Her father’s hysterical letters to her from home showed a bizarre assumption that, on the subject of her suitor, they thought as one. Nicholls, he felt sure, had exposed his “dangerous designs” and was no longer to be trusted: “His conduct might have been excus’d by the world, in a confirmed rake—or unprincipled army officer, but in a Clergyman, it is justly chargeable, with base design and inconsistency…[I] wish that every woman may avoid him, forever, unless she should be determined on her own misery.” In case Charlotte hadn’t got the message, he wrote another horribly cloying letter, in the character of Flossy, reporting on the seducer’s “manoeuvres” witnessed from a doggy vantage point: “I see people cheating one another, and yet appearing to be friends—many are the disagreeable discoveries, which I make…Ah! My dear Mistress, trust dogs rather than men—They are very selfish, and when they have the power, (which no wise person will readily give them) very tyrannical.” Patrick Brontë clearly thought this clever and charming and the warning about tyrannical men not in the least bit applicable to himself.
Nicholls had been making anxious inquiries to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel about the progress of his application, but towards the end of February asked if they could suspend the process indefinitely, as “some doubts have occurred to me as to the desirability of leaving the country at present.” He seems to have decided to stand his ground—though not ground in Haworth: he had applied for a separate curacy at Kirk Smeaton, about twelve miles away and was to move there in June. In the meantime, his increasingly melancholic and erratic behaviour was causing gossip in the village. He was said to sit in his rooms alone for hours, or take his long face on glum solitary walks. When forced into the company of Reverend Brontë, he was surly and snappish and had caused raised eyebrows by his withdrawn manner when the Bishop came to stay in March. Charlotte had begun to worry about “that dark gloom of his” and that he had followed her along the lane after church, also stopped her in the passageway on the Bishop evening, forcing a strategic retreat upstairs. Martha had noted his “flaysome” looks on that occasion, and developed a very unflattering view of Nicholls’s character. The only person he saw was his friend Sutcliffe Sowden, curate of Oxenhope, but he had spread no stories about his rebuff at the Parsonage; “I own I respect him for this,” Charlotte told Ellen.
I pity him inexpressibly. We never meet nor speak—nor dare I look at him—silent pity is just all I can give him—and as he knows nothing about that—it does not comfort…alas! I do not know him well enough to be sure that there is truth and true affection—or only rancour and corroding disappointment at the bottom of his chagrin. In this state of things I must be and I am—entirely passive. I may be losing the purest gem—and to me far the most precious—life can give—genuine attachment—or I may be escaping the yoke of a morose temper—In this doubt conscience will not suffer me to take one step in opposition to Papas will—blended as that will is with the most bitter and unreasonable prejudices. So I just leave the matter where we must leave all important matters.
Charlotte felt powerless, but was hardly as entirely passive as she claims. Warned by her father so melodramatically about Nicholls’s malignant temper and dark designs, she was on the look-out constantly for evidence to the contrary and, all through these uncomfortable months while he was waiting to leave Haworth, took the opportunity to assess his demeanour. She soon had proof of his feelings (and felt “punished” for her doubts of him), when, on Whit Sunday, taking the communion service for the last time in Haworth, Nicholls lost control of himself in church and began to shake and falter when he saw Charlotte at the rail. “[He] stood before my eyes and in the sight of all the communicants white, shaking, voiceless.” The parish clerk had to have a word with him, but Nicholls could only whisper the rest of the service. Several ladies in the congregation were moved to tears by this spectacle, and Charlotte herself was almost overcome, but when Reverend Brontë heard of these shameless displays of sentimentalism, his response was to call Nicholls an “unmanly driveller.” “Compassion or relenting is no more to be looked for than sap from firewood,” Charlotte remarked bitterly to Ellen. A further point in Nicholls’s favour was his refusal to suggest any criticism of Patrick Brontë when quizzed by curious parishioners, though Charlotte couldn’t help noticing his continued chilliness towards her father in person. A snub at the school’s tea-drinking was the sort of public discourtesy that she knew Papa would “never…forget or forgive.” “I am afraid both are unchristian in their mutual feelings,” Charlotte wrote sadly to Ellen, stuck in the middle of this battle of wills. “Nor do I know which of them is least accessible to reason or least likely to forgive. It is a dismal state of things.”
