Graham Watson (3)

Poor Charlotte! Not because she lived in 'poverty' in Haworth and was taken for granted by the men in her life - supposedly - but rather that with friends like Elizabeth Gaskell (and Harriet Martineau to a lesser degree), who needs enemies? What a self-serving bitch! I knew not to trust Gaskell's notoriously unreliable biography of Charlotte, but now I hate the author to boot.

'It was the start of Elizabeth winning intimacies, encouraging this deeply private woman to expose herself in show more confessions she could read aloud to her family then pass around for her friends’ amusement.'

There are apparently two camps of women in Graham Watson's take on literary history: the outgoing, 'charming', chatty (middle class) matrons like Gaskell and Martineau, who are forgiven every devious act against their 'friend', and the downtrodden, shy and insular freaks of nature like Charlotte who would rather hide behind curtains than be passed around like human curiosities at tedious dinner parties. Well, sorry, but I now have ten times more sympathy for Charlotte, whose novels I have never really enjoyed, and would like to set North and South on fire out of spite. Charlotte took a lot of shit from women like Harriet, who cowardly mocked her writing anonymously in the press, and Thackeray, of all men - 'The poor little woman of genius! The fiery little eager brave tremulous homely-faced creature!' - but the real betrayal came from Mrs Gaskell after Charlotte's drawn out death aged 38.

Chosen by Patrick Bronte and Arthur Bell Nicholls to write a tribute to the last of the talented sisters, Mrs Gaskell was already well on her way to selling out Charlotte's every last word and setting 'a dangerous new precedent for intruding into the lives of private individuals, turning anonymous people into household names the press was now at liberty to discuss.' This is the woman, after all, who would gossip about Charlotte with her friends while she still lived, so all bets were obviously off after her demise. Gaskell squeezed every last drop of gossip and hearsay out of Haworth, from friends like Ellen Nussey who thought they were helping Gaskell to celebrate Charlotte's life and work, to random strangers like the local stationer who called himself Charlotte's best friend and former servants from the Parsonage. She then bound all the facts, half-truths and malicious lies into a book, crammed with direct quotes from Charlotte's personal correspondence, and had the nerve to feel aggrieved when those named took issue with her 'novel' approach. No wonder Arthur claimed he had burned all of Charlotte's papers and wouldn't supply Gaskell with further ammunition! As Patrick observed, '‘Well, I think Mrs Gaskell tried to make us all appear as bad as she could."

Did Gaskell talk to as many friends and acquaintances of Charlotte as she could, beg, borrow and steal correspondence to bolster her knowledge of her 'friend', and even traipse to Belgium to interview Monsieur Heger? Yes. Should her work count as research and should she be praised for her efforts? Hell, no. What was the purpose of The Life? Why did an intended tribute turn into a tabloidesque tell-all, dragging in Branwell's affairs and ridiculous rumours about Patrick Bronte? Why does the author of this book think Charlotte's life was so dreadful just because she didn't want to be the performing monkey at Gaskell's soirees? Charlotte had spirit where it counted - in defending herself and her writing - and didn't need Gaskell to drum up posthumous pity for the 'poor, ugly spinster'.

I did get a kick out of learning that everybody thought Charlotte had based Rochester on Thackeray, but otherwise this was a slow, superfluous read, reducing Charlotte's later life to Gaskell, marriage and death, before recounting with comical outrage the critical and personal responses to her biography. show less

It's rather unusual for me to be reading a biography of a fiction writer and I can't really recall what prompted me to buy it. Maybe it was a nostalgic recollection of the reading I did for the Honours exam in English when iIwas in my final year of high school. I found that I read rather too much of jane Austen and certainly read Wuthering Heights multiple times. (Though Wuthering Heights was written by Emily Bronte....Charlotte's younger sister). I WAS fascinated by this book (WH) and still show more remember the father arriving home and announcing that he has just walked 60 miles from Liverpool...and produced the child Heathcliff from under his cloak. The father here certainly fits the bill for Patrick, the Bronte girl's actual father.
