Charlotte Brontë

Charlotte Brontë is one of the few writers whose life has assumed as great a presence in the popular imagination as her works themselves. As Lucasta Miller observes in her book The Brontë Myth, a study of the various afterlives of the Brontë sisters through biography, “the sisters themselves, plus their entire family, have become mythic figures in their own right. Since 1857, when Elizabeth Gaskell published her famous Life of Charlotte Brontë, hardly a year has gone by without some form of biographical material on the Brontës appearing—from articles in newspapers to full-length lives, from images on tea towels to plays, films, and novelizations” (Miller, xi). The idea of three sisters, the daughters of a lower middle-class curate living an isolated life in a Yorkshire moorland village, producing some of the most complex and moving literature of the century, turned the Brontës into celebrities within their lifetime, and their notoriety has only increased over the years. Their childhood home at Haworth Parsonage has become the site of tourist pilgrimages, where enthusiasts travel to see the attic where the children wrote, in miniscule handwriting, their first imaginative tales. As Miller points out, the popular fascination with the lives of the Brontë sisters often threatens to overshadow serious critical interest in their works. Digging through the cultural accretions of myth and fantasy, however, one can see how powerfully the Brontës’ lives affected their work, and how they transformed an often bleak and tragic existence, marginalized by their geographic location but also by their gender, into the material for art. Though Anne and Emily were also published novelists and poets, Charlotte was the most prolific of the three, and remains the most popular.

Charlotte was the third of six children, born to Patrick and Maria Branwell Brontë on April 21, 1816, at the Market Street Parsonage in Thornton, near Bradford in Yorkshire. When Charlotte was four years old, the family moved to the village of Haworth in Yorkshire, where her father had been appointed perpetual curate. Charlotte’s mother died shortly thereafter, in 1821, leaving Patrick to raise the young family. (Charlotte’s siblings Branwell, Emily, and Anne had been born in 1817, 1818, and 1820, respectively.) The children’s aunt, Elizabeth Branwell, came to help care for them.

In 1824, Charlotte and Emily were sent to join their two older sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, at the Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge in Lancashire. The traumatic experience they had there, caused by harsh discipline and poor diet, would remain in Charlotte’s memory all her life, emerging in her later fiction. The Clergy Daughters' School became Lowood School in Jane Eyre, and its founder, the Reverend William Carus Wilson, was the model for Mr. Brocklehurst, the hypocritical Calvinistic disciplinarian in that novel. An epidemic of typhoid fever broke out at the school, and both Maria and Elizabeth fell victim to the disease. Maria was sent home in February 1825, and died in May. Elizabeth was sent home in late May, and Patrick soon thereafter sent for Charlotte and Emily to be brought back to Haworth as well. Elizabeth died on the 15th of June. Charlotte immortalized her oldest sister Maria as the long-suffering, angelic character Helen Burns in Jane Eyre.

Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne became increasingly close after the loss of their two oldest siblings. Taking refuge from grief in imaginative play, the four children began to make up stories, opposing the arbitrariness of death with the control of authorship. Their first stories took inspiration from a box of Branwell’s tin soldiers, but as they outgrew these toys, the children established their tales in worlds of their own creation. Not surprisingly, Charlotte and Branwell dominated their younger sisters in these plays, and eventually the siblings split off into two groups—Charlotte and Branwell chronicling the imaginary kingdom of Angria, while Emily and Anne created the alternate world of Gondal (Miller, 5). Sibling rivalry fuelled these endeavors, as well as collaboration, and Charlotte often felt threatened by Branwell’s early sense of entitlement with regard to the male-dominated world of literary production.

Charlotte and her siblings were prolific readers as well as writers. Her novels are steeped in literary and biblical allusion, the product of this wide-ranging education in classical and contemporary writers. “Unlike most middle-class Victorian households,” writes Christine Alexander, “there was little censorship of reading in the Brontë parsonage. The Bible was staple fare; yet Patrick Brontë also encouraged an eclectic diet of Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, Bunyan, Milton, Pope, Johnson, Gibbon, Cowper, Burns, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Southey, and Byron” (ODNB). The children also devoured the poetry and prose published in monthly periodicals, such as Blackwood’s Magazine and Fraser’s.

One of the writers who most influenced Charlotte as an emerging writer was Lord Byron (1788-1824). His poetry furnished her imagination with exotic settings and dashing heroes. Byron’s legacy, writes Miller, can be seen “her obsession with the amours of her aristocratic hero, Zamorna” (Miller, 8). Zamorna became the central focus of Charlotte’s Angrian tales, and it is clear that he captured her imagination in a manner bordering on hero-worship. Tall, dark and Byronic, Zamorna was charismatic and sexually potent. One can see in Zamorna the embryonic form of Brontë’s tortured, brooding hero Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre, though Charlotte’s unqualified admiration for this type of character would become more ambivalent and nuanced over the intervening years.

