Brontës
Page 91
In the day-time effort and occupation aid me – but when evening darkens something in my heart revolts against the burden of solitude – the sense of loss and want grows almost too much for me. I am not good or amiable in such moments – I am rebellious – and it is only the thought of my dear Father in the next room, or of the kind servants in the kitchen – or some caress from the poor dogs which restores me to softer sentiments and more rational views. As to the night – could I do without bed – I would never seek it – waking – I think – sleeping – I dream of them – and I cannot recall them as they were in health – still they appear to me in sickness and suffering –105
That anger against her fate which had, in the past, pricked on her ambition to succeed as a writer was now to be her saving grace, preventing her relapsing into morbidity. Even so, it was to be a continual fight. The sound of the clock ticking loud through the still house was a constant reminder of what had been. The sight of Keeper making his daily visit to Emily’s bedroom or Flossy looking wistfully round for Anne would wring her heart. The pleasure of receiving another parcel of books from Cornhill was to be poisoned by the memory that Emily was just beginning to be ill when the first such parcel had arrived, that Charlotte had read one of Emerson’s essays to her the night before she died, reading on until she found that her sister was not listening. ‘I thought to recommence next day—’, Charlotte told Williams, adding, with her peculiar gift for reinventing the past where her sisters were concerned, ‘Next day, the first glance at her face told me what would happen before night-fall.’106
‘My life is what I expected it to be –’, Charlotte confessed to Ellen,
sometimes when I wake in the morning – and
But crushed I am not – yet: nor robbed of elasticity nor of hope nor quite of endeavour – Still I have some strength to fight the battle of life. I am aware and can acknowledge I have many comforts – many mercies – still I can get on.107
Among those mercies were the friendship of Ellen and Williams, both of whom wrote continually to her to buoy up her spirits. The latter even had a practical suggestion to make – why not get a cheerful young companion to ease her loneliness? Charlotte acknowledged that it was a good idea in some respects,
but there are two people whom it would not suit – and not the least incommoded of these would be the young person whom I might request to come and bury herself in the hills of Haworth – to take a church and stony churchyard for her prospect – the dead silence of a village parsonage – in which the tick of the clock is heard all day long – for her atmosphere – and a grave, silent spinster for her companion. I should not like to see youth thus immured.
Echoing the words of one of her most damning notices, in the Quarterly Review, and thereby revealing how much the barbed comments had festered in her mind, she added:
For society – long seclusion has in a great measure unfitted me – I doubt whether I should enjoy it if I might have it. Sometimes I think I should, and I thirst for it – but at other times I doubt my capability of pleasing or deriving pleasure. The prisoner in solitary confinement – the toad in the block of marble – all in time shape themselves to their lot.108
There was, as Charlotte recognized, only one cure for her grief and loneliness. Recalling Shakespeare’s lines from Macbeth, Charlotte took her courage in both hands and declared to Williams, ‘Labour must be the cure, not sympathy – Labour is the only radical cure for rooted Sorrow.’109 ‘The fact is,’ she later confided, rather less grandiloquently, ‘my work is my best companion – hereafter I look for no great earthly comfort except what congenial occupation can give –.’110
Chapter Twenty-One
NO LONGER INVISIBLE
Charlotte’s ‘radical cure for rooted Sorrow’ was to return to Shirley, the book she had begun with such high hopes when her brother and sisters were still alive. She had written almost two-thirds of it when Branwell had been struck down; since then she had lost both Emily and Anne and the manuscript had been laid aside, virtually forgotten. Now, in unaccustomed isolation, she began to write again, but her mood had changed irrevocably. Her loss permeated the remainder of the novel. She opened the third volume with a chapter entitled ‘The Valley of the Shadow’ and with words that were wrung from her own heart.
The future sometimes seems to sob a low warning of the events it is bringing us, like some gathering though yet remote storm, which, in tones of the wind, in flushings of the firmament, in clouds strangely torn, announces a blast strong to strew the sea with wrecks … At other times this Future bursts suddenly, as if a rock had rent, and in it a grave had opened, whence issues the body of one that slept. Ere you are aware, you stand face to face with a shrouded and unthought-of Calamity – a new Lazarus.1
Over that future, Charlotte had had no control, but in her book she wielded the powers of life and death over her characters, just like the Genius Tallii of long ago. In her first chapter since her sisters’ deaths, she felled Caroline Helstone with a sudden fever and brought her to the very threshold of death. Kinder than God had been in her own life, Charlotte saved her heroine and miraculously restored her to health through the discovery that her nurse was actually her long-lost mother. The plot was as improbable as Charlotte’s juvenile efforts at resurrection, but her descriptions of the mother’s sufferings as she ‘wrestled with God in earnest prayer’ at the bedside of her dying daughter were as real and searing as anything she had written.
