The Chief Genii and their works
Sep. 14th, 2012 03:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakTo allow a generalization: most writers don't have very interesting lives, or rather, the qualities that make their fictions compelling usually aren't there in their every day existence. Both because real life seldom bows to the necessities of plot, and because spending a good deal of your time reading, writing and redrafting isn't dramatic to read about. But there are exceptions. The Bronte family is one of them. It's not a coincidence that the very first biography, of Charlotte Bronte, published a short time after her death, was written by a fellow novelist: Mrs. Gaskell recognized a good plot when she saw one. Her interpretation shaped the idea of the Brontes for at least a century until biographers increasingly started to argue with it, not least because of the wealth of new material available, to the point that the current acknowledged standard biography, Juliet Barker's The Brontes (from 1994, recently republished and updated), explicitly markets itself as being anti-Gaskell, but the counter picture drawn is no less dramatic, and says a lot about the changed needs and expectation of readers as well. Mrs. Gaskell's biography above all wanted to defend Charlotte (and to a lesser extent, her sisters) from the charge of being "coarse and brutish", as many of the original reviews had accused the Brontes of being, especially before the secret of their feminine identities were revealed, and so she created Charlotte-the-perfect-Victorian-martyr, with everyone else in the family being slided in the appropriate roles. Today, Bronte-friendly readers are more inclined to defend Charlotte & Co. from the charge of having been proper Victorians.
My favourite about-the-Brontes books: Elsemarie Maletzke's biography "Die Schwestern Bronte", which is in German and written both in a fluid, suspenseful style and with a sense of humour, full of affection for her subjects but also not inclined to overlook the contractions and less attractive qualities; Lucasta Miller's The Bronte Myth, which covers a wide field from Mrs. Gaskell to Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (both poets explicitly tackled the Emily Bronte and Wuthering Heights in their poetry, and Ted Hughes' birthplace as well as Sylvia Plath's grave aren't that far away from Haworth), both fiction and non-fiction; and, yes, Juliet Barker's magnum opus The Brontes (over 800 pages narrative, about 127 pages in footnotes), which is a genuine family biography in the sense that it covers Patrick and Branwell with the same thoroughness as it does Charlotte, Emily and Anne. Mind you, if you're new to Bronte biographies, I wouldn't advise starting with Juliet Barker, because a) that volume is intimidating and b) it's very much an argument with Elizabeth Gaskell, so it helps being familiiar at least in broad outlines with what Barker's attacking. But if you already have a basic idea about the Brontes, Barker is really the most thorough and exhaustive biographer ever. Near the end of the book, which also covers the story of how Mrs. Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Bronte came to be written (a fascinating story in its own right, subtitled in Juliet Barker's biography Saintliness, Treason and Plot with a irreverent allusion to the Guy Fawkes rhyme), she sums up her argument with Mrs. G. thusly:
Mrs. Gaskell was a supreme writer of fiction, but she too easily identified what she perceived to be the facts of Charlotte's life with the themes of her own novels: Charlotte and her sisters thus became the dutiful, long suffering daughters and Branwell the wastrel son of a harsh, unbending father. The portrayal of Charlotte as the martyred heroine of a tragic life served its purpose at the time. Charlotte's wicked sense of humour, her sarcasm, her childhood joie de vivre which enlivens the juvenilia, are completely ignored. So, too, are her prejudices, her unpleasant habit of always seeing the worst in people, her bossiness against which her sisters rebelled, her flirtations with William Weightman and George Smith and her traumatic unrequited love for Monsieur Heger. What remains may be a more perfect human being, but it was not Charlotte Bronte. Mrs. Gaskell's Emily, too, reduced to a series of vignettes illustrating her unusual strength of character, betrays nothing of the obsession with Gondal which made her almost incapable of leading a life outside of the sanctuary of her home but led her to the creation of the strange and wonderful world of Wuthering Heights. Anne is simply a cipher, the youngest child, whose boldness in defying convention by adopting a plain heroine in Agnes Grey and advocating startlingly unorthodox religious beliefs and women's rights in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall finds no place in Mrs. Gaskell's portrait. Most of all, however, it was the men in Charlotte's life who suffered at her biographer's hands. The Patrick Bronte who took such tender care of his young children, campaigned incessantly on behalf of the poor of his parish and espoused unfashionable liberal causes is unrecognizable in her malicious caricature of a selfish and excentric recluse. Similarly, the Branwell who was his family's pride and joy, the leader and innovator, artist, poet, musician and writer, is barely touched uppon, despite the fact that, without him, there would probably have been no Currer, Ellis or Acton Bell.
Leaving biographer arguments aside, what keeps compelling me about the Brontes as people is that they were indeed an incredibly gifted family; that you have four children, rich in imagination, who create elaborate fantasy realms in which they role play and start to write stories for, but as opposed to many children who do the same never really stop (well, Charlotte did eventually, but it took her a long, long time and was not least due to the fact her game partners were gone), and the clash between Victorian reality and their fictional Angria and Gondal had such devastating result. And yet, out of this also emerged some unique novels and poetry which, though at the time so very different from what their contemporaries produced, now is seen as typical for the age. As Elsemarie Maletzke writes in her biography, every time you visit the National Portrait Gallery and see that painting, three school girls from the North painted by their brother who then wiped out his own portrait in what was originally a picture of four, that painting which hangs among the various worthies of the age depicted with far more professional and less haunting skill, it gets you. And yet they were very much part of their time and responding to it.