In January 1831, Charlotte was sent to the Roe Head School, about 15 miles from home. This second experience with institutional education was much more positive than the first. Charlotte worked hard at her studies, and formed several lasting friendships. Two women in particular would become lifelong friends and correspondents: “the conscientious, calm, religious Ellen Nussey who fulfilled Charlotte's dutiful self and need for affection, and the fiercely independent Mary Taylor, whose radical views on politics, women, and religion fuelled Charlotte's ambitious and rebellious nature” (ODNB). In many ways these two very different women exemplified a split in Charlotte’s nature, which tension would emerge in her writing. Charlotte would often express feelings of doubt and guilt over the working of her “fiery imagination” in letters to Ellen Nussey, worrying that the content of her writing was not appropriate for a clergyman’s daughter (Miller, 12). Though she stayed at Roe Head for only eighteen months as a pupil, Charlotte excelled in French and drawing, as well as continuing to write.

Charlotte went back to Haworth briefly, but returned to Roe Head in July 1835, this time as a teacher. Charlotte remained there for three and a half years. She soon became impatient however, at the strictures of the life she was leading. Charlotte confessed to her journal her frustrations with her straitjacketed world: “The thought came over me: am I to spend all the best part of my life in this wretched bondage, forcibly suppressing my rage at the idleness, the apathy and the hyperbolical and most asinine stupidity of those fatheaded oafs, and on compulsion assuming an air of kindness, patience and assiduity?” (ODNB).

She continued to harbor literary ambitions secretly while at Roe Head. Once, while on holiday, she sent some of her poems to Robert Southey, the Poet Laureate of England. This was an audacious move, and Charlotte revealed to him in her letter her desire “to be forever known” (Miller, 10). Southey was gracious enough to write back, but his response was far from encouraging. He admitted that she possessed “the faculty of Verse,” but declared unequivocally that “Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life: & it ought not to be.” He advised her to attend to her “proper duties” as a woman, and to be “less eager for celebrity” (Miller 12). Chastised, Charlotte responded that she attempted to repress herself and conceal her ambitions from those around her. The accusation that her ambitions were “unfeminine” would plague Charlotte all her life.

Charlotte felt increasingly guilty about her continued indulgence of her Angrian fantasies, which nurtured her passionate desire to be loved and understood. John Maynard points to Charlotte’s continued obsession with the hyper-masculine Zamorna, while a teacher at Roe Head. At nineteen years of age, escaping the “mirthless, lifeless room” at the school, she recorded this daydream:

Never shall I, Charlotte Brontë, forget…how distinctly I, sitting in the school-room at Roe-head, saw the Duke of Zamorna…his black horse turned loose grazing among the heather, the moonlight so mild and so exquisitely tranquil, sleeping upon that vast and vacant road…I was quite gone. I had really utterly forgot where I was and all the gloom and cheerlessness of my situation. I felt myself breathing quick and short as I beheld the Duke lifting up his sable crest which undulated as the plume of a hearse waves to the wind, and knew that that music…was exciting him and quickening his ever rapid pulse. (Maynard, 13-14)

Charlotte worried that this kind of passionate fantasy was unwholesome, and confessed her doubts to Ellen Nussey. Nussey’s conventional Christian advice only increased Charlotte’s sense of her own sinfulness. Charlotte left Roe Head in 1838, chastened and sobered by her experiences, but not quenched in her literary ambition.

Returning home, Charlotte continued to write; two more novellas in the Angrian mode concluded her involvement in the saga. “Although Angria continued to provide material for future characterization, scene, and theme,” writes Alexander, “she made a distinct move towards artistic independence from both her brother and her private world” (ODNB).

In 1839, Charlotte received two proposals of marriage, both of which she refused. The first was from the Reverend Henry Nussey, Ellen’s brother. The second was from the Reverend James Bryce, an Irish clergyman whom she barely knew. Nussey’s passionless and pious proposal formed the basis for Charlotte’s portrayal of St. John Rivers in Jane Eyre. Both Charlotte and Jane’s refusal of such matches would have been considered imprudent and even shocking in Brontë’s time. It was somewhat radical to refuse a respectable offer and to hold out for a marriage based on love. Either Nussey or Bryce would have been considered an eminently suitable match for Charlotte; if she had accepted one of them, it would have obviated the need to hire herself out as a governess, one of the few respectable career options available to a woman of her class.

