Charlotte Brontë

by Claire Harman

  —

  AT SOME POINT in May 1845 Charlotte’s pulse had been set racing by the sight of Constantin Heger’s writing on a letter for her, an electrifying pleasure, though the content was not intended to gratify her. None of his letters to her have survived, but from her references to this one in November that year, we have to deduce that Heger sent some form of reprimand (not surprising, given the intemperance of her outburst in January) and stipulated that in future she should not write more frequently than twice a year, limiting herself to matters of family news and health. She must have replied to him on 18 May (that letter is also now lost), for exactly six months later she felt free to write again. She had obviously been thinking about what to say to him and probably drafting the letter many times in the interim:

  The summer and autumn have seemed very long to me; to tell the truth I have had to make painful efforts to endure until now the privation I imposed upon myself: you, Monsieur—you cannot conceive what that means—but imagine for a moment that one of your children is separated from you by a distance of 160 leagues, and that you have to let six months go by without writing to him, without receiving news of him, without hearing him spoken of, without knowing how he is, then you will easily understand what hardship there is in such an obligation. I will tell you candidly that during this time of waiting I have tried to forget you, for the memory of a person one believes one is never to see again, and whom one nevertheless greatly respects, torments the mind exceedingly and when one has suffered this kind of anxiety for one or two years, one is ready to do anything to regain peace of mind. I have done everything, I have sought occupations, I have absolutely forbidden myself the pleasure of speaking about you—even to Emily, but I have not been able to overcome either my regrets or my impatience—and that is truly humiliating—not to know how to get the mastery over one’s own thoughts, to be the slave of a regret, a memory, the slave of a dominant and fixed idea which has become a tyrant over one’s mind. Why cannot I have for you exactly as much friendship as you have for me—neither more nor less? Then I would be so tranquil, so free—I could keep silence for ten years without effort.

  Slave of a dominant and fixed idea which has become a tyrant over one’s mind: this was a penetrating self-analysis, and a “real confession” to make. How could Heger not have been arrested by it? Did he answer? Charlotte was expecting him to—the continuation of some kind of correspondence, however sporadic and circumscribed, seemed to be part of the compact. But what is also clear, as she draws towards the end of this monologue and faces another half-year of torment, is that Charlotte’s endurance was nearing its limit:

  Your last letter has sustained me—has nourished me for six months—now I need another and you will give it me—not because you have any friendship for me—you cannot have much—but because you have a compassionate soul and because you would not condemn anyone to undergo long suffering in order to spare yourself a few moments of tedium…[S]o long as I think you are fairly pleased with me, so long as I still have the hope of hearing from you, I can be tranquil and not too sad, but when a dreary and prolonged silence seems to warn me that my master is becoming estranged from me—when day after day I await a letter and day after day disappointment flings me down again into overwhelming misery, when the sweet delight of seeing your writing and reading your counsel flees from me like an empty vision—then I am in a fever—I lose my appetite and my sleep—I pine away.

  All this was in French, but she added a postscript in English: “I wish I could write to you more cheerful letters, for when I read this over, I find it to be somewhat gloomy—but forgive me my dear master—do not be irritated at my sadness.” Perhaps the articulation of her sorrow brought home to Charlotte the hopelessness of her situation, for the way she signs off has a poignant sense of intuiting it is for the last time: “Farewell my dear Master—may God protect you with special care and crown you with peculiar blessings.”

  When this heartbroken letter first came to public notice in 1913, along with the other three remaining ones, they created a sensation with their hints of hidden scandal in Brontë’s life, or at the very least a shamefully inappropriate unrequited love. The motivations of Monsieur Heger’s children, who donated the letters to the British Library (it was the Library that then publicised them, not the family), seem exemplary: they wanted the letters preserved for their literary and biographical value. What happened to the letters between the dates of arrival at the rue d’Isabelle in 1844–5 and their preservation under glass in Bloomsbury sixty-nine years later is more difficult to piece together. The story told by Madame Heger to her daughter Louise was that Constantin tore up the letters after he had read them and threw them away, whereupon Madame Heger retrieved them from the waste-paper basket, mended them carefully—one with tiny gummed paper strips, two with thread—and preserved them in her jewel box for fifty years. Louise, who had been shown the letters by her mother, found them again after Madame’s death in 1890 and gave them back to her father, who, apparently, tried to throw them away again.

  This account implies that the tearing up of the letters happened on or near receipt, as did their rescue from the bin and preservation by Madame Heger. Her motives, if she did this, would seem clear: the letters were ample proof of Charlotte Brontë’s irrationality, in case such was needed in future. But Heger showed or read the letters to Elizabeth Gaskell in 1856 when she interviewed him for her biography of Charlotte and copied out passages he felt happy for her to quote from. If they had been torn and mended at that date, Mrs. Gaskell would have been the first to notice. Her remark to George Smith that she should “deprecate anything leading to the publication of those letters” shows that she was conscious of the damage they could do to Charlotte’s reputation.

