A Girl Walks Into a Book

by Miranda K. Pennington

  I think it wasn’t in Charlotte’s nature to be happy away from home, surrounded by strangers and strange ways. But I imagine she would have been the first to recognize how beneficial her time at the pensionnat was for her future career. However disheartened we both became during our times abroad, we each gained necessary skills, a new appreciation for the comforts of home, and a more evolved ability to withstand criticism.* As my semester in Jaipur neared its conclusion, what I wrestled with most was the feeling I’d failed—and failed hard—at my first capital-R romance.

  Charlotte went to Brussels and fell in love. I went to India and fell out of it. We had both picked the wrong men. The security of a high school sweetheart’s affection couldn’t compete with the intoxication of independence, or with those Indian men and their motorcycles. James and I were on opposite schedules, moving in different directions, and the long-distance phone calls that began as a treat had become an expensive chore. Plus, James’s playfulness was also immaturity; he was still merrily climbing trees, barefoot in a bathrobe while I was confronting the future, whatever it held. His disregard for public opinion, which I had found so liberating after high school, wasn’t so attractive to me as adulthood loomed on the horizon.

  We broke up over the phone, which was tacky but unavoidable—the alternative was dragging it out for weeks. I sat on the rooftop of the guest house where I was staying and watched neighborhood kids play with kites in the dusty street below as I told him I wanted to stay friends and apologized for his staggering phone bill. Later, I found out he launched into a new relationship immediately. When I heard about it, I left angry voicemails and petulantly asked for my tokens and letters back, despite having rebounded with a muscular man with tribal tattoos named Vivek who took me out in his Humvee to the remixed sounds of “Hotel California.” A few years later, long after the dust settled, one unfortunate night my entire family and I ended up right next to James and his family at a play; his relatives were cordial to me, but he switched seats to get as far away from me as possible. A few days later I got a spiteful email in which he unleashed all the hurt and rage he must have been feeling months and months before; I responded with a mix of penitence and confusion—I was sorry, and had behaved badly, but we were both better off. I never heard from him again.

  IN early October of 1843, Charlotte finally gave her notice. Afterward, she wrote to Ellen:

  Monsieur Heger—having heard of what was in agitation… pronounced with vehemence his decision that I should not leave—I could not at that time have persevered in my intention without exciting him to passion—so I promised to stay a while longer.…

  I have much to say Ellen—many odd little things queer and puzzling enough—which I do not like to trust to a letter, but which one day perhaps or rather one evening—if ever we should find ourselves again by the fireside at Haworth or Brookroyd with our feet on the fender—curling our hair—I may communicate to you.11

  Oh to be a fly on the wall by that fireside! I must be satisfied with the echoes of this moment in Jane Eyre and Villette, I suppose, though I feel so curious I can hardly contain myself. After three more months, Charlotte overrode Heger’s objections and departed for Haworth and home. When she arrived, she wrote,

  Dear Ellen,

  I cannot tell what occupies your thoughts and time—are you ill? is someone of your family ill? are you married? are you dead? if it be so you may as well write a word to let me know—for my part I am again—in old England. I shall tell you nothing further till you write to me.

  C Brontë

  Haworth 1844

  Write to me directly that is a good girl… 12

  Years later, Heger’s son donated four letters from Charlotte to Heger to the British Museum and suggested there must have been several more that have not survived. In the earliest extant one, from July of 1844, Charlotte apologizes for a previous letter that was “hardly rational, because sadness was wringing [her] heart.”13 She promises to be patient until he writes back to her, dancing on the line between eager and desperate. In the second letter, from October, Charlotte attempts to seem casual and disinterested, ostensibly writing merely to ascertain if her earlier letter had in fact been delivered. In the third letter, written in January of 1845, she loses her cool—

  Day and night I find neither rest nor peace—if I sleep I have tormenting dreams in which I see you always severe, always saturnine and angry with me.…

  I submit to all kinds of reproaches—all I know—is that I cannot—that I will not resign myself to the total loss of my master’s friendship—I would rather undergo the greatest bodily pains than have my heart constantly lacerated by searing regrets. If my master withdraws his friendship from me entirely I shall be absolutely without hope—if he gives me a little friendship—a very little—I shall be content—happy, I would have a motive for living—for working.14

  It’s uncharacteristic for Charlotte to allow herself to be so vulnerable, at least on paper. Brontë scholar Juliet Barker suggests it was writing in French that freed Charlotte from the constraints of modesty and self-restraint she would ordinarily be under.15 Charlotte comes to a close with, “I don’t want to reread this letter—I am sending it as I have written it,” which unconsciously imitates a letter written by her mother years earlier, who wrote to Patrick, “Enough of this; I must bring my pen to order, for if I were to suffer myself to revise what I have written I should be tempted to throw it in the fire, but I have determined that you shall see my whole heart.”16

  Charlotte’s final letter, from November of 1845, makes reference to a lost letter to which Heger must have replied, for she says, “Your last letter has sustained me—has nourished me for six months.”17 Charlotte has regained some of her composure; while she still admits that thoughts of Heger intrude upon her every waking moment, she only asks for news of his children, his school, and himself. She also admits his extended silences leave her miserable.