—
NICHOLLS LEFT HAWORTH on 27 May, having received a handsome gold watch from the parish and Sunday School in recognition of his eight years of service. Not surprisingly, Patrick Brontë found himself indisposed on the day of the presentation and did not attend. Nicholls delivered the deeds of the school to Reverend Brontë on the evening before his departure, but his hopes of seeing Charlotte to say goodbye were thwarted by her sitting room being occupied by the servants, who were washing down the paintwork. Charlotte didn’t want to see Nicholls in her father’s presence, so said she was not available; however, when she surreptitiously watched him leave the house for what he imagined was the last time, she noticed that he lingered near the garden gate, in obvious distress. Her heart went out to him:
remembering his long grief I took courage and went out trembling and miserable. I found him leaning again[st] the garden-door in a paroxysm of anguish—sobbing as women never sob. Of course I went straight to him. Very few words were interchanged—those few barely articulate: several things I should have liked to ask him were swept entirely from my memory. Poor fellow! but he wanted such hope and such encouragement as I could not give him. Still I trust he must know now tha[t] I am not cruelly blind and indifferent to his constancy and grief.
Though Charlotte believed she could and had not encouraged Nicholls at this tender moment, he was made of sterner stuff, and clearly stored the scene away with renewed hope, however small. Charlotte, on the other hand, felt much worse at their parting, waking up as she was to her own feelings. She did not even know where Nicholls’s new curacy was going to be, and saw no chance of hearing anything more about him, except through second-hand sources and gossip, the worst possible channels. She had to revert to her lonely life with her father, and, worst of all, witness his voluble relief at having routed the interloper, for, as she told Ellen, Patrick Brontë remained “implacable” on the subject of the wily curate.
Following Nicholls’s departure, Charlotte became ill with influenza, exacerbated by a continued headache and other nervous symptoms that left her so “weak and bewildered” that she had to put off a visit by Elizabeth Gaskell that she had been looking forward to. Her father was also ill, and, despite his late shameful behaviour in relation to her, Charlotte’s compassion and anxiety for him were still intact. When one evening she heard him call her name, she rose from her sickbed and found him “strangely arrested” on the stairs, holding a candle but saying that he could see nothing. The old terror of losing his sight gripped both of them, and, though Patrick began to recover the next day, saying “it seemed as if a thick curtain was gradually drawn up,” the incident served to make any travel away from home impossible.
Ellen filled the need for companionship by coming to stay at the Parsonage in late June, but the visit proved an unhappy one for their friendship. Charlotte had a great deal to share about the distressing events of the past few months, and Nicholls’s departure from Haworth. Her letters to Ellen about the proposal and its aftermath had, as ever, been frank and vivid, but may have veiled the intensity of her feelings, and her growing regrets that the relationship seemed to be over. All this became evident to Ellen when she saw her friend face to face, and she took it as signs of weakness and defection. Perhaps Charlotte had already received one of the
“very miserable” letters she later told Catherine Winkworth that Nicholls had written to her from exile, which she had answered by saying he must submit to his lot as well as he could. Nicholls carefully kept this line of communication open.
Charlotte certainly seemed to be thinking more sympathetically than ever of the former curate now that he was gone, and Ellen didn’t like it. Ellen’s misgivings about him as a potential husband for her friend are understandable: she had known Nicholls for the past eight years and didn’t find him at all exciting—more to the point, Charlotte had hardly had a good word to say for him all that time. Having been privy to so many intimate conversations over the years, and the recipient of so many confiding letters, Ellen might well have felt the full force of Charlotte’s inconsistency and been piqued or disturbed by it. It downgraded her own consistency and fidelity. Whatever the exact grounds for their falling-out, it is clear that she and Charlotte quarrelled seriously for the first time ever, either during her visit to Haworth in July 1853 or soon after, and no letters exist from this time until eight months later.
