The Bronte Sisters

by Catherine Reef

  seven

  “Moorish, and Wild, and Knotty as a Root of Heath”

  WHEN the air was in an uproar and rainy squalls blew over the Yorkshire moors, the locals had a word for it: wuthering. Emily Brontë grew up hearing this word from Tabby Aykroyd and other country folk, and in 1846, she wrote it down. Emily gave the name Wuthering Heights to her only novel and to a home that is central to the story it tells. It is there that Emily’s dark tale of destructive love, cruelty, and early death begins.

  Laurence Olivier was Heathcliff and Merle Oberon played Catherine in the 1939 film Wuthering Heights.

  Just a few stunted firs and thorn bushes grow near Wuthering Heights, a farmhouse on a lonely, windswept moor, miles from any neighbors. Strange things happen there. Ghostly fingers tap at its windows; a tortured man lives within its walls and brings those around him to ruin.

  But these dreadful goings-on have yet to happen when Catherine Earnshaw’s father returns from Liverpool with a mysterious child, a boy who is dirty and ragged and “dark almost as if it came from the devil.” Mr. Earnshaw christens the child Heathcliff and intends to raise him as his own. Young Catherine and Heathcliff form a kinship that is stronger than any blood tie. They become inseparable friends, a rebellious pair who like nothing better than to run freely on the moors. Meanwhile, Mr. Earnshaw’s love for the boy consumes Catherine’s older brother, Hindley, with deadly envy. After years pass, Mr. Earnshaw dies, and Hindley marries and becomes the master of Wuthering Heights. Hindley takes revenge on Heathcliff by forcing him to labor on the farm, but the bond between Heathcliff and Catherine stays as strong as ever, even as they grow up and life draws them apart.

  At Wuthering Heights, emotions like jealousy and love are forces as wild and savage as the harshest weather. But another moorland house, Thrushcross Grange, is a place of comfort and refinement. There, the Linton family enjoys a peaceful, genteel life supported by wealth. Their fine clothes and manners attract Catherine, and when kind, docile Edgar Linton asks her to marry him, she accepts.

  Her choice sets off a dark sequence of revenge and destruction that leaves no one unhurt. Heathcliff hardens into a sinister Byronic figure whose heart is closed to everyone but Catherine. He acquires wealth and wins possession of Wuthering Heights and, later, Thrushcross Grange. He elopes with Edgar Linton’s sister, Isabella, only to cause pain. Isabella will ask what many readers have pondered: Is Heathcliff a man or a devil?

  As for Catherine, she will shock Victorian readers by claiming that she has no place in heaven; her soul belongs on the moors. “I’m wearying to escape into that glorious world, and to be always there; not seeing it dimly through tears, and yearning for it through the walls of an aching heart; but really with it, and in it.” Rejecting earthly existence, Catherine retreats to her room, where she refuses food and steadily weakens. She and Heathcliff meet for the last time in her bedchamber on a Sunday, while Edgar is at church and Catherine lies close to death. They kiss and embrace, yet each blames and accuses the other. “You have killed me—and thriven on it, I think. How strong you are!” cries Catherine, who is beautiful in her frailty.

  “You have killed yourself,” Heathcliff argues back. “I have not broken your heart—you have broken it—and in breaking it, you have broken mine.” Catherine sinks into unconsciousness, and she dies that night after giving birth prematurely to a daughter, another Catherine, or Cathy.

  Catherine calls into a storm for Heathcliff in this early illustration.

  So much has happened, but Emily Brontë has told only half her story. In the second part of her novel, it will be the task of another generation to restore joy and hope to Wuthering Heights.

  Emily Brontë devised a complex structure for Wuthering Heights. She told her tale through the diary of a character named Lockwood, who some years later is a new tenant at Thrushcross Grange. When he rides up to Wuthering Heights on a winter day to call on his landlord, Mr. Heathcliff, a snowstorm forces him to spend the night. A servant shows him to a chamber that was never used, explaining that the master rarely allowed it to be entered. As Lockwood drifts into sleep, half dreaming, he hears a tree blowing against the window beside his bed. The window refuses to open, so he breaks a pane of glass and reaches out to snap off the bothersome branch. To his surprise, he grasps not twigs, but tiny, cold fingers. His cries bring Heathcliff into the room. By this time the spirit has gone, but what Lockwood sees next is equally shocking. His landlord throws open the window and in anguish begs his beloved Cathy to enter.