  Heger does not appear to have encouraged any future correspondence. In fact he tore Charlotte’s letters up and discarded them—they were found and stitched back together by his wife, Zoë, somewhat inexplicably. Did she anticipate needing them as proof? Did she perceive some attachment on her husband’s side, as Charlotte suspected? Or did she foresee Charlotte’s writing career? Brontë biographer Elizabeth Gaskell was able to gain access to these letters (or rather, to hear Heger read them aloud) and discussed them in her biography. She attempted to downplay the evidence of a young woman clearly in love with her married teacher that they contained. She noted that Heger seemed to have appreciated Charlotte’s talent, but she attributes the cooling off of the relationship between Charlotte and Zoë Heger to a difference of religion, delicately avoiding any further implications.18

  As a love-struck teenager I so wanted to believe that Charlotte had a great love affair with a man she respected, although nothing on paper confirms Heger’s feelings toward Charlotte were anything other than fatherly. The sad truth is Charlotte probably never experienced a love scene as good as the ones she wrote—though of course neither has anyone else I’ve known.

  Shortly after Charlotte came home, Anne Brontë resigned her governess position—she’d been working for the Robinson family for years. Branwell had been employed as the tutor to the family’s young sons, but was soon after fired for “proceedings… bad beyond expression,” which is the pre-Victorian euphemism for having an illicit affair with the mistress of the house.19 It was a scandal that, though hushed up by the Robinsons themselves, has essentially become Branwell’s legacy.

  Home together again, the sisters once again discussed the possibility of opening their own school—this time planning to board pupils at the Parsonage. They even went so far as making advertisement cards and writing to their former employers to secure pupils. But by the end of the year the low response rate forced Charlotte and her sisters to realize the futility of their school plan—plus, let us not forget, none of them actually liked teaching. So, the sisters began to consider othe
r ways of making money.

  I’m genuinely sorry the Brontës’ experiences with private households killed off their enthusiasm for running a school—I like to imagine myself in Charlotte’s Roe Head classroom, or having a cup of tea together in the teachers’ parlor, even still. It occurs to me as I think back on the Brontës’ work that perhaps they did get their school. And they didn’t even have to admit any boarders! They just had to write, and to live. Thousands of people have read their work, and dozens of those people became writers, inspired to create brave heroines, tell unconventional love stories, reign over imaginary nation-states, or simply to write, no matter what.

  I let my enthusiasm for the Brontës spill into everything I do, but especially teaching. When I talk to my students, I like to point to the Brontës as evidence that sometimes your first effort ends in disappointment. Sometimes your second effort tanks too. And even your third one. You may have to try one avenue, then another and another before you find the one that satisfies and sustains you. Charlotte’s desperation to forget Heger and take her mind off Branwell’s failures was likely a major factor in her next attempt at self-sufficiency: publication of the writing she and her sisters had been doing all along.

  Making the Rounds

  [In] dreary expectation of finding two hard hopeless lines… instead he took out of the envelope a letter of two pages. He read it trembling. It declined, indeed, to publish that tale, for business reasons, but it discussed its merits and demerits so courteously… that this very refusal cheered the author better than a vulgarly-expressed acceptance would have done.

  —Charlotte Brontë, “Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell,” 18501

  After I returned to the States, I took refuge in New York for the summer. Barb helped me get an internship with a book publisher and I took to it immediately—reading fledgling books out of the slush pile, sitting in on editorial meetings, even ferrying paperwork back and forth from production to marketing was thrilling. It was exciting to see how the literary sausage got made. The editors I worked for had eclectic tastes in projects, and I got to meet their authors and help with their book parties, draft cover copy, and make art logs. I loved hunting for new projects they’d like in the week’s submissions, reading their backlists, and hearing what it was like to spend days between the pages of books nobody has read yet.

  I lived with my aunt and uncle in White Plains, took the Metro-North train into Grand Central, and walked up Madison Avenue every day. I ate lunch next to a slab of the Berlin Wall where the Stork Club used to stand and passed St. Patrick’s Cathedral and the Waldorf Astoria on my way home. I remember the first time I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge; I made myself go all the way to the middle, despite wearing flip-flops, before I turned around to take in the view. What can you say about the skyline up close that hasn’t been said? It’s dizzying and glittering and somehow still makes me think of the tiny colonial seaport that used to cluster at the water’s edge. And then I turned to the left and saw the Statue of Liberty, who never fails to put a lump in my throat. The city made my still-painful breakup seem like an even better idea than it had been at the time. How could I ever have settled for only one year here?