This book is clearly a biography of Charlotte Bronte but it is also the story of how the main, original and "authentic" biography was produced by Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte's friend. It's also the story of how the various myths and legends surrounding Charlotte came into being and were perhaps reinforced by Elizabeth's book.
Really, those girls (and their brother) seemed to have precious little contact with the world on which to base their writings......So no surprise that one can find reflections of most of the people they knew in the characters of the books. And pretty clear that Jane Eyre is very much an autobiographic account of Charlotte's life ...though embellished with her inner conversations and imagination. And Charlotte seems to make this very clear in her response to critics after the publication of "Villette". viz:
"With a frankness she would at one time have only spoken through her characters, Charlotte spelled it out: [to critical reviewers of her novel “Villette”]....Providence so regulated my destiny that I was born and have been reared in the seclusion of a country parsonage. I have never been rich enough to go out into the world as a participator in its gaieties,......the brief and rare glimpses I have had of the world do not incline me to think I should seek its circles with very keen zest–nor can I consider such a disinclination a just subject for reproach. This is the truth. The careless, rather than malevolent insinuations of reviewers have, it seems, widely spread another impression."
I enjoyed the book far more than I ever thought I would. And I'm left with profound respect for Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte...and some sadness and the rough deal they encountered from life. Clearly the males of the story are the villains in this biography. And maybe justly so...though I wonder what it was in society that brought this about.
I now recall what really turned me off Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters for the last 60 years....and it was the obsessions about marriage and the procession of curates who seemed to be one of the few marriageable options around for educated young ladies. Either a curate or a rake from the military or a bore from the Law. Though I guess, this was real life. Either you found someone who was a rough match or you lived as a spinster, caring for your aging parents. (Which looked like being Charlotte's fate). Though I was impressed with Mary, the friend of Charlotte from her first school ,who emigrated to NZ and seemed to make a new and different life for herself there.
I was going to give the book four stars but after writing this review, so far, I'm giving it five stars.
I've also included some extracts from the book (below) which appealed, or struck me in some way. (Mainly as an aide memoire for me but also to evoke the writing for me in the years to come).
Part One: Visiting (1850–1854)
Charlotte flinched at the spectacle of a governess surrounded by small children. For here was the woman she had once been, before she won the celebrity that now attracted the class of people who once employed her as an ignorable underling......A governess, without prospects or means, had to separate herself from her family and migrate into the friendless territory of live-in role between servants and masters, respected by neither.
He [Charlotte’s father] was frugal and stern, eating separately from his six motherless children and leaving them to be educated by the servants, destroying their colourful shoes and depriving them of meat to staunch vanity and indulgence. Charlotte and three of her sisters boarded at the charity school where the eldest, Maria and Elizabeth, contracted the tuberculosis that killed them six weeks apart aged 11 and 10 after they were brought home.
Harriet Martineau heard similar stories from Charlotte the night they met. To her, Charlotte was elemental, ‘full of life and power’, volunteering ‘her name and the history of her life’ in an intense two-hour dialogue.
After a lifetime of preparation, their literary careers were over after only three years, amounting to ignored poetry and three disdained novels. Branwell’s predicted glories never rose beyond a few published verses, leaving stacks of unpublished poems and stories.
From adolescence, Branwell cultivated the rakish air of an effortlessly talented Romantic poet: garrulous, supremely self-assured but personally reckless.