Juliet Barker certainly makes her case for Patrick Bronte as anything but the Gaskellian misanthropic hermit with lots of quotes from Patrick's campaigns, from his youth onwards, against a lot of Victorian injustices. He was a Tory (his hero worship of the Duke of Wellington was something all of his children inherited), but one who was simultanously full of liberal goals when it came to the poor. Of course, transforming himself from poor Irishman to respected Yorkshire Reverend via effort and brains alone already made for takes-nothing-for-granted start. He had the proverbial Irish temper, and nothing aroused it as quickly as seeing injustice.
Consider, moreover, the inadequacy of punishment. A man will be hanged for stealing a fat sheep, though he be hungry; - he will incur no greater punishment for murdering twenty men! IN the name of common sense, what is the necessary tendency of this?
Another life long Patrick cause was improvement of sanitation (he saw too many people in Haworth die because the unhygenic water supply), and education for the poor. And he was startingly unconventional when it came to abusive behaviour in the marriage. A case that was to inspire his youngest daughter Anne for The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was that of Mrs. Collins, wife of a curate in Keighley who was not under Patrick's supervision, but the pastor for Keighly was not helpful, and so Mrs. Collins came to Patrick instead for advice. Writes Charlotte about Mrs. Collins: She asked Papa's advice; there was nothing, she said, but ruin before them. They owed debts which they could never pay. She expected Mr. Collins' immediate dismissal from his curacy; she knew, from bitter experience, that his vices were utterly hopeless. He treated her and her child savagely; with much more to the same effect. Papa advised her to leave him for ever, and go home, if she had a home to go to. She said this was what she had long resolved to do and that she would indeed leave him directly (...).
(Mrs. Collins a few years later showed up in Haworth again and was thankfully far better off, sans husband. But just in case you need a precedent for a Victorian clergyman to advise a wife to leave her abusive husband, the Reverend Patrick Bronte is your man.)
His habit of sharing newspapers and what books he had with the six children he found himself with after the death of his wife meant that when Angria and Gondal were created, Charlotte and Branwell first did this in the form of writing fictional newspapers for their fantasy realm. But at that point, the two eldest sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, were already dead, victims of the brief but horrible time the Bronte girls spent at Cowan Bridge, a school for clergymen's daughters. Charlotte neither forgot nor forgave, and her thinly veiled portrait of said schooll in Jane Eyre practically pulsates with anger and grief to this day. (She named it Lowood which contemporaries would have known was the name of Napoleon's prison on Elba, which tells you something about Charlotte, too.) It was homeschooling for everyone from this point onwards for a few years, and the story of how this led to the writing game is an inevitable highlight in any biography; Branwell gets toy soldiers, shares them with his sisters, and they decide to claim countries in Africa with them. (Oh, Victorian colonialists in a tiny town in Yorkshire...) And then they become Chief Genii writing odes:
Awful Braniii gloomy giant
Shaking over earth his blazing spear
Brooding on blood with drear and vegeful soul
He sits enthroned in clouds to hear his thunder roll
Dread Tallii next like a dire Eagle flies
And on our mortal miseries feasts her bloody eyes
Emmii and Anniii last with boding cry
Famine and war fortell and mortal misery.
Being Chief Genii of Angria is all very well, but after some time Emily and Anne apparantly weren't content anymore to let Branwell and Charlotte run the game and founded their own realm, Gondal. A few years later, Charlotte satirizes all four of them in an Angria story where she pokes fun at her brother in the guise of "Patrick Benjamin Wiggins" ("I was always looking above my station", Wiggins said, "I wasn't satisfied with being a sign-painter at Howard, as Charlotte and them things were with being sempstresses"), but she doesn't spare herself and her sisters, either:
'I've some people who call themselves akin to me in the shape of three girls.(...)'
'What are your sisters' names?'
'Charlotte Wiggins, Jane Wiggins and Anne Wiggins.'
'Are they as queer as you?'
'Oh, they are miserable silly creatures not worth talking about. Charlotte's eighteen years old, a broad dumpy thin, whose head does not come higher than my elbow. Emily's sixteen, lean and scant, with a face about the size of a penny, and Anne is nothing, absolutely nothing.'
'What? Is she an idiot?'
'Next door to it.'
