Charlotte’s own inner turbulence and chronic dissatisfaction with her lot was leading inevitably towards a crisis at Roe Head. Just before Christmas 1837, Anne had been taken so severely ill at school that both she and Charlotte believed her life to be in danger, as did the Moravian minister, James La Trobe (later an influential bishop), who visited her sickbed several times to console her. His words were truly comforting to Anne, who was a deeply pious girl. Charlotte meanwhile was becoming frantic, just as she had been when Emily was ill at Roe Head two years before. The difficulty and pain Anne had breathing were inextricably linked in her mind with consumption. “I cannot tell you what agony these symptoms give me,” she told Ellen when Mary Taylor suffered from similar shortness of breath and chest pains; “they remind me so strongly of my two sisters whom no power of medicine could save.” But Miss Wooler did not share Charlotte’s view of the seriousness of the situation and appeared “hard and unfeeling” about it. Possibly she was rather tired of having to deal with her young colleague’s hyper-sensitivity and was trying to encourage her to snap out of it; certainly Charlotte’s implied criticism of her judgement and management—that she couldn’t recognise a danger to one of her charges—was insulting.
What started as a difference of opinion about Anne’s health rapidly escalated to a row, and after years of biting her tongue Charlotte suddenly let fly at Miss Wooler with bitter reproaches and “one or two rather plain truths,” as she reported to Ellen with pride. Miss Wooler was reduced to tears during the shocking scene, and unsurprisingly wrote to Patrick Brontë the next day, reporting his daughter’s behaviour. The day after that Charlotte and Anne were called home. Charlotte, utterly unrepentant of her outburst and scornful of Miss Wooler’s distress, had resolved to give in her notice, but in their parting interview agreed, rather loftily, to Miss Wooler’s request that she should return after a break at home. She was determined that Anne was not going back, however.
For once Charlotte had asserted control over her situation, albeit violently, and when she returned a few weeks later, she was in a detached mood and disinclined to oblige anyone. She had spent her month’s respite finishing a story called “Mina Laury,” her most ambitious fiction to date, depicting the slavish devotion of the heroine to the Duke of Zamorna. Sequestered and neglected in a country hideaway, Mina is poorly rewarded for her love by Zamorna’s increasing disdain, and her obsessive focus on her cruel lover mirrors Charlotte’s own feelings for this favourite product of her imagination: “She had but one idea—Zamorna, Zamorna!…She could no more feel alienation from him than she could from herself.”
The school moved that winter from Roe Head to a smaller property on Dewsbury Moor, Heald’s House, nearer Miss Wooler’s ailing parents at Rouse Mill. Charlotte thought the situation damp and unhealthy, but one gets the impression that she had no intention of staying there long. The sole advantage of the move to Charlotte was that it was within easy walking distance of Brookroyd, the house in Birstall where Mrs. Nussey and her family had moved after her brother-in-law’s death, but, frustratingly, Ellen was away from home that spring on an extended visit to her brother John in London. Charlotte missed her terribly, worried about her health and that of all the Nusseys in the over-sensitive way that became characteristic of this period, and called on Ellen’s mother and sisters whenever opportunity allowed. The family were having a dreadful year with William, Ellen’s 31-year-old apothecary brother, suffering from a psychotic illness that led to his suicide in the summer. Ellen suppressed all references to William’s death in her papers, as she did to her brother George’s later mental breakdown, her brother Joseph’s alcoholism and her sister Mercy’s chronic nervous disorders. But, as Ellen’s close friend and confidante, and friend to her sisters Mercy and Ann too, Charlotte was aware of the family’s troubles, and agonised over them almost as much as she did her own.