The pen names that protected them in life were obscuring them in death, hastening the tide that had swept away the rest of the family, pulling them further from her reach. She [Charlotte] compromised and decided their rehabilitation should start with what was already published. Copies of Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey were scarce after only two years, suggesting their publisher, T.C. Newby, had sold out without reprinting them......Equally unrepresentative for Charlotte, though inescapably impressive, was Emily’s Wuthering Heights. Its power, she told Williams: fills me with renewed admiration–but yet I am oppressed–the reader is scarcely ever permitted a taste of unalloyed pleasure–every beam of sunshine is poured down through black bars of threatening cloud–every page is surcharged with a sort of moral electricity;
In looking over my sister Anne’s papers I find mournful evidence that religious feeling had … subdued her mood and bearing to a perpetual pensiveness:
Charlotte wrote, ‘My sister Emily was not a person of demonstrative character.......Hers was a life of contemplative seclusion, deliberately cleared of complications.....An interpreter ought always to have stood between her and the world......Emily’s: disposition was not naturally gregarious; circumstances favoured and fostered her tendency to seclusion....Both were starved of support and encouragement.......Writing candidly in a way their reticence once prohibited, this was not only Charlotte’s love letter to the past but her plea for it to end.
At the start of October, Charlotte received a letter from her school friend Mary Taylor, posted from New Zealand the previous April.......Her advice could not have been better timed. It urged Charlotte to fight for professional success. ‘You ought to care as much for that as you do about going to Heaven,’ she told her sharply......Your books will sell and you will acquire influence and power.
After tea, they were left alone to talk. Harriet remembered there was something: inexpressibly affecting in the aspect of the frail little creature who had done such wonderful things, and who was able to bear up, with so bright an eye and so composed a countenance......When Harriet assured her Jane Eyre was among the best novels of their time, Charlotte glowed with pleasure and relief.
Charlotte Brontë was never free … from the gnawing sensation or consequent feebleness of downright hunger; and she never grew an inch from that time. She was the smallest of women and it was that school which stunted her growth.
Harriet wrote the day before Charlotte arrived, ‘and the most splendid skies at night. My starlight walks before my early breakfast are delicious....The rushing River Rotha seems to carry down gushes of stars to the lake.’....Harriet rose early for an ice-cold bath then a walk in the dawn before she started writing at seven.....At the weekend, Harriet took Charlotte to dinner at the home of Edward Quillinan, an elderly minor poet and widower of Wordsworth’s daughter Dora.......Quillinan acquiesced.[to conditions, because of Charlotte’s shyness] and told her he would only include one neighbour, Matthew Arnold....The underwhelming feeling was mutual. Charlotte thought him superficial but was told he would improve on acquaintance,
He was considering what Charlotte told him that evening. Her education in Brussels was one of the turning points in her life, initiating deeply conflicting private emotions and an unrequited love that took her years to recover from, its influence bleeding into all her books.
Yet here with two strangers, she talked about it all.
As the new editions of Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey were picked up, the press presented Charlotte’s prefaces as an exposé: ‘The unknown authors! The Bells! At length, the veil has been drawn aside that shrouded the mystery of the relationship of Currer, Acton and Ellis Bell. They were three sisters.
Charlotte’s life as an anonymous woman ended with the year 1850, which began with her neighbours’ whispers, and ended with her name in the press. Currer Bell, birthed for print, was effectively killed by it. Unmasked, Charlotte stepped into 1851 a public figure and a celebrity, known to all by her own name–and for her own talents.
Elizabeth lived two miles south-east of Manchester’s heavily industrialised centre in a large house she had taken a few months before she met Charlotte in Windermere...Here Elizabeth could introduce Charlotte to her family for the first time: her cleric husband of eighteen years....All the girls were inheritors of their mother’s intelligence and charm....Charlotte was enchanted by their exuberance and unselfconscious affection.....This, Charlotte knew, was how a home should feel, with a partner and children and friends orbiting ‘a woman whose conversation and company I should not soon tire.
Elizabeth was surprised when she added, ‘If I had to earn my living, I would go out as a governess again, much as I dislike the life. But I think one should only write out of the fullness of one’s heart, spontaneously.’
From the moment he brought Thackeray and Charlotte together, she was star-struck.