Sibling teasing aside, they were all still very close through their teenage years; one sign for this is that when Patrick finally risked sending Charlotte as the surviving eldest to school again (a different one, Roe Head), Branwell once visited her on foot, walking 41 kilometres to and back, just to update her on political events in Angria so she wouldn't have to wait for his letter. Only once everyone enters their twenties does it start to fall apart. Branwell is unable to keep any of the jobs he gets (as painter, railway man, tutor) very long. All three sisters tackle one of the few jobs available to women, being a governess, and all three hate it. Emily tries least, memorably telling a charge the only one in the household she liked was a dog, and ending up in Haworth again. Charlotte tried longer and wrote savage portraits of her employers and their offspring in her letters home, but one has to feel for the employers in question, too, for, as one of them later commented:
My cousin Benson Sidgwick, now vicar of Ashby Parva, certainly on one occasion threw a Bible at Miss Bronte! and all that another cousin can recollect of her is that if she was invited to walk to church with them, she thought she was being ordered about like a slave; if she was not invited, she imagined she was excluded from the family circle.
Anne fared best at governessing - proven not least by the fact that her charges kept up correspondance with her and visited her long after she'd left the position - but didn't like it much more, either. The truth was that all four of them wanted to be writers, kept writing throughout, but couldn't earn their living this way. Branwell managed to get a few poems published in Yorkshire papers but both he and Charlotte had bad luck when sending their poems to the higher literati; Robert Southey's reply to Charlotte became (in)famous in its condescension, not least because today, Charlotte is far better known and well read than he is, but it was fairly representative:
.
Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life, and it ought not to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure she will have for it, even as an accomplishment and a recreation.
As far as "proper" duties were concerned: despite considering herself ugly and described by everyone who knew her as "plain" (though also everyone said she had beautiful eyes), Charlotte did get no loss than four proposals, all of whom she declined because I could not sit all day long making a grave face before my husband - I would laugh and satirize and say whatever came into my head first (Charlotte explaining to her friend Ellen Nussey why she said no to Ellen's brother Henry). Bless. This makes it all the more painful in any version of the tale to read what happened when Charlotte did fall hopelessly, painfully in love. She and Emily had gone to Belgium to improve their home-learned French and to aquire the necessary skills to open their own school (which they never did) eventually; Charlotte fell in love with the directrice's husband, Monsieur Heger, promptly demonized his wife and her later letters from Britain begging for Monsieur Heger's love and attention are so raw and self abasing and honest that one keeps cringing on her behalf. For his part, Heger never seems to have encouraged her and done his best to let her down gently, but there is no real "best" in such a case. That Branwell simultanously was dismissed from his tutor position for having had an affair with his employer's wife (whether he did or didn't and only told an Angrian fantasy became a matter of long controversy, but biographies in the last twenty years settled on "yes, he did") rubbed salt into the wound and destroyed the last bit of sister and brother closeness. Having to keep your misery to yourself while your brother tells all and sunder about his and proceeds to drink himself to death must have been extra awful. Charlotte got out of her depression and rage by reading Anne's and Emily's Gondal poems without permission and deciding that the three of them should try to publish again, under gender-free pseudonyms. Then came prose, and literary history ensued.
It's fascinating to read contemporary reviews from the time the reviewers didn't know yet the authors were female, and how said reviews changed the moment "Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell" were outed as women. Before that happened, you get stuff like this:
Jane Eyre combines 'masculine hardness, coarseness, and freedom of expression' and the whole book expresses 'a total ignorance of the habits of society, a great coarseness of taste, and a heathenish doctrine of religion'; Wuthering Heights is 'coarse and loathsome', showing the 'brutalizing influence of unchecked passion' and 'there is such a general roughness and savegeness... as never should be found in a work of art'; The Tenant of Wildfall Hall brings the reader 'into the closest possible proximity with naked vice, and there are conversations such as we had hoped never to see printed in English. Or: Books, coarse even for men, coarse in language and coarse in conception, the coarseness apparently of violence and uncultivated men.
Hence Mrs. Gaskell's effort to rehabilitate Charlotte in the public eye, and before that, Charlotte's own effort to do this for Emily and Anne. The series of deaths - Branwell, Emily (who left the house for the last time at Branwell's funeral), Anne (who was already coughing when Emily died) all within nine months - is tragic in any version of the story, and makes you understand where Charlotte came from, but still, the way she rewrote and censored several of Anne's and Emily's poems upon republication and her foreword for her sister's novels, basically excusing Emily for having been too naive to understand the monsters she created and Anne as too nice are nearly as infuriating to read as Southey's letter to her was.
"Charlotte and the literati", once "Currer Bell" has become a surprise bestselling author, otoh, makes for an amusing tale. Charlotte was an enthusiastic Thackeray reader (whereas she had no time for Dickens at all), and was thrilled when her publisher told her Thackeray had loved Jane Eyre, so much so that he wrote a fan letter to the publishers, who passed it on to Charlotte, who was in author heaven.
Quoth the great man: I wish you had not sent me Jane Eyre. It interested me so much that I have lost (or won if you like) a whole day in reading it at the busiest period, with the printers I know waiting for copy. Who the author can be I can't guess - if a woman she knows her language better than most ladies do, or has had a 'classical' education. It is a fine book though - the man & woman capital - the style very generous and upright so to speak. Some of the love passages made me cry - to the astonishment of John who came in with the cloals. St. John the Missionary is a failure I think but a good failure. There are parts excellent. I don't know why I tell you this, but I have been exceedingly moved & pleased by Jane Eyre. It is a woman's writing, but whose?
