The Bronte Sisters

by Catherine Reef

  Bending inclination to duty, Charlotte grew depressed. She asked herself, “What in all this is there to remind me of the divine, silent, unseen land of thought, dim now and indefinite as the dream of a dream, the shadow of a shade.” Miss Wooler reached out to the despairing teacher, inviting her to talk, but Charlotte rejected her employer’s help and chose to be stoical. “I could have been no better company for you than a walking ghost,” Charlotte told Miss Wooler.

  Emily found the routine of school so stifling that she lasted barely three months at Roe Head. She desperately needed time alone for her creativity to flourish, and she had none at school. She awoke every morning thinking of Haworth and the moorland. These fond thoughts of home darkened even the brightest day for her, and she rapidly wasted away. “Liberty was the breath of Emily’s nostrils; without it, she perished,” Charlotte said. “I felt in my heart she would die if she did not go home.” Charlotte was not about to let Emily follow Maria and Elizabeth into early death, so she arranged for Anne to replace Emily at Roe Head. Anne toiled quietly at her studies, and after a year at school, she earned a medal for good conduct. Anne did her duty by preparing for a governess’s life and gave voice to her unhappiness only in poetry:

  This place of solitude and gloom

  Must be my dungeon and my tomb.

  No hope, no pleasure can I find;

  I am grown weary of my mind.

  This year and the next, the Christmas holidays reunited Charlotte and Anne with Branwell and Emily. In late December 1836, Branwell and Charlotte hatched a plan to mail some of their poems to well-known writers and ask for comments and advice. Branwell sent his to William Wordsworth, who wrote so beautifully about nature. Charlotte, meanwhile, wrote to Robert Southey, Britain’s poet laureate.

  They waited one month, two months, then three, until at last a letter came to the parsonage for Charlotte. It contained advice, but of the kind that could only discourage. Southey had tried his best to destroy Charlotte’s dream, and not because she wrote badly. “Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be,” he wrote. “The more she is engaged in proper duties, the less leisure she will have for it, even as an accomplishment and a recreation.”

  Robert Southey, England’s poet laureate from 1813 to 1843, urged Charlotte Brontë to give up writing and pursue a woman’s “proper duties.”

  Charlotte Brontë wanted to be a writer more than anything else. How it made her feel to read a statement like this can be guessed from the sarcastic tone of her next letter to Southey. She told him, “I have endeavoured not only attentively to observe all the duties a woman ought to fulfil, but to feel deeply interested in them. I don’t always succeed, for sometimes when I’m teaching or sewing I would rather be reading or writing; but I try to deny myself.” She concluded, “I trust I shall nevermore feel ambitious to see my name in print; if the wish should rise, I’ll look at [your] letter, and suppress it.” Branwell never heard from Wordsworth.

  Back at Roe Head, Charlotte struggled against her creative urges. If she appeared outwardly at peace, she let loose her frustration in her journal. “Am I to spend all the best part of my life in this wretched bondage,” she asked herself, “on compulsion assuming an air of kindness, patience & assiduity?”

  While Charlotte fought with herself, Anne grew ill, and Charlotte and Miss Wooler argued about what to do. Charlotte wanted to take Anne home, but Miss Wooler insisted that she was being too cautious. Anne could rest and recover at Roe Head, Miss Wooler said. Her condition was hardly grave. At this Charlotte lost her composure. “I told her one or two rather plain truths, which set her a-crying,” she told Ellen Nussey. As Charlotte prepared to leave her post, Miss Wooler hurried off a letter to Mr. Brontë, telling him about the fight.

  Tempers cooled, and the two women made up. “If anybody likes me I can’t help liking them, and remembering that she had in general been very kind to me, I gave in and said I would come back if she wished me,” Charlotte wrote, “but I am not satisfied.” Mr. Brontë settled the matter by calling his daughters home. Anne slowly regained her health at the parsonage, and after the winter holidays, Charlotte went back to work alone. Sometime before spring Miss Wooler moved her school to a place called Dewsbury Moor, to a building that was smaller than the one at Roe Head but closer to her own aging father.