  The letters themselves hold a great deal of information in their very paper, in the way that three of them were torn and in the ways they were folded. The torn ones look as if they were “in little pieces” before mending, but, in truth, they only needed two tears across from their original folded four-page form to make the correct number of fragments—casual disposal, in other words. The last one wasn’t torn at all, but was obviously kept on Heger’s desk for a while and used by him as a piece of rough paper. Next to Charlotte’s pleas—“I am in a fever—I lose my appetite and my sleep—I pine away”—he has noted the address of a cobbler.

  Ignoring the tear marks and mending, something else is evident from the fold marks on the paper and signs of wear: these letters were folded again after they were read. They were stored somewhere, perhaps a pocket or drawer, that required them to be made smaller. They were not, in other words, torn up right away.

  In the years after Charlotte became famous, Laetitia Wheelwright met her again in London and asked if she was still in correspondence with Monsieur Heger. Charlotte told her that she had ceased to write to him after Monsieur had mentioned in one letter that his wife didn’t like it, “and he asked her therefore to address her letters to the Royal Athénée, where he gave lessons to the boys.” Could this be true? Did Heger, subsequent to Charlotte’s last letter, really suggest that they could carry on a surreptitious correspondence, behind his wife’s back and against her wishes? For him to have suggested it seems as extraordinary as Charlotte thinking it an appropriate thing to pass on to Laetitia Wheelwright; yet Laetitia had no doubt of Charlotte’s veracity: “She said [it] with the sincerity of manner which characterised her every utterance.”

  And what happened to the letters he wrote to her, “the only joy I have on earth”? Were they lost or destroyed in later years by Charlotte’s widower? Did she destroy them before or after her marriage? Like so much in that novel that seems to be a transposition of her own life, one scene in Villette is heavily suggestive of what Charlotte Brontë herself might have done. When Lucy Snowe comes to the realisation that she will have no more letters from Dr. John, she decides that they must be “put away, out of sight: people who have undergone bereavement always jealously gather together and lock
away mementos: it is not supportable to be stabbed to the heart each moment by sharp revival of regret.” She makes a little roll of the letters, wraps them in oiled silk and inserts them into a bottle, to be stoppered, sealed and rendered air-tight by an “old Jew broker.” “In all this I had a dreary something—not pleasure—but a sad, lonely satisfaction. The impulse under which I acted, the mood controlling me, were similar to the impulse and mood which had induced me to visit the confessional.” In the evening, Lucy steals out into the Pensionnat garden and buries the bottle in a hole under the oldest pear tree. “I was not only going to hide a treasure—I meant also to bury a grief.”

  * * *

  *1 He was suspected of fiddling the accounts at his next parish, Keighley, and emigrated to North America in 1848 under a cloud.

  *2 The only reference to it is in CB’s letter to Constantin Heger of 24 July 1844 (LCB 1, 358).

  *3 And was £10 more than Charlotte had been considering only weeks before (see LCB 1, 363).

  *4 Some commentators have suggested that Branwell’s “proceedings…bad beyond expression” might have involved sexual offences against his pupil Edmund Robinson, then fourteen, though Juliet Barker has countered this theory convincingly (Barker, 456–64).

  *5 Whose name is the same as a beck and dale near Hebden Bridge.

  TEN

  Walking Invisible

  1845–6

  When Charlotte wrote a biographical preface in 1850 explaining the origins of her sisters’ books, she made it clear that by 1845 they had fallen out of the habit of showing and sharing each other’s work, “hence it ensued, that we were mutually ignorant of the progress we might respectively have made.” Charlotte’s surprise was all the greater, then, when in the autumn of 1845 she stumbled across a notebook in Emily’s writing and found dozens of recent poems, including this:

  Riches I hold in light esteem

  And Love I laugh to scorn

  And Lust of Fame was but a dream

  That vanished with the morn—

  And if I pray—the only prayer

  That moves my lips for me

  Is—“Leave the heart that now I bear

  “And give me liberty”—

  Yes, as my swift days near their goal

  ’Tis all that I implore—

  In Life and death, a chainless soul,

  With courage to endure!—

  “[The poems] stirred my heart like the sound of a trumpet when I read them alone and in secret,” Charlotte said, remembering this pivotal discovery. Here was evidence of astonishing development, maturity and power, “not common effusions, nor at all like the poetry women generally write. I thought them condensed and terse, vigorous and genuine.” And this flowering of her sister’s genius had taken place entirely out of her sight—indeed, privacy and secrecy had been essential to its production, just as one can say they were essential to Charlotte’s reading—a reading that was surreptitious and unlicensed, and therefore unimpaired by the usual sisterly judgements and pecking orders. “To my ear, they had also a peculiar music—wild, melancholy, and elevating,” she wrote later; “no woman that ever lived—ever wrote such poetry before.”