By March, Charlotte was again sent home in a state of collapse, then returned in April to superintend the empty building at Heald’s House during the holidays while Miss Wooler tended her father in his final illness. Sixteen days on her own in the school proved anything other than easy or restful, and an even more dramatic collapse followed. Term started again, but now that both Charlotte’s sisters had gone home, her nerves gave way: “she would turn sick and trembling at any sudden noise, and could hardly repress her screams when startled,” Mrs. Gaskell heard. Miss Wooler clearly recognised that Charlotte’s insurrectionary outburst at Christmas, released on Anne’s behalf, had reflected her own chronic disturbance, and was genuinely concerned about Charlotte’s mental state. She insisted that a doctor was called, and he, diagnosing the case as nervous, advised that Charlotte should also go home. She departed in May, on an indefinite sick leave, reinforcing the now familiar pattern of the Brontë siblings failing to thrive in any environment other than the Parsonage.
Miss Wooler had presented Charlotte with two books at her departure, inscribed with affection. Charlotte was by far the most remarkable student she had ever had, and Miss Wooler—who had no inkling of Charlotte’s literary output and ambitions at this date—could not have imagined a more benign plan than for Charlotte to persevere with her career as a teacher. She was possibly already thinking ahead to her own retirement and who was to take over the running of the school—a subject she raised a few years later.
The severity of Charlotte’s collapse can be gauged by the unusual treatment she received at home, where she was put to bed for a period of absolute rest and quiet. Who prescribed this? Patrick Brontë or Aunt Branwell? The doctor? The Brontës didn’t always follow medical advice very closely, or seek it promptly, and Patrick’s trusty reference work, Dr. Thomas John Graham’s Modern Domestic Medicine,*1 had little to say on the subject of nervous disorders. Charlotte was kept alone and quiet for a full week, removed from all sources of excitement, including books and pictures. No doubt she was given a sedative, perhaps rather a heavy dose, to help her sleep and regain physical strength. The episode in Jane Eyre where Jane recovers from her collapse from hunger and exhaustion outside Moor House—and the similar scenes of extreme convalescence in Shirley and Villette—might well recall some of this time:
I knew I was in a small room, and in a narrow bed. To that bed I seemed to have grown: I lay on it motionless as a stone; and to have torn me from it would have been almost to kill me. I took no note of the lapse of time—of the change from morning to noon, from noon to evening. I observed when any one entered or left the apartment; I could even tell who they were; I could understand what was said when the speaker stood near to me; but I could not answer: to open my lips or move my limbs was equally impossible.
Charlotte recovered in the warmth of her family’s concern, and in the company of the Taylor sisters, who had been asked to come and cheer her up. The Parsonage brightened in the presence of these lively friends—Martha had been “in a constant flow of good-humour during her stay here and has consequently been very fascinating,” Charlotte reported to Ellen, who was still at her brother’s house in London—and one can imagine the spirited discussions the group had over religion, literature and politics, Mary’s forthright opinions voiced freely and Charlotte’s mind expanding pleasurably after her lonely vigils at Heald’s House. “They are making such a noise about me I can not write any more,” she wrote happily; “Mary is playing on the piano. Martha is chattering as fast as her little tongue can run and Branwell is standing before her laughing at her vivacity.”
No doubt the Taylors took a keen interest in the difficulties the Brontë girls were facing trying to establish themselves as wage-earners. Mary and Martha had been spared the same fate—so far—by a fairly narrow margin of privilege. Their large family was supported by ever-diminishing resources from Hunsworth Mill, and the two girls had been encouraged not to be complacent about their futures. Since leaving school, both had travelled and continued to study, but Mary was as unenthusiastic about teaching for a living as her friend. Mary’s novel Miss Miles shows how engaged
she became with the subject of women’s self-sufficiency, and her later essays (published in the 1860s) insisted that women should be able to learn and earn enough to ensure they weren’t “driven into matrimony.”
In the next few years Charlotte and her siblings seem to have come to a form of compact between them that they would share the hated necessity of “going out” to earn money, as long as they could also share times of respite, such as Charlotte greedily took advantage of in the summer of 1838. It’s a measure of how reduced Charlotte was when she came home from Heald’s House that Emily, the most ferocious hater of Elsewhere, attempted to do her bit and take a post at a school run by a Miss Elizabeth Patchett at Law Hill, on the hills outside Halifax.