Not always do those who dare such divine conflict prevail. Night after night the sweat of agony may burst dark on the forehead; the supplicant may cry for mercy with that soundless voice the soul utters when its appeal is to the Invisible. ‘Spare my beloved,’ it may implore. ‘Heal my life’s life. Rend not from me what long affection entwines with my whole nature. God of heaven – bend – hear – be clement!’ And after this cry and strife, the sun may rise and see him worsted … Then the watcher approaches the patient’s pillow, and sees a new and strange moulding of the familiar features, feels at once that the insufferable moment draws nigh, knows that it is God’s will his idol shall be broken, and bends his head, and subdues his soul to the sentence he cannot avert, and scarce can bear.2
Reading these lines before she knew anything about Charlotte Brontë, Mrs Gaskell, who had recently lost her own beloved baby son, recognized and empathized with the suffering which had inspired them.3 For Charlotte there was a catharsis in living through her characters and allowing them a gentler fate than her own; even so, she never lost sight of the fact that her writing was now her profession. Taking up what she had developed as one of the main themes of Shirley, she passionately defended the right of women to work in a letter to Williams.
Lonely as I am – how should I be if Providence had never given me courage to adopt a career – perseverance to plead through two long, weary years with publishers till they admitted me? – How should I be with youth past – sisters lost – a resident in a moorland parish where there is not a single educated family? In that case I should have no world at all: the raven, weary of surveying the deluge and without an ark to return to, would be my type. As it is, something like a hope and motive sustains me still. I wish all your daughters – I wish every woman in England had also a hope and motive: Alas! there are many old maids who have neither.4
Williams’ daughter, Louisa, was attempting to secure a place at the Queen’s College, an establishment connected with the Governess Institution which offered four years of training to potential governesses. Charlotte had had her reservations about the Governess Institution from the start. It seemed to her ‘both absurd and cruel’ to raise the standard of governesses’ acquirements still higher, when they were already not half nor a quarter paid for what they taught
and, in most instances, not a half nor a quarter of their attainments were required by their pupils. ‘It is true the world demands a brilliant list of accomplishments; for £20 per ann. it expects in one woman the attainments of several professors’, but, Charlotte had argued, good health, steady unimpressionable nerves and an ability to impart information rather than acquire it, were far more important qualities in a governess.5 Now, however, when she had been forced by the events of the last year to realize that her mind and her work were her only resources, Charlotte urged Williams to consider the priceless advantage of the education his daughter would gain.
Come what may – it is a step towards independency – and one great curse of a single female life is its dependency … Believe me – teachers may be hard-worked, ill-paid and despised – but the girl who stays at home doing nothing is worse off than the hardest-wrought and worst-paid drudge of a school. Whenever I have seen, not merely in humble, but in affluent homes – families of daughters sitting waiting to be married, I have pitied them from my heart. It is doubtless well – very well – if Fate decrees them a happy marriage – but if otherwise – give their existence some object – their time some occupation – or the peevishness of disappointment and the listlessness of idleness will infallibly degrade their nature.6
No doubt among those families of daughters sitting waiting to be married Charlotte had in mind the Nusseys: Ann, who at the grand age of fifty-three had at last secured a husband and was now fluttering about making preparations for her wedding as if she were a schoolgirl bride; Mercy, forty-one years old and so jealous of her elder sister’s good fortune that she threatened the happiness of the whole household; Ellen herself, already thirty-two, for so long the subject of Charlotte’s teasing about her suitors and earnest advice on the sort of man she should marry and now, like Charlotte, as they both admitted, facing a future as an old maid.7
What that future was likely to be Charlotte painted with grim realism in her portraits of the despised and misunderstood ‘old maids’, Miss Mann and Miss Ainley, in Shirley. Miss Mann, who had ‘passed alone through protracted scenes of suffering, exercised rigid self-denial, made large sacrifices of time, money, health for those who had repaid her only by ingratitude’, had become a censorious, morose and deeply lonely woman. Miss Ainley, who would watch by any sickbed, feared no disease, would nurse the poorest whom no one else would nurse and was serene, humble, kind, and equable throughout, was yet despised for being repellently ugly and barely thanked for her services, which had come to be expected. It was hardly right that the world should demand only one thing of unmarried women: a life of self-sacrifice, requited only by a distant praise for their devotion and virtue. ‘Is this enough? Is it to live?’ Charlotte made Caroline Helstone cry as she faced the prospect of spinsterhood:
Is there not a terrible hollowness, mockery, want, craving, in that existence which is given away to others, for want of something of your own to bestow it on? I suspect there is. Does virtue lie in abnegation of self? I do not believe it. Undue humility makes tyranny; weak concession creates selfishness … Each human being has his share of rights. I suspect it would conduce to the happiness and welfare of all, if each knew his allotment, and held to it as tenaciously as the martyr to his creed.8
