Charlotte Brontë

by Claire Harman

  The book was made up of sixty-one poems, of almost an equal number from each writer, though Charlotte’s contributions were notably longer than her sisters’: “Pilate’s Wife’s Dream,” the ambitious monologue that opened the volume, with its carefully wrought effects, all lamps, glowings, glimmers and chiaroscuro, was 156 lines long and “Mementos” 255 lines. Many of Charlotte’s poems dated from her time at Roe Head and included former Angrian material; some, like “Mementos,” were essentially amalgamations of works with similar themes—grief, longing, lost love, loneliness. No part of the Byronic epic by which she had hoped “to be forever known” was included.

  Charlotte had one particular reader at the front of her mind as she made her selection: Constantin Heger. Though she could hardly send him a physical copy of the book without breaking her promise to Emily (whereas she could, and I am sure did, send him her earlier, solo, French translation), her expectations were of some modest success, and she meant to ensure that if Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell ever fell into Heger’s hands, he would have little trouble guessing the authors. He would have had little trouble guessing too the impetus behind poems such as “Frances,” full of anguish at lost love, looking back to days of “Eden sunshine” and a cup of joy that “sank to dregs, all harsh and dim.” “Gilbert” would have had similar resonances, with its characterisation of a married man who has toyed with the affections of an emotionally susceptible young woman. Gilbert’s nature is not “to linger o’er the past,” so he remembers the name of his conquest with cold complacency rather than sorrow:

  He says, “She loved me more than life;

  And truly it was sweet

  To see so fair a woman kneel,

  In bondage, at my feet.

  There was a sort of quiet bliss

  To be so deeply loved,

  To gaze on trembling eagerness

  And sit myself unmoved.

  And when it pleased my pride to grant,

  At last some rare caress,

  To feel the fever of that hand

  My fingers deigned to press.

  ’Twas sweet to see her strive to hide

  What every glance revealed;

  Endowed, the while, with despot-might

  Her destiny to wield.

  But Gilbert’s domestic contentment is broken by visions of the rejected girl drowning, and when her ghost appears, dripping, at his door, he is filled with remorse for his heartlessness and commits suicide. As a form of wish-fulfilment for Charlotte, it was a bleak and vengeful one. “Frances” too indicates that her period of idealising Heger was over, and her former devotion was turning into anger. Frances has been the dupe of deferred hope as much as false love, as she realises at the end of the poem:

  And we might meet—time may have changed him;

  Chance may reveal the mystery,

  The secret influence which estranged him;

  Love may restore him yet to me.

  False thought—false hope—in scorn be banished!

  I am not loved—nor loved have been;

  Recall not, then, the dreams scarce vanished,

  Traitors! mislead me not again!

  —

  BY THE END of February, Charlotte felt it possible to take her first visit away from home in seven months, to Ellen at Birstall. Returning on the new train line to Keighley on 2 March, she walked the old road back to Haworth,*2 thereby missing Emily and Anne, who had gone to meet her the other way. Perhaps they had wanted to prepare her for what she would find at home: Branwell silent and stupefied in bed. He had wheedled a sovereign out of their father in her absence on the pretense of needing to pay a debt and “employed it as was to be expected.” “[It] was very forced work to address him,” Charlotte wrote bitterly to Ellen later. “I might have spared myself the trouble as he took no notice & made no reply.” What a sad image this is of the siblings who were formerly so close, one coldly disapproving and the other locked in sullen defiant silence. When Emily and Anne got home, two hours later and soaked to the skin, Emily said she thought Branwell had become “a hopeless being,” a rare criticism from that quarter. Charlotte’s response was less sorrowful than disgusted: “In his present state,” she wrote to Ellen, “it is scarcely possible to stay in the room where he is—what the future has in store—I do not know.”

