Charlotte Brontë

by Claire Harman

  Fortunately for Charlotte, another new pupil arrived the following week, Ellen Nussey, the daughter of a cloth merchant from nearby Birstall, who, when she was shown into the library by Miss Wooler, was surprised to discover she was not alone: “there was a silent, weeping, dark little figure in the large bay-window; she must, I thought, have risen from the floor.” The shrinking girl wanted to hide, but when asked what the matter was, admitted she was homesick. Ellen’s attempts to comfort her were not successful until she pointed out that they were both in the same boat, and that she, Ellen, might be even more to be pitied, having only just arrived. It was the magic formula that always worked with Charlotte—the call of sympathy. “A faint quivering smile then lighted her face; the tear-drops fell,” and the two girls held hands silently until the other pupils came in from outdoor play.

  This was the beginning of a lifelong friendship, and one of great significance to Brontë studies because of Ellen’s careful preservation of more than 600 letters from Charlotte over the next twenty-four years. Only one of the many letters that Charlotte wrote to Mary Taylor has survived, a loss that severely unbalances the picture of Charlotte’s life and opinions, since Mary was the more challenging friend, as ferociously and precociously interested in topical affairs as any Brontë. Ellen was a very conventional girl, mild and affectionate, while Mary seemed the opposite of Charlotte in every respect but intellectually—she might have proved a formidable enemy in such a small community as Roe Head, had she not recognised and responded to Charlotte’s spirit. Between them, Mary and Ellen helped Charlotte to overcome her separation from home, becoming, indeed, almost substitute sisters.

  Charlotte’s abilities were evident from the outset; she shot from the bottom to the top of the class, staying there the whole of her eighteen-month school career. “She was first in everything but play,” Ellen recalled later, “yet never was a word heard of envy or jealousy from her companions; every one felt she had won her laurels by an amount of diligence and hard labor of which they were incapable.” Ellen later recalled that when the other girls were chatting round the fire or playing outside in their precious leisure hour, Charlotte “would be kneeling close to the window busy with her studies,” often so late into the gloaming that her friends joked she must be able to see in the dark. Such a girl could have been dreadfully unpopular, but Charlotte’s decency and lack of pride endeared her to her classmates, who rather marvelled at the exotic nature of her knowledge and laughed affectionately at her oddities.

  Ellen’s reminiscences of Charlotte as a teenager stress her physical feebleness: her tiny appetite, terrible eyesight (which prevented her from reading music or learning any instrument), nervousness and lack of strength or spirit to join in the games that everyone else looked forward to with relish. During playtime at school, Charlotte always preferred to stand apart and watch, or read, and when Mary tried to get her to join in a ball game, she said she had never played and did not know how. “We made her try, but soon found that she could not see the ball, so we put her out.”

  “For years she had not tasted animal food,” Ellen said; “she had the greatest dislike to it; she always had something specially provided for her at our midday repast.” Ellen thought it a triumph that at the end of the first term Charlotte had come round to trying a little gravy every now and then with her vegetables, and was consequently looking a bit livelier. Inadequate quantities of meat in his children’s diet was one of Mrs. Gaskell’s later accusations against Patrick Brontë, but it’s clear from Ellen’s remarks that Charlotte was an infrequent meat-eater by inclination as much as by habit.*1

  Mary was particularly impressed by Charlotte’s intense concentration when examining any sort of picture, and her ability to explain what she thought about it: “She made poetry and drawing…exceedingly interesting to me,” Mary recalled gratefully; “and then I got the habit…of referring mentally to her opinion on all matters of that kind, along with many more.”