  Lockwood goes home to Thrushcross Grange, and as often happens to people in nineteenth-century novels, exposure to wintry air gives him a bad cold. While he rests in bed, his housekeeper tells him the saga of Wuthering Heights. In this way, Emily Brontë’s novel becomes a tale within a tale, as Lockwood records in his diary the housekeeper’s story.

  Lockwood stands at the graves of Edgar, Catherine, and Heathcliff and wonders “how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers, for the sleepers in that quiet earth.”

  Wuthering Heights belongs to the Yorkshire landscape, Charlotte Brontë said. “It is moorish, and wild, and knotty as a root of heath. Nor was it natural that it should be otherwise; the author being herself a native and nursling of the moors.”

  But was there anything natural about Wuthering Heights? “The characters are as false as they are loathsome,” one outraged critic declared. He pronounced Heathcliff, Hindley, Catherine, and the rest “a perfect pandemonium of low and brutal creatures, who wrangle with each other in language too disgusting for the eye or the ear to tolerate.” This critic had no idea how Ellis Bell’s novel ended, because after reading a few offending scenes, he “took the liberty of declining the honour of a farther acquaintance.”

  Ellis Bell’s skill as a writer failed to excuse the “strange wild pictures” that he had created, another reviewer wrote. Rather, Bell’s powerful talent succeeded only in “heightening their repulsiveness.” The editors of a weekly newspaper promised their readers “that they have never read anything like it before.” Wuthering Heights was so puzzling that the editors concluded, “We must leave it to our readers to decide what sort of book it is.”

  Today people might decide that the behavior Emily Brontë described was dysfunctional. Harmful relationships are nothing new, though; human beings have hurt one another through their words and actions in every period of history. But to the prim Victorians, this side of life was to be kept hidden. It was to be ignored, if possible, and certainly not displayed in a novel for anyone to read. Emily cut out some reviews and saved them in her desk drawer, but neither she nor Anne ever told their father that they were published authors.

  While the two-volume Wuthering Heights was causing so much noisy comment, the third volume in the set, Agnes Grey, slipped quietly into the world. To the relief of the few critics who bothered to notice it, Acton Bell’s slender novel offered a clear moral lesson: it taught readers “to put every trust in a supreme wisdom and goodness.” This was the author’s intention. “Such humble talents as God has given me I will endeavour to put to their greatest use,” Anne stated. “If I am able to amuse, I will try to benefit too; and when I feel it my duty to speak an unpalatable truth, with the help of God, I will speak it.” This is why her novel began with the words, “All true histories contain instruction.”

  Yet this author, like the other Bells, chose “subjects that are peculiar without being either probable or pleasing,” some critics lamented. It hardly mattered that Agnes Grey was written well; “the injudicious selection of the theme and matter” marred the work. Anne’s tale contained no dark secret or deadly revenge. Instead, its tyranny and cruelty were truer to life. Anne had described everyday behavior in well-to-do households.

  Emily Brontë found the raw material for Wuthering Heights in her imagination, but Anne drew on her own experience, as Charlotte had done. Her main character, Agnes Grey, comes from a poor but respectable clergyman’s family, and she seeks a post as a governess, like Ja
ne Eyre. Recounting Agnes’s adventures among the families that employ her, Anne revealed much that she had seen and done as governess to the Inghams and Robinsons. Her account sounded so true to life that one reviewer supposed Acton Bell—this man—“must have bribed some governess very largely, either with love or money, to reveal to him the secrets of her prison-house.”

