Despite everyone’s best efforts, not a single family inquired about sending a daughter to the Brontës’ school. Haworth was simply too remote and hard to reach. Its isolation outweighed Charlotte’s outstanding qualifications in every parent’s opinion, so the planned school failed before it could open.
It was just as well, because in June 1845, Anne unexpectedly came home, and Branwell followed not long after. Anne quit her job with the Robinsons after she “had some very unpleasant and undreamt-of experience of human nature,” she wrote. Anne left no further explanation for her departure. Branwell, according to Charlotte, had been fired for proceedings that were “bad beyond expression,” and he was forbidden to have further contact with any member of the Robinson family.
The facts came out in Branwell’s letters to his friends: he had carried on a love affair with Lydia Robinson, his employer’s spirited wife. While still at Thorp Green, he had informed John Brown, “My mistress is DAMNABLY TOO FOND OF ME.” From Haworth, he wrote to Francis Grundy that Mrs. Robinson’s kindness had “ripened into declarations of more than ordinary feeling.” His admiration for her “mental and personal attractions” had grown into “an attachment on my part, and led to reciprocations which I had little looked for.” Mr. Robinson learned of the affair and fired the guilty tutor.
Feeling wronged more than ashamed, Branwell drank away his sorrow in taverns night after night, or sought peace through opium. He begged money from his family, raged against his fate, and became more than flesh and blood could bear. “No one in the house could have rest,” Charlotte complained. Hoping to restore Branwell’s mind and healthy habits, the Brontës sent him off with his friend John Brown to Liverpool and the Welsh coast. The change of scene may have helped Branwell control his outbursts, but he complained that wherever he went, “a certain woman robed in black, and calling herself ‘MISERY,’ walked by my side, and leant on my arm as affectionately as if she were my legal wife.”
Emily and Anne found some calm by taking a short train trip to the city of York. Twenty-seven and twenty-five years old, they still loved to lose themselves in Gondal fantasies. Emily wrote in a diary paper:
During our excursion we were, Ronald Macalgin, Henry Angora, Juliet Angusteena, Rosabella Esmaldan, Ella and Julian Egremont, Catharine Navarre, and Cordelia Fitzaphnold, escaping from the palaces of instruction to join the Royalists who are hard driven at present by the victorious Republicans.
To Charlotte, who was secretly dealing with her own impossible love, life in the parsonage was depressing. Again Mary Taylor urged her to get away. “I told her very warmly that she ought not to stay at home,” Mary said, “that to spend the next five years at home, in solitude and weak health, would ruin her.” Mary had left the German school and was soon to sail to the other side of the world, to the young British colony of New Zealand. A book for new settlers claimed that no place on Earth offered “a more promising career of usefulness to those who labour in the cause of human improvement, than the islands of New Zealand.” It sounded like just the place for a purposeful woman like Mary Taylor.
Mary Taylor sailed to Wellington, New Zealand, which in the 1840s was a small coastal town like this one. Women enjoyed more opportunities in such a young society than they did in England. In 1850 Mary and her cousin Ellen Taylor opened a shop selling draperies, dress fabrics, small toys, and other English goods. Ellen died in 1851, and Mary carried on the business alone.
Even with a wide world to live in, Charlotte stubbornly told her adventurous friend, “I intend to stay.” She hung her hope on Monsieur’s words, so when he failed to write, she simply had to break the six-months rule and send him a letter. “You showed me once a little interest, when I was your pupil in Brussels, and I hold to the maintenance of that little interest—I hold to it as I would hold on to life,” she wrote. “If my master withdraws his friendship from me entirely I shall be altogether without hope.”
Charlotte tried to restore the old closeness she had enjoyed with her teacher, but such desperate words caused Constantin Heger to draw away. At last, hearing nothing to cheer her heart, Charlotte gave up. Wishing no longer to be “the slave of a regret, of a memory; the slave of a fixed and dominant idea which controls the mind,” she cut her ties with the Pensionnat Heger in November 1845. Haworth became her world.