A delighted Charlotte promptly told her publisher to dedicate the second edition (as the first was quickly sold out) to Thackeray. What Charlotte, living in Yorkshire, couldn't know, but all of London did, and what her publisher should have told her, was that Thackeray's wife a few years earlier had gone insane. (And ended up not in an attic but in an asylum.) Also, his novel Vanity Fair was just then published in a magazine, featuring his anti heroine Becky Sharpe, con woman and for a time governess. So when the second edition of Jane Eyre was dedicated to Thackeray, conspiracy theorists immediately deduced that Currer Bell must be a fired governess (now depicted as Becky Sharpe) in love with Thackeray. Charlotte was mortified. Some time later when she was in London and got introduced to Thackeray, more awkwardness ensued as he waved his cigar around her, but she didn't recognize this was supposed to be a Rochester joke. And then:
With his usual high spirit and thoughtlessness, Thackeray had said in a loud voice 'audible over half the room', 'Mother, you must allow me to introduce you to Jane Eyre.' Naturally, heads had turned in every row and everyone stared at the 'disconcerted little lady' who grew confused and angry when she realized every eye was upon her. (...) The next day Thackeray paid an afternoon call. Which Charlotte's publisher, with whom she was staying, describes thusly:
Thackeray was tanding on the hearthrug, looking anything but happy. Charlotte Bronte stood close to him, with head thrown back and face white with anger. The first words I heard were, 'No, Sir! If you had come to our part of the country in Yorkshire, what would have have thought of me if I had introduced you to my father, before a mixed company of strangers, as 'Mr. Warrington'? Thackeray replied, 'No, you mean 'Arthur Pendennis'. 'No, I don't mean Arthur Pendennis!' retorted Miss Bronte; 'I mean mr. Warrnginton, and Mr. Warrington would not have behaved as you behaved to me yesterday.' The spectacle of this little woman, heardly reaching to Thackeray's elbow, but, somehow, looking stronger and fiercer than himself, and casting hier incisicve words at his head, dresmbled the dropping of shells into a fortress.
So much for you, Thackeray. Observe that Charlotte remains a fan to the last, though; as far as his own characters are concerned, she doesn't identify him with snobbish Pendennis but with noble Warrington.
Given Charlotte's HUGE Jane Austen issues (which among other things tell you something about Charlotte's enormous class chip on the shoulder; she imagines the late Jane Austen looking down at her "with a well-bred sneer", i.e. basically casts her as Blanche Ingram or any of the ladies she worked for as governess, never mind the actual circumstances of Jane Austen about whom she couldn't know anything, being only a generation apart), it's ironic that her eventual marriage totally reads like a Jane Austen plot, not like one of her own novels, with the hero being someone she'd known for a long while, her father's curate, Arthur Nichols, who had loved her from afar but had needed years to get up the courage of asking her. Charlotte says no, everyone at Haworth, especially her father (who until then had gotten along fine with his curate) is horribly sarcastic and ridicules poor Arthur Nichols, which promptly drives Charlotte to sympathize with him, as she knows what that feels like, and lo and behold, falling in love and marriage ensues. But because the Brontes' lives were not written by a Moffat but rather by a Joss Whedon or RTD type of fate decider, this is but a brief reprieve; Charlotte dies, pregnant, presumably of the same disease that took all of her siblings, consumption.
Patrick, having survived his wife and all his children, somehow managed not to end up bitter; he also reacted stoically and with self deprecating humour to finding himself depicted as a half-mad recluse in Mrs. Gaskell's biography. The letter he wrote to her makes for a fine concluding quote:
The principal mistake (...) which I wish to mention, is that which states that I laid my Daughters under restriction with regard to their diet, obliging them to live chiefly on vegetable food. This I never did. After their aunt's death, with regard to housekeeping affairs they had all their own way. Thinking their constitutions to be delicate, the advice I repeatedly gave them was that they should wear flannel, eat as much wholesome animal food as they could digest, take air and exercise in moderation (...). I do not deny that I am somewhat excentric. Had I been numbered among the calm, concentric men of the world, I should not have been as I now am, and I should, in all probability, never have had such children as mine have been. I have no objection, whatever to your representing me as a little excentric, since you, and other learned friends will have it so; only don't set me on, in my fury to burning hearthrugs, sawing the backs of chairs, and tearing my wife's silk gown!
(...) I am not in the least offended at your telling me that I have faults! I have many - and being a Daughter of Eve, I doubt not that you have also some. Let us both try to be wiser and better, as Time recedes, and Eternity advances.