  “There is a climax to everything, to every state of feeling as well as to every position in life,” Charlotte Brontë was later to write. She lasted at Dewsbury Moor until summer neared. Then she decided that her position there and the feelings it evoked had run their course. When she wrote to Ellen Nussey on June 9, she was in Haworth, having left Miss Wooler’s school for good, she hoped. “My health and spirits had utterly failed me,” Charlotte admitted. “So home I went; the change has at once roused and soothed me—and I am now I trust fairly in the way to be myself again.”

  A visit from Mary Taylor and her talkative sister Martha added to Charlotte’s happiness. “Mary is playing on the piano. Martha is chattering as fast as her little tongue can run and Branwell is standing before her laughing at her vivacity,” Charlotte wrote to Ellen, in a letter that sounded like one of the sisters’ diary pages.

  By the end of July, Branwell had left Haworth to open a portrait studio in Bradford, a center of textile manufacturing. In August, Charlotte reluctantly went back to Dewsbury Moor, and in September 1838, Emily took her first paying job. She was to be a teacher at Law Hill, a ladies’ school in Halifax, near Bradford. Only Anne remained at home with their father and aunt.

  Branwell Brontë painted this portrait of his sisters. Left to right are Anne, Emily, and Charlotte. The lighter area between Emily and Charlotte is a clue that Branwell’s painting once included a fourth person, probably himself, and that he painted over this likeness.

  The young Brontës needed to work. Their father was sixty-one years old, and there was no telling how long he would live, although he took good care of his health. He studied the pages of Modern Domestic Medicine, a home-treatment guide, and jotted hundreds of notes in its margins. “Should a flea, or other insect get into the ear—it will produce a dreadful uneasiness—but oil poured in will kill the insect and effect a cure,” he wrote. He also noted, “A roasted onion, with a little water and sugar mixed and eaten with bread, is an excellent remedy for a hard dry cough.” Still, no one knew when an illness might carry someone away.

  three

  “What on Earth Is Half So Dear?”

  MISS Elizabeth Patchett’s School, Law Hill, sat high on sloping ground. From the windows of this solid stone mansion, Emily Brontë looked out on a landscape that she loved, miles of farmland and untamed moors. Nearby Halifax offered concerts and art exhibitions that would delight many bright young women. Yet Emily felt downhearted. She complained to Charlotte that she had entered slavery. She was one of three teachers for forty girls ages eleven through fifteen. Miss Patchett had her working from six o’clock in the morning until eleven at night. “I fear she will never stand it,” Charlotte wrote to Ellen Nussey.

  Emily made it through her first term, “though she could not easily associate with others,” as one of her pupils later reported. According to another girl, Emily told her pupils that she cared more for the school’s dog than for any of them. Clearly, Emily, like Charlotte, felt no love for teaching. Her well-being, more than that of her sisters, depended on being in Haworth.

  In her brief periods of free time, Emily poured her yearning for home into verses:

  There is a spot mid barren hills

  Where winter howls and driving rain

  But if the dreary tempest chills

  There is a light that warms again

  The house is old, the trees are bare

  And moonless bends the misty dome

  But what on earth is half so dear—

  So longed for as the hearth of home?

  With the start of the second term, Emily looked ahead to bleak winter months. She stopped writing poetry as s
he fell into despair, and her health deteriorated, as it had at Roe Head. She went home to recover before the term ended. Charlotte had also had enough of the teacher’s life. At the end of the fall term in 1838, she told Miss Wooler that she was leaving the school for good, and this time she kept her word. For a while, all three sisters were reunited in the parsonage, happily adding to the stories of Angria and Gondal. Branwell came home from Bradford on weekends, either taking a coach or walking the eight miles to Haworth across the moors.