  Not politics, however, as the Taylor family were vociferous Dissenters, and Charlotte was of course a rabid Tory. Nothing was more likely to rouse the inner spirit of the “little old woman,” as Mary called her, than a vigorous debate about the issues of the day, just the sort of talk she so missed from home. Mary was impressed at how much Charlotte knew in this field too:

  She knew the names of the two Ministries; the one that resigned, and the one that succeeded and passed the Reform Bill. She worshipped the Duke of Wellington, but said that Sir Robert Peel was not to be trusted; he did not act from principle, like the rest, but from expediency. I, being of the furious Radical party, told her, “How could any of them trust one another? they were all of them rascals!” Then she would launch out into praises of the Duke of Wellington, referring to his actions; which I could not contradict, as I knew nothing about him. She said she had taken interest in politics ever since she was five years old. She did not get her opinions from her father—that is, not directly—but from the papers, etc., he preferred.

  At Roe Head, Charlotte found, for the first and last time, happiness similar to that of home. Miss Wooler was thirty-nine when Charlotte arrived, and she proved a fine role model: maternal but not sentimental, and her unshowy neatness in dress and deportment was something that Charlotte emulated in adult life. Miss Wooler wore white at this date, and arranged her hair in a plaited coronet, like “a lady abbess,” as Ellen said. The girls enjoyed her company in the evenings when she relaxed and shared stories with them, some of the old days, when the area had been riven with strife over the march of the new technology in the mills (which Patrick Brontë had also experienced first-hand in nearby Hartshead)—the route of the attack on Rawfolds Mill had gone right past Roe Head. Her accounts of her travels on the Continent and the cities and art works she had seen would have particularly intrigued Charlotte, with her private wish-list of paintings she would one day like to view. When the weather did not allow these evening gatherings to take place outdoors, Miss Wooler would perambulate the long schoolroom instead, with the girls hanging about her “delighted to listen to her, or have a chance of being nearest in the walk,” another habit Charlotte was to make her own.

  Having friends was a blessed novelty. Mary always spoke her mind, and countered Charlotte’s tendency to brood with shafts of common sense. Her good intentions were always clear, however brusquely she sometimes expressed herself, and her affectionate interest broke down Charlotte’s intense self-consciousness. Mary was perceptive about her friend: “She took all our proceedings with pliable indifference,” she recalled of their schooldays, “and always seemed to need a previous resolution to say ‘No’ to anything”—the mark of a child over-anxious of authority. It was clear to Mary that Charlotte’s upbringing had been odd and unhealthy, and that the make-believe powers that were so highly developed in her were the result of having insufficient other interests or stimulus. “The whole family used to ‘make out’ histories, and invent characters and events,” Mary told Mrs. Gaskell later. “I told her sometimes they were like growing potatoes in a cellar. She said, sadly, ‘Yes! I know we are!’ ” Charlotte had revealed to Mary the existence of “The Young Men’s Magazine”: “No one wrote in it, and no one read it, but herself, her brother, and two sisters. She promised to show me some of these magazines, but retracted it afterwards, and would never be persuaded to do so.” Charlotte must have had some of the tiny books with her at Roe Head and, in the warmth of her growing confidence in Mary, felt tempted—briefly—to share them. Interestingly, she never gave Ellen any hint of her private writing.

  In the dormitory, the girls would lie in the dark, half hoping to hear the female ghost said to walk the attics,*2 or whisper long intimate conversations, risking a fine for “late-talking” if discovered. Charlotte was often prevailed on to tell a story, and liked to oblige. The darkness was liberating, and the sense of an eager audience almost like home. She could extemporise with great ease and conviction, but on at least one occasion had too much success with the vividn
ess of her invention and upset a girl who was meant to be convalescing. Characteristically, Charlotte felt conscience-stricken about this and didn’t do it again.

  But being at boarding school made her think of her dead sisters more than ever. “Her love for them was most intense; a kind of adoration dwelt in her feelings,” Ellen perceived, astonished that Charlotte “would still weep and suffer” when recalling Maria’s last illness. Charlotte spoke of her eldest sister as “superhuman in goodness and cleverness” and of both as “wonders of talent and kindness,” but perhaps talking about them to strangers stirred her up in odd ways, for Charlotte told Mary about a disturbingly vivid dream she had around this time in which Maria and Elizabeth were waiting to see her in the Roe Head drawing room, but, when she went eagerly to meet them, they had changed into the type of fashionable young lady whom Charlotte loathed, vain and critical. “[T]hey had forgotten what they used to care for,” she said to Mary sadly. Her subconscious was perhaps telling her that continuing to grieve over her sisters’ fates was useless—time had moved on.