Simple jealousy must have also played its part in the rift, as Ellen knew she would be significantly sidelined if Charlotte fell in love or got married. At the age of thirty-six (she was one year younger than Charlotte almost to the day) Ellen had got used to the idea of being an old maid and wrote complainingly to Mary Taylor about Charlotte abandoning their supposed joint fate, and how she would be best off “bearing her position” and “enduring to the end” without Mr. Nicholls disturbing everything. It was a pity that Charlotte couldn’t have seen Mary Taylor’s sharp reply: “You talk wonderful nonsense abt C. Brontë in yr letter,” Mary scolded.
If its C’s lot to be married shd n’t she bear that too? or does your strange morality mean that she shd refuse to ameliorate her lot when it lies in her power. How wd. she be inconsistent with herself in marrying? Because she considers her own pleasure? If this is so new for her to do, it is high time she began to make it more common. It is an outrageous exaction to expect her to give up her choice in a matter so important, & I think her to blame in having been hitherto so yielding that her friends can think of making such an impudent demand.
By the time this reached Birstall, in the summer of 1854, much of its force would have been spent; Mary knew that she was essentially talking out loud in her home above the shop she was running in Wellington, New Zealand, on the other side of the world. But what she lost in dialogue, she made up for in truth-telling.
Back when Ellen wrote to Mary, though, in the summer of 1853, Charlotte was becoming increasingly isolated herself. Arthur Nicholls had removed to Kirk Smeaton, Ellen was estranged, she had broken friends with Harriet Martineau and felt so much that her influence over George Smith was on the wane that she wrote to chide him over his negligence of her, making clear her own upset and anger: “when you turn with distaste from the task of answering a friendly letter…let me just say, though I say it not without pain, a correspondence which has not interest enough in itself to sustain life—ought to die.” Pressure of work was insufficient explanation for the falling-off of Smith’s correspondence since the publication of Villette. Had she heard somehow, or sensed, that his thoughts were elsewhere—that he had in fact fallen madly in love? For, in the months since her visit to London (which turned out to be her last), Smith had met young, lovely Elizabeth Blakeway, the woman he would propose to later that year.
—
WITH ALL THE TIME in the world to be writing, Charlotte was doing very little. In the spring of 1853, with Villette successfully published, she made the surprising announcement to Elizabeth Gaskell that she was “not going to write again for some time,” though the next month, she wrote the fragments now known as “The Story of Willie Ellen,” a return to the theme of two rival brothers. It did not, however, get far—just a dozen or so pages.
After reading Elizabeth Gaskell’s sprightly Cranford in July 1853 (and now knowing what a frenetically busy home life Gaskell managed as well as writing) she asked, “Do you…find it easy, when you sit down to write—to isolate yourself from all those ties and their sweet associations—[so] as to be quite your own woman—uninfluenced, unswayed by the consciousness of how your work may affect other minds—what blame, what sympathy it may call forth? Does no luminous cloud come between you and the severe Truth—as you know it in your own secret and clear-seeing Soul?”
Deprived of her usual resource in Ellen, Charlotte went to stay with Miss Wooler in Hornsea in October, and accompanied Joe Taylor, his wife Amelia and baby “Tim” (the nickname for their daughter) on a trip to Cumberland. She clearly felt at home neither with undiluted maiden-ladyhood nor with the young parents, and remained a sarcastic observer of the Taylors’ fussy modern manners: “Papa and Mamma could only take their meals, rest and exercise at such times and in such measure as the despotic infant permitted. While Mrs. J. eat her dinner, Mr. J—relieved guard as nurse. A nominal nurse indeed accompanied the party, but her place was a sort of anxious, waiting sinecure, as the child did not fancy her attendance.”
Elizabeth Gaskell’s deferred first visit to Haworth in September was much more to Charlotte’s taste and an opportunity to release herself into intimacy, for however brief a time. Gaskell wrote one of her headlong letters to John Forster soon after she got home to Plymouth Grove, crammed with details of her week at Currer Bell’s home, the wild situation, the “pestiferous” churchyard, with the graves peering over the wall of the Parsonage garden and the wind that half blew her back from the door. Everything within doors was warm and welcoming, though, and scrupulously clean and tidy; Miss Brontë was clearly very particular, and anything out of place would have annoyed her sense of order.