  Also like Jane Eyre, Agnes tells her own story. “How delightful it would be to be a governess! To go out into the world; to enter upon a new life; to act for myself,” Agnes thinks. She wants, too, “to earn my own maintenance, and something to comfort and help my father, mother, and sister.” She finds the governess’s life anything but delightful when she is given charge of three impossible children in the Bloomfield family. Seven-year-old Tom, “the flower of the flock—a generous, noble-spirited boy,” according to his mother, delights in cutting up live birds with his penknife. It shocks Agnes that Tom’s father and uncle encourage this gruesome hobby. Tom and his sisters refuse to obey Agnes, knowing their parents have forbidden her to punish them, while the parents blame Miss Grey for the children’s tantrums and wild behavior. A frustrated Agnes pulls six-year-old Mary Ann’s hair and shakes her violently in a desperate effort to make her cooperate. But these methods of discipline, questionable at best, do no good. The Bloomfields fire Miss Grey before a year has passed.

  Agnes Grey struggles with Mary Ann’s hair in this 1922 illustration.

  Agnes likes life somewhat better with the second family to employ her, the Murrays of Horton Lodge. Her new pupils include two teenage girls, Rosalie and Matilda. Rosalie is sixteen and pretty, but she thinks only of the impression she makes and the hearts she can conquer. Fourteen-year-old Matilda is a big, active girl who uses rough language and feels most at home in the stable. Mrs. Murray orders the governess to “oblige, instruct, refine, and polish” these girls, or, as Agnes observes, to “render them as superficially attractive and showily accomplished as they could possibly be made.” Securing wealthy husbands is to be their great aim in life.

  After her father’s death, Agnes returns home to help her mother run a school. She feels some regret at leaving Rosalie, who has grown close to her, and a new curate, Edward Weston, of whom she is fond. A year later, Agnes returns to the neighborhood of Horton Lodge to visit Rosalie, who is married to the wealthy Sir Thomas Ashby. Rosalie has done what was expected of her. She has a grand home and a baby, but she detests her husband and her life with him. “And as for all the wisdom and goodness you have been trying to instil into me—that is all very right and proper I dare say, and if I were some twenty years older, I might fructify by it,” she admits to Agnes Grey. “But people must enjoy themselves when they are young!”

  Agnes tells her readers, “Of course, I pitied her exceedingly, as well for her false idea of happiness and disregard of duty, as for the wretched partner with whom her fate was linked.” In contrast to Rosalie, Agnes earns the love of pious Mr. Weston and the happiness she deserves through virtue and bending of inclination to duty.

  The publisher of these two novels, T. C. Newby, turned out to care only about making a quick profit. Thanks to sloppy editing, his editions of Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey contained many punctuation errors and misspellings. Even Agnes Grey’s name appeared as “Anges” on several pages. Much later it would come to light that he lied to the sisters about how many books he had printed and sold so he could cheat them out of money they had earned. In 1854, Charlotte, as the last surviving sister, would receive ninety pounds that should have been paid to Emily and Anne.

  While Charlotte, Emily, and Anne continued writing, they also did the duties expected of a minister’s unmarried daughters. One of these was to sit and visit with ladies who called at the parsonage. One day, they spent two hours listening to a woman named Mrs. Collins, who told a tale of triumph over woe.

  Six years earlier, this good woman had lived with her husband in Keighley. Mr. Collins had been a curate, a man of the cloth, but in his drunkenness he used to beat his wife and children. His reckless spending plunged the couple into debt, and finally his bad habits led to his dismissal. Mr. Collins abandoned his ailing wife and their offspring in Manchester and took off for places unknown. Slowly, Mrs. Collins worked to restore her health and reputation. When she called in Haworth she could boast that she was an independent woman who ran a lodging house in Manchester, and that she had saved her children from their father’s violence and bad example.

  Anne soaked up every word.

  eight

  “A Dreadful Darkness Closes In”

  THE public’s great interest in Jane Eyre brought invitations through her publisher to venture into society, but Charlotte turned them down. In February 1848, a London theater company presented a play based on her novel, but she declined to see it. Stepping out meant telling the world that Currer Bell was really Charlotte Brontë of Haworth. Charlotte preferred to keep her secret, to stay home and write with her sisters. In the evening, after their father had retired to his bedchamber, they read aloud to one another from their work in progress.