My favourite about-the-Brontes books: Elsemarie Maletzke's biography "Die Schwestern Bronte", which is in German and written both in a fluid, suspenseful style and with a sense of humour, full of affection for her subjects but also not inclined to overlook the contractions and less attractive qualities; Lucasta Miller's The Bronte Myth, which covers a wide field from Mrs. Gaskell to Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (both poets explicitly tackled the Emily Bronte and Wuthering Heights in their poetry, and Ted Hughes' birthplace as well as Sylvia Plath's grave aren't that far away from Haworth), both fiction and non-fiction; and, yes, Juliet Barker's magnum opus The Brontes (over 800 pages narrative, about 127 pages in footnotes), which is a genuine family biography in the sense that it covers Patrick and Branwell with the same thoroughness as it does Charlotte, Emily and Anne. Mind you, if you're new to Bronte biographies, I wouldn't advise starting with Juliet Barker, because a) that volume is intimidating and b) it's very much an argument with Elizabeth Gaskell, so it helps being familiiar at least in broad outlines with what Barker's attacking. But if you already have a basic idea about the Brontes, Barker is really the most thorough and exhaustive biographer ever. Near the end of the book, which also covers the story of how Mrs. Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Bronte came to be written (a fascinating story in its own right, subtitled in Juliet Barker's biography Saintliness, Treason and Plot with a irreverent allusion to the Guy Fawkes rhyme), she sums up her argument with Mrs. G. thusly:
Mrs. Gaskell was a supreme writer of fiction, but she too easily identified what she perceived to be the facts of Charlotte's life with the themes of her own novels: Charlotte and her sisters thus became the dutiful, long suffering daughters and Branwell the wastrel son of a harsh, unbending father. The portrayal of Charlotte as the martyred heroine of a tragic life served its purpose at the time. Charlotte's wicked sense of humour, her sarcasm, her childhood joie de vivre which enlivens the juvenilia, are completely ignored. So, too, are her prejudices, her unpleasant habit of always seeing the worst in people, her bossiness against which her sisters rebelled, her flirtations with William Weightman and George Smith and her traumatic unrequited love for Monsieur Heger. What remains may be a more perfect human being, but it was not Charlotte Bronte. Mrs. Gaskell's Emily, too, reduced to a series of vignettes illustrating her unusual strength of character, betrays nothing of the obsession with Gondal which made her almost incapable of leading a life outside of the sanctuary of her home but led her to the creation of the strange and wonderful world of Wuthering Heights. Anne is simply a cipher, the youngest child, whose boldness in defying convention by adopting a plain heroine in Agnes Grey and advocating startlingly unorthodox religious beliefs and women's rights in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall finds no place in Mrs. Gaskell's portrait. Most of all, however, it was the men in Charlotte's life who suffered at her biographer's hands. The Patrick Bronte who took such tender care of his young children, campaigned incessantly on behalf of the poor of his parish and espoused unfashionable liberal causes is unrecognizable in her malicious caricature of a selfish and excentric recluse. Similarly, the Branwell who was his family's pride and joy, the leader and innovator, artist, poet, musician and writer, is barely touched uppon, despite the fact that, without him, there would probably have been no Currer, Ellis or Acton Bell.
Leaving biographer arguments aside, what keeps compelling me about the Brontes as people is that they were indeed an incredibly gifted family; that you have four children, rich in imagination, who create elaborate fantasy realms in which they role play and start to write stories for, but as opposed to many children who do the same never really stop (well, Charlotte did eventually, but it took her a long, long time and was not least due to the fact her game partners were gone), and the clash between Victorian reality and their fictional Angria and Gondal had such devastating result. And yet, out of this also emerged some unique novels and poetry which, though at the time so very different from what their contemporaries produced, now is seen as typical for the age. As Elsemarie Maletzke writes in her biography, every time you visit the National Portrait Gallery and see that painting, three school girls from the North painted by their brother who then wiped out his own portrait in what was originally a picture of four, that painting which hangs among the various worthies of the age depicted with far more professional and less haunting skill, it gets you. And yet they were very much part of their time and responding to it.
Juliet Barker certainly makes her case for Patrick Bronte as anything but the Gaskellian misanthropic hermit with lots of quotes from Patrick's campaigns, from his youth onwards, against a lot of Victorian injustices. He was a Tory (his hero worship of the Duke of Wellington was something all of his children inherited), but one who was simultanously full of liberal goals when it came to the poor. Of course, transforming himself from poor Irishman to respected Yorkshire Reverend via effort and brains alone already made for takes-nothing-for-granted start. He had the proverbial Irish temper, and nothing aroused it as quickly as seeing injustice.
Consider, moreover, the inadequacy of punishment. A man will be hanged for stealing a fat sheep, though he be hungry; - he will incur no greater punishment for murdering twenty men! IN the name of common sense, what is the necessary tendency of this?
Another life long Patrick cause was improvement of sanitation (he saw too many people in Haworth die because the unhygenic water supply), and education for the poor. And he was startingly unconventional when it came to abusive behaviour in the marriage. A case that was to inspire his youngest daughter Anne for The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was that of Mrs. Collins, wife of a curate in Keighley who was not under Patrick's supervision, but the pastor for Keighly was not helpful, and so Mrs. Collins came to Patrick instead for advice. Writes Charlotte about Mrs. Collins: She asked Papa's advice; there was nothing, she said, but ruin before them. They owed debts which they could never pay. She expected Mr. Collins' immediate dismissal from his curacy; she knew, from bitter experience, that his vices were utterly hopeless. He treated her and her child savagely; with much more to the same effect. Papa advised her to leave him for ever, and go home, if she had a home to go to. She said this was what she had long resolved to do and that she would indeed leave him directly (...).