  Given Branwell’s hopelessness, the question of what to do in the event of their father losing his sight was more pressing than ever, and while she was away Charlotte had been canvassing medical opinion among the Nusseys’ friends. She now tried to encourage him to submit to an eye operation, though Reverend Brontë was very fearful and glad to find excuses to defer any action as long as possible. His anxieties transmitted readily to his daughter, who told her cousin “we shall be most thankful when it is well over for there is something formidable in the idea.” Meanwhile, Patrick needed to be led to the pulpit to preach, a sight full of pathos to parishioners no doubt, many of whom knew all about the trouble their vicar was having at home and how withdrawn the Brontë family had become. Fortunately, Mr. Nicholls the curate was proving very kind and useful, took many of Reverend Brontë’s services for him and provided a discreet buffer between the parish and the Parsonage. He lodged at the house of John Brown the sexton, so must have been well aware of everything going on there, but he was loyally silent on all delicate matters.

  Thrown back on their resources, emotional and artistic, and desperately alert to the question of income, the sisters had made a bold decision while their poems were in production: not to wait for the reception of the book, but to press on immediately with trying to get their fiction before the public too. Charlotte was again the interlocutor for all three: the “Bells” were prepared to shape their work, she told Aylott and Jones, “three distinct and unconnected tales,” in whatever format would be most likely to appeal. Charlotte was trying to guess what that might be: “a work of 3 vols. of the ordinary novel-size, or separately as single vols.” She stipulated that they did not wish to be published at their own expense this time, but at the publisher’s risk. Clearly, the Bells expected Aylott and Jones to have been sufficiently impressed by their poems to be interested in a work of fiction from the same pens.

  The sisters got a discouraging answer about their proposed novel, but this was hardly surprising: Aylott and Jones were known for their theological works, not “light literature,” and, much more importantly, the novel that was being proposed must have sounded—and was—far too “unconnected” to be viable as a single publication. The three-volume model that was standard at the time was a substantial thing, typically of about 160,000 words. No one was likely to want to publish three much shorter books under one cover, nor publish them separately.

  If Aylott and Jones had asked to see the “three tales” they might well have been astonished, for volume one consisted of “The Master,” Charlotte’s novel about Brussels (retitled, at an unknown date, The Professor); volume two was Wuthering Heights; and volume three Agnes Grey. How Wuthering Heights as we know it could ever have been sandwiched comfortably between any two other stories is a moot question; it seems a strange arrangement on grounds of length alone, and the scholars Tom Winnifrith and Edward Chitham are surely right to guess that Emily expanded her story later, and that the version proposed in 1846 was much shorter, possibly ending with the death of the elder Cathy.*3 The Professor and Agnes Grey are both about the same length, approximately 70,000 to 80,000 words.

  How long Emily had been preparing Wuthering Heights, and whether it was connected to any of her Gondal chronicles, is not known. The opening chapters are some of the most gripping ever written in English romance, and it is amazing to think they came from the pen of a young woman whose gaze had been turned inward for so long and who seemed to have so little concern for popular taste. The novel is nothing like a love story in any ordinary sense. The bond between Cathy and Heathcliff comes from the mutual recognition of like souls, a psychic identification that has little to do with their circumstan
ces, and makes it almost redundant for the hero and heroine (if those words apply) to be paired off in the novel. Catherine tells the old housekeeper Nelly Dean, in a speech which has become one of the most famous and quoted in nineteenth-century literature, that she loves Heathcliff “because he’s more myself than I am…my love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath—a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff—he’s always, always in my mind—not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself—but, as my own being.” The reclusive and misanthropic second daughter of the Parsonage turned out to have a romantic vision more extravagant than any novelist before her. It was primal, visceral and decidedly heretical: “heaven did not seem to be my home,” Cathy says after she has dreamt of going there; “and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out, into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy.”