The romance of the place, and of Miss Brontë’s tragic life, struck Gaskell very forcibly and seems to have excited in her the possibility of writing about it all one day. The extraordinary detail of her letter to Forster, and of those to other friends such as Catherine Winkworth and Emma Shaen on the same subject, certainly looks like the salting-down of impressions, and Gaskell did in fact use parts of her own letters almost verbatim in the biography she eventually wrote three years later. The essence of that book is already present in her description to Forster of the wind “piping & wailing and sobbing round the square unsheltered house in a very strange unearthly way,” of Mr. Brontë’s queer formality and habit of dining alone “(fancy it! only they two left),” of his habit of putting a loaded pistol in his pocket “just as regularly as he puts on his watch. There was this little deadly pistol sitting down to breakfast with us, kneeling down to prayers at night—to say nothing of a loaded gun hanging up on high ready to pop off on the slightest emergency.” There was the sensual appeal of the place too, so evocative of the sisters’ untamed spirits. “Before tea we had a long, delicious walk,” Gaskell reported,
right against the wind on Penistone Moor which stretches directly behind the Parsonage going over the hill in brown & purple sweeps and falling softly down into a little upland valley through which a “beck” ran; & beyond again was another great waving hill,—and in the dip of that might be seen another yet more distant, & beyond that she said Lancashire came; but the sinuous hills seemed to girdle the world like the great Norse serpent, & for my part I don’t know if they don’t stretch up to the North Pole.
Elizabeth Gaskell wasn’t to know it at this point, but Charlotte had taken her to her sisters’ favourite spot, “The Meeting of the Waters.” Coming back across the moor, Charlotte showed her some of the desolate farms and told stories that thrilled her friend, “such wild tales of the ungovernable families, who lived or had lived therein that Wuthering Heights even seemed tame comparatively.” She also pointed out several newly built churches in the distance, places “which her Irish curates see after.”
Having such an eager, intelligent friend was remarkably like a return of sibling warmth and affection, and the two women stayed up late talking every night, for Charlotte’s life-circumstances fascinated
her guest. Elizabeth Gaskell saw the family graves in the church and spoke to Tabby and to Martha about Emily and Anne, whose portrait by Branwell she was shown.
Tabby says since they were little bairns Miss Brontë & Miss Emily & Miss Anne used to put away their sewing after prayers, [“]& walk all three one after the other round the table in the parlour till near eleven o’clock. Miss Emily walked as long as she could; & when she died Miss Anne & Miss Brontë took it up,—and now my heart aches to hear Miss Brontë walking, walking on alone.” And on enquiring I found that after Miss Brontë had seen me to my room, she did come down every night, & begin that slow monotonous incessant walk in which I am sure I should fancy I heard the steps of the dead following me.
Charlotte must have found comfort in having these sad secret habits shared at last with an astute and loving friend.
Charlotte confided in Elizabeth Gaskell about Arthur Nicholls too, and must have told her that he had come back to Haworth earlier that month, hoping to revive his suit, and that he had been writing to her occasionally. Although it disturbed Charlotte to be withholding this news from her father, she clearly welcomed the return of interest from Nicholls, and the chance to make up for the pain of his departure in June. Elizabeth Gaskell felt emboldened to go behind her back, when she returned to Manchester, with an initiative to improve Nicholls’s income and prospects, and make him more appealing to Patrick Brontë as a son-in-law. Swearing him to secrecy, she enlisted the help of her friend Richard Monckton Milnes, who, in January 1854, under the auspices of the Vicar of Leeds, travelled to Kirk Smeaton to offer the curate two posts, one in Scotland and one in Lancashire. Milnes reported back to Mrs. Gaskell that Charlotte Brontë’s would-be spouse was “a strong-built, somewhat hard-featured man, with a good deal of Celtic sentiment about his manner & voice—quite of the type of the Northern Irishmen,” but that he had seemed despondent, “sadly broken in health & spirits,” and had refused both the proffered jobs. Nicholls was privately puzzled by the visit, as he had no idea who Milnes was, or that strings were being pulled on his behalf. But, putting two and two together, he must have been encouraged by the idea that his situation had been noted, and that Charlotte was somehow involved. He lost no time in pressing to be allowed to visit her again.
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