The Bronte Sisters

by Catherine Reef

  Colorful rugs and textiles were on display in one section of London’s Great Exhibition of 1851.

  She again saw Thackeray, who needled her this time by greeting her in public as Jane Eyre. The next morning, when Thackeray called at the Smith home, Charlotte lambasted him for his ungentlemanly behavior. Thackeray left, having had enough of Charlotte Brontë. “There’s a fire and fury raging in that little woman, a rage scorching her heart which doesn’t suit me,” he said.

  By this time Charlotte’s happiness had faded. Smith withdrew into his work and had little time for his guest. No one knows what went wrong, but Mrs. Smith opposed a relationship between Charlotte Brontë and her son and may have been to blame. Tuberculosis ran in the Brontë family, Mrs. Smith told George; this lone surviving sister was tainted with consumption. It was useless for Charlotte to insist that she was healthy; Mrs. Smith’s mind was made up. Charlotte Brontë remained George Smith’s friend, but she turned down an invitation to visit in September 1851 and another one that winter.

  The thought that she was destined to live out her life in Haworth as her father’s closest companion brought back her old friend depression. She worked at her writing, hoping to push the gloom from her mind. Then Emily’s dog, Keeper, died, and Charlotte lost this link with a beloved sister. Soon, she had no appetite. Her head ached, and a pain shot through her side. A doctor diagnosed liver trouble and gave her blue pills to take, but they were full of mercury and nearly poisoned her. In spring she went to the Yorkshire coast to see Anne’s grave, and walking in the sun and sea air helped to heal her body and spirit.

  Arthur Nicholls came often to the parsonage. He chatted with the Reverend Brontë into the evening while Charlotte worked alone at the dining table. One night in December 1852, she heard Nicholls leave her father’s study, but instead of going straight home, he tapped at the dining room door. “Like lightning it flashed on me what was coming,” Charlotte wrote to Ellen. The curate stood before her, tall and solid, trembling from head to toe. All the color had drained from his face, and he was barely able to speak. With great trouble, he said that he had long cared for Charlotte and wanted her for his wife.

  “He made me for the first time feel what it costs a man to declare affection where he doubts response,” Charlotte wrote. “That he cared something for me—and wanted me to care for him—I have long suspected—but I did not know the degree or strength of his feelings.”

  Hardly knowing what to do, she guided the quaking man from the room and promised him an answer the next day. Then, as a dutiful daughter, she put the matter before her father. “Papa worked himself into a state not to be trifled with—the veins on his temples started up like whip-cord—and his eyes became suddenly blood-shot,” she reported. How dare an ordinary curate propose marriage to his talented daughter! And why did Nicholls address Charlotte without coming to her father first!

  Charlotte told Ellen that if she had been in love with Nicholls, she never could have borne her father’s furious oaths. As it was, the Reverend Brontë aroused her sense of fairness: the curate hardly deserved such abuse. For a single woman to go against her father’s wishes was unseemly, so the next day, Charlotte answered Arthur Nicholls with a firm refusal and focused on her next novel, Villette.

  More than ever before, Charlotte Brontë had drawn on her own life when writing Villette, which was published in 1853. She had studied her heart so that she could explore the inner life of her main character, an Englishwoman named Lucy Snowe. Lucy’s name summed up the chilly spirit in which she began her life’s adventure. Her heart slept under a white, wintry blanket. Lucy “has about her an external coldness,” Brontë explained. The word “external” is important. Lucy only waits to have her inner fire kindled by love.

  In Villette, Lucy tells her own story, as Jane Eyre did. A tragedy—its nature unrevealed—has left her alone in the world, without family or home. At twenty-three, she claims to be “inadventurous, unstirred by impulses of practical ambition,” yet almost on a whim she sails to Europe and becomes a teacher at a girls’ school that is much like the Pensionnat Heger, in a fictional Belgian town called Villette. The school, housed in a building that used to be a convent, is rumored to be haunted by the ghost of a nun. Lucy, in her plain gray dress, resembles this shadowy spirit. Lucy’s employer is Madame Beck, the headmistress who keeps tight order. Modeled on Madame Heger, Beck does her job with cool efficiency; “she had no heart to be touched,” Lucy tells the reader.