  In Charlotte’s tribute to, and defence of, the book later, it was clear that, while she admired many things about her sister’s novel, she also found it profoundly disturbing and difficult, as many other readers have too. Why was it so violent, so impious? Where had these brutish characters and coarse action come from? Charlotte discouraged the idea that Emily had had any personal experience similar to that in the book—Heathcliff’s beatings and incarcerations of his family, the long attritions played out against Hindley and Linton and the younger Catherine, the brutalising of Hareton—but it was almost as alarming to think that Emily had spun such things out of her own head. Emily seemed to have no idea how unconventional her resulting portraits were: “If the auditor of her work when read in manuscript, shuddered under the grinding influence of natures so relentless and implacable, of spirits so lost and fallen; if it was complained that the mere hearing of certain vivid and fearful scenes banished sleep by night, and disturbed mental peace by day, Ellis Bell would wonder what was meant, and suspect the complainant of affectation.” Even before it was published, there was a great deal about Wuthering Heights that made Charlotte uncomfortable.

  Anne Brontë’s contribution to the proposed three-decker made a jolting change of tone and style. Agnes Grey was a profoundly autobiographical account of the trials of a young governess, which she later claimed was “carefully copied from the life, with a most scrupulous avoidance of all exaggeration.” It is hard to see where Anne Brontë got her reputation for being “mild” and “quiet.” Her novels, as the next one was to show even more explicitly, are seething with irritation, and their trapped heroines find only the bleakest and bitterest comfort from their superior morals and sensibilities. Agnes Grey’s own impotence makes her a chilly and severe judge; her hope for her rival Rosalie’s dangerous beauty is that it will eventually lead her into such folly that she will be “incapacitated from deceiving and injuring others.” All Agnes’s virtues are expressed in the negative, and act out in peculiar forms, none more so than in the disgusting scene in which she crushes a nest of baby birds. Her collusion with Rosalie’s ruse to be alone with Mr. Hatfield is deeply cynical, as is her conclusion that beautiful but heartless women might have been created by an omniscient deity as a “useful” punishment for men, “as vain, as selfish, and as heartless.”

  The novel must have come as something of a revelation to Charlotte, who clearly saw in Anne’s exposé of governess life potential for better use of her own autobiographical experiences. Agnes is at every sort of worldly disadvantage—impoverished, unbeautiful, insignificant—but insists on her essential worth and holds to the belief that she is at least the equal of “her betters.” The happy ending, with marriage to the virtuous and delightful curate Weston (often imagined to be a portrait of William Weightman), triumphs over the tyranny of being judged on appearances, but the problem lingers in the reader’s mind long after the happy ending has been arranged. Although Agnes knows that “it is foolish to wish for beauty,” nevertheless she can’t help wishing she had some, if only to avoid the isolation or, worse, “instinctive dislike” that unbeautiful women constantly encounter.

  That Anne had experienced “a passion of grief” was clear also from Agnes’s heartfelt recollection of her own, when she feels that her love for Weston will never be recognised or reciprocated, a passage that would have provoked Charlotte’s assent: “Yes! at least, they could not deprive me of that; I could think of him day and night; and I could feel that he was worthy to be thought of. Nobody knew him as I did; nobody could appreciate him as I did; nobody could love him as I…could, if I might; but there was the evil. What business had I to think so much of one that never thought of me? Was it not foolish?…was it not wrong?”

  Here, and in Emily’s novel, was an emotional force that Charlotte had denied in her own first fiction in the effort to make it more acceptable, more “realistic.” But her sisters showed her how to move forward. Charlotte was always learning, watching, turning the lock to find the right combination. Putting together Anne’s autobiographical governess plot with her own story of Master and subordinate, and adding thrilling Gothic flights similar to those that made Wuthering Heights so electrifying, Charlotte began the process of creative amalgamation that would result in Jane Eyre.

