Throughout their courtship, Maria had exulted in the faith that united her and Patrick, but this certainty forsook her towards the end. Patrick Brontë wrote, in obvious perturbation, to his friend John Buckworth: “During many years she had walked with God, but the great enemy, envying her life of holiness, often disturbed her mind in the last conflict. Still, in general she had peace and joy in believing, and died, if not triumphantly, at least calmly, and with a holy yet humble confidence that Christ was her Saviour, and heaven her eternal home.” What a scene this evokes, of Maria Brontë not resigned to death at all, not cheered by the prospect of eternal salvation that had been her mainstay previously but “disturbed” and conflicted in her final days and weeks. To any pious person attending the sickbed, Maria’s mental distress at the door of eternity must have been inexpressibly painful to witness.
On the morning of 15 September, Nancy Garrs related, Maria asked that “all the dear faces should be about her,” and the children were brought in to see their mother for the last time. Patrick Brontë stayed at the bedside and she died later that day, aged thirty-eight. After almost eight months of alternate dread and hope, and eight months of seclusion from their mother, this was a blow from which none of the family ever fully recovered. Charlotte’s memories were very scant indeed: “[she] tried hard, in after years, to recall the remembrance of her mother,” Mrs. Gaskell noted, “and could bring back two or three pictures of her. One was when, sometime in the evening light, [Maria Brontë] had been playing with her little boy, Patrick Branwell, in the parlour of Haworth Parsonage.” How strange this fragmentary memory is (the only one of the promised “two or three pictures” that Charlotte passed on, or Mrs. Gaskell recorded)—the daughter looking into a room veiled in lambent light and seeing, like a tableau, mother and son playing together. But not part of that happy scene herself, nor having known anything like it.
Charlotte Brontë’s heroines are all motherless, adrift and starving for parental love. The mere mention of the word “mother,” in Shirley, sets the orphaned Caroline Helstone thinking about her own, “unknown, unloved, but not unlonged-for.” While her companion talks on about Nature, Caroline is lost in reverie:
The longing of her childhood filled her soul again. The desire which many a night had kept her awake in her crib, and which fear of its fallacy had of late years almost extinguished, relit suddenly, and glowed warm in her heart: that her mother might come some happy day, and send for her to her presence—look upon her fondly with loving eyes, and say to her tenderly, in a sweet voice:
“Caroline, my child, I have a home for you; you shall live with me. All the love you have needed, and not tasted, from infancy, I have saved for you carefully. Come! it shall cherish you now.”
In an exquisitely tender scene later in the book, Caroline and her mother are reunited. Her mother has, in fact, been there all along, undiscovered: “The offspring nestled to the parent: that parent, feeling the endearment and hearing the appeal, gathered her closer still. She covered her with noiseless kisses: she murmured love over her, like a cushat fostering its young. There was silence in the room for a long while.” Caroline Helstone gets her dream-like, Shakespearian moment of restoration and restitution; but, for Charlotte Brontë, the only way to be reunited with her mother was in death.
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ELIZABETH BRANWELL STAYED on at the Parsonage after her sister’s death, though it isn’t clear whether she went back to Penzance for a while after the initial period of mourning. The idea of her taking up the role of substitute mother to her nieces and nephew probably didn’t arise immediately, as Patrick Brontë had a preferred solution to the family’s predicament, which was to seek another wife. There is no doubt that he felt the loss of Maria with painful intensity, but he was also a practical man, and had six children to bring up as well as a large parish to run. He was forty-four years old, and such a move was to be expected in an age of high mortality among women of childbearing age. His friends Firth, Morgan, Dury and Fennell all remarried after their first wives’ deaths.*4
After a decent interval of mourning, Patrick set out for Kipping House, the scene of so many happy days in the past. Dr. Firth had died in 1820, just after the Brontës’ removal to Haworth, but Elizabeth lived on at the house with her stepmother. What sort of prospect the melancholic widower presented to lovely Miss Firth, who, in 1822, was still only twenty-five, can be guessed by her prompt refusal of him, but the fact that Elizabeth continued to do what she could for the Brontë children testifies to her kind heart and sincere affection for the family. And, though she had no intention of marrying Patrick Brontë, she must have continued to esteem him, as there is a family tradition that the letters he wrote to her were destroyed only years later, “just before the Miss Brontës became famous.”