Thackeray recalled ‘the trembling little frame, the little hand, the great honest eyes. An impetuous honesty seemed to me to characterise the woman.’ Once mocked or taken for granted, Charlotte turned her devotion into laser-like scrutiny, making others more uncomfortable than they felt free to make her......‘I was moved to speak to him of some of his shortcomings,’ she coolly reported to Ellen,
The first few rows, Charlotte told Ellen, were completely filled by the elderly duchesses and countesses who won the best of Thackeray’s attention. She locked eyes with him as soon as she arrived. He came down from the platform and took her to his mother, announcing for half the audience to hear, in jest but with a barb, ‘Mother, you must allow me to introduce you to Jane Eyre!’.......In a hall bustling with aristocrats, he was calling her out as the most famously uncouth domestic servant in England. If he needed an opportunity to remind her of her position as a lower-class subject, without defence against the scrutiny of social superiors, and to restate his own as the effortless commander of patronage, here it was.
But in private, after displays of courtesy, Carlisle and Monckton Milnes were derisory: ‘Her person was insignificant, her dress somewhat rustic, her language quaintly precise and formal, her manner odd and constrained. Altogether this was a woman whom even London could not lionise; somebody outwardly altogether too plain, simple, unpretending.’
Charlotte wrote to her father and Ellen that she enjoyed the lecture but did not mention she was smouldering with rage.
Elizabeth’s daughters remembered how passionately she spoke about seeing Rachel Felix a few weeks before. Interviewed in the twentieth century, they recalled how, ‘Her eyes fairly blazed, and she clenched her fists as she tried to give them her impressions of the great French actress.’......There, on stage, was an expression of her own buried fire, her resilience continually tested by tragedy, and there–magnificent and insubordinate–was the woman as artist.
She was seen by a doctor at the end of December who confirmed her lungs were clear but, suspecting she had an inflamed liver, prescribed mercury pills to be taken at night, followed in the morning by drinking a black purgative of Epsom salts, liquorice, cardamom, ammonia and senna. She had symptoms of poisoning within twenty-four hours. [No wonder...taking mercury].
At last, Harriet made the connection between her critique and Charlotte’s withdrawal and confronted her directly to ask why her letters had stopped. Charlotte confided to Ellen:
Miss Martineau wrote to ask why she did not hear from me....I have declined being her visitor–and bid her good-bye......The gulf was not bridged and they never spoke again.
She said Arthur [The curate who had confessed his love to Charlotte but had been rejected by her] and Patrick [her father , the Vicar] were still not speaking despite still working together. ‘Papa has a perfect antipathy to him–and he, I fear, to papa. Martha hates him.
Charlotte heard that when other vicars visited Arthur he was so withdrawn and silent they never returned:
Having for most of her life been the one who loved others without being loved in return and with a new novel whose principal theme was unrequited love, Charlotte unexpectedly found herself on the other side of that dynamic, as the rejector rather than the rejected,
She decided to leave it with God and turned to prayer in her quandary. She could either permanently reject someone she did not love and risk losing her last chance at marriage or accept him and whatever life that would bring, one where she might receive love but never feel it for a man who was either sincere or not.
The parsonage consensus was that Arthur was an impoverished opportunist. Fifty-five years on, Julia would remember Charlotte Brontë affectionately in an interview where she described another example of her morbid shyness when a visitor dropped by:....Louisa Potter published nostalgic sketches in the Manchester Guardian about life at the start of the century. Two generations later in the 1890s, she reflected on how bewildering it was to lose her rural landscape twice, when country settlements were subsumed into industrial villages that in turn were swept off by larger factories, more tenements......
Elizabeth understood part of Charlotte’s reticence stemmed from her feeling of physical ugliness. She had always felt this, Charlotte told her, it having ‘been strongly impressed upon her imagination early in life’. As an adult, as one relationship after another fell into estrangement, Charlotte exaggerated this sense of disadvantage, imagining her appearance rather than her unsociability put off strangers. She told Elizabeth, ‘I notice that after a stranger has once looked at my face, he is careful not to let his eyes wander to that part of the room again!’