  Two men enter Lucy’s life. The first is Dr. John, the handsome young English doctor who comes to the school to treat Madame Beck’s children. Lucy eventually reveals to the reader that he is John Graham Bretton, her godmother’s son, and someone she last saw in England a decade earlier. Throughout much of the novel, Dr. John is smitten with Ginevra Fanshawe, a coquette enrolled in the pensionnat where Lucy teaches. The other man is more suited to Lucy’s mind and temperament. He is Monsieur Paul Emanuel, stern but kind, a fellow teacher who resembles Constantin Heger in looks and behavior. Through his friendship he draws Lucy out of her cold reserve, but she wonders what his feelings toward her might be.

  Lucy is left virtually alone at the school during an end-of-summer vacation, and her solitude weighs heavily on her spirit. “My nervous system could hardly support what it had for many days and nights to undergo in that huge empty house,” she says. She concludes that God plans for some people to live lives of suffering, “and I thrilled in the certainty that of this number I was one.” Eventually, desperate for human contact, she enters the confessional in a Catholic church, as Charlotte Brontë had done. After leaving she suffers a breakdown and is rescued by Dr. John. He brings her to the home that he shares with his mother in Villette, and she recovers there. When Lucy is well enough, the doctor escorts her to the theater, where they see an actress much like Mademoiselle Rachel.

  School resumes again, and the friendship deepens between Lucy Snowe and Paul Emanuel. Lucy continues to wonder how strongly he is attached to her. She gets her answer when a business matter requires him to travel to the West Indies for three years, and he asks her to marry him upon his return. He reveals that he has set up a school for her to run so that she can be independent and useful while he is away. “I had been left a legacy,” Lucy says, “such a thought for the present, such a hope for the future, such a motive for a persevering, a laborious, an enterprising, a patient and brave course.”

  As Paul’s date of return draws near, a wild storm barrels in from the southwest. “It did not cease till the Atlantic was strewn with wrecks: it did not lull till the deeps had gorged their fill of sustenance,” Lucy relates. Does Monsieur Paul safely return? Brontë left this question for her readers to decide.

  Most people liked Villette better than Shirley. Reviewers praised the author’s “clear, forcible, picturesque style” and said the novel had the “charm of freshness.” One eager writer claimed about Currer Bell, “This book would have made her famous, had she not been so already.” Mary Ann Evans (the novelist George Eliot) read Villette three times. She pronounced it a “still more wonderful book than Jane Eyre,” and exclaimed about Brontë, “What passion, what fire in her!” A proud Patrick Brontë sent a copy of Villette to his brother in Ireland.

  Some critics quibbled that parts of the book could have been better. One complained that the plot was “very slight”; another thought the author displayed a “cynical and bitter spirit.” Brontë had learned to take such comments in stride, but she felt unable to forgive one particular review, because it came from Harriet Martineau. Writing in the London Daily News, Martineau had called Villette “almost intolerably painful.” Not only does “an atmosphere of pain” hang over the story, but “all the female characters, in all their thoughts and lives, are full of one thing,” Martineau wrote, and that one thing was love. Charlotte Brontë, who had long favored a woman’s right to independence and ambition, had to bear the insult of this high-handed statement from Martineau: “There are substantial, heartfelt interests f
or women of all ages, and under ordinary circumstances, quite apart from love.” Martineau also disliked the novel’s main character, and said about Lucy Snowe, “We do not wonder that she loved more than she was beloved.”

  Stunned by this cruel betrayal, Charlotte sent a final letter to Martineau. “I know what love is as I understand it; and if a man or woman should be ashamed of feeling such love, then there is nothing right, noble, faithful, truthful, unselfish in this earth,” she wrote.

