Charlotte Brontë

by Claire Harman

  ELEVEN

  That Intensely Interesting Novel

  1846–8

  Charlotte Brontë was not an artist who could command her muse at will. She was too much a prey to her feelings, to her state of body and mind, and to circumstances. She told Elizabeth Gaskell that she composed her books in fits and starts:

  it was not every day that she could write. Sometimes weeks or months elapsed before she felt she had anything to add to that portion of her story which was already written. Then, some morning she would waken up, and the progress of her tale lay clear and bright before her, in distinct vision. When this was the case, all her care was to discharge her household and filial duties, so as to obtain leisure to sit down and write out the incidents and consequent thoughts, which were, in fact, more present to her mind at such times than her actual life itself.

  When Charlotte returned home from Manchester with her father at the end of September 1846, her new novel advanced in just that way, “clear and bright before her.” Taking on board the lesson of The Professor’s rejection, she had decided on “something more imaginative and poetical—something more consonant with a highly wrought fancy, with a native taste for pathos—with sentiments more tender— elevated—unworldly.” She went to the best source of strong feeling—her own—and in her story of an orphaned and unprotected girl made a return to her own childhood and its tragic losses, tapping into a vein of extraordinary power. Charlotte Brontë was essentially a poet of suffering; she understood every corner of it, dwelt both on and in it. In life, this propensity was a chronic burden; in her art, she let it speak to and comfort millions of others.

  Not that Jane Eyre is a melancholy book. Its predominant emotion is anger, rushing through Jane’s narrative of her life like the storm winds shaking the walls at Roe Head. It begins in the first pages, with Jane’s resolve “to go all lengths…like any other rebel slave,” continues through her defiance of the bullying teachers at Lowood School and propels her through her seemingly hopeless career with a belief that vengeance is due:

  Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth. Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags.

  Charlotte’s return to her childhood and its tragic losses—that of Maria depicted so minutely in the death of Helen Burns—was a sort of exorcism, powered by strong feelings. This gave a peculiar momentum to the first weeks of writing that left her in a fever, and compelled to pause. The astonishing vividness of Jane Eyre, not least its personal address and energy, derives a great deal from this articulation of long-pent-up sorrows, and the author’s identification with her unconventional heroine, a poor, plain, overlooked governess, licensed to speak for all underlings and trampled people. Jane was nothing like demure, correct, constrained Frances Henri in The Professor, with her meaningful silences and plan of gradual passive influence, but a girl pressed, like the author, into speaking her mind by ungovernable force: “it seemed as if my tongue pronounced words without my will consenting to their utterance: something spoke out of me over which I had no control.” Jane’s fear of transgressing is soon replaced by unbridled excitement, as she finds when she answers her manipulative and unloving aunt with a torrent of truth-telling:

  Ere I had finished this reply, my soul began to expand, to exult, with the strangest sense of freedom, of triumph, I ever felt. It seemed as if an invisible bond had burst, and that I had struggled out into unhoped-for liberty. Not without cause was this sentiment: Mrs. Reed looked frightened; her work had slipped from her knee; she was lifting up her hands, rocking herself to and fro, and even twisting her face as if she would cry.

  This could not have been more insurrectionary if it tried.

  The appearance of her heroine, as previously announced to Emily and Anne, was deliberately unbeautiful, to emphasise her absolute right to love. “[A]t eighteen most people wish to please,” Jane says, with significant understatement, “and the conviction that they have not an exterior likely to second that desire brings anything but gratification.” “I sometimes regretted that I was not handsomer: I sometimes wished to have rosy cheeks, a straight nose, and small cherry mouth; I desired to be tall, stately, and finely developed in figure; I felt it a misfortune that I was so little, so pale, and had features so irregular and so marked.”