Law Hill was large in comparison with Roe Head, having almost forty pupils, half of whom were boarders. Emily was kept at her work from the moment the girls woke up until after their bedtime, with, as Charlotte reported to Ellen, “only one half hour of exercise between—this is slavery.” Emily responded with her own brand of non-compliance: one of the girls later recalled her as dreamy and untidy, a loner who at least once lashed out and told them that she preferred the house dog to any of her pupils. But privately she was studying and translating Virgil that year, writing a remarkable number of poems and storing up material. Law Hill had been built some fifty years earlier by a man called Jack Sharp, who had been adopted by John Walker of nearby Walterclough Hall, and was later ousted from the property by the rightful heir, his cousin. Law Hill was as near as Sharp could get to Walterclough, against which he conducted a cold-blooded campaign of revenge. This energetically malevolent man has so much in common with Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights that it is hard not to see him as a direct inspiration for the novel Emily would write in the next decade.
The Law Hill estate had a contemporary neighbour of equal notoriety and interest, the heiress Anne Lister, who lived at Shibden Hall with her lover Ann Walker in a lesbian relationship, the nature and ardour of which were only made widely known in the twentieth century when Lister’s remarkable diaries were decoded and published. Local gossips would not have needed the evidence of a diary to confirm what was going on at Shibden Hall, though. Lister’s masculine style was so pronounced that one of her lovers, Marianna Lawton, used to be ashamed to be seen in public with her, and her nickname in Halifax was “Gentleman Jack.” “You do not know what is said of your friend,” a tipsy well-wisher once warned Marianna, but she did, and Elizabeth Patchett surely did too. It would have been strange if Emily Brontë had not met Anne Lister at some time in her seven-month soujourn next door, or heard the stories about her, and it is interesting that Emily’s time at Law Hill, high on the moors, gave her both stories of bitter past rivalries prosecuted over generations, and understanding of a wild, passionate and very unconventional erotic force.
Anne Brontë went bravely off alone to her first governess post with a family called Ingham at Blake Hall, Mirfield, just a few weeks after Emily’s return home. None of the sisters had any experience of governessing before, from either side of the divide, and her reports back must have been something of a shock. Anne was in charge of the elder two of five children, both “desperate little dunces,” as Charlotte told Ellen, whose bad behaviour Anne was not empowered to discipline: “she is requested when they misbehave themselves to inform their Mamma—which she says is utterly out of the question as in that case she might be making complaints from morning until night.” This was the sort of difficulty that none of the sisters had imagined, and that they were all singularly ill-qualified to deal with, being so anxious socially. Anne had her extreme taciturnity to overcome too, and her stammer (the one probably exacerbated the other). She was the least complaining of all the siblings, the most long-suffering and the best employee among them by far. But she certainly found the life of a governess hard to bear, and missed home as much as any of them. Her survival strategy at Blake Hall, like Emily’s in Halifax, was to collect her impressions for later use.
Presumably the techniques used to subdue her charges by Agnes Grey in Anne’s novel were ones that Anne herself used, since they are presented as perfectly reasonable: shaking, pulling hair, holding down the child until she repeats part of the lesson correctly, pinning her in a corner with a chair. Just as surprising to twenty-first-century sensibilities is Agnes’s solution to the discovery of little John’s tormenting of a nest of baby birds—she finds a rock and smashes it down on the nest to put an end to the creatures’ suffering. In the novel, this is proof of Agnes’s tenderness as much as resolve, but is unquestionably severe. Anne was the sister who was least impatient with children, but even she found dealing with them more like battle than anything else: “it was one struggle of life-wearing exertion” to keep the little Inghams “in anything like decent order.”
