A Girl Walks Into a Book

by Miranda K. Pennington

  I was shown into the research library (which meant crossing the velvet rope and getting to walk through the Brontës’ kitchen!), where the library and collections officer had laid out some of the Brontës’ own books for me. I slipped on a pair of white cotton gloves and dove into their copy of Goldsmith’s Geography. Charlotte signed her name twice on its inside cover and filled the flyleaves with sketches and doodles. She, or Emily or Anne, added their place names to the index (Gondal, and perhaps Glass Town?).

  I was filled with love and affection for her. This is the whole point of primary research—to be surprised and delighted by things you can only discover in person. Geography showed me how she came to learn about far-off places, and how she felt she could know them despite not having traveled there. In addition to short narrative descriptions, the book features illustrations of cities and clothing, invokes poets to describe the scenery when appropriate, and includes editorial observations to enliven what might otherwise have been a fairly dry recounting of people and places. It makes total sense she and her siblings would have been interested in establishing their own countries and making games out of historical figures—these were their toys.

  Figure 14.1: Doodles in the flyleaf of Goldsmith’s Geography.

  PHOTO COURTESY OF THE BRONTË PARSONAGE MUSEUM.

  Why does Charlotte Brontë come to life in the pages of a little geography book she doodled on and not in the very room she died in? Virginia Woolf said, referring to the clothing on display, that it was because “the natural fate of such things is to die before the body that wore them, and because these, trifling and transient though they are, have survived, Charlotte Brontë the woman comes to life, and one forgets the chiefly memorable fact that she was a great writer.”8 When Charlotte doodled in that little book, and Anne annotated its index, they gave it pieces of themselves that still endure, not as Great Writers, but as curious, engaged young girls. I’m touching something Charlotte touched, bracing it with my hands where she might have held it, as she sketched a fine lady in a long gown. Nobody has repapered over the book or moved its furnishings around. They didn’t have to reconstruct it from their best period estimates. It was already here. Charlotte drew her thoughts and when I look at them, I see what she was thinking, and thus she is alive again for a moment.

  When I stand where she stood, hold what she held, and hear things she might have heard (the gusting wind on the moors, for example) I can almost forget there are no living reminders of Charlotte Brontë left. Or that none of us have the luxury of leaving our actual selves behind, outside the pages of our books or the canvas of our artwork. People left graffiti on the staircase of St. Paul’s to make their mark, so we know they were there. And sometimes that’s as permanent a memento as we can hope for.

  For the preservation of Haworth we have the hard work of the Brontë Society to thank. It was formed in 1893 and immediately became responsible for obtaining and preserving every scrap of Brontëana that it could get. Its first president was the Right Honorable Earl (later Marquess) of Crewe, Robert Offley Ashburton Crewe-Milnes.9 The collection became the largest in the world upon the sudden death of collector and publisher Henry Houston Bonnell, who bequeathed to the museum his extensive collection of Brontë manuscripts, letters, first editions, and personal effects in 1926.

  There is an amazing body of scholarly work in the Society’s transactions, essays, research, and transcriptions of first-person accounts. My favorites are the narratives from early visitors to Haworth, who came to visit while Arthur Nicholls and Patrick Brontë were still alive. Everyone talks about those hills. The lucky ones sat in the Haworth church to hear Patrick or Arthur preach, and a few were invited into the Parsonage to talk to Patrick afterward. Their accounts of the village’s grimness and its surroundings are generally pretty dramatic, though some do acknowledge it was pretty in summer. People seem to have the hardest time believing the Brontë children could ever have been cheerful. Even though I get to see Brontë relics too, how jealous I am of all the early Brontë fanatics who got to hear stories directly and handle all the mementos themselves, sitting in the kitchens and parlors of neighbors. They got to speak with maids at the Black Bull and sextons to whom Branwell owed money, and shopkeepers who sold the Brontës their paper.