  “The differences of feeling between Miss M. and myself are very strong and marked; very wide and irreconcilable,” she told George Smith. “In short she has hurt me a good deal, and at present it appears very plain to me that she and I had better not try to be close friends.”

  That spring, the time came for another parting. Arthur Nicholls had been a gloomy presence in Haworth since Charlotte refused him, and he had even broken down in tears during one Sunday’s communion service. On the evening of May 26, Charlotte found him standing at the parsonage’s garden gate, “in a paroxysm of anguish—sobbing as women never do,” as she described him. He would soon start work at another church, but he could hardly bear the thought of leaving Haworth without seeing Charlotte once more. The two exchanged a few brief words. “Poor fellow!” Charlotte said. “He wanted such hope and such encouragement as I could not give him.”

  In September, when the purple heather that erupts on the moors had faded to brown, Charlotte’s other writer friend, Elizabeth Gaskell, spent four days with her in Haworth. Charlotte cautioned Gaskell that she was coming to a place like “the backwoods of America.” She was coming to a country of “barbarism, loneliness, and liberty,” Charlotte warned.

  A dull, gray village and strong gusts formed Gaskell’s first impression of Haworth. Upon reaching the parsonage, she was “half-blown back by the wild vehemence of the wind which swept along the narrow walk,” she wrote. Once inside, she received a kind welcome. She was given the bedroom that had been Aunt Branwell’s, one that overlooked the graves in the churchyard. Gaskell, who saw life’s bright side, claimed the view was “beautiful in certain lights.”

  Each day, the two women had breakfast and tea with Charlotte’s father. Gaskell had trouble finding something good to say about the senior Brontë, though. She admitted to being “sadly afraid of him in my inmost soul; for I caught a glare of his stern eyes over his spectacles at Miss Brontë once or twice which made me know my man.”

  Out on the moors and in the parsonage after the others had gone to bed, Charlotte told Gaskell the story of her life. She talked about the school at Cowan Bridge, the tales of Angria, and her student years at Roe Head and in Brussels. She described the pain of losing Branwell, Emily, and Anne. After Gaskell retired for the night, Charlotte walked alone in the dining room as she once had walked with her sisters. Gaskell imagined how her friend must have felt. “I am sure I should fancy I heard the steps of the dead following me,” she commented.

  The novelist Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell was Charlotte Brontë’s friend and first biographer.

  The passing months brought changes of circumstances and of heart. Patrick Brontë suffered a stroke that diminished the vision in his one good eye, and he needed his curate’s help. Solitude weighed on Charlotte more heavily than ever, and her words lay dead on the page. So when Arthur Nicholls came back to Haworth in January 1854 to assist the Reverend Brontë and to renew his offer to Charlotte, she approached the old man again. “Father, I am not a young girl, nor a young woman, even—I never was pretty,” she said. But his response was the same: never. For an entire week after their discussion, he refused to say a word to her.

  Finally, Tabby Aykroyd, the longtime household servant, lost patience and spoke up. “Do you wish to kill your daughter?” she demanded angrily of her employer. Patrick Brontë grudgingly gave in, and Charlotte and Arthur became engaged in March 1854.

  Arthur Bell Nicholls won Charlotte Brontë’s hand through persistence.

  Ellen Nussey disapproved. She spoke her mind in a letter to Mary Taylor in New Zealand, complaining that Nicholls was no match for someone like Charlotte. If Ellen expected a sympathetic reply, she was mistaken. Mary, who had decided against ever marrying herself, supported Charlotte’s choice. “You talk wonderful nonsense,” Mary shot back. Charlotte had every right to consider her own pleasure. “If this is so new for her to do, it is high time she began to make it more common,” Mary wrote.

  Mary was right: Charlotte was thinking of her own happiness. “I trust to love my husband. I am grateful for his tender love to me. I believe him to be an affectionate, a conscientious, a high-principled man,” she wrote. She believed that Providence, or God’s wise guidance, had opened this path for her. She would be lonely no more.