  But the griefs and fears expressed in Charlotte’s dream touched a nerve that resonated painfully all her life: the understanding that there was a loss beyond loss, that bereavements might not only multiply but intensify. Such feelings torment the protagonist of Villette at the novel’s crisis, the eye of suffering in that most suffering book: “Methought the well-loved dead, who had loved me well in life, met me elsewhere, alienated: galled was my inmost spirit with an unutterable sense of despair.” Time does move on for the bereaved, but alarmingly. Healing, “recovering,” from a death is also a form of estrangement, a further loss.

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  THE SCHOOL’S HALF-HOLIDAYS were chances to play-act and revel, rare occurrences in Charlotte Brontë’s life. Little performances were got up, with dancing to follow and a supper “coaxed out of yielding mammas and elder sisters,” as Ellen recalled. Charlotte was again the odd one out, not having any family near enough to take an interest in the junket, but she proved useful when the girls decided to stage a mock coronation (presumably around the time of the coronation of the new king, William IV, on 8 September 1831), making up aristocratic titles for her schoolfriends, writing speeches and directing the proceedings. Here was a glancing connection between real life and the courtly society of “Glass Town” that must have struck a pleasurable chord in Charlotte’s breast. Miss Wooler’s sister Catherine acted as Queen, but the show was stolen by Mary Taylor’s lively younger sister Martha, who threw herself into the role of mulatto servant and blacked up to serve at table.

  In the shorter holidays from school, Charlotte did not go home, but to friends of the family nearer Roe Head. The school was only minutes away from the home of the Atkinsons and only four miles from the Frankses in Huddersfield, where warm-hearted Elizabeth Franks was more than willing to keep an eye on her old friend’s daughter, have her to stay at the vicarage and oversee her welfare.

  Charlotte also visited Mary and Martha Taylor’s home, the Red House in Gomersal, and met an eccentric and interesting family. The house had been built in the seventeenth century by one of their forebears and their prosperity came from a wool mill at Hunsworth established by their grandfather. Though the Taylors’ fortunes were on the turn when Charlotte Brontë first met them in the early 1830s, that wasn’t obvious from the look of their comfortable home, with its handsome family portraits in the hall, original artworks and a curious double-arched stained-glass window depicting Milton and Shakespeare in its central panels.*3 Nothing could have better expressed the Taylors’ secular bent and their taste in books, art and culture: when Charlotte evoked their home in her novel Shirley, she called up images of candlelight, the sounds of lively debate and laughter, and the warmth of a coal fire, even in the summer. There was another kind of warmth too, a paterfamilias who ate and sat with his children, and liked to watch over them, “naturally a social, hospitable man—an advocate for family unity.”

  The air of comfort at the Red House was an eye-opener to Charlotte, a striking example of what a cultivated middle-class home looked like, compared with the windswept Parsonage with its unloved patch of thorns abutting graves. Mary was never complacent about her family’s affluence, though; the necessity for girls as well as boys to earn their keep had been drummed into her from an early age. In the novel Mary wrote many years later, dealing with a set of young women of the 1830s trying to support themselves, the difficulties are starkly laid out: “There’s no decent way fit for you to take by which a woman can earn more than just a living. You must make up your mind to work close—all day, and every day, and all your life, and then, if you are sharp and thrifty, you may perhaps get bread.”

  Charlotte and Mary got on so well at school that Miss Wooler ran out of things to teach them in the final term and set them both to commit to memory a book of belles-lettres. Mary protested against this boring expedient and was sent supperless to bed for the last month of school, but Charlotte knuckled under, obedient to the last. Charlotte left with three prizes, and a silver medal for fulfilment of duties. Her intellectual powers were evident in her prodigious memory, analytic skill and avidity for learning, added to which she was a model of good conduct (only once incurring a fine, after telling those stories at night to the other girls) and not only “very familiar with all the sublimest passages” in scripture, but genuinely pious. Miss Wooler could not have wished for a better pupil.