(Mrs. Collins a few years later showed up in Haworth again and was thankfully far better off, sans husband. But just in case you need a precedent for a Victorian clergyman to advise a wife to leave her abusive husband, the Reverend Patrick Bronte is your man.)
His habit of sharing newspapers and what books he had with the six children he found himself with after the death of his wife meant that when Angria and Gondal were created, Charlotte and Branwell first did this in the form of writing fictional newspapers for their fantasy realm. But at that point, the two eldest sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, were already dead, victims of the brief but horrible time the Bronte girls spent at Cowan Bridge, a school for clergymen's daughters. Charlotte neither forgot nor forgave, and her thinly veiled portrait of said schooll in Jane Eyre practically pulsates with anger and grief to this day. (She named it Lowood which contemporaries would have known was the name of Napoleon's prison on Elba, which tells you something about Charlotte, too.) It was homeschooling for everyone from this point onwards for a few years, and the story of how this led to the writing game is an inevitable highlight in any biography; Branwell gets toy soldiers, shares them with his sisters, and they decide to claim countries in Africa with them. (Oh, Victorian colonialists in a tiny town in Yorkshire...) And then they become Chief Genii writing odes:
Awful Braniii gloomy giant
Shaking over earth his blazing spear
Brooding on blood with drear and vegeful soul
He sits enthroned in clouds to hear his thunder roll
Dread Tallii next like a dire Eagle flies
And on our mortal miseries feasts her bloody eyes
Emmii and Anniii last with boding cry
Famine and war fortell and mortal misery.
Being Chief Genii of Angria is all very well, but after some time Emily and Anne apparantly weren't content anymore to let Branwell and Charlotte run the game and founded their own realm, Gondal. A few years later, Charlotte satirizes all four of them in an Angria story where she pokes fun at her brother in the guise of "Patrick Benjamin Wiggins" ("I was always looking above my station", Wiggins said, "I wasn't satisfied with being a sign-painter at Howard, as Charlotte and them things were with being sempstresses"), but she doesn't spare herself and her sisters, either:
'I've some people who call themselves akin to me in the shape of three girls.(...)'
'What are your sisters' names?'
'Charlotte Wiggins, Jane Wiggins and Anne Wiggins.'
'Are they as queer as you?'
'Oh, they are miserable silly creatures not worth talking about. Charlotte's eighteen years old, a broad dumpy thin, whose head does not come higher than my elbow. Emily's sixteen, lean and scant, with a face about the size of a penny, and Anne is nothing, absolutely nothing.'
'What? Is she an idiot?'
'Next door to it.'
Sibling teasing aside, they were all still very close through their teenage years; one sign for this is that when Patrick finally risked sending Charlotte as the surviving eldest to school again (a different one, Roe Head), Branwell once visited her on foot, walking 41 kilometres to and back, just to update her on political events in Angria so she wouldn't have to wait for his letter. Only once everyone enters their twenties does it start to fall apart. Branwell is unable to keep any of the jobs he gets (as painter, railway man, tutor) very long. All three sisters tackle one of the few jobs available to women, being a governess, and all three hate it. Emily tries least, memorably telling a charge the only one in the household she liked was a dog, and ending up in Haworth again. Charlotte tried longer and wrote savage portraits of her employers and their offspring in her letters home, but one has to feel for the employers in question, too, for, as one of them later commented:
My cousin Benson Sidgwick, now vicar of Ashby Parva, certainly on one occasion threw a Bible at Miss Bronte! and all that another cousin can recollect of her is that if she was invited to walk to church with them, she thought she was being ordered about like a slave; if she was not invited, she imagined she was excluded from the family circle.
Anne fared best at governessing - proven not least by the fact that her charges kept up correspondance with her and visited her long after she'd left the position - but didn't like it much more, either. The truth was that all four of them wanted to be writers, kept writing throughout, but couldn't earn their living this way. Branwell managed to get a few poems published in Yorkshire papers but both he and Charlotte had bad luck when sending their poems to the higher literati; Robert Southey's reply to Charlotte became (in)famous in its condescension, not least because today, Charlotte is far better known and well read than he is, but it was fairly representative:
.
Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life, and it ought not to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure she will have for it, even as an accomplishment and a recreation.