  If Charlotte had been any less astonished by Emily’s poems, she is unlikely to have owned up to having snooped on them, for, as she said afterwards, her sister was not “one, on the recesses of whose mind and feelings, even those nearest and dearest to her could, with impunity, intrude unlicensed.” Emily, in fact, was furious at the invasion of her privacy and property: “it took hours to reconcile her to the discovery I had made, and days to persuade her that such poems merited publication.” No wonder that Emily resisted the idea of publication: many of the poems were intimately connected with her Gondal inventions, and even if they could be read or detached from their context (the poem above was eventually published under the title “The Old Stoic”), they came from that most private world, not entirely shareable even with Anne.

  As soon as the matter was out in the open, Anne produced a sheaf of her own, intimating (but not actually saying) that since Charlotte had enjoyed Emily’s poems, she might like these too. Anne shows a certain flair here for making the most of a situation that could have otherwise remained intractable due to Emily’s anger. Charlotte was turned to as judge and monitor, and the natural conclusion of this was that all three sisters decided to submit their work for publication together. Emily had one inflexible condition—that they remain strictly anonymous. They told neither their father nor their brother anything about the plan.

  It was not perhaps how Charlotte had envisioned her first book, during so many years of restless composition, but the discovery of Emily’s genius gave her a new focus and momentum. “We had very early cherished the dream of one day becoming authors,” she wrote later. “This dream, never relinquished even when distance divided and absorbing tasks occupied us, now suddenly acquired strength and consistency: it took the character of a resolve. We agreed to arrange a small selection of our poems, and, if possible, get them printed.”

  “The bringing out of our little book was hard work,” she recalled with dry humour five years later. “As was to be expected, neither we nor our poems were at all wanted; but for this we had been prepared at the outset.” The main difficulty was getting any answer at all from the publishers they approached, and, frustrated by this, Charlotte applied for guidance to Chambers of Edinburgh (the publishers of Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal, a weekly whose aim was to “instruct and elevate” the “intelligent artisan”). She received “a civil and sensible reply,” and it was presumably on Chambers’s advice that she approached the publisher Aylott and Jones, of Paternoster Row, asking if they would be prepared to publish “a Collection of short poems in 1 vol. oct[avo].”

  That first letter to Aylott and Jones was characteristic of all Charlotte’s correspondence with them: brief, businesslike and cautiously knowledgeable, suggesting that the author, if ignorant of certain “insider” information, at least understood her position. She learnt something from every exchange, immediately deploying every piece of new knowledge: “If you object to publishing at your own risk,” she asked the unknown young men in London, “would you undertake it on the Author’s account?” Aylott and Jones wrote back promptly, not out of interest in the text, which they had not yet laid eyes on, but because publishing “at the author’s risk”—vanity publishing, in essence—was, yes, very acceptable to them. They seemed, indeed, almost indifferent to what the contents of the proposed book might be, though had noticed the address of their correspondent, “C Brontë,” and wondered if the work was that of a clergyman. Charlotte wrote back saying no, nor were the poems “exclusively of a religious character,” adding, with a hint of irony, “but I presume these circumstances will be immaterial.” In retrospect, describing Emily’s heretical poetry as “not exclusively of a religious character” seems rather an understatement.

  The poems were to appear under pseudonyms, the choice of which “yielded some harmless pleasure” to the sisters. In each case they kept their initials intact: Charlotte was to be “Currer Bell,” Emily “Ellis Bell” and Anne “Acton Bell,”*1 deliberately androgynous-sounding names “dictated by a sort of conscientious scruple at assuming Christian names positively masculine, while we did not like to declare ourselves women, because—without at that time suspecting that our mode of writing and thinking was not what is called ‘feminine’—we had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice.” The Brontë sisters understood a great deal about the print culture of their day and its misogynistic bias, but it was also gloriously true that they had read and written, up to this point, with minds free of “what is called ‘feminine.’ ” At the point of publication, they instinctively moved to protect that freedom: “we had noticed,” Charlotte concluded, “how critics sometimes use for [women’s] chastisement the weapon of personality, and for their reward, a flattery, which is not true praise.”

  “C Brontë” gave no hint to
Aylott and Jones of the multiple authorship of the work in question until the manuscript was submitted, with the names Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell appended; “three persons—relatives,” she told the publishers, without explaining her own connection to them, or their gender. An anxious nine days passed before the sisters heard that their manuscript had reached Paternoster Row safely and that production could go ahead once the authors had chosen a type size and face. Charlotte had considerably overestimated the size of the finished book (she had guessed 200–250 pages; it came out at 165 in the end) but could not possibly have predicted the costs for this slim volume: Aylott and Jones wanted £31.10s., with another £5 further down the line. This was an enormous sum: just slightly more than the whole of Anne’s annual salary at Thorp Green, and a considerable bite out of each sister’s careful savings. The edition was of 1,000 copies, far more than any untried poets were likely to sell, but Aylott and Jones kept their opinion on that matter to themselves, and the Bells were sufficiently optimistic about their first step into print to go ahead as suggested.