The Reverend Brontë still ministered to the little village, but his vision was failing. He depended on his daughters to read and write for him and to guide him as he walked in the street. The new curate who arrived in 1845 took over many of his pastoral duties. Handsome Arthur Bell Nicholls, age twenty-seven, came from Ireland. He was the son of a poor farmer, like Patrick Brontë, but after his parents died he was adopted by his uncle, who was headmaster at one of Ireland’s best boys’ schools. He was more serious and plodding than the charming William Weightman, but the Brontës liked him well enough. “He appears a respectable young man, reads well, and I hope will give satisfaction,” Charlotte noted.
When Charlotte said that Nicholls read well, she was referring to the way he read sermons aloud in church. The reading he did for pleasure was a different matter. He preferred dry books on church governance to the kinds of writing the Brontë siblings were producing—fiction and poetry. Branwell, for one, was trying to write a novel. He was blending Angrian legend with his heart’s dearest wish to tell the tale of the fictional Maria Thurston. This beautiful married woman falls in love with Alexander Percy, the hero who had fought Satan in one of Branwell’s early stories. Charlotte had also started a novel, one that she would call The Professor. She drew inspiration from her memories of Brussels. And Anne had begun writing Agnes Grey, a novel with a governess as its main character, while still employed at Thorp Green.
Emily was writing something, too, but what? “Many’s the time that I have seen Miss Emily put down the ‘tally-iron’ as she was ironing the clothes to scribble something on a piece of paper,” said Martha Brown, who came to the parsonage as a “help-girl,” to assist the aging Tabby. “Whatever she was doing, ironing or baking, she had her pencil and paper by her.”
One autumn day in 1845, Charlotte happened on a notebook of poems that Emily had written and hidden away. While she was paging through the book, “something more than surprise” took hold of her. Here were verses unlike any she had seen flow from a woman’s pen: “They stirred my heart like the sound of a trumpet.” These poems brought to Charlotte’s ear “a peculiar music—wild, melancholy, and elevating.” When she revealed to her remote, self-willed sister that she had read the secret verses, Emily flew into a rage. It took hours for her to quiet down enough to hear Charlotte say how good the poems were.
The angry storm passed, and quiet Anne stepped forward to invite Charlotte to read a stash of poems that she had written. Charlotte acknowledged that this poetry was different from Emily’s but thought that “these verses too had a sweet sincere pathos of their own.”
All three sisters had written poems worthy of being printed in a book—a book that might bring in some money. So on February 6, 1846, a package left Haworth addressed to Aylott and Jones, a small London publishing company. It held the work of three poets with the manly names Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell.
Women had been publishing novels, poetry, and nonfiction for a century, but whether women should write was controversial. Some Victorian women courageously produced books under their own names. In 1850, for example, Elizabeth Gaskell would take credit for Mary Barton, a novel of lower-class life. Other women hid their sex from the reading public by choosing male pseudonyms. One such woman was Mary Ann Evans, who is known to the world as George Eliot, the author of Middlemarch and other realistic novels. Evans wanted readers to judge her as a writer rather than as a woman. She wanted to be free to write about any subject, even if people thought it wrong for a female author. For not only did society tell women what they must not do, it also decided which subjects were off limits to them in books and in life. One of these subjects was passion.
T
he pen name George Eliot gave Mary Ann Evans freedom to write novels that people thought should come from a man.
Many people agreed with the poet Robert Southey, who had told Charlotte that literature was the business of men. The critic George Henry Lewes asked, “Does it never strike these delightful creatures that their little fingers were meant to be kissed, not to be inked?” In 1854 Lewes and George Eliot would cause a scandal by living together as an unmarried couple. Yet before then Lewes belittled women writers, wondering, “Are there no stockings to darn, no purses to make, no braces [suspenders] to embroider?”