Patrick might then have approached Isabella Dury, the sister of his friend the curate of Keighley, as there was local gossip on the subject that Miss Dury responded to in lively tones in a letter of 1823: “I heard before I left that I had quarrelled with my brother about Mr. Brontë. I beg if ever you hear such a report, you will contradict it as I can assure you it is perfectly unfounded. I think I should never be so very silly as to have the most distant idea of marrying anybody who has not some fortune and six children into the bargain. It is too ridiculous to imagine any truth in it.”
Patrick’s last recorded attempt to find a new wife was even more ill-judged than these two, turning his attentions once more to Mary Burder. He hadn’t seen her since leaving Wethersfield in 1809, but in April 1823 he wrote to her mother with an outline of his current situation, giving careful attention to salary and resources, asking after her children, “whether they be married or single,” and threatening to come down to visit the old neighbourhood. The gist of this was so obvious that no reply came for some months—the family must have been stunned at Brontë’s re-emergence after fifteen years and at the gall of the man—but then at last Mrs. Burder sent Mary’s address. The old lover promptly revived his suit in a letter of quite remarkable crassness and egotism. He was glad to hear Mary was still single, he told her, suggesting that was very appropriate to the power of their former attachment: “You were the first whose hand I solicited, and no doubt I was the first to whom you promised to give that hand…However much you may dislike me now, I am sure you once loved me with an unaffected innocent love, and I feel confident that after all which you have seen and heard, you cannot doubt my love for you.” This claim sounded even more insulting in the context of his breezy assumption that not much could have happened to disturb Mary in the intervening period (not having married), whereas his harsh experience—including the death of his wife—had led him to believe “this world to be but vanity, and…my heart’s desire is to be found in the ways of divine Wisdom.” Then he got down to business, with suitable emphases: “I have a small but sweet little family that often soothe my heart and afford me pleasure by their endearing little ways, and I have what I consider a competency of the good things of this life.” All he lacked was a “dearly Beloved Friend” with whom to share this Elysium, which he was prepared to offer in apology for past wrongs: “I cannot tell how you may feel on reading this,” he concluded, “but I must say my ancient love is rekindled.” He was, in fact, rather moved.
Life rarely offers a slighted woman such a chance to disburden herself, and Mary Burder grasped it with relish. Far from awakening tender memories and kindling a new flame of love, Patrick’s letter had prompted her to disinter and reread the ones he had sent before, during the three years of their former relationship, and to reflect on her lucky escape from “one whom I cannot think was altogether clear of duplicity.” Paraphrasing the old love-notes in front of her (perhaps including one in which Patrick broke off communication), she satirises his hubris, then and now: “Happily for me I have not been the ascribed cause of hindering your promotion, of preventing any brilliant alliance, nor have those great and affluent friends that you used to write and speak of withheld their patronage o
n my account, young, inexperienced, unsuspecting and ignorant as I then was of what I had a right to look forward to.” Her answer to his request for permission to visit was, unsurprisingly, “a decided negative.”
Patrick Brontë’s next move is a vivid example of his intransigence, pride and emotional blindness and gives some idea of what all of the women and some of the men in his life had to deal with. Instead of accepting Mary Burder’s scorching reprimand in decent silence, he felt entitled, even obliged, to write back reprimanding her in turn for the “many keen sarcasms” in her letter that “surprised and grieved me.” He launches into an attack on her version of events fifteen years before and a defence of himself that is hectoring and wheedling by turns, but then his letter takes an astonishing turn: “Once more let me ask you whether Mrs. Burder and you would object to my calling on you at the Park some time during next spring or in the summer?” Mary Burder clearly did not answer this, but neither did she destroy these last salvos from her troublesome admirer. Perhaps they were kept as curiosities of human nature, and reminders of Divine Providence. She married the local Dissenting minister later the same year.