Charlotte knew it would soon be her turn to rejoin “that dreary Gin-horse round” and was due to go out herself as a governess that summer. But something happened in the spring of 1839 to remind her, if rather uncomfortingly, that there were other fates than work for a young woman in her position. Ellen’s 27-year-old brother Henry, a recent graduate of Magdalene College Cambridge, had been aware of Charlotte’s concern for their family during their crisis with William the previous year, and was probably much impressed by her fervent discussion of religious matters with Ellen around that time, for he was a rigidly pious man himself. He had had a personal crisis of his own in March 1838 (obliquely referred to a year later in his diary) and difficulties settling in to his first curacy at Earnley in Sussex. Charlotte undoubtedly heard about the latter through her friend; nevertheless, she was extremely surprised to get a letter from Henry Nussey, written on his birthday in February 1839 from Earnley, proposing marriage to her. Henry’s diary shows that he was working his way methodically through a list of possible candidates, rather as Patrick Brontë had done in the early 1820s, and had just been turned down by a friend’s sister: “On Tuesday last received a decisive reply from M. A. L.’s papa. A loss, but I trust a providential one. Believe not her will, but her father’s. All right. God knows best what is good for us, for his Church, & for his own Glory. This I humbly desire. And his Will be done, & not mine in this or in anything else…Wrote to a Yorke Friend, C. B.”
“C. B.” must have been more astonished by his proposal than flattered: it showed him to be so reckless. “I have no personal repugnance to the idea of a union with you,” she wrote back to him, in a suitably matter-of-fact manner, “but I feel convinced that mine is not the sort of disposition calculated to form the happiness of a man like you.” In describing what that might be, Charlotte gave an interesting self-portrait in the negative: “[Your future wife’s] character should not be too marked, ardent and original—her temper should be mild, her piety undoubted, her spirits even and cheerful, and her ‘personal attractions’ sufficient to please your eye and gratify your just pride.” She expressed herself grateful for his attention and for the suggestion that she could help him run a school in Sussex; but even with these incentives—and the alluring possibility that Ellen could come and live with them—Charlotte knew she could never marry for the sake of it, nor “take a worthy man whom I am conscious I cannot render happy.” “You do not know me,” she said truthfully. “I am not the serious, grave, cool-headed individual you suppose.”
“Received an unfavourable report from C. B.,” Henry noted in his diary with barely perceptible disappointment. “The will of the Lord be done.” Charlotte’s wisdom in rejecting Henry’s suit (if suit isn’t too strong a word) seems obvious, and to Ellen, who had naturally been anxious to know the outcome, she was far more explicit about her reasons: “I felt that though I esteemed Henry—though I had a kindly leaning towards him because he is an aimiable [sic]—well-disposed man Yet I had not, and never could have that intense attachment which would make me willing to die for him—and if ever I marry it must be in that light of adoration that I will regard my Husband.” One would expect no less from the creator of Mary Percy and Mina
Laury, but it wasn’t just “intense attachment” and passionate love that Charlotte hoped for in a mate, but an all-encompassing familiarity, like that she had with her siblings: “I was aware that Henry knew so little of me he could hardly be conscious to whom he was writing—why it would startle him to see me in my natural home-character he would think I was a wild, romantic enthusiast indeed—I could not sit all day long making a grave face before my husband—I would laugh and satirize and say whatever came into my head first—and if he were a clever man & loved me the whole world weighed in the balance against his smallest wish should be light as air—”
The proposal didn’t put an end to the respectful friendship between Charlotte and Henry Nussey—if anything, it opened up their interest, or rather disinterest, in each other. Charlotte admired Henry’s spiritual earnestness, but knew he was a prig at heart and she drew heavily on his characteristics for the worthy but priggish St. John Rivers in Jane Eyre.
And, for all her talk of “ten to one I shall never have the chance again” to consider a proposal, only five months later the former Haworth curate Mr. Hodgson (who had moved away to Colne in 1837) came to tea with his subordinate, a 28-year-old Irishman, recently arrived from Dublin, called David Pryce. Pryce’s manner was expansive and lively “after the manner of his Countrymen,” as Charlotte told Ellen later, and he caught Charlotte in the mood to enjoy and reciprocate. Most importantly, this first meeting took place at home: “at home you know Ellen I talk with ease and am never shy—never weighed down & oppressed by the miserable mauvaise honte which torments & constrains me elsewhere—so I conversed with this Irishman & laughed at his jests.” The effect was remarkable: a few days later, she received a letter from him, asking for her hand. “[W]ell thought I—I’ve heard of love at first sight but this beats all.” She of course turned him down, but the episode was amusing and heartening.
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