  Charlotte Brontë and Arthur Nicholls were married on June 29, a Thursday. The bride wore a white embroidered dress and a white bonnet. The villagers of Haworth declared that she looked just like a snowdrop. The Reverend Brontë decided at the last minute not to give the bride away, so Miss Wooler did the honors. Ellen Nussey and the servants Tabby Aykroyd and Martha Brown were the only other guests.

  The newlyweds honeymooned for a month in Arthur Nicholls’s native Ireland. Charlotte met and liked his family. She was surprised by the grandeur of their home, Cuba House, where Arthur had been raised by an uncle. She noted its thick walls, lofty rooms, and handsome furniture. Cuba House sat on ample grounds at the end of an avenue of lime trees. Everyone Charlotte met praised Arthur and told her she had married “one of the best gentlemen in the country.” More than before, Charlotte was convinced that she had made “what seems to me a right choice.”

  Charlotte and Arthur returned to live in the Haworth parsonage, where Arthur took over many of the Reverend Brontë’s duties. “Each time I see Mr. Nicholls put on gown or surplice—I feel comforted to think that this marriage has secured Papa good aid in his old age,” Charlotte confided to Miss Wooler. She spent her days looking after her husband and father. She wrote no more novels, but she still wrote to her friends.

  Arthur insisted on his right as a husband to read the letters exchanged between his wife and Ellen Nussey and to approve the ones that Charlotte wrote. But the two women hated to give up the intimacy they had enjoyed for so many years, and they protested. “Men don’t seem to understand making letters a vehicle of communication—they always seem to think us incautious,” Charlotte said. At last Arthur agreed to leave their correspondence alone if Ellen promised to burn Charlotte’s letters—including those she had carefully saved over the years. Ellen swore that she would, but she had no intention of keeping this promise. Later she would claim that Nicholls had continued to censor what Charlotte wrote to her. If he broke his side of the bargain, then she was under no obligation to uphold hers. (Either Charlotte or Arthur destroyed the letters that Ellen wrote.)

  Charlotte Brontë was photographed in her last year of life.

  December came, and Charlotte believed she was pregnant, if the nausea she felt was any clue. Instead of passing, though, her queasiness worsened. She grew feverish and frail and went to bed. A week, two weeks, and more passed, and she felt no better. Tabby Aykroyd was sick, too. When Tabby died, on February 17, 1855, at eighty-four, Charlotte was still bedridden and was vomiting blood. The local doctors had no idea what was wrong. They spoke of phthisis, or wasting away, and tuberculosis.

  By the third week in March, Charlotte was fading in and out of consciousness, but in an alert moment she heard Arthur ask God to spare her. “Oh! I am not going to die, am I?” she cried. “He will not separate us; we have been so happy.” She managed to scrawl a last note to her friends: “No kinder, better husband than mine, it seems to me, there can be in the world.” Ellen Nussey rushed to Haworth, but she was too late to say goodbye. Instead she prepared her friend’s body for burial. Charlotte Brontë had died on March 31, 1855. In three weeks she would have turned thirty-nine.

  Afterword

  “Alas!”

  Early she goes on the path


  To the Silent Country, and leaves

  Half her laurels unwon,

  Dying too soon . . .

  Currer Bell—Charlotte Brontë—was dead. Matthew Arnold had been moved to remember her in verse when he learned that she was gone.

  Other tributes appeared in print, including a mean-spirited one from Harriet Martineau, in which she repeated her criticism of Brontë’s novels. “Her heroines love too readily, too vehemently, and sometimes after a fashion which their female readers may resent,” Martineau wrote. She reminded people of what had shocked them in the 1840s about all three Bells: “the coarseness which, to a certain degree, pervades the works of all the sisters, and the repulsiveness which makes the tales by Emily and Anne really horrible to people who have not iron nerves.”

  Martineau was smart enough to recognize that her late friend’s talent was greater than her own. Her words smack of jealousy, especially her final image of Currer Bell as a passing literary fad, soon to be forgotten. Bell had already become a shadow, Martineau wrote, “vanishing from our view.”