As far as "proper" duties were concerned: despite considering herself ugly and described by everyone who knew her as "plain" (though also everyone said she had beautiful eyes), Charlotte did get no loss than four proposals, all of whom she declined because I could not sit all day long making a grave face before my husband - I would laugh and satirize and say whatever came into my head first (Charlotte explaining to her friend Ellen Nussey why she said no to Ellen's brother Henry). Bless. This makes it all the more painful in any version of the tale to read what happened when Charlotte did fall hopelessly, painfully in love. She and Emily had gone to Belgium to improve their home-learned French and to aquire the necessary skills to open their own school (which they never did) eventually; Charlotte fell in love with the directrice's husband, Monsieur Heger, promptly demonized his wife and her later letters from Britain begging for Monsieur Heger's love and attention are so raw and self abasing and honest that one keeps cringing on her behalf. For his part, Heger never seems to have encouraged her and done his best to let her down gently, but there is no real "best" in such a case. That Branwell simultanously was dismissed from his tutor position for having had an affair with his employer's wife (whether he did or didn't and only told an Angrian fantasy became a matter of long controversy, but biographies in the last twenty years settled on "yes, he did") rubbed salt into the wound and destroyed the last bit of sister and brother closeness. Having to keep your misery to yourself while your brother tells all and sunder about his and proceeds to drink himself to death must have been extra awful. Charlotte got out of her depression and rage by reading Anne's and Emily's Gondal poems without permission and deciding that the three of them should try to publish again, under gender-free pseudonyms. Then came prose, and literary history ensued.
It's fascinating to read contemporary reviews from the time the reviewers didn't know yet the authors were female, and how said reviews changed the moment "Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell" were outed as women. Before that happened, you get stuff like this:
Jane Eyre combines 'masculine hardness, coarseness, and freedom of expression' and the whole book expresses 'a total ignorance of the habits of society, a great coarseness of taste, and a heathenish doctrine of religion'; Wuthering Heights is 'coarse and loathsome', showing the 'brutalizing influence of unchecked passion' and 'there is such a general roughness and savegeness... as never should be found in a work of art'; The Tenant of Wildfall Hall brings the reader 'into the closest possible proximity with naked vice, and there are conversations such as we had hoped never to see printed in English. Or: Books, coarse even for men, coarse in language and coarse in conception, the coarseness apparently of violence and uncultivated men.
Hence Mrs. Gaskell's effort to rehabilitate Charlotte in the public eye, and before that, Charlotte's own effort to do this for Emily and Anne. The series of deaths - Branwell, Emily (who left the house for the last time at Branwell's funeral), Anne (who was already coughing when Emily died) all within nine months - is tragic in any version of the story, and makes you understand where Charlotte came from, but still, the way she rewrote and censored several of Anne's and Emily's poems upon republication and her foreword for her sister's novels, basically excusing Emily for having been too naive to understand the monsters she created and Anne as too nice are nearly as infuriating to read as Southey's letter to her was.
"Charlotte and the literati", once "Currer Bell" has become a surprise bestselling author, otoh, makes for an amusing tale. Charlotte was an enthusiastic Thackeray reader (whereas she had no time for Dickens at all), and was thrilled when her publisher told her Thackeray had loved Jane Eyre, so much so that he wrote a fan letter to the publishers, who passed it on to Charlotte, who was in author heaven.
Quoth the great man: I wish you had not sent me Jane Eyre. It interested me so much that I have lost (or won if you like) a whole day in reading it at the busiest period, with the printers I know waiting for copy. Who the author can be I can't guess - if a woman she knows her language better than most ladies do, or has had a 'classical' education. It is a fine book though - the man & woman capital - the style very generous and upright so to speak. Some of the love passages made me cry - to the astonishment of John who came in with the cloals. St. John the Missionary is a failure I think but a good failure. There are parts excellent. I don't know why I tell you this, but I have been exceedingly moved & pleased by Jane Eyre. It is a woman's writing, but whose?
A delighted Charlotte promptly told her publisher to dedicate the second edition (as the first was quickly sold out) to Thackeray. What Charlotte, living in Yorkshire, couldn't know, but all of London did, and what her publisher should have told her, was that Thackeray's wife a few years earlier had gone insane. (And ended up not in an attic but in an asylum.) Also, his novel Vanity Fair was just then published in a magazine, featuring his anti heroine Becky Sharpe, con woman and for a time governess. So when the second edition of Jane Eyre was dedicated to Thackeray, conspiracy theorists immediately deduced that Currer Bell must be a fired governess (now depicted as Becky Sharpe) in love with Thackeray. Charlotte was mortified. Some time later when she was in London and got introduced to Thackeray, more awkwardness ensued as he waved his cigar around her, but she didn't recognize this was supposed to be a Rochester joke. And then:
With his usual high spirit and thoughtlessness, Thackeray had said in a loud voice 'audible over half the room', 'Mother, you must allow me to introduce you to Jane Eyre.' Naturally, heads had turned in every row and everyone stared at the 'disconcerted little lady' who grew confused and angry when she realized every eye was upon her. (...) The next day Thackeray paid an afternoon call. Which Charlotte's publisher, with whom she was staying, describes thusly:
Thackeray was tanding on the hearthrug, looking anything but happy. Charlotte Bronte stood close to him, with head thrown back and face white with anger. The first words I heard were, 'No, Sir! If you had come to our part of the country in Yorkshire, what would have have thought of me if I had introduced you to my father, before a mixed company of strangers, as 'Mr. Warrington'? Thackeray replied, 'No, you mean 'Arthur Pendennis'. 'No, I don't mean Arthur Pendennis!' retorted Miss Bronte; 'I mean mr. Warrnginton, and Mr. Warrington would not have behaved as you behaved to me yesterday.' The spectacle of this little woman, heardly reaching to Thackeray's elbow, but, somehow, looking stronger and fiercer than himself, and casting hier incisicve words at his head, dresmbled the dropping of shells into a fortress.