  During the week, Branwell occupied a rented room and a studio where he painted portraits of the local clergymen and his landlord’s family, the Kirbys. The Kirbys’ niece described him as “low in stature, about 5 ft 3 inches high, and slight in build, though well proportioned.” She said, “Very few people, except sitters, came to visit him. . . . I recollect his sister Charlotte coming and I remember her sisterly ways.” Branwell made friends among the artists and writers of Bradford, who gathered in the George Hotel to talk and joke and drink. He had discovered the pleasures of tavern life, but he gave the Kirbys no cause to complain. Their niece observed, “He was a very steady young gentleman, his conduct was exemplary, and we liked him very much.” Despite being liked and having some clients, Branwell earned too little to support himself painting portraits, so sometime in the winter or spring of 1839, he, too, returned to Haworth to live, to his father’s great disappointment.

  Branwell Brontë drew this picture of himself at age twenty-three.

  All four of the grown children were then at the parsonage, but for how long? As a young man of twenty-two, Branwell especially needed to launch a career. His attempt to live as a painter had failed, so his father urged him to consider teaching. Father and son embarked on a course of study designed to refresh Branwell’s knowledge of classical Greek and Latin.

  Before long, Branwell’s sisters would have to return to teaching—or marry. Being without money and living in such an isolated place, they had slim chances of finding husbands, but marrying still was possible. That same spring, Charlotte received a marriage proposal from Ellen’s brother, the Reverend Henry Nussey, age twenty-seven. Henry proposed in a letter, which has been lost, but Charlotte remarked that he wrote “in a common-sense style which does credit to his judgment.”

  Charlotte had an important decision to make. Henry earned enough money to support a wife, which meant that she would never again have to earn her own way if she accepted him. Because she was unlikely to receive many offers of marriage, this could be her only chance. So she asked herself two questions. First, “Do I love him as much as a woman ought to love the man she marries?” And second, “Am I the person best qualified to make him happy?” The answer to both questions was no. She replied to Henry’s letter, turning him down. “You do not know me; I am not the serious, grave, cool-headed individual you suppose,” she wrote. She ended by saying, “I will never for the sake of attaining the distinction of matrimony and escaping the stigma of an old maid take a worthy man whom I am conscious I cannot render happy.” Henry’s businesslike proposal could never appeal to a romantic heart like Charlotte’s.

  Thinking that her friend deserved an explanation, she wrote to Ellen, “I had a kindly leaning towards him because he is an amiable—well-disposed man yet I had not, and never could have that intense attachment which would make me willing to die for him—and if I ever marry it must be in that light of adoration that I will regard my Husband.” Henry took Charlotte’s refusal in stride. He promptly proposed to another woman, who accepted him, and Charlotte looked forward to an eventual return to teaching.

  Charlotte Brontë painted a loving portrait of her closest friend, Ellen Nussey.

  The next of the four Brontë siblings to try to earn a living was nineteen-year-old Anne. She was hired by a family named Ingham to be their children’s governess. The Inghams lived in a mansion near Roe Head called Blake House. They were a prominent family in the region, and their wealth had been passed down for generations. There were five Ingham children in 1839, but Anne had charge of only the oldest boy and girl—Cunliffe, who was six, and Mary, who was five.

  Anne had become one of thousands of women employed as governesses in mid-nineteenth-century England. The demand for governesses had grown along with the rising middle class. For as long as people could remember, a chasm that was nearly impossible to cross had separated the upper classes from people in trade. Then, beginning in the 1700s, manufacturing moved from small shops and cottages to factories. The owners of great mills grew wealthier than many aristocrats. And once they had money, they wanted gentility. They dressed like upper-class Britons and mimicked their manners and customs, which included employing governesses to teach their children. A governess became a status symbol for any household hoping to move up.