Following this, Charlotte endured two brief stints as a governess, a position she enjoyed even less than teaching. Brontë’s resentment of the treatment she received, and the tendency of the upper classes to treat governesses as subhuman, would emerge in her fiction, much of which dealt with the humiliations endured by women forced to earn their living in these degrading circumstances.

Returning home in 1841, Charlotte began to make plans with Emily and Anne to open their own school. However, the sisters felt they could attract more pupils if their language skills were more robust. Plans for the school were postponed in favor of a scheme in which Charlotte and Emily would enroll at a school in Brussels in order to improve their French. The sisters traveled to Belgium in February 1842, and enrolled at the Pensionnat Heger. In Constantin Heger, a professor of French literature, Charlotte finally found a man who challenged her intellectually and encouraged her literary ambitions. Heger was, by all accounts, a strict master, and his comments on the Brontës’ French compositions show that he did not spare his criticism, even though he was impressed by the abilities of these young Englishwomen.

Charlotte and Emily were called home in October by the death of their Aunt Branwell. Emily decided to stay in England and live off the legacy she had received from their aunt, and Charlotte returned alone to Brussels in January 1843. Madame Heger’s increasing coldness towards Charlotte, who was obviously devoted to her husband, alienated Charlotte from the Hegers and contributed to her feelings of loneliness and depression. (She would later use this time in her life as material for her novels The Professor and Villette.) By the end of 1843, Charlotte had decided to return to Haworth.

Charlotte’s depression deepened upon her return to England. Plans for the girls’ school fell through, and Charlotte longed for the company of M. Heger. She wrote him a series of increasingly desperate and passionate letters, to which he did not reply. Charlotte’s unrequited love tortured her, and she begged Heger to write back to her. Wounded by his silence, Charlotte discontinued her correspondence with him.

Her private suffering was compounded by shared family trials, when Branwell was dismissed in disgrace from his post as tutor for having an affair with his employer’s wife. Branwell led a dissipated and self-destructive life after this, nursing his addiction to alcohol and opium. Charlotte’s brother became a strain on his family and his health began a rapid decline.

Once again, Charlotte took refuge from grief in work, focusing on her goal of becoming a published writer. In 1845, she discovered a notebook containing Emily’s poetry, and persuaded her that they merited publication. Charlotte, Emily and Anne edited and selected a portion of their verse and submitted it for consideration. They chose androgynous pseudonyms to avoid criticism based on their gender. Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell was published in 1846 by Aylott and Jones, at the authors’ expense (using money from their aunt’s legacy). The book sold only two copies, but received several favorable reviews, which was enough to encourage the sisters to continue.

The three began to work on prose next, perfecting their novels in the hopes of publication. Charlotte drew on her Brussels experience for her first novel, The Professor. Emily wrote Wuthering Heights, reworking her Gondal saga in an English setting, and Anne wrote Agnes Grey, based on her life as a governess (ODNB). All three sent their manuscripts to publishers for consideration. Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey were accepted by Thomas Cautley Newby in July 1847, but The Professor was not so well received. Christine Alexander points out that Charlotte wrote The Professor in reaction against her Angrian fantasies (ODNB). In what is now known as “The Farewell to Angria” (1839), Charlotte had expressed her determination to “quit for awhile that burning clime where we have sojourned too long…lit with love, flushed with passion, shaded with grief, kindled with ecstasy,” and move “to a cooler region where the dawn breaks grey and sober” (Maynard, 14). Alexander argues that the result of this artistic decision was a novel stiff and detached, not true to its author’s emotional experiences and inner knowledge. The Professor was never published during Charlotte’s lifetime.

However, the firm of Smith, Elder & Co. had offered encouragement in their rejection letter, indicating that they would be interested to read anything Charlotte might send to them in future. By August 1847, Charlotte had sent them the manuscript of Jane Eyre. George Smith, one of the publishers, recorded that he was so engrossed when he began to read the novel that he cancelled his plans to go out riding with a friend and skipped dinner in order to finish it in one sitting (Miller, 16). The next day he wrote to “Currer Bell” to offer £100 for the copyright. Jane Eyre was published in October 1847 and was an instant bestseller. The novel also received critical acclaim: literary celebrities such as G. H. Lewes and William Makepeace Thackeray praised it.