Elizabeth explained: The difference between Miss Brontë and me is that she puts all her naughtiness into her books, and I put all my goodness. I am sure she works off a great deal that is morbid into her writing and out of her life; and my books are so far better than I am, but I often feel ashamed of having written them, as if I were a hypocrite.....And yet, Elizabeth knew, despite Charlotte’s instinct to light her way ahead by burning bridges, ‘she is thoroughly good; only made bitter by some deep mortifications and feeling her plainness as “something almost repulsive”.’......By her own account, Charlotte was a drudge to duty–‘duty to her father, to the poor around her, to the old servants.
This puzzled and concerned Ellen. Led by Charlotte’s own ambivalence about Arthur, she feared she was starting to cave under the strain of her own loneliness, reducing her to such desperation she was now considering marrying anyone in a last attempt to avoid the spinsterhood Ellen felt was Charlotte’s inescapable destiny. To Charlotte’s astonishment, Ellen appears to have tried to explain this to her. Instead of drawing friendly sympathy, her admission of vulnerability about Arthur had only drawn castigation. The women argued and Ellen left.
As illness in Haworth parsonage made alternate invalids of Charlotte and her father.....He seemed to have lost his sight. ‘He was in total darkness. Medical aid was immediately summoned but nothing could be done. It was feared a slight stroke of paralysis had occurred.’ While his speech and movements were not affected Charlotte naturally feared those would come next, to leave him paralysed by the next day. By morning, he was gradually able to distinguish daylight and his sight slowly restored imperfectly over the next few hours, as though a curtain was rising.
‘Without feelings of humble reverence for men, female characters such as Lucy Snowe, and by implication Charlotte Brontë, cannot deserve the respect of a man,’ the reviewer concluded firmly.

Her account of how Emily and Anne perished from hardship and ill health before their time seems not to have moved the critics at The Christian Remembrancer. Far from being sympathetic, they felt it was unwarranted exceptionalism that did not excuse the moral degradation of their novels.
After what must have felt like the irreparable conclusion of her twenty-two-year friendship with Ellen, Charlotte was at a loss. According to Elizabeth: No one comes to the house; nothing disturbs the deep repose; hardly a voice is heard; you catch the ticking of the clock in the kitchen.
They walked down to the house for tea, to be told that Patrick would join them for once, ‘an honour to me I believe,’ Elizabeth commented. She found the 76-year-old vicar ‘a tall fine looking old man, with silver bristles all over his head; nearly blind’ who spoke with a strong Northern Irish accent. He had ‘a sort of grand and stately way of describing past times, which tallied well with his striking appearance,’ but she noticed how his gentility gave way to acerbity when it came to the personal, and how inflexibly he exerted his authority over Charlotte, making her acquiesce in a way Elizabeth had never seen before:
Elizabeth described how when Charlotte left the room: then all his pride in her genius and fame came out. He eagerly listened to everything I could tell him of the high admiration I
had at any time heard expressed for her works. He would ask for certain speeches over and over again, as if he desired to impress them on his memory.
The austerity of the house appeared to have its expression in Charlotte’s very body and in her compulsion to control and order everything around her. Disruption was enough to interrupt her train of thought and ‘her habits of order were such that she could not go on with the conversation if a chair was out of its place.......Knowing how much Charlotte sacrificed for her father and how his moods and fluctuating health terrorised her, Elizabeth was appalled by him and awed by the ‘patient docility’ of her care.
She talked about her brother and his disintegration from the family’s great hope to its shame. Elizabeth was reluctant to repeat details of his alcoholism and drug dependence to correspondents and thought ‘the less said the better, poor fellow.
Departing for the train from Keighley, Elizabeth took with her the cheerful affability that lifted everyone in her company.
Father, I am not a young girl, not a young woman even. I never was pretty. I now am ugly. At your death I shall have £300 besides the little I have earned myself. Do you think there are many men who would serve seven years for me? .....Patrick let it drop until, unable to let his aggression subside, he asked why she had to marry a curate. She told him, ‘Yes, I must marry a curate if I marry at all; not merely a curate but your curate; not merely your curate but he must live in the house with you, for I cannot leave you.’ Patrick stood up to look down on her. ‘Never,’ he said, ‘I will never have another man in this house.’
