Mr. Milner. But I made an assumption about which Mr. Milner, choosing the oldest of a local family with sons, despite his unfortunate name—William. Bessy went on to marry another William—William Jessop—a business connection of her uncle William Evans (keeping these Williams straight?).

  There is even some slight evidence that Lydia senior had to put up with a difficult mother-in-law. In one of the letters to her agent in 1848, Lydia wrote that Elizabeth Robinson, here referred to as “grandmamma,” had been “exceedingly angry” when she tried to dismiss Tom Sewell. From this seed sprouted the animosity between Lydia, the Sewells, and Edmund’s mother, which fuels several subplots in the novel.

  Fourth, there is no extant evidence about Dr. John Crosby’s sexuality. He was well loved in Great Ouseburn, as demonstrated by the beautiful and prominent memorial to him you can still read in St. Mary’s church. It concludes:

  His universal kindness

  Professional ability benevolent

  Disposition and active usefulness

  During a residence here of 30 years

  Warmly endeared him

  To a large circle of friends

  Who deeply lament

  His sudden removal

  An even longer eulogy appears on the obelisk that marks his grave in the churchyard. Despite becoming a widower at age twenty-eight, he never remarried, although he appears to have had the resources to support siblings, nephews, and nieces. According to Branwell, he acted as a go-between following the end of the Brontë/Robinson affair. This has led some scholars to suggest that Dr. Crosby was a second victim of the femme fatale, Lydia. This didn’t fit with my vision for the novel, and so I conceived of Dr. Crosby as Lydia’s one true friend, sympathetic to her attraction to Branwell due to secrets of his own.

  Branwell and Dr. Crosby were both Freemasons, suggesting a basis for their intimacy. Branwell even held office at the Lodge in Haworth. During my visit to Yorkshire, I noticed that the quote on Edmund’s memorial plaque in Holy Trinity Church (“When the shore is won at last, Who will count the billows past?”) was from a poem in John Keble’s The Christian Year (1828) for St. John’s Day—an important milestone in the Masonic calendar. And so I made the local Freemasons’ Lodge (a room above an inn in York) the center of the educated Great and Little Ouseburn men’s social lives, from which Lydia is naturally excluded.

  THE AFFAIR

  What, then, about the all-important question: Did Branwell and Lydia conduct an affair? Generations of Brontë academics have tried to answer this question, and I’m happy to offer a perspective.

  Branwell wrote to a friend, “My mistress is damnably too fond of me,” in May 1843, and by that November, he claimed to have a lock of her hair (the inspiration behind the events of Chapter 7 in my novel). Something caused Anne Brontë to resign on 11th June 1845 (Chapter 12) and Edmund Robinson to dismiss Branwell by letter on 17th July 1845 (Chapter 13). Following this, it seems certain that Branwell told the Brontë family that he and Lydia had an illicit relationship and likely that the coachman, William Allison, took news of Edmund Robinson’s death to Haworth in 1846 (Chapter 15). We also know for sure that Edmund’s will did not preclude Lydia’s remarriage (you can read the document in the archives at the Brontë Parsonage Museum), although Branwell told his family that it did. The conclusion? Branwell, Lydia, or both of them lied.

  Key to the debate about the affair has been tracing the movements of all parties in June and July 1845. Why was Branwell alone at Thorp Green Hall, rather than with the Robinsons, as usual, in Scarborough, or home with the Brontës in Haworth? My novel provides a tentative solution. The opening of the railway line between York and Scarborough—a huge public spectacle, with plenty of celebratory champagne—was a potential connector between the lovers in this crucial period and one that felt in keeping with my characters, given Branwell’s interests in locomotives and drinking.

  Brontë’s Mistress is a work of fiction. I don’t pretend that it records what happened between Lydia and Branwell, but given the facts at our disposal, it imagines what could have happened.

  LOOSE ENDS

  Finally, a few notes on what happened next to some of the main characters after the end of my novel.

  The fates of the Brontë siblings are well known. After Branwell’s death in September 1848, Emily’s and Anne’s followed in quick succession, on 19th December 1848 and 29th May 1849, respectively. Charlotte enjoyed literary celebrity when her identity became known and lived until March 1855, when she died in the early stages of pregnancy. The Reverend Brontë outlived all his children. He died in 1861.