Semi-autobiographical in content, Jane Eyre is the story of an unloved orphan whose experience of suffering and neglect fail to subdue her passion and will to become independent. Charlotte Brontë finally found her voice in Jane Eyre. Casting aside the dispassionate third-person male narration of The Professor, Brontë audaciously adopted the voice of Jane, a first-person female narrator. Jane’s insistence on her sense of self-worth and dignity, in spite of her gender and social position, was a powerful critique of mid-Victorian life, and not surprisingly, ruffled quite a few feathers.

Jane Eyre’s psychologically astute portrayal of a female voice and perspective led many readers to assume that its author was, in fact, a woman. Some readers, especially women, were shocked by the novel’s frank depiction of passionate desire, its discussion of adultery, and sometimes angry and rebellious tone. Elizabeth Rigby (later Lady Eastlake) expressed the disapproval felt by some readers most memorably, in her anonymous critique, published in the Quarterly Review in December 1848. Rigby deplored the novel’s “coarseness of language and laxity of tone” and described Jane’s independent spirit as unfeminine. She condemned the novel as “anti-Christian” and the heroine as “the personification of an unregenerate and undisciplined spirit” who had “the strength of a mere heathen mind which is a law unto itself.” If, as had been speculated, the author was indeed a woman, Rigby declared that she must be one who “has for some sufficient reason, long forfeited the society of her own sex” (Miller, 22-23).

It is ironic that the assumption of an androgynous pseudonym, rather than shielding Charlotte from censure, should have led to such vicious gossip and speculation. Charlotte dedicated her second edition of Jane Eyre to Thackeray, unaware that such a move was likely to spark more gossip. Thackeray, like Rochester, had a wife who was mentally ill, leading to rumors that Jane Eyre had been written by Thackeray’s mistress.

Charlotte finally revealed her true identity to her publishers, after Thomas Newby attempted to capitalize on the popularity of Charlotte’s recent novel by claiming that Agnes Grey and Wuthering Heights were written by the same author as Jane Eyre. Charlotte and Anne traveled to London to confirm their identities to Charlotte’s publisher George Smith, who welcomed them and took them to the opera, the Royal Academy, and the National Gallery (ODNB).

Upon her return to Haworth, Charlotte began work on her next novel, Shirley, but her new literary success was soon overshadowed by family tragedy. Within a year, all three of her remaining siblings were dead. Branwell’s health had been declining steadily, weakened by alcoholism and addiction to opiates. His grandiose expectations of artistic or literary fame never came to fruition. Branwell died of chronic bronchitis in September 1848, at age thirty-one. Charlotte grieved as much for Branwell’s wasted life as she did for his death.

mily caught a cold on the day of Branwell’s funeral. She grew steadily weaker, refusing to consult a doctor, despite Charlotte’s urging. She died in December 1848, of pulmonary tuberculosis, at age thirty. Anne also displaying symptoms of tuberculosis, Charlotte rushed her to the seaside in an attempt to help her recover, but Anne died in May 1849, aged twenty-nine.

The sole surviving Brontë sibling, Charlotte was bereft of her imaginative and literary support. Lonely and desolate, Charlotte still managed to finish Shirley by the end of August 1849. It was published in October by Smith, Elder & Co. Shirley was not as successful as Jane Eyre, but nevertheless, it did address important social issues of the day. This novel was Charlotte’s attempt to address the “condition of women” issue, as well as the class conflicts of industrialization. Avoiding the topics that had aroused such scandal with Jane Eyre, Charlotte declared that Shirley would be “as unromantic as Monday morning” (ODNB). This foray into strict realism did not produce Brontë’s most powerful work, but Shirley is still an ambitious and masterful novel.

While Charlotte kept her identity a secret from the public, for the time being, she was curious to meet the literary celebrities of London, and asked George Smith to introduce her to some of them when she stayed with him and his mother in 1849 and 1850. There she met such prominent writers as Thackeray and Lewes, who noted her shyness and her lack beauty. Charlotte had always been self-conscious about her unimpressive physicality, and it seems these encounters caused her more uneasiness than pleasure. She also met Elizabeth Gaskell on a trip to Edinburgh in 1850. Gaskell was a novelist who would become Charlotte’s friend and confidant, and later, her first biographer.