So much for you, Thackeray. Observe that Charlotte remains a fan to the last, though; as far as his own characters are concerned, she doesn't identify him with snobbish Pendennis but with noble Warrington.
Given Charlotte's HUGE Jane Austen issues (which among other things tell you something about Charlotte's enormous class chip on the shoulder; she imagines the late Jane Austen looking down at her "with a well-bred sneer", i.e. basically casts her as Blanche Ingram or any of the ladies she worked for as governess, never mind the actual circumstances of Jane Austen about whom she couldn't know anything, being only a generation apart), it's ironic that her eventual marriage totally reads like a Jane Austen plot, not like one of her own novels, with the hero being someone she'd known for a long while, her father's curate, Arthur Nichols, who had loved her from afar but had needed years to get up the courage of asking her. Charlotte says no, everyone at Haworth, especially her father (who until then had gotten along fine with his curate) is horribly sarcastic and ridicules poor Arthur Nichols, which promptly drives Charlotte to sympathize with him, as she knows what that feels like, and lo and behold, falling in love and marriage ensues. But because the Brontes' lives were not written by a Moffat but rather by a Joss Whedon or RTD type of fate decider, this is but a brief reprieve; Charlotte dies, pregnant, presumably of the same disease that took all of her siblings, consumption.
Patrick, having survived his wife and all his children, somehow managed not to end up bitter; he also reacted stoically and with self deprecating humour to finding himself depicted as a half-mad recluse in Mrs. Gaskell's biography. The letter he wrote to her makes for a fine concluding quote:
The principal mistake (...) which I wish to mention, is that which states that I laid my Daughters under restriction with regard to their diet, obliging them to live chiefly on vegetable food. This I never did. After their aunt's death, with regard to housekeeping affairs they had all their own way. Thinking their constitutions to be delicate, the advice I repeatedly gave them was that they should wear flannel, eat as much wholesome animal food as they could digest, take air and exercise in moderation (...). I do not deny that I am somewhat excentric. Had I been numbered among the calm, concentric men of the world, I should not have been as I now am, and I should, in all probability, never have had such children as mine have been. I have no objection, whatever to your representing me as a little excentric, since you, and other learned friends will have it so; only don't set me on, in my fury to burning hearthrugs, sawing the backs of chairs, and tearing my wife's silk gown!
(...) I am not in the least offended at your telling me that I have faults! I have many - and being a Daughter of Eve, I doubt not that you have also some. Let us both try to be wiser and better, as Time recedes, and Eternity advances.
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Date: 2012-09-14 02:09 pm (UTC)That aside, this essay makes me want to read Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights again, and that never ends well. (Shirley. I liked Shirley. I should reread Shirley.)
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Date: 2020-09-09 04:45 am (UTC)I remember you telling me that story about Patrick and Mrs. Collins, and just as I was then I am still GO PATRICK :D That concluding quote is amazing, and I am not sure I'd manage to be nearly as sanguine in the same situation. Poor Patrick :(
Not knowing anything about the Brontes, really, except about Gondal and that Branwell wasn't much good at anything, I had no idea about Charlotte's fate, and I'm happy she got at least love and marriage even if that was it, but Put Out that she then promptly died. Joss Whedon, indeed.
Do you happen to remember what happened to Cowan Bridge? From Quartet it sounded like girls were dropping like flies, which one thinks someone would have had to notice! (I know, 19th C. Basically, you could not pay me enough to live in any other century, especially as a woman, even speaking from 2020!)
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Date: 2020-09-09 09:05 am (UTC)However, by the time Mrs. Gaskell published her biography, thus outing the school, the headmaster had been dead, so sadly he died in self satisfied peace and unpunished.
If you come across it anywhere, here is a recent movie about the Brontes I can reccommend, as opposed to many an earlier attempt.
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Date: 2020-09-12 05:44 am (UTC)I will put that movie on my list! (Why must DVDs have region codes?? :P )
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Date: 2020-09-13 07:31 pm (UTC)It seems to be included for free with my Amazon Prime membership. Check yours? Despite the fact that I generally don't watch movies or TV, it's on my list of things to try the next time my brain will cooperate with watching something.
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Date: 2020-09-09 06:36 pm (UTC)Okay, okay, I've been meaning to reread Miller for a while now, and clearly the time has come. :D
I haven't read the Barker, but Miller is muuuch shorter, so it might be a good next step for you. Especially since our Fritzian reading group is still going strong, and I need you to keep me on track with German a while longer by reading in sync with me (in English)!
There's also a much shorter sequel to Dark Quartet, which gives you Charlotte's life after her siblings die. Obviously, with 3 of the 4 being dead, it can't be *as great* as Quartet, but it's still worth reading.