  It only struck Charlotte on her last day at Roe Head that she had been such a diligent and obedient student that something had evaded her—the whole experience, in fact. Turning to Ellen, she said, “I should for once like to feel out and out a school-girl; I wish something would happen! Let us run round the fruit garden; perhaps we shall meet some one, or we may have a fine for trespass.” Ellen was surprised at the suggestion, since she had never seen Charlotte run anywhere, or express an interest in livening things up. “[Charlotte] evidently was longing for some never-to-be-forgotten incident,” Ellen said. “Nothing, however, arose from her little enterprise. She had to leave school as calmly and quietly as she had there lived.”

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  WHEN CHARLOTTE RETURNED home from school in June 1832, having just turned sixteen, she was expected to share with Emily and Anne the schooling she had just received, taking charge of them every morning for three hours of lessons, including drawing. The sisters were delighted to be united again and soon settled down to a congenially unmonitored routine: lessons all morning, followed by a walk up on to the moors. One of their favourite destinations was a sheltered hollow under Round Hill now known as “The Brontë Waterfall,” where water from Oxenhope Edge runs down into South Dean Beck. Emily and Anne called this retreat “The Meeting of the Waters” and led the way to it, fording the streams and putting down stepping stones for Charlotte if necessary: “nothing appearing in view but miles and miles of heather: a glorious blue sky, and brightening sun…there was always a lingering delight in these spots, every moss, every flower, every tint and form, were noted and enjoyed.” They often stayed out until dinner time. “[A]fter dinner I sew till tea-time,” Charlotte told Ellen, who had not at this date ever visited Haworth, “and after tea I either read, write, do a little fancy-work or draw, as I please. Thus in one delightful, though somewhat monotonous course my life is passed.”

  What she wasn’t mentioning to Ellen was the amount of writing that the siblings were doing, and their other lives in the “Glass Town” stories that were the very opposite of monotonous. In her absence, “Glass Town” itself had become the more classical-sounding “Verdopolis,” Wellington’s son Arthur and his erstwhile friend Ellrington had acquired new titles—Duke of Zamorna and Earl of Northangerland respectively—and Zamorna had become king of the new country of Angria, formed after the latest Ashantee Wars in a manner rather like Napoleon’s dealing out of kingdoms and honours to his sons and brothers in the years after 1802. Zamorna’s rise to power stimulated Charlotte to write “The Bridal,” which summarised the existing
narrative and restarted Charlotte’s participation in it, and she added to the saga with “The Green Dwarf,” “High Life in Verdopolis” and “Arthuriana.” The content of the stories was moving on to reflect the siblings’ charged adolescent preoccupations. The newly ennobled Duke of Zamorna became increasingly worldly, scandalous and ruthless, with dark secrets from his past suddenly revealed, mistresses and bastards discovered everywhere, and all this salacious detail relished by the young author. Meanwhile Branwell was developing Alexander Percy (aka Ellrington, aka Northangerland) into a fully fledged Byronic anti-hero, a sneering, black-clad atheist, with a wife called Augusta di Segovia who was the first really immoral female character in the tales.

  Charlotte and Branwell’s fight for imaginative space within their joint creations was competitive and stimulating, but their attitudes to their invented characters were markedly different. Branwell began to identify so closely with Northangerland that he published under that name from 1839 onwards and affected it in correspondence outside the family circle. Charlotte felt every bit as possessive and admiring of Zamorna, and knew his every thought, but retained an observer’s view of him. This wasn’t simply to do with gender: Charlotte was very much at ease in the skin of a male alter ego such as “Charles Townshend,” Zamorna’s younger brother, whose name and initials she sometimes used in correspondence. Zamorna was beyond that sort of identification, though. Her intense feeling for him was more like a love affair.