  Her hero was meant to be imperfectly attractive too, though it is hard to keep that in mind as Edward Rochester rears into view through the mist on his black charger, a remarkable creation, combining Byronic cynicism, eloquence and wit with Zamorna’s physical charisma, domineering nature and dark past. Rochester is passionate but never brutal, masterful but also vulnerable—helpless indeed at the end, when he is reduced to a blinded, maimed shadow of himself. He is the demon-lover domesticated and made humble, but not enfeebled: he never once in the book utters a piece of piety or cant.

  With the massive literature of Angria and The Professor to her credit already, Charlotte had served as long and hard an apprenticeship as any writer could expect, but the perfection of Jane Eyre still takes one by surprise. The story itself is one of the most gripping ever written, and the telling of it effortlessly clever and assured: Adele’s childish prattle as she introduces herself to Mademoiselle guilelessly exposes Rochester’s chequered past; Mrs. Fairfax is both friendly and secretive; the mystery of Grace Poole, introduced as a social puzzle, diverts attention away from the careful placing of observations in what is essentially a detective novel avant la lettre. And, although the novel is thoroughly Gothic in its use of dark stairways, mad women, mysterious laughter, fire, exile, near-starvation—the whole glorious gamut, in other words—Jane’s resolute common sense, fatalism and instinct for the rational allow the enjoyment of all this “burning clime” material without degenerating into the incredible.

  Charlotte’s ability to enter trance-like into her own imaginary world comes through in Jane Eyre’s intensely dramatic, filmic scenes, such as the preparation of Thornfield for the house party, the rescue of Rochester from his burning bed, the interrupted wedding ceremony, the revelation of Bertha, snarling in her attic corner. These superb visions come as from the author’s mind straight to the reader’s inner eye. She also slips into the present tense at moments, just for a half-page at a time, surreptitiously drawing us into the action, into Jane’s thoughts. One such passage is when Jane returns to Thornfield after a month’s absence, attending her dying aunt. The step-by-step approach to the house alerts us, as it dawns on Jane, that “I have but a field or two to traverse, and then I shall cross the road and reach the gates. How full the hedges are of roses! But I have no time to gather any; I want to be at the house.” It is only when she catches sight of Rochester, whom she did not expect to meet, and “every nerve I have is unstrung” that she begins to comprehend her own eagerness to be home.

  There are other such strikingly modern touches, one as Proustian as Proust, when Jane re-enters the breakfast-room at Gateshead after ten years: “There was every article of furniture looking just as it did on the morning I was first introduced to Mr. Brocklehurst: the very rug he had stood upon still covered the hearth…The inanimate objects were not changed: but the living things had altered past recognition.” Elsewhere, Charlotte gives a brilliant description of a cognitive leap as Jane anticipates by a few seconds hearing the news that she and her beloved friends Diana and Mary Rivers (veiled portraits of Emily and Anne) are cousins:

  I stopped: I could not trust myself to entertain, much less to express, the thought that rushed upon me—that embodied itself,—that, in a second, stood out a strong, solid probability. Circumst
ances knit themselves, fitted themselves, shot into order: the chain that had been lying hitherto a formless lump of links, was drawn out straight,—every ring was perfect, the connection complete. I knew, by instinct, how the matter stood, before St. John had said another word…

  Not surprisingly, Monsieur Heger stalked the novel too, but obliquely. When Jane walks in the evening on the parterre, it is the scent of a cigar that announces the near presence of her dark-browed, choleric, volatile lover, and it is his wife (made over into an incarcerated fury, ready to kill for jealousy) who stands between Jane and her destined soul-mate. Rochester’s feelings of soul-unity with Jane are akin to Cathy’s with Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, but much more gently expressed. His image of the communicating cord was indeed rather apposite in a decade when the first experimental telegraph cables were being laid under the English Channel:

  I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you—especially when you are near me, as now: it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. And if that boisterous channel, and two hundred miles or so of land come broad between us, I am afraid that cord of communion will be snapt; and then I’ve a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly.