  When I’d absorbed as much Brontë communion as I could take for one day, I went back to the guesthouse to check on Eric. He felt like his throat was closing up and it was becoming difficult to swallow. I spoke with our host, feeling fairly confident leeches weren’t still Haworth’s best option for medicine, and he directed us to a “surgery” just around the corner. I felt worried until I realized “surgery” is the British word for clinic. The doctor there sent us to a specialist at the Bradford Royal Infirmary because he was afraid Eric’s throat ailment was quinsy. This was hard to hear, but it felt great to say it in my fake British accent, because we don’t have “Royal Infirmaries” in America and nobody gets quinsy (KWIN-zay) anymore. I felt a pit of dread in my stomach when he told us to look for the “casualty unit,” until I found out it was British for “emergency room.”

  We took a cab to Bradford, the next town over, which is a thriving metropolis compared to quiet, hilly Haworth. I spent a lot of the ride reassuring Eric that quinsy almost never needed surgery (it often does) and that it had absolutely not killed George Washington (it definitely did). On a positive note, we got to see Yorkshire countryside we’d never have seen without a visit to the hospital. A miserable evening on the ENT ward later, Eric was diagnosed with tonsillitis and sent home with antibiotics and baby Tylenol, since the pharmacy was closed and they wanted us to at least have something to get through the night with. Bless you, socialized medicine.

  OUR second day in Haworth, Eric was still in pain and elected to stay in bed. I had a stroll through the freezing church, which was unlocked and only inhabited by a long-haired black cat, who’d taken up residence on a fifty-pence book table near the entrance. I saw the Brontë memorial marble plaque, which had been preserved from the original church. Even if it was for space reasons, I’m miffed that Branwell gets his own line. Anne is the only missing member, as she was buried at Scarborough.

  Charlotte’s pew is long gone, and the reconstruction pews aren’t nearly as quaint. There were a variety of postcards and photos for sale, surrounded by disheartening pleas for financial support. I dropped a pound coin in the box and petted the cat gingerly; it felt like I quite had Brontë Country to myself for the morning.

  Eric’s throat was even more swollen when I finished reading Goldsmith’s Geography, which blithely asserted that calf-sized American elephants could be found in the New World, and Brontë Society Transactions for the afternoon, so back to Bradford we went, to see a doctor, who teased us for giving Eric’s weight in pounds (“Don’t you speak proper English?” he asked dryly. “Is it… stones?” I said, tentatively. “Kilograms,” he replied, with playful disdain. Even my medical references are from outdated literature). Then he gave Eric steroids to reduce the swelling so the antibiotics could do their work.

  It was a characteristically Haworthian day, gray and cloudy with occasional rain. The grimness of the landscape seeped into my imagination and I envisioned the glorious misery of a plane ride home alone to explain that Eric had caught a case of the Brontës and perished on Haworth moor. Amazingly, two hours after taking his first dose of steroids Eric sat up, announced he was hungry, and ate all of our remaining rolls (pronounced tea cakes). The next morning he woke up before I did, still ravenous. Modern medicine had worked its magic, the sun had burnt off the fog, and I was quite happy to say goodbye to that particular realm of Brontë overidentification.

  MY third day, I dove into the Blackwoods magazines, starting with 1825, when Charlotte was nine. These are the magazines on which she and Branwell based their own hand-sewn versions. I found evidence of articles and stories she certainly must have read—the burning of Indian widows; folktales with brownies, fairies, and witches; essays about the life of the Du
ke of Wellington. There was advice for bachelors and unmarried women, a great deal of satire, poetry, history, dispatches from all over the British Empire, open letters to the editor, political essays, debates on women’s rights, and brief installments of novels and plays. The bound-up editions of the actual magazines I got to read aren’t the Brontës’ own copies, but they live on the bookshelves in the Brontës’ dining room. Now that I’ve read their source material, I can see how precise the Brontës’ imitations were, and better appreciate their adoption of so many editorial “voices” at such young ages. At two, my now “usual” quitting time, Eric met me at the Parsonage and we had a quick lunch before the unlikely beauty of a sunny day in Yorkshire beckoned us onto the moors.

  Our walk was glorious. The relief at Eric’s recovery combined with the splendidness of the weather and the unspeakable wonder of the landscape. If seeing the Brontës’ London felt like ringing a little bell inside my ribcage, gazing out on their moors was like striking a gong the size of my whole body. Every Brontë acolyte who’s ever come this way has done exactly as we did—crossed the churchyard and turned right into the narrow walled-in lane, reached the moors, and decided whether to make for Top Withens or Stanbury or the Brontë Waterfall. I began as a waterfall skeptic, since it sounded like touristy nonsense, but then I found an account by Ellen Nussey of a day trip to Haworth in which the sisters did take her on a long walk. They had idled away the afternoon, in fact, by a waterfall. We walked and exclaimed and walked some more.