After the debacle with Mary Burder, Patrick Brontë seems to have accepted that his fate was to remain a widower. It is not clear who first suggested that Elizabeth Branwell should come and keep house at the Parsonage, but Elizabeth was clearly under no financial constraint to find a roof for her head, and proudly insisted on giving Patrick money for her upkeep all the years she lived with him. She must have been lonely or restless to have agreed to leave Cornwall permanently, for, like Maria, she found her home town vastly superior to Haworth, where the weather, the natives, the food, the flora and the poor social scene were just some of her categories for critique. This was not going to be a happy revival of Thornton days. Even before his wife’s death, Patrick had adopted the practice of dining alone (for the sake of his digestion, it was said), and his habits of seclusion dictated the tone of the household. By 1823 he had settled for a pared-down, simplified existence: celibate, middle aged, eccentric, unpopular and burdened with melancholy.
Towards the children, Elizabeth Branwell seemed consciously to adopt an unsentimental, rather withholding demeanour, so as not to intrude too far on her dead sister’s territory. She knew that she could never replace Maria in anyone’s affections, but her constrained kind of love was not powerful enough to rouse much reciprocal feeling, not in Charlotte at any rate. The children Aunt Branwell were closest to were Anne, who did not remember her mother at all, and Branwell, who as the only boy seemed naturally preferable to his sisters.
Charlotte therefore found herself somewhat lost in the middle of her sibling group—not the paragon, Maria, not the reliable lieutenant Elizabeth, not the son and heir Branwell, not the endearing individualist Emily, not the baby Anne, who was most to be pitied, most motherless. A story she told to her schoolfriend Ellen Nussey in the 1830s poignantly illustrates her isolation at this time. Five-year-old Charlotte had heard the Garrs sisters describe the town of Bradford in such glowing terms that she imagined it must be the nearest thing to the Golden City in the Book of Revelation and the Celestial City of The Pilgrim’s Progress, and that it was her duty to leave home to search for it, as Pilgrim did. But the little girl had hardly got a mile outside Haworth when a team of horses drawing a huge loaded wagon (the 1820s equivalent of a thundering juggernaut) bore past her with such noise, rush and darkness that she cowered at the roadside in fright, and stayed there until she was found by one of the servants who had noticed her absence and followed her. Filthy Bradford, the most rapidly industrialising city in the country, would have been a disappointing pilgrimage destination indeed, and Charlotte later joked about her misapprehension of it,*5 but the story shows Charlotte’s essential solitude, even at a time when all her siblings were still alive—a solitude of being and of mind, mulling over the powerful texts that spoke to her and feeling the urgency to act on them.
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CHARLOTTE’S ELDEST SISTER, Maria, a precociously mature and intellectual child, was the children’s emotional lynch-pin after their mother’s death, “a little mother among the rest,” as Charlotte described her, “superhuman in goodness and cleverness.” Maria was an avid reader of newspapers and periodicals, and her father later said she could converse “on any of the leading topics of the day” just like an adult. She must also have been a deeply contemplative girl if it is true (as Charlotte insisted) that the character of Helen Burns in Jane Eyre was an exact, even understated, portrait of her. In the novel, Helen advises Jane not to let her grudges against Mrs. Reed rankle, since other people’s antipathies are beyond one’s control; “Would you not be happier if you tried to forget her severity, together with the passionate emotions it excited?” the young stoic counsels.
The “plays” that Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne later developed obsessively were already part of their private entertainment in their earliest childhood, and were presumably instigated by their eldest sister. Patrick Brontë told Mrs. Gaskell that they made up such games “as soon as they could read and write,” and remembered sometimes having to step in when contentions between Hannibal, Caesar, Wellington and Bonaparte got too rowdy. Their father was often struck by “signs of rising talent” in his offspring, but was somewhat mystified by its origins, and on one occasion devised a test of their opinions by assembling all six children in his study and giving them in turn a mask to wear from behind which they could “speak boldly.”