  —

  ALL THREE NOVELS, The Professor, Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey, must have been well advanced by the date of Charlotte’s letter to Aylott and Jones of April 1846, enquiring about possible publication; her own manuscript was completed on 27 June. The Haworth bookseller, John Greenwood, had begun to stock stationery in his shop and later told Mrs. Gaskell how the demand for paper from the Brontë daughters at this time made him wonder what they were doing with so much of it. “I sometimes thought they contributed to the Magazines. When I was out of stock, I was always afraid of their coming; they seemed so distressed about it, if I had none.” Greenwood was so eager to oblige the Misses Brontë, whom he always found “much different to anybody else; so gentle and kind,” that he would rather walk the eight or ten miles to Halifax to fetch a half-ream than have nothing to sell them.

  Unknown to him, the dining room of the Parsonage had been turned into something like a book factory, as the sisters paced round the table, reading, listening and discussing each other’s work, and sat bent over their portable desks for hours, writing. “The sisters retained the old habit…of putting away their work at nine o’clock, and beginning their steady pacing up and down the sitting room,” Mrs. Gaskell heard later from Charlotte. “At this time, they talked over the stories they were engaged upon, and discussed their plots. Once or twice a week, each read to the others what she had written, and heard what they had to say about it.” Patrick Brontë never thought to inquire what they were doing. He was used to his children spending the greater part of their time together, his self-sufficiency being equal to their own. “I never interfer’d with them at these times,” he told Mrs. Gaskell. “I judged it best to throw them upon their own responsibility.”

  Charlotte admitted to Elizabeth Gaskell that she had rarely changed anything in her work because of her sisters’ opinions; indeed, her creation of Jane Eyre as a plain and insignificant-seeming heroine, she said, was in direct defiance of them, though this is hard to square with Anne’s characterisation of Agnes Grey, whom Jane resembles quite closely. Charlotte told fellow novelist Harriet Martineau that she had “once told her sisters that they were wrong—even morally wrong—in making their heroines beautiful as a matter of course. They replied that it was impossible to make a heroine interesting on any other terms. Her answer was, ‘I will prove to you that you are wrong; I will show you a heroine as plain and as small as myself, who shall be as interesting as any of yours.’ ” This sounds less like collaboration than invigorating competition. Emily had seen no reason for anyone to lose sleep over her depiction of Heathcliff, and had no intention of changing it accordingly. Charlotte was just as inflexible and “possessed…with the feeling that she had described reality.” Nevertheless, the nocturn
al readings in the Parsonage dining room were “of great and stirring interest to all.”

  —

  ALL THAT YEAR, the sisters had been hoping for some improvement in Branwell’s situation, preferably his removal from the house: “how can we be more comfortable so long as Branwell stays at home and degenerates instead of improving?” Charlotte wrote to Ellen. He had been offered his old job back on the railway, a rather remarkable break, which Charlotte of course expected him to seize on with gratitude, but Branwell was in no state to respond. “He refuses to make an effort,” she wrote in disgust; “he will not work—and at home he is a drain on every resource—an impediment to all happiness—But there’s no use in complaining.”

  Branwell felt equally affronted at “the inability to make my family aware of the nature of most of my sufferings.” But while he lay in bed, planning an epic poem called “Morley Hall,” which kind Leyland had suggested and probably commissioned (it was to be based on a story in Leyland’s own family history*4), Charlotte continued as his secret scourge, punishing him for his own disabling vanity and pernicious addiction by keeping him entirely unaware of what his sisters were doing. He “never knew,” Charlotte said later, “what his sisters had done in literature—he was not aware that they had ever published a line.” It was a most peculiar revenge, and one that, in the years following his death, she had no desire to recall. But in these months, while she was finishing The Professor, her feelings could not be entirely contained, as this outburst, utterly unrelated to the action of the novel, indicates:

  if we rarely taste the fulness of joy in this life, we yet more rarely savour the acrid bitterness of hopeless anguish…God, spirits, religion can have no place in our collapsed minds where linger only hideous and polluting recollections of vice; and Time brings us on to the brink of the grave and Dissolution flings us in—a rag eaten through and through with disease, wrung together with pain, stamped into the churchyard sod by the inexorable heel of Despair.