  Charlotte needed the comfort of her novel in hand to endure the difficulties of that winter. It’s hard to see how the household carried on, hunkered down with only one income to support six adults (counting Tabby, as they always did) and no prospect of any improvement. In December the appearance of a sheriff’s officer at the Parsonage, demanding payment of Branwell’s debts or “a trip to York,” i.e., gaol, shamed and mortified the whole family, apart from the miscreant, who let his sisters and father stump up again. “It is not agreeable to lose money time after time in this way,” Charlotte wrote grimly to Ellen, “but it is ten times worse—to witness the shabbiness of his behaviour on such occasions.” Visitors had to be kept away from the Parsonage because of Branwell’s volatility. On one occasion, it is said that he set his bed on fire, and was only rescued by Emily’s prompt action, a story that, if true, seems to have gone straight into Charlotte’s novel. In some remarks to J. A. Erskine Stuart many years later, Ellen Nussey implied that there was an unspoken point of no return that families recognised when dealing with their addict sons (hers had one, and so did the Taylors), and that she saw Branwell Brontë only once “after he became an inebriate,” “and then he was full of the most intense egotism and vanity.”

  The tailor’s son, Benjamin Binns, remembered seeing Branwell around this time “dragging his way home” of a night after leaving his boon companions at the Black Bull. Most of Branwell’s time was spent in bed, writing poems about his misery and doodling bleak, black caricatures in his letters to Leyland and on the drafts of poems. One shows him lying like a figure on a tomb, draped classically in a robe; one is a Promethean figure in hell-fire, bound at the wrists with the word “Myself” written beneath; one is a self-portrait as the convicted murderer Patrick Reid with a noose around his neck, awaiting execution. His last sketch is called A Parody and shows him lying exhausted in bed, being summoned to a bout with a skeleton, who has readied his fists but also looks as if he is thumbing his nose while saying, “The half minute time is up, so Come to the scratch; won’t you?”*1

  Branwell had ceased to consider his family at all. He dreaded his father’s death (which he presumed crassly would be fairly soon, due to age) because of the plunge into penury it would mean for himself, but he no longer felt capable of submitting to “a new lifes battle [sic],” as he put it, one more time. It is clear at this point that he had never seriously intended to submit to it, always secretly hoping and expecting to make his name, and a living, through art, literature or personal charm. His dreams of marrying the Lady of Thorp Green were in tatters, but his self-interest in that scheme now became fully exposed. As her husband, he told Leyland, he had hoped, “in more than competence” to “live at leisure to try to make myself a name in the world of posterity, without being pestered by the small but countless botherments, which like mosquitoes sting us in the world of work-day toil.” With massive egotism, he persisted in thinking that the only thing that prevented this convenient arrangement from going ahead was the intimidation of Lydia Robinson by her trustees and by terrific deathbed vows that Branwell imagined her late husband had extracted from her with his “ghastly dying eye.” The Robinson family doctor, on the other hand, was charged with returning Branwell’s unopened letters and advised him to give up soliciting Mrs. Robinson, “cost what it may.” Charlotte was fairly sure, from the gossip that came their way, that Mrs. Robinson now repented her “errors” vis-à-vis Branwell. All three sisters strove carefully to hide from him that the younger daughters were back in touch with Anne, and the news that in March 1847 Mrs. Robinson had moved away from Thorp Green to her cousin Lady Scott’s commodious home at Great Barr in Birmingham.

  —

  BY THE SUMMER of 1847 Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell’s queer three-part novel had been out to numerous publishers—and had come back with a refusal every time. To cheer themselves, and perhaps rouse the interest of a champion, the sisters reverted to their old tactic of aggressive solicitation and posted out some copies of Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell to their most admired authors, Wordsworth, De Quincey, Hartley Coleridge, J. G. Lockhart and the coming man, Alfred Tennyson. The same very amusing covering letter, with minor variations, was sent to them all. This is the one to De Quincey:

  Sir

  My Relatives, Ellis and Acton Bell and myself, heedless of the repeated warnings of various respectable publishers, have committed the rash act of printing a volume of poems.