She had one final thing for Ellen.....She asked her not to tell anyone and wrote to Margaret the next day that her father had not only been won round to having Arthur as his son-in-law but had offered him his old job back. Arthur wanted to marry in three months, she told her, then would move in with them. ‘It gives me unspeakable content to see that now my Father has once admitted this new view of the case–he dwells on it complacently.’
Although she knew he was a worthy Christian and an admirable man, neither meant they matched personally. ‘I cannot conceal from myself that he is not intellectual. There are many places into which he could not follow me intellectually.’.....Regardless of her prospects, she told Katie [Winkworth...a friend of Elizabet]..., she had resolved Arthur’s ‘love was too good to be thrown away by one so lonely’ as she........Privately, Katie thought that despite her reservations Charlotte was making the best choice for herself.
The three great writers of that house were never equipped with a study for any or all of them. Even once Charlotte was a success, she continued to write her novels on scraps of paper leaning on a portable desk she could hold in her lap.
Women like her, she raged, regardless of their capabilities or needs, were coerced into the roles of unpaid nursemaids for men who enjoyed comforts impossible for women to imagine. What many men regarded as commonplace entitlements would be exceptional if made by women.
Instantly, he [Charlotte’s father, Patrick] shattered any possibility of a tender happy moment. He announced he had decided not to come to her wedding, so would not be giving her away. As a man who conducted them for a living, he knew how this would thwart one due to start in eleven hours. [I wonder what motivation? What a cruel thing to do].
The women walked down the lane to the church on what Charlotte described as ‘that dim quiet June morning’. Within half an hour she went from Charlotte Brontë, a ‘spinster’ of ‘no rank or profession’, as she was described in the record, to clergyman’s wife.....‘The old villain!’ she [Ellen] wrote years later, ‘I can never think of this episode without the most contemptuous feeling.’
Part Two: Departing (1854–1857)
Charlotte: she had lost her shyness. Meeting strangers with her husband brought none of the turmoil it caused her in all the years of her solitude. The anxieties that plagued her on visits to London, Manchester and the Lake District in the last few years had completely disappeared.
‘My dear husband,’ Charlotte could call him now: appears in a new light here in his own country. More than once I have had deep pleasure in hearing his praises on all sides.
In the first week of her marriage, Charlotte found herself the primary focus, for the first time ever, of someone who loved her. Now she was called for, escorted, held, kissed, protected, guided–receiving the loving attention she had bestowed on others without any return of affection.
For the first time, she was becoming indebted to someone else’s unselfish kindness. Good, true, pure and affectionate he is, but he is also narrow, and she can never be so.’
From Dublin, Arthur’s brother and the Bell cousins took Charlotte and Arthur back to their family home in Banagher......As Charlotte knew Patrick’s childhood home had been an earth-floored farm cottage, she could see her husband’s early life could not have been more different from his, or for that matter from the childhood her father had given her. Here was no plainer answer to Charlotte’s doubt about her father’s judgement. ‘Most of the rooms are lofty and spacious,’ Charlotte breathlessly described:
Charlotte and Arthur organised a supper in the schoolroom beside the parsonage. Pupils, teachers, bellringers, the choristers and other parishioners came and when one toasted Arthur as a ‘true Christian and a kind gentleman’, Charlotte was touched enough to conclude that such a husband was ‘better than to earn either Wealth or Fame or Power’.....A relationship, Charlotte came to conclude, was the curative for much that ailed her single female friends and began to intimate solutions to those she had previously admired as independent.
At the parsonage, Ellen encountered a different household from the one she was used to.
She began to suspect, with more evidence yet to collect, that his [Arthur’s] inadequacy was turning into a need to control.