The criticism she had received for Jane Eyre still rankled, however, and now that her sisters were dead, there was no longer as much reason for concealing the sisters’ true identity. (Emily had been the most fiercely protective of her privacy.) Charlotte decided to clear her reputation, as well as her sisters’. She issued a second edition of Agnes Grey and Wuthering Heights (this time published by Smith, Elder & Co.) with a “Biographical Notice” appended to it, in which she revealed her sisters’ true identity and defended their work. However, the defensive tone that she adopts is also curiously apologetic, and seems to infantilize Emily and Anne. Charlotte protests that her sisters were merely ignorant Yorkshire girls who didn’t know any better, and didn’t mean to offend. She describes Haworth as a “remote district where education had made little progress” (Miller, 28), urging this in extenuation of her sisters’ errors. This depiction was certainly an act of misrepresentation, albeit sincerely meant. In the introduction to her seminal biography of the Brontës, Juliet Barker describes how she trawled through the archives of local newspapers published in the time of the Brontës, unearthing a large amount of information that controverts "the myth that Haworth was a remote and obscure village where nothing ever happened. It was a township, a small, industrial town in the heart of a much larger chapelry, where politics and religion were hotly disputed and culture thrived” (Barker, xix).

However, if the view of Haworth Parsonage as a completely isolated landmark in the midst of unadulterated moorland is a popular myth, as both Miller and Barker observe, it is a myth that is partly of Charlotte Brontë’s own making. This myth was embellished by Elizabeth Gaskell in her famous Life of Charlotte Brontë, which attempted to portray Charlotte as a dutiful, self-denying woman—sanitizing anything controversial in her works or papers. Gaskell discusses Brontë’s career as an author in gendered terms, seeing the role of author and the role of woman as competing for first place in Charlotte’s priorities. Gaskell emphasizes her belief that for Charlotte, the duties of womanhood always came first. “When a man becomes an author,” writes Gaskell, “it is probably merely a change of employment to him…[another] steps into his vacant place, and probably does as well as he.” For a woman, however, cannot shirk her domestic responsibilities to pursue a career:

But no other can take up the quiet regular duties of the daughter, the wife, or the mother, as well as she whom God has appointed to fill that particular place: a woman’s principal work in life is hardly left to her own choice; nor can she drop the domestic charges devolving on her as an individual, for the exercise of the most splendid talents that were ever bestowed. (Gaskell, 271-272)

Gaskell was obviously at pains to prove to the world that Charlotte did not neglect her “principal work” as a woman in order to exercise her talents, that she was a dutiful daughter and sister, without unfeminine ambitions. As Gaskell’s biography was commissioned by Patrick Brontë to fight the “misrepresentations” that had sullied his daughter’s image, such an idealized portrayal of Charlotte is hardly surprising (Miller, 64). Gaskell’s portrayal continued to influence popular and scholarly conceptions of Charlotte’s life, and it is only recently that the larger picture has begun to be pieced together.

In her last completed novel, Villette, Charlotte reworked the material she had previously used in The Professor, again drawing on her experiences in Brussels and her unrequited love for Constantin Heger. In Villette, Charlotte returned to the first-person female narrator, this time the character Lucy Snowe, who travels to Villette, an imaginary version of Brussels, to teach in a girls’ school. Lucy is in some ways a more complex, although less likeable, narrator than Jane Eyre. Her paranoia and secrecy lead her to conceal information, even from the reader. Villette contains the promise of fulfillment in love, but the ending remains ambiguous.

Published in January 1843, Villette met with mixed reviews. Thackeray characteristically attributed the heroine’s longing for love to the author herself. “Poor little woman of genius!” he wrote to a friend, “She wants some Tomkins or another to love her and be in love with. But you see she is a little bit of a creature without a pennyworth of good looks…and no Tomkins will come” (Maynard, 15). Like Gaskell, Thackeray implies that women can gain true fulfillment only in conventional domesticity; literary achievement is a sort of consolation prize.

Ironically, Charlotte would soon after achieve the kind of domestic happiness from which Thackeray thought she was permanently excluded. Her father’s curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls, declared his attachment to Charlotte. Although Patrick Brontë initially disapproved of the match, Charlotte and Arthur were married in Haworth Church on June 29, 1854. They spent their honeymoon in Ireland, and then returned to Haworth to care for Charlotte’s aging father.

Charlotte’s letters reveal that it was a happy marriage, but sadly, her new happiness was short-lived. In the early stages of pregnancy, Charlotte was weakened by morning sickness, caught a chill, and died on March 31, 1855. She had been married less than a year. At her death, Charlotte left the manuscript of her last novel Emma unfinished.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alexander, Christine. “Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 2004. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/3523

Barker, Juliet. The Brontës. Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London: 1994.

Gaskell, Elizabeth. The Life of Charlotte Brontë. Ed. Angus Easson. Oxford University Press, Oxford: 1996.

Maynard, John. Charlotte Brontë and Sexuality. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge: 1984.

Miller, Lucasta. The Brontë Myth. Alfred A. Knopf, New York: 2003.