  I took a sprig of heather to tuck in my journal (an homage to the one Charlotte allegedly carried in to Emily during her last weakening days). There were stone walls and grassy fields all around, and the view stretched down and away for miles and miles. The colors went from ruddy brown to bright green and faded yellow across the landscape. We passed small farmhouses and scattered flocks of sheep, grazing and napping in the sun next to their lambs. When we crossed over the road from Stanbury we came upon a large group of rams munching grass together, staring at us with their keyhole-shaped pupils.

  Every time we passed a halfway passable pool of water we wondered if we’d reached the “meeting of the waters,” and debated turning back. Eventually we were rewarded for our perseverance when the path became stonier and the stones became steps and the moors bent into a seam, out of which burbled quick-flowing water. If you ever make this journey yourself, just trust me and keep going. When you find it, you’ll know. It is not vague or subtle. Just like everything else about the Brontës, their waterfall is emphatic and deliberate and unmistakable. The Brontës would have crossed the stream with stepping stones, but the Brontë Society has placed a bridge there for pilgrims to use. We walked as close to the water’s source as we could in unsteady shoes, and I kept an eye out for ghosts. Unfortunately, only another hiker and his two spaniels, presumably mortal, made their presence known.

  When I was a kid, visiting relatives in rural Arkansas or woodsy Connecticut, I’d occasionally enjoyed a walk out into the flat grass-filled plains or the hilly forests around their houses. I liked the outdoors as a concept, as a view from a cabin window or from the top of a moderate hill near the parked car that had driven me there. But I had never seen anything like this. The mossy stones, the villages that looked like train-set models, the farmhouses set apart from their neighbors. There was nothing I saw that I did not love immediately. If I could, I would have opened my eyes wider, let them take over my whole face just to see more of West Yorkshire at a time.

  The only difficulty in the whole day was the wind, which was always present and at times quite, well, wuthering. But despite that—or more likely because of it—we had a remarkable day that felt like it was sent just for us (the ultimate delusion of pilgrims to well-traveled historical sites). I have never been so sad to leave a place as I was to go back inside after being on those moors. No wonder Emily Brontë sickened to be away from them. No wonder Charlotte devoted whole passages of Shirley just to landscape rhapsody. No wonder none of them could be happy cooped up in a city or confined to a nursery caring for someone else’s children. They knew what real liberty felt like, and no alternative would ever be worthwhile as long as this awaited them at home.

  OUR last two days in Haworth were overcast—ideal for research, as if the moors didn’t want me to overdose. The next morning the Parsonage employee at the admissions desk greeted me like a regular. I spent the day immersed in books on the Brontës, their education, and the significance of their artwork. I mined their letters for references to Blackwoods and any other publications I would be able to track down back home. It was damp and rainy, but it was also Thursday, so some of the shops that had been closed all week were finally open. Eric and I made the best of it and shopped along Main Street with sodden feet.

  Our last morning in Haworth, I started my day in the graveyard. I have always loved cemeteries, never found them scary or ominous. My cat friend, Oscar, who I heard sometimes slips into the Parsonage and tries to lay on the beds, came to say hello. I stopped by the graves of Tabby and the Browns, friends of the family who also worked for the Brontës, who were now buried close to the churchyard wall. Oscar and I wandered around together, noting big families and odd surnames and unusual memorials. Many of the interred would have known the Brontës, and some still have family ties in the village. A man walked by while I stood near the railing at the front and said, “You’d nought have been standing the’ las’ night—it was slashing down ’ere, and I came by an’ back thro’ it and wondered why I’d ever gon’ out,” in a Yorkshire accent so delicious and thick that every word had either half or twice the usual number of syllables. There was actually a time delay while I worked out what he’d said. It made me think of an early visitor to Haworth, who’d said after a similar encounter in 1877, “I… could have hugged the good woman for allowing me to hear it in Yorkshire air.”10