Ellen remembered the pitiful sight of her friend, wasted by undeserved agony and illness, littered in what few moorland flowers of little promise could be scavenged from the intemperate wilds around her.......Dr Ingham returned to certify her death, giving the assumed cause as three...months of ‘phthisis’, progressive wasting, leading to a mistaken belief she too had died from tuberculosis. Her symptoms correspond more accurately with hyperemesis gravidarum, a pernicious form of morning sickness.
Villagers drew lots to send a representative from every household, making a cortege of more than 500 men and women, rich and poor, from all trades and none......Those who could not get into the church to hear Rev. Sowden read the service packed the graveyard and the narrow lane to see that singularly lonely woman carried through the crowd to her final resting place.
Greenwood and Harriet were not the only ones who felt opportunities had come with the death of Charlotte Brontë. While Elizabeth ruefully suspected it was only a matter of time before Thackeray reappeared and got in touch with the parsonage, Harriet’s Lake District neighbour Matthew Arnold was thinking about how he too could capitalise on the situation. Only one week after the funeral he wrote to Fraser’s Magazine to pitch an elegy: ‘a thing in memory of poor Charlotte Brontë.
Her intention stated, Elizabeth sketched out the general shape and tone such a memoir could take:....Only two days later, on 6 June, Sharpe’s London Magazine ran an anonymous feature with the title ‘A Few Words About Jane Eyre’......A copy found its way to Birstall and into the hands of Ellen Nussey. Attentive to any references to Charlotte in the press she read ‘A Few Words About Jane Eyre’ with horror and wrote to Arthur straight away. She told him it had ‘much hurt and pained’ her.....Unhappy but undeterred, Ellen wrote to Patrick that articles would continue to appear and multiply errors until he sanctioned someone to correct them. A few days later he contacted Elizabeth:....He told her she was the first person he had approached and that Arthur approved.
Patrick, Arthur and Ellen had no idea how little persuasion Elizabeth would need.
He [Patrick, writing some biographical details about himself for Elizabeth], met Maria Branwell, whom he married at the end of December 1812. They remained in Hartshead, where their first two children, Maria and Elizabeth were born in 1814 and 1815, until they moved to Thornton, where Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne were born in its vicarage. Patrick was appointed Haworth’s perpetual curate and moved his family in 1820 and there, he told Elizabeth:....my family afflictions began.....He wrote about how he sent his daughters to school. Maria and Elizabeth boarded at Cowan Bridge in Kirkby Lonsdale in the summer of 1824, to be joined by Charlotte and Emily in the autumn. Maria and Elizabeth caught consumption that winter and declined in the early months of 1825. Maria was brought home in February and died three months later, a few weeks before terminally ill Elizabeth was returned.....[There seems to be an assumption in the book, and in The minds of the participants, that the deaths of Maria and Elizabeth were due to the poor treatment at the school...including poor food. These may have been contributing factors but the primary issue was exposure in some way to the TB mycobacterium].
He added that the toll her siblings’ deaths took on Charlotte was apparent to him now:
Reading his account, it became clear he was leaving out more than he was sharing.
This discrepancy between Charlotte and Patrick’s perspectives was Elizabeth’s first indication that telling the story of her life would be anything but straightforward.
Arthur was not convinced that telling Charlotte’s life story was either inevitable or necessary and Elizabeth noted ‘his feeling was against its being written but [he] yielded to Mr Brontë’s impetuous wish.’
Without his ability to recollect or even, it appeared, to have noticed the stages of Charlotte’s intellectual development, Elizabeth must have wondered whether there was another record she could consult, such as a diary or letters. There was no trace of a diary and Arthur said he destroyed all of Charlotte’s personal papers, including all letters she had received.
Ellen was affronted. Given his demand she burn everything, she must have suspected he would still carry this out if she co-operated. She left no record of her response but her actions speak for her. She never sent him a single letter and chose to negotiate with Elizabeth herself.
Scanning letters for revelations she felt she ought to conceal from the public, Ellen foresaw how a professional writer of Elizabeth’s capabilities would likely draw more meaning than she herself had and resolved to protect Charlotte from her own indiscretions but felt no loyalty to Patrick or Arthur.