Aylott and Jones agreed to print the Bells’ book of poems, and Charlotte, Emily, and Anne managed to come up with the required fee of thirty-one pounds, ten shillings. No one but the sisters knew of their book. Charlotte said nothing about it to Ellen, and she, Emily, and Anne made no mention of it to their father or brother. Emily called Branwell “a hopeless being,” and Charlotte remarked, “In his present state it is scarcely possible to stay in the room where he is.” She pondered, “What the future has in store—I do not know.”
On May 7, 1846, the first copies of Poems, by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, reached the Haworth parsonage. The Brontës’ book was a slim green volume of sixty-one poems on love, loss, religious faith, and nature. Currer Bell (Charlotte) wrote about risking everything for love in “Passion”:
Some have won a wild delight,
By daring wilder sorrow;
Could I gain thy love to-night,
I’d hazard death to-morrow.
In another poem, “Solace,” she hinted at a deep emotional life:
The human heart has hidden treasures,
In secret kept, in silence sealed;—
The thoughts, the hopes, the dreams, the pleasures,
Whose charms were broken if revealed.
Ellis Bell (Emily) proclaimed her kinship with the night in “Stars”:
Oh, stars, and dreams, and gentle night;
Oh, night and stars return!
And hide me from the hostile light,
That does not warm, but burn.
Emily had written “Remembrance” to an imaginary lost love:
Cold in the earth —and the deep snow piled above thee,
Far, far removed, cold in the dreary grave!
Have I forgot, my only Love, to love thee,
Severed at last by Time’s all-severing wave?
Acton Bell (Anne), the most pious of the Brontë sisters, addressed God in the depressing poem “Life”:
If life must be so full of care,
Then call me soon to Thee
Or give me strength enough to bear
My load of misery.
It was fortunate for Anne that nature could restore her happiness, as she wrote in “Lines Composed on a Windy Day”:
My soul is awakened, my spirit is soaring
And carried aloft on the wings of the breeze;
For above and around me the wild wind is roaring,
Arousing to rapture the earth and the seas.
The three authors barely had the pleasure of holding their finished book in their hands when an emotional crisis threw the Brontë household into turmoil. It began on May 26, when Mr. Edmund Robinson, Anne and Branwell’s former employer, died suddenly at age forty-six. Branwell reacted to the news with joy, because the woman he loved was free to marry again. He got ready to join her at Thorp Green as soon as she sent word. The young tutor abruptly learned that he meant less to Lydia Robinson than he had been led to believe, however. Instead of summoning Branwell to her side, she sent her coachman to Haworth with a message. The coachman met Branwell at a local tavern and informed him that he and Mrs. Robinson had no future together.
Branwell had bragged about stealing the older woman’s heart, but he loved Mrs. Robinson more than she had ever cared for him. His shock and sorrow were beyond his control. The witnesses who heard his wails compared them to “the bleating of a calf.” Lydia Robinson took a further step to prevent Branwell from showing up at Thorp Green unasked. She had her doctor send him a letter stating that his presence would upset her fragile state of mind.
Death mocks Branwell Brontë in one of his drawings.
For four nights, Branwell went without sleep. For three days, he ate no food. “To papa he allows rest neither day nor night,” Charlotte wrote to Ellen, “and he is continually screwing money out of him sometimes threatening to kill himself if it is withheld from him.” According to Modern Domestic Medicine, twelve drops of ammonia in a glass of sugared water would calm a drunken man, but Patrick Brontë noted in the margin that this treatment had “only some little effect.”
If his family refused to give him money, then Branwell resolved to get it elsewhere. He spent weeks away from home, frequenting the inns and public houses of Halifax, and running up debts.
Meanwhile, the little book called Poems received some notice in the press. One reviewer compared it to “a ray of sunshine, gladdening the eye with present glory, and the heart with promise of bright hours in store.” This was “good, wholesome, refreshing, vigorous poetry,” he proclaimed. Another writer singled out Emily, or “Ellis Bell,” for special praise. Here was “a fine quaint spirit” that “may have things to speak that men will be glad to hear,—and an evident power of wing that may reach heights not here attempted.”