  The social changes spurred by the Industrial Revolution gained momentum after 1837, the year that Queen Victoria took the throne. Victoria’s coronation marked the start of the Victorian period, which lasted until 1901, when the queen died. Britain gained power and wealth during Victoria’s reign, enlarging and securing its empire of colonies and possessions. The Victorian era was a time of greatness, when the English naturalist Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species and revolutionized people’s thinking about evolution. It was the era when an Englishwoman, Florence Nightingale, founded the profession of nursing. Also among the many great British Victorians were Henry Fox Talbot, an inventor of photography, and Alexander Graham Bell, who gave the world the telephone.

  An outstanding figure from the Victorian era, trained nurse Florence Nightingale improved sanitation and patient care at the British army hospital at Üsküdar (in present-day Istanbul) during the Crimean War of the 1850s.

  The move from home-based production to the factory system had been painful and bloody. Factories employed fewer hands than home looms did and put many weavers out of work in Haworth and elsewhere. International conflict made the problem worse. Great Britain and France were at war, and each was attacking the other’s trade. In 1806, Napoleon forbade his European allies from trading with Britain, so in 1807 Great Britain responded with the Orders in Council, prohibiting France from trading with Britain, its allies, and neutral nations. The Royal Navy enforced the orders by blockading French ports. Reduced foreign trade meant less work, and lower profits, for large and small manufacturers in England.

  As their families starved, some displaced workers struck out violently. Beginning in 1811, in Yorkshire and other manufacturing centers, bands of men descended on mills to destroy the power looms and knitting frames that had taken away their livelihood. They called themselves Luddites in recognition of their unseen leader, Ned Ludd, who might have been real or imaginary. The government sent in thousands of armed foot soldiers and cavalrymen to halt the rioting and destruction. By the end of the decade, the forces of law and order had snuffed out the Luddite movement and hanged its ringleaders or deported them to Australia.

  Later, during the Victorian period, needy people seeking work moved from the English countryside to the slums that were growing around cities. There, factories devoured their hard labor and paid them barely enough to get by. Fueled by coal, the mighty factories spewed out smoke that darkened the sky, choked plant life, and even blackened the wool of sheep.

  In fine homes supported by this system, governesses instructed their charges in “the usual branches of a solid English education,” which included reading, spelling, and a modern foreign language, usually French. A governess might also give instruction in music, drawing, dancing, and fancy needlework. Perhaps most important, she was to set an example of high moral standards and proper behavior. Governesses came from groups that enjoyed social stature but lacked money. They were unmarried daughters of clergymen, military officers, and aristocrats who had lost their fortunes.

  According to Charlotte, Anne wrote home to say that her pupils were “desperate little dunces”—dolts in the making—and beyond her control. Anne’s employers had ordered her not to punish the c
hildren, but to inform Mrs. Ingham if they misbehaved. There was one big problem with this system: The children knew their mother would be lenient, so they had no reason to obey their governess. Anne scolded them uselessly, and she tried methods that would be called inappropriate today. Once, she tied Cunliffe and Mary to a table leg to make them do their lessons. Anne rightly felt that her employers gave her no support, but she also showed little understanding of children. Years later, Mrs. Ingham commented that she “had once employed a very unsuitable governess called Miss Brontë.”

  A governess enjoyed little respect, even from the children in her care. The boys in this family clearly want to escape the home schoolroom, and one refuses to study at all.

  Charlotte, too, tried her luck as a governess. In May 1839, she took a temporary job with a family named Sidgwick, whose great home, Stonegappe, was twelve miles from Haworth. She was to teach and care for the two youngest Sidgwick children, seven-year-old Matilda and four-year-old John Benson. At first Charlotte, like Anne, found the children impossible to govern. “More riotous, perverse, unmanageable cubs never grew,” she griped. On one occasion, John Benson threw a rock at Charlotte and hit her on the head. Nevertheless, unlike Anne, Charlotte won over the children well enough to enjoy order in the schoolroom.