  While Charlotte searched her imagination for the story of her next book, Anne finished a second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Anne stubbornly had it published by T. C. Newby, despite his slipshod handling of Agnes Grey, but she soon regretted her decision. Hoping to make a big profit on an American edition, the shady publisher told a U.S. firm that Anne’s new book was written by the author of the best-selling Jane Eyre. In other words, Currer and Acton Bell were really the same person. Word got around, and soon Charlotte received a perplexed letter from George Smith of Smith, Elder and Company. He demanded an explanation, and he deserved one, because Currer Bell’s next novel had been promised to him.

  London was “the Emporium of the World,” noted a writer in 1847. It was a place of “magnificent squares, and noble mansions—tenanted by persons of the highest rank.” Such a view ignored the poverty that Dickens and others described.

  The sisters knew that the time had come to reveal their separate identities—at least to their publishers. So in July 1848, Charlotte and Anne packed a small box. One day after tea, they walked four miles through a thunderstorm to Keighley, where they boarded a train to the West Yorkshire city of Leeds. There they caught an overnight train to London. Emily, the most private and homebound of the three, had flatly refused to go.

  Anne and Charlotte reached the great city at eight in the morning and went to their lodging, the Chapter Coffee House. It was an old, paneled place where gentlemen stayed. It was thought unsuitable for ladies on their own, but the Brontë sisters came from the country and knew no better. They washed up, had breakfast, and set out on their errand.

  A plaque at 65, Cornhill, London, commemorates the visit of Charlotte and Anne Brontë to Smith, Elder and Company.

  That morning, George Smith was hard at work at his desk, with a busy day ahead of him. He was less than pleased to hear that two ladies had come to see him, and that they declined to give their names. Smith had them shown into his office and vowed to deal quickly with this irksome interruption. He looked up to see two “rather quaintly dressed little ladies, pale-faced and anxious-looking.” The smaller one handed him a letter that he had written to Currer Bell.

  Smith glanced at the letter in his hand, and then at the woman. He looked again at the letter, and back at the woman. Several moments passed before he understood that he was meeting the author of Jane Eyre. His morning’s work forgotten, he introduced the Misses Brontë to his colleague William Smith Williams, a gentle older man. His earlier annoyance transformed into joy, George Smith suddenly wanted the Brontës to see London’s sights and its people. He urged them to view the latest art exhibition. He talked excitedly of presenting them to his mother and sisters, and to Thackeray and Lewes.

  No, Charlotte said, although she would have loved to meet these literary stars. She and Anne were telling their secret to their publishers alone. The rest of the world must go on thinking of the Bells as three gentle
men, she insisted. But wouldn’t they at least attend a party while pretending to be his “country cousins,” Smith asked. Charlotte saw that “he would have liked some excitement,” but again she said no.

  That evening, Smith called for Charlotte and Anne at their hotel. He was with his two sisters and William Smith Williams, and all were elegantly dressed. They were on their way to the opera and insisted the Brontës come along. Charlotte’s head ached, and she and Anne had nothing fancy to wear, but they put on their best country dresses and went anyway. “Fine ladies and gentlemen glanced at us with a slight, graceful superciliousness quite warranted by the circumstances—still I felt pleasurably excited,” Charlotte reported to Mary Taylor, “and I saw Anne was calm and gentle which she always is.”

  Charlotte Brontë and George Smith later wrote down their impressions of each other. In a letter to Mary Taylor, Charlotte summed up Smith as “a firm, intelligent man of business though so young.” He was “bent on getting on—and I think desirous to make his way by fair, honourable means.” Smith was “enterprising—but likewise cool & cautious.” And, finally, “Mr. Smith is a practical man.”

  Long after Charlotte Brontë’s death, George Smith confessed that he thought she looked “interesting rather than attractive. She was very small, and had a quaint old-fashioned look. Her head seemed too large for her body. She had fine eyes, but her face was marred by the shape of the mouth.” Charlotte displayed very little “feminine charm,” and, Smith perceived, “of this fact she herself was uneasily and perpetually conscious. It may seem strange that the possession of genius did not lift her above the weakness of an excessive anxiety about her personal appearance. But I believe she would have given all her genius and her fame to have been beautiful.”