  Then I walked down the footpath toward Haworth moor, which we hadn’t visited on our perfect day on Penistone Hill. The morning was sunny and clear and cold. I could see the shadows of clouds moving over the fields in the valley. To my left and up the hill were several ewes with their lambs, frolicking on the green or sleeping in the sun. To my right was a row of cottages just waking up, starting the day with this view. The Brontës’ ability to evoke the moors so vividly seems all the more impressive when you consider how the scenery brings even the most verbose outsider to an awed sort of stillness. At last, I turned back to the Parsonage, and was pleased to see Oscar padding over to say goodbye. I scratched behind his ears, pulled some leaves from his tail, and watched him saunter off on whatever cat business took him on his way.*

  Eventually I had to go inside and take my seat for the last time. I’d saved the best for last—three of the surviving tiny Young Men’s Magazines handcrafted by Branwell and Charlotte. The librarians had laid them out on a cushion for me. Not facsimiles, not transcriptions, not copies, but the little manuscripts themselves, even smaller than I’d anticipated. I dramatically opened the folder in which they sat, anticlimactically catalogued in plastic bags. I’d expected to be blown away by their intricacy, but for all their imitative fidelity, these tiny paper booklets were clearly made by the hands of children (albeit precocious ones). I pulled on cotton gloves and figured out how to brace them in my fingers so I could read with a magnifying glass and take notes. If it weren’t for my gloves, our fingerprints might have lined up in that moment.

  The first magazine I opened began with a narrative of walking in a country landscape much like the one we had roamed over a day ago. I transcribed most of the first little book, dated August of 1830, chuckling over the silliness of Captain Tree and Stumps, marveling at the versatility of Charlotte’s wit and imagination. Upon reaching the end, I had a brief thrilling moment, wondering if I could possibly be one of the first people to sit there and puzzle out these particular tiny manuscript books. Then a reference in my edition of selected juvenilia led me to an entire collection of The Early Writing of Charlotte Brontë, where th
e magazine I’d just transcribed and half a dozen more were reprinted. Still. I bet not many people have sat here and done it by hand, taking the time to decipher a confusing misspelling or an archaic turn of phrase. Or maybe everyone who visits does—Would that really make it less of a miracle?

  I found in the end that Eric didn’t distract me at all, though his hospital visits certainly escalated the verisimilitude. Without him, I wouldn’t have gotten to see the Royal Infirmary, which was at least as exciting as it was frightening. I wouldn’t have enjoyed the moors so completely, because I would have been constantly wishing he was there to see them too. On our trip and in our lives together, he helps me make room for everything I want to do and see, and keeps me from rushing through it. He’s also good for making sure I stop and eat occasionally.

  Realizing we could get one more full day in London if we left Haworth early, we packed our things and changed our train tickets to Friday night, instead of Saturday as initially planned. Back in London, we got to see Buckingham Palace deserted under a full moon, and the next morning, St. James’s Park and its daffodils and at least four different species of ducks. We rode the Eye and basked in its panoramic views, and heard Big Ben toll a final time before we headed to the airport. I researched holiday rentals and tried to figure out how I could ever afford to come back. I imagined taking a room for a month or two to write and visit the moors and pester the librarians with questions about the Brontës’ bank balances, thinking, “I could truly be happy here!”

  But by the time I took my seat on the plane to New York, I was wondering how true that was—Could I be happy someplace so quiet? Maybe it’s the effect of so many childhood moves, but I always want to stay someplace long enough to feel comfortable. It rarely occurs to me that I’d eventually get bored. I’d miss going to movies in the middle of the night, the satisfaction of living somewhere the world thinks of as a global capital. But on the other hand? I could be Charlotte Brontë’s neighbor. I could walk my dog on the moors with Emily’s ghost. As a member of the Brontë Society, I can visit the museum every single day if I want to. I could come to know their dining room better than my own. I could read every single piece of Brontë material in the catalogue—and still not have seen it all, because there are Brontë collections in Austin, in Boston, in Buffalo, and New York. I’m comforted by the knowledge that there are still plenty of Brontë fragments for me to pore over, housed in libraries and even private collections. Charlotte was at work on a novel called Emma when she died—Thackeray published it in Cornhill with a eulogy he wrote himself a few months later. There may still be undiscovered pieces out there somewhere in Charlotte’s tiny, usually precise, but occasionally careless hand.