I began with the youngest (Anne, afterwards Acton Bell), and asked what a child like her most wanted; she answered, “Age and experience.” I asked the next (Emily, afterwards Ellis Bell), what I had best do with her brother Branwell, who was sometimes a naughty boy; she answered, “Reason with him, and when he won’t listen to reason, whip him.” I asked Branwell what was the best way of knowing the difference between the intellects of man and woman; he answered, “By considering the difference between them as to their bodies.” I then asked Charlotte what was the best book in the world; she answered “The Bible.” And what was the next best; she answered “The Book of Nature.” I then asked the next what was the best mode of education for a woman; she answered, “That which would make her rule her house well.” Lastly, I asked the oldest what was the best mode of spending time; she answered “By laying it out in preparation for a happy eternity.”
Patrick was pleased with these responses, though even with the mask on, his children seem to have been in no doubt that this was a form of examination and they should say what was expected of them, with the exception perhaps of Emily, whose no-nonsense answer reflects a certain irritation at being asked a question about her brother instead of something more interesting. The two elder girls fell in with their Martha-and-Mary roles exactly and Charlotte’s reply that the Bible was the best book in the world not satisfying her father, she had to answer figuratively the second time.
Patrick Brontë and his sister-in-law taught his children their first lessons, but, while Branwell could continue to be tutored by his father at home as he grew older, some formal schooling was clearly necessary to fit the girls for the only sort of work socially within their grasp: teaching or governessing. Maria and Elizabeth went briefly to a boarding school in Wakefield,*6 but early in 1824 a new establishment opened up near Kirkby Lonsdale, on the edge of the Lake District, which seemed like a direct answer to Patrick Brontë’s prayers. The Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge—the first of its kind—had the backing of several leading evangelicals, including William Wilberforce, Hannah More and Charles Simeon and had been specifically set up to benefit “the really necessitous clergy” by educating their children at a substantially subsidised rate. Patrick’s old friends John Eyton (from Shropshire) and Theodore Dury from Keighley were among the trustees, and it was without difficulty that Maria and Elizabeth Brontë were accepted among the first pupils in the summer of 1824, for a fee of £14 each per annum. There was even a regular stagecoach service from Leeds to Kendal tha
t passed along the high road right by the school and also stopped in Keighley, making it a relatively easy journey for the time, albeit fifty miles across the Pennines from Haworth.
Maria and Elizabeth, who were both still convalescing from whooping cough, were taken to Cowan Bridge by their father on 21 July and Charlotte followed on 10 August. The school was in a picturesque situation, nestled in a wooded valley with a tributary of the River Lune running close by. Converted from a row of cottages, it had an expensive new wing containing a large schoolroom on the ground floor and four dormitories above. In the main section of the building was a dining room, the teachers’ bedrooms and the superintendent’s lodging, and the garden in front of the building, running down to the Leck Beck, was divided up into sections and little individual plots, with the idea that the pupils could learn to cultivate flowers and vegetables. There was a new covered walkway to one side of the garden, so that the girls could take some exercise whatever the weather, and just beyond that was the ancient bridge from which the hamlet gets its name.
The man behind the project was a powerful local landowner and philanthropist called William Carus Wilson, whose Cambridge-born evangelicism and circle of clerical acquaintance were very similar to Patrick Brontë’s own, even if his Calvinistic views placed him on the outer margins of the Anglican spectrum. The regime he instigated at the school was a deliberately Spartan one of early rising, long prayers, spare facilities, plain food and outdoor exercise, based on familiar charity-school models. The curriculum was much more ambitious than that of a charity school, however, as befitted the daughters of clergymen: history, geography, “the Use of Globes,” grammar, writing and maths as well as needlework and “the nicer kinds of household-work.” For those who might go on to be governesses or teachers, extras in French, music and drawing were offered at £3 a year each. Maria and Charlotte had extras, but Elizabeth did not, indicating that less was expected of her intellectually. In the admission register, compiled by the superintendent, Elizabeth was marked down as reading “little,” writing “pretty well,” but being poor in everything else. Maria didn’t fare much better: she read “tolerably,” knew “a little of Grammar” and French. Neither was much good with a needle. Charlotte was assessed as writing “indifferently,” “Ciphers a little, and works neatly. Knows nothing of grammar, geography, history, or accomplishments. Altogether clever of her age, but knows nothing systematically.”
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