Elizabeth wanted to extend her searches to find everyone who knew the Brontës, especially those who had employed Charlotte and her siblings or had known her in Belgium.
Both having heard fond anecdotes of the other from Charlotte, Elizabeth and Ellen were primed to like each other at first sight. Finding Ellen just as Charlotte described her, Elizabeth thought her ‘simple, affectionate, refined and sensible’.
Patrick’s knowledge was as limited as it was with every other aspect of his daughter’s life, Elizabeth noticed when she read his cursory replies. He had escorted Charlotte and Emily to Brussels in 1841 but only Emily stayed on with Charlotte afterwards, making the other key witnesses the friends who were there at the same time:
When Susanna Winkworth came to Silverdale in the damp, blustery last week of August, she saw how committed Elizabeth was becoming to presenting the unmediated truth. Charlotte’s own voice, still vivid in Elizabeth’s memories now resonated from the bundles of letters,
she insisted to Ellen,....”am sure the more fully she, Charlotte Brontë–the friend, the daughter, the sister, the wife–is known, and known where need be in her own words, the more highly will she be appreciated.” To Elizabeth’s relief Ellen needed no convincing.
When Williams sent her his selection in December, she had the same experience again and commented how curious it was to see ‘how much the spirit in which she wrote varies according to the correspondent’.
As her daughters copied Charlotte’s letters, Elizabeth confessed to Ellen she had not written a line of the book.........Elizabeth wrote twenty pages of The Life of Charlotte Brontë through the first seven weeks of 1856.......As she explained to George: Leaving all authorship on one side, her character as a woman was unusual to the point of being unique.
For every person who was happy to be interviewed about Charlotte, there were as many who were not.
Once she found the school to be physically identical to the one in Villette she may have gradually realised Charlotte had been serious. Furthermore, Madame Héger’s opposition would not be incompatible with Elizabeth’s suspicion she was the original of Villette’s sinister Madame Beck, whose interferences threaten Lucy Snowe’s love life.
But she could not have known a pirate edition was already circulating there, that the Hégers had read it, and soon readers were making connections to the Pensionnat Héger and between the school’s staff in the book.......Madame Héger blamed the book specifically for her school’s eventual failure.........In the first few weeks before he got to know Charlotte and Emily, he explained, he could not help but notice them in the school corridors and garden, where they walked together in silence. The two sisters clung together, and kept apart from the herd of happy, boisterous, well-befriended Belgian girls, who, in their turn, thought the new English pupils wild and scared-looking.......He observed how they spoke exclusively to each other, only referring to anyone else when unavoidably necessary.......Knowing both sisters should be ill-served by the standard methods provided to the other students he consulted his wife about how best to teach them. It was proposed he read the French classics with them then dissect their strengths and weaknesses together in a seminar........He told Elizabeth he kept their coursework because it had been so remarkable.
I can never think without gloomy anger of Charlotte’s sacrifices to the selfish old man. How well we know that, had she left him entirely and succeeded in gaining wealth, and name, and influence, she would have had all the world lauding her to the skies for any trivial act of generosity that would have cost her nothing.
Before she emigrated at the start of 1845, Mary had tried to persuade Charlotte to break away from her father and Haworth......No one ever gave up more than she did and with full consciousness of what she sacrificed. I don’t think myself that woman are justified in sacrificing themselves for others, but since the world generally expects it of them, they should at least acknowledge it.
As different as women like Mary, Ellen and Elizabeth were from each other–Elizabeth the charming, subversive and shrewd professional; Ellen, whose sentiment and love for Charlotte were fusing into an evangelical zeal to preserve like pressed flowers the after-images of the Brontës; and Mary the drily witty pragmatist and independent businesswoman abroad–this was the one perspective upon which they all agreed.
Charlotte’s comfortless life–deserved a compensation of glory denied to her in life. show less