  The consequences predicted have, of course, overtaken us; our book is found to be a drug; no man needs it or heeds it; in the space of a year our publisher has disposed but of two copies, and by what painful efforts he succeeded in getting rid of those two, himself only knows.

  Before transferring the edition to the trunk-makers,*2 we have decided on distributing as presents a few copies of what we cannot sell—we beg to offer you one in acknowledgment of the pleasure and profit we have often and long derived from your works—

  I am Sir

  Yours very respectfully

  Currer Bell.

  Did they think to start at least a topic of conversation between the Lake Poets by sending out these packages simultaneously and making a virtue of their gad-fly status? And did Charlotte imagine that Hartley Coleridge had forgotten his former correspondence with “CT” of Haworth, whose handwriting was identical to Currer Bell’s, or with Patrick Branwell Brontë, who had hailed from the same village?

  The sales of Poems crept with painful slowness from two copies in June 1846 to thirty-nine in September 1848, when the remaining stock (of 961 copies) was bought by Charlotte’s later publisher and reissued. It had more currency and influence than they ever knew, though. Among its early readers, unknown to the authors, was Richard Monckton Milnes, a well-connected amateur poet, bibliophile and MP for Pontefract, who took the book to Lea Hurst in Derbyshire in the autumn of 1846, and read some of it aloud to the young woman he was trying to woo, Florence Nightingale.*3 She was particularly struck by a poem she remembered as “The Captive” (“The Prisoner”):

  He comes with western winds, with evening’s wandering airs,

  With that clear dusk of heaven that brings the thickest stars.

  Winds take a pensive tone, and stars a tender fire,

  And visions rise, and change, that kill me with desire.

  And, though the courtship of Milnes ended in a refusal of marriage, Florence Nightingale’s intense interest in the “Bells” and their clarion call to action and liberty had just begun.

  And good news was on the way for Emily and Anne when they received a letter in July from Thomas Newby, of Cavendish Square, London, offering to publish Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey together as a three-volume nov
el. Whether or not Newby saw and rejected The Professor at the same time is unclear, as the books might have been going around separately before this, in response to their frequent rejections. He proposed that Wuthering Heights should take up the first two volumes and Agnes Grey the third, and that they should publish on a shared-risk basis, the authors putting down a £50 deposit towards the costs of production, repayable on sufficient sales. Though they had taken such a hit the previous year with Poems, Emily and Anne felt sufficiently optimistic to pay up this large sum. From what reserves it is hard to tell, as they had not sold or transferred any of the railway stock they inherited from Aunt Branwell, and in 1847, the year of Railway Panic, there could have been little or no profits from the investment. But they accepted the terms, and by early August the first proofs of their book were ready.

  Charlotte had by this time almost finished copying out her second novel, Jane Eyre,*4 but had still not found a home for The Professor. She sent it out yet again, with a note she must by this stage have tired of writing:

  Gentlemen

  I beg to submit to your consideration the accompanying Manuscript—I should be glad to learn whether it be such as you approve and would undertake to publish—at as early a period as possible.

  The publisher George Smith remembered the arrival of this package at his Cornhill office, because the author had gauchely used as a wrapper the same paper it had been out in many times before, so he could see the whole history of the manuscript’s rejection by fellow members of his trade. “This was not calculated to prepossess us in favour of the MS,” Smith recalled drily, but the package was handed to his colleague, William Smith Williams, who wrote back to Mr. Bell regretting that, though they didn’t want to publish The Professor, the manuscript “evinced great literary power,” which convinced him that “[the writer] could produce a book which would command success.” Looking back three years later, Charlotte recalled the thrill of receiving this letter, the first to respond to her novel with intelligent interest; “it declined, indeed, to publish that tale, for business reasons, but it discussed its merits and demerits so courteously, so considerately, in a spirit so rational, with a discrimination so enlightened, that this very refusal cheered the author better than a vulgarly expressed acceptance would have done.”