Charlotte always claimed that she could not write books on matters of public interest nor for a moral or philanthropic purpose. Though she was to prove this emphatically by what she omitted from Shirley on the question of the rights and sufferings of mill workers, the whole story was an exploration of the ‘Woman Question’ which so exercised educated minds at this time. Again, however, despite her fiercely argued case for women to have an independent and valued existence outside marriage, Charlotte lacked the courage of her convictions and, much to Mary Taylor’s disgust, ended her book in the conventional manner by providing both her heroines with a husband.9
Charlotte worked long and hard at her book throughout the summer after Anne’s death. Inevitably it was a struggle, not least because her unhappiness manifested itself as usual in ill health. Not surprisingly, after three sudden deaths in the family, she could not help seeing in every cough or cold the first sign of something worse. She had returned from ‘that dismal Easton’ with the seeds of a cold that she could not throw off and when she developed a sore throat, cough and pain between her shoulders, she was extremely alarmed. ‘Say nothing about it –’, she ordered Ellen, ‘for I confess I am too much disposed to be nervous.’ A month later she was still complaining of cold, but a recurrence of her father’s bronchitis threw her into near panic: ‘I feel too keenly that he is the last, the only near and dear relation I have in the world.’10
Floundering in the depths of hypochondria, which was not helped by an outbreak of English cholera in Haworth, Charlotte commissioned Ellen to buy her a fur boa and cuffs (in July!) and a shower-bath.11 The emotional milestone of the first anniversary of Branwell’s death found her in despair. Both the servants were ill in bed, Martha in a critical condition with an internal inflammation and Tabby, whose lame leg had broken out in ulcers, having had a bad fall from her kitchen chair. Depressed with headache and sickness herself, Charlotte ‘fairly broke down for ten minutes – sat & cried like a fool’. The crisis passed, however. Martha recovered, her mother and sister came to assist in the house and, a few days later, a ‘huge Monster-package’ arrived from Leeds containing the shower-bath which Ellen had at last managed to find.12
Throughout these traumas, Charlotte’s writing provided her with a lifeline to sanity. By the end of August, the fair copy of the manuscript was complete and ready to go to the publishers. Charlotte found herself unable to decide whether it was better or worse than Jane Eyre, but, as she owned to Williams, ‘Whatever now becomes of the work – the occupation of writing it has been a boon to me – it took me out of dark and desolate reality to an unreal but happier region.’ After toying with ‘Hollows Mill’ and ‘Fieldhead’ as the title, she finally settled on Shirley, ‘without any explanation or addition – the simpler and briefer, the better’.13
Though she was anxious to send the manuscript off to Cornhill as soon as possible, James Taylor, her newest correspondent at the firm, had offered to call and collect it in person on his return from a holiday in Scotland. Charlotte was somewhat alarmed at this proposal, particularly as she could not remember meeting Taylor at Cornhill and perhaps suspected his motives in wishing to beard ‘Currer Bell’ in his den. The idea that she might be a peep-show for the curious appalled her, but it was difficult to turn down the offer. Instead, while appearing to welcome the prospect of his visit, she tried to put Taylor off with a long recital of the difficulties of actually getting to ‘a strange uncivilized little place’ such as Haworth – ‘he must remember that at a station called Shipley the carriages are changed – otherwise they will take him on to Skipton or Colne, or I know not where’. For good measure, she warned him that he could only call for the day because she could not entertain him for longer: ignoring the fact that Arthur Bell Nicholls would gladly have made himself available, she told Taylor she had neither father nor brother to walk the moors with him or show him the neighbourhood. And, like many a child before and since, she blamed her elderly parent for her lack of hospitality. It was irksome to him to give much of his time to a stranger, she claimed, blaming ‘the peculiar retirement of papa’s habits’; ‘without being in the least misanthropical or sour-natured – papa habitually prefers solitude to society, and Custom is a tyrant whose fetters it would now be impossible for him to break’.14 It was no wonder that Patrick gained a reputation at Cornhill for being a fierce, solitary eccentric when his own daughter described him thus.
When James Taylor did eventually call, on 8 September, the visit did not go well. Charlotte took an immediate personal dislike to him. ‘He is not ugly – but very peculiar’, Charlotte later told Ellen privately, ‘the lines in his face shew an inflexibility and – I must add – a hardness of character which do not attract.’ When he looked at her �
�in his keen way’, she actually recoiled before him and, even though he was clearly both excited and nervous at meeting ‘Currer Bell’ for the first time, his stern, abrupt manner only added to her repugnance. Patrick, too, did not get on well with his guest, who seems to have been unaware of the impression he had made on the Brontës. Certainly he reported favourably back to Cornhill, compelling Charlotte to reciprocate with more politeness than truth that the pleasure had been mutual and that she and her father had enjoyed the hour or two of conversation with him exceedingly.15 When Taylor wrote to her a few days after his visit, Charlotte did not reply for a week, excusing herself on the grounds that she had had a clergyman staying, though she had found time in the interval for at least five letters to Williams.16
It was an immense relief to Charlotte to get the manuscript of Shirley off her hands at last, particularly when Williams wrote back expressing a favourable opinion. ‘Your letter gave me great pleasure’, she declared.
An author who has shewn his book to none, held no consultation about plan, subject, characters or incidents, asked and had no opinon from one living being, but fabricated it darkly in the silent workshop of his own brain – such an author awaits with a singular feeling the report of the first impression produced by his creation in a quarter where he places confidence17