  Lydia and Sir Edward were married for only three years, meaning Sir Edward didn’t live to hear Mrs. Gaskell’s allegations against his wife. He died at Great Barr Hall on 27th December 1851, leaving Lydia (Lady Scott) a widow once more. In his will, he left her an annuity of £600 a year, a house in London, and the family diamonds. His sons inherited the rest of his property. Lydia herself died, aged fifty-nine, in London on 19th June 1859.

  The younger Lydia had two sons with her actor husband, Henry Roxby. The pair moved from city to city due to his career, presumably under somewhat straitened circumstances, given Edmund’s excision of them from his will. At some point, Lydia too was widowed, as she married a Henry Lincoln Simpson in Islington in 1877. Her first son was a journalist who never married. Her second immigrated to Brooklyn. He and several of his descendants are buried in Evergreens Cemetery, not far from my current apartment.

  Bessy’s lot seems to have been the happiest of the three sisters. She and her husband, William Jessop, enjoyed considerable wealth and lived in Butterley Hall in Ripley, Derbyshire. They went on to have five children and eventually retired to the Isle of Wight, where William was vice commodore of the Royal Victoria Yacht Club. They are buried together in Ryde Cemetery.

  Mary was widowed in the seventh year of her marriage, when her husband, Henry Clapham, was only twenty-eight. She and her one daughter continued to live with her father-in-law until she married her second husband, Reverend George Hume Innes Pocock, in 1862. She had no further children and died in Florence in 1877.

  Ned’s early death is described above. Following this, Thorp Green Hall was sold to the Thompson family.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  WHEN I BEGAN TO work on the novel that would become Brontë’s Mistress, I had no idea I’d end up with as many people to thank as I did characters. Writing can be a lonely pastime, but writing this novel has brought me closer to so many people. I am grateful to you all.

  First and foremost, thank you to my editor, Daniella Wexler, and my agent, Danielle Egan-Miller, for bringing this novel into the world with me. I couldn’t have asked for better guides. Thank you too to the wider teams at Atria Books and Browne & Miller Literary Associates for transforming my manuscript into a book. Special thanks to Ellie Roth and Loan Le for fielding my many emails!

  Thank you to the scholars, alive and departed, whose work was invaluable to me in researching this novel—especially to Helier Hibbs, dedicated local historian of the Ouseburn area; Juliet Barker and Edward Chitham, Brontë academics; Mick Armitage, blogger and Brontë fanatic; Richard Horton, chronicler of Yorkshire graveyards; and Daphne du Maurier, whose novels and biography of Branwell inspire me with their scholarship and humanity. Thank you too to Julia
n Crabb, chairman of the Poppleton History Society, and to Deborah at Poppleton Library, who furnished me with information on the poetry of the curate, Edward Greenhow, which references Edmund Robinson, and to Neil Adams, archive assistant at the Borthwick Institute for Archives, for his investigation into the York Medical Society.

  Thank you to those I met on my Yorkshire pilgrimage, including Sarah Laycock and the team at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth; Margaret and Dave Hillier, who invited me into their home to have tea in Dr. Crosby’s living room; the staff at Saint Ethelburga’s School, which is on the site of the former Thorp Green Hall; and the Reverend Sarah Feaster and her congregation (including Mick Lofthouse, June Sanderson, and Alison Smith).

  Thank you to my prompt and thoughtful past and present beta readers—Alexandra Da Cunha, Elizabeth (Lily) Barker, Kathleen Flynn, Valerie Gatignon, Alec Macdonald, Alison Pincus, Kathryn (Katy) Moyle, Emily Rutherford, Raya Sadledein, and Henry Ward.

  Thank you to my two writers’ groups for critiquing this novel and others—the “Panera Collective” (Sarah Archer, Adina Bernstein, Megan Corrarino, Christina Cox, Joe Fisher, Harry Huang, Virginia Kettles, Vicki Kleinman, Sara Lord, David Marino, Alexander Milne, Lindsey Milne, G. M. Nair, Boyd Perez, Sophie Schiller, and Karen Sesterhenn) and my historical fiction group (Gro Flatebo, Barbara Lucas, Laura Schofer, and Susan Wands). And thank you to my fellow writers Kiri Blakeley and Leanne Sowul for their critiques, companionship, and advice.

  Thank you to Jon Steel, John O’Keeffe, and the WPP Fellowship for launching me on a career path that expands, rather than strangles, my creativity, and to my colleagues for their encouragement and support through the years.