  I promptly developed a crush on a fellow intern named Bianca, a New York native who knew every bartender from the Upper West Side to the East Village. We wheedled garish happy-hour margaritas out of T.G.I. Fridays waiters, charmed bouncers into waving us in without checking ID, sipped gin and tonics at hookah bars in Alphabet City, and stumbled around laughing uproariously until the next day, when we’d commiserate over our hangovers via Gchat and hope our bosses couldn’t smell alcohol through our pores. Bianca made me feel like I wasn’t some socially remedial weirdo. I could be cool, casual, and vivacious too—liberated from my usual prison of self-consciousness, capable of anything. I would try to carry some of that confidence with me when I returned to Ithaca in the fall. Thanks to that internship, my post-graduation plan had gone from a vague notion of freelancing somewhere to “become New York publishing editorial prodigy.”

  I finished my final semester of college, spent a month publishing theater reviews in the local papers, and had a fling with a townie ten years my senior. I’d gone to Ithaca to become a musical theater ingenue and found myself a writer embarking on my own odyssey. I graduated with a folder of clips, a fairly high-profile editorial internship under my belt, and a desire to take my place as a star in the publishing firmament. It did not precisely unfold as I would have liked. The course of true love, the literal and the literary, never did run smooth.

  COUNTER to the common legend that the Brontë sisters just so happened to be writing poems in 1845 in a magical confluence of chance and fate that catapulted them to stardom, Charlotte had been probing at the corners of a potential literary career for years (as had Branwell). In 1836 she sent some poems to the poet Robert Southey, who sent back an infuriating letter condescendingly explaining that women shouldn’t worry about being literary, for some man would be along to marry them soon enough:

  You… so ardently desire “to be for ever known” as a poetess.…

  The daydreams in [which] you habitually indulge are likely to induce a distempered state of mind.… Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life & it ought not to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure will she have for it, even as an accomplishment & a recreation.2

  This would not be the first time Charlotte heard such attitudes expressed—her own father’s novel, The Maid of Killarny, contained similar sentiments. Charlotte replied to Southey so graciously I have to wonder if she was actually making fun of him:

  I must thank you for the kind & wise advice you have condescended to give me. I had not ventured to hope for such a reply; so considerate in its tone, so noble in its spirit.… At the first perusal of your letter I felt only shame, and regret that I had ever ventured to trouble you with my crude rhapsody;—I felt a painful heat rise to my face, when I thought of the quires of paper I had covered with what once gave me so much delight, but which now was only a source of confusion; but, after I thought a little and read it again and again, the prospect seemed to clear. You do not forbid me to write; you do not say that what I write is utterly destitute of merit. You only warn me against the folly of neglecting real duties, for the sake of imaginative pleasures; of writing for the love of fame; for the selfish excitement of emulation.3

  Every time I read Southey’s letter I get livid. Firstly, the arrogance of some poet whose major contribution to literature was “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” making the author of Jane Eyre feel bad about writing poetry makes me ill. Secondly, why is she so polite? Then I started reading her response differently. Where at first I thought I heard sincerity in each line, I enjoy imagining every word dripping with sarcasm.

  She wrote back once more to assure him her ambition was “cured.” He replied again to urge her to “take care of over-excitement & endeavor to keep a quiet mind.”4 What could be less useful to a writer than a quiet mind?

  So, did she believe him? Charlotte did keep Southey’s letters and write “to be kept for ever” on the outside. But she also worked on at least five novels in the next ten years. In each one she spent time lambasting pompous blowhards who devalue the abilities of women as critical thinkers. She became a world-famous author and chose not to marry, despite several offers, until after she was well on her way to being “for ever known” so. She claimed the right for herself and her sisters to earn a living through their talents. She helped make a world where women can have a writing career and a respectable marriage. Maybe she thought of Southey the way I think of the classmate who read an autobiographical comic I had invested ink, tears, and months into and callously advised me to “stick to prose.” I tell my students that story every year now, to motivate them to be thoughtful, constructive, and empathetic in their feedback with one another.

  Maybe Charlotte had seen how Branwell’s more confrontational tactics had failed and decided to
try to catch literary flies with prosaic honey instead. His repeated letters to Blackwoods may have begun with humble compliments for the poetry of the Ettrick Shepherd, but by 1837 Branwell had become demanding and petulant. He had more success in reaching Hartley Coleridge, essayist, poet, and son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In 1840, Charlotte sent Coleridge a few chapters of her own novel in progress, Ashworth. It was a fairly Jane Austen–like tale of a French opera singer and her illegitimate daughter, presaging Jane Eyre’s Celine Varens and Adele. Coleridge told Charlotte her novel was unlikely to find a publisher. She wrote him a spectacularly strange letter back, in which she thanked him for writing and added that she was glad he couldn’t tell if she were male or female:

  As to my handwriting, or the ladylike tricks you mention in my style and imagery—you must not draw any conclusion from those—Several young gentlemen curl their hair and wear corsets—Richardson and Rousseau—often write exactly like old women—and Bulwer and Cooper and Dickens and Warren like boarding-school misses. Seriously Sir, I am very much obliged to you for your kind and candid letter.5