Yet a single question loomed large in the critics’ minds: who were Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell? Their book offered no clues. Did they live in England or America? Were they alive or dead? One book reviewer rightly guessed, “Perhaps they desired that the poems should be tried and judged upon their own merits alone, apart from all extraneous circumstances.”
Even with good reviews and an air of mystery surrounding it, Poems failed to find readers. Only two people bought it. Ambitious Charlotte understood that she and her sisters would never support themselves writing poetry. If they were going to make money as writers, they would have to be novelists.
Novels had been growing popular with British readers since the 1700s, when Henry Fielding wrote works like Tom Jones, the story of a young man who is turned out of his home and must make his way in the world. Tom Jones is a picaresque novel, one that follows the hero’s adventures, one after another. Tobias Smollett’s humorous Humphry Clinker, the tale of a stableman traveling through England with a well-to-do family, is another. Many readers also enjoyed gothic novels, with eerie castles and hints of the supernatural. One of the most famous gothic novels of the early nineteenth century, Frankenstein, was written by a woman, Mary Shelley.
As the eighteenth century gave way to the nineteenth, Jane Austen cast a penetrating eye on human nature in Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and other novels dealing with families, love, and courtship. Austen influenced the course of fiction by showing authors that they could explore human relationships and depend less on action and thrills. Charlotte Brontë disliked Austen’s novels, however. “She does her business of delineating the surface of the lives of genteel English people curiously well,” but “the Passions are unknown to her,” Charlotte wrote. “Her business is not half so much with the human heart as with the human eyes, mouth, hands and feet.”
Victorian novelists strove to present real life on their pages, to observe people’s problems and interactions. Some, like George Eliot and Charles Dickens, also cast light on society’s ills and the conditions of the lower classes. Dickens published his novels first as serials in magazines. From 1837 to 1839, he brought out Oliver Twist, whose title character is one of the many orphans living in London. Oliver Twist exposed the harshness of the workhouses that sheltered the poor, the depraved lives of criminals, and the evils of child labor. It also broke new ground by presenting a prostitute, the character Nancy, in a sympathetic way. Dickens went on to write other important, socially conscious novels, among them David Copperfield, Bleak House, Hard Times, and Little Dorritt.
Many people know Victorian England through the novels of Charles Dickens, who wrote about the prosp
erous and the poor. This illustration is from his final, unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
William Makepeace Thackeray, another great Victorian novelist, achieved fame with Vanity Fair, which was published first in serial form, in 1847 and 1848. He took a satiric look at society by focusing on two women, the scheming social climber Becky Sharp and her sweet-natured, naïve friend, Amelia Sedley. Thackeray subtitled Vanity Fair “A Novel Without a Hero,” because every character had flaws.
In July 1846, a second parcel left Haworth addressed to a London publisher. It held the manuscripts of three novels: The Professor, by Currer Bell; Agnes Grey, by Acton Bell; and a third by Ellis Bell. Titled Wuthering Heights, Emily’s novel told a strange, tragic tale of love and revenge on the moors. The sisters hoped their novels would be published together as a three-volume set. But as the three books, as yet unknown, made their way into the world, their authors could only wait for news of them.
In August, despite a throbbing toothache, Charlotte traveled with her father to the city of Manchester, where he was having surgery to restore his sight. The lenses of his eyes had developed cataracts. Removing a lens, if done correctly, would restore the sight in that eye. Patrick Brontë was wide awake throughout the surgery and felt everything, because the doctor performed it without anesthesia. In his copy of Modern Domestic Medicine, the Reverend Brontë later noted, “The feeling, under the operation —which lasted fifteen minutes, was of a burning nature—but not intolerable. . . . My lens was extracted so the cataract can never return in that eye.” The doctor removed one lens—the left, because if an infection set in, then only that one eye would be permanently blinded. A month’s convalescence in a darkened room followed the surgery. During this time a nurse applied leeches to the patient’s temples to reduce inflammation.
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