Charlotte Bronte:
A Passionate Life
By Lyndall Gordon
Norton, 418 pages, $27.50
In March of 1837 one item in the voluminous correspondence of the English poet laureate Robert Southey was a note rebuking an obscure young woman who had asked for his opinion of her verses. “Madame,” he scolded, “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.”
The young woman, who happened to be a poor clergyman’s daughter named Charlotte Bronte, showed no outward resentment of this advice. Indeed, her father, a selfish and eccentric widower with chronic indigestion and a terror of fires, held much harsher views of the role of women than did Southey. The Rev. Bronte, with all his hopes pinned on his son, Branwell (who died addicted to opium, sullen and reclusive), was nearly oblivious to the existence of his five daughters, except as they inconvenienced him.
Shortly after his wife’s death he packed four of the girls-the eldest 11, the youngest 6-off to the appallingly grim Clergy Daughter’s School, where two of them, Maria and Elizabeth, promptly contracted tuberculosis. Given insufficient food and beaten when their illness prevented their completion of school tasks, they died within a year. Charlotte’s scalding, passionate resentment of this time, and her grief and anger at the loss of her sisters, particularly Maria, emerges clearly in “Jane Eyre.”
Charlotte and Emily returned home to their father’s indifference. His neglect, however, did afford them a bleak freedom that permitted the growth of their art. Emily, later to write “Wuthering Heights,” led Anne, the future author of “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,” in roaming the Yorkshire moors. Always in each other’s company, they were isolated from the gentry of Haworth by their father’s poverty and from the lower classes by their own snobbishness. At night, after their father left the dinner table, the girls blew out all the candles and by firelight marched in circles together, laughing and whispering as each contributed her part to stories of fantastic adventure.
Often these were tales of realms of their own invention, presided over by heroes who had their origins in a gift that Rev. Bronte made to Branwell of a dozen lead soldiers. Each child took a soldier to be the ruler of an imaginary land. Angria, the empire imagined by Charlotte, was so real to her that she wrote about it into adulthood. The manuscripts survive, but as Lyndall Gordon, the author of “Charlotte Bronte: A Passionate Life,” so bluntly states, “It has to be owned that most of her juvenilia is boring.”
For Gordon, who has written an acute and unsentimental biography, the real question is how Charlotte Bronte went from writing the sagas of Angria, by turns lurid and insipid, to the realistic childhood suffering and mature passion of “Jane Eyre,” a book that retains its power to shock the reader by its sheer strength of feeling. For Gordon, the answer lies in part in Bronte’s associations with a handful of people who possessed uncommon character and insight. One was a school friend named Mary Taylor, an intelligent and outspoken early feminist who eventually emigrated to New Zealand. She tried to convince Charlotte to do likewise and escape “the terrible old man,” her father.
Another, even more significant influence was Constantin Heger, the headmaster of the Pensionnat Heger in Brussels, where Emily and Charlotte studied. Aware of the young women’s extraordinary gift, Heger set about inventing a curriculum that would help develop their abilities as writers. “Genius must be rash and daring,” wrote Charlotte to him, chafing, perhaps, at these exercises. “Genius without study, without art, without the knowledge of what has been done, is strength without the lever,” Heger wrote back. It was this conflict between mastery and freedom, self-control and passion in literature and in life that Gordon rightly sees as central to Charlotte’s view of the world.
Earlier biographies have stressed Charlotte Bronte’s drab dutifulness, her poverty, the bleakness of working as a governess and the lifelong shadow cast by the death of her mother and all her siblings. The horror of so much death is certainly real enough and colors everything Charlotte Bronte wrote with a sense of life’s precariousness. The tragedy of recurrent death that Charlotte experienced early in life was repeated in 1848 and ’49, when Branwell, Emily and Anne all died within nine months.
It was the loss of Emily, perhaps, that Charlotte felt most, for Emily did not just succumb to death but hurried toward it, adding self-starvation to tuberculosis. When the undertaker came to make her coffin he remarked it was the narrowest-17 inches across-he had ever built for an adult. “When I saw with what a front she met suffering, I looked at her with an anguish of wonder and awe,” wrote Charlotte. “I have seen nothing like it, but indeed, I have never seen her parallel in anything.”
But it was Charlotte, Lyndall Gordon points out, who was the survivor, Charlotte who tempered the passionate nature she shared with Emily with self-control. Outwardly small and weak and unworldly, Charlotte was tough and well aware of her own worth. As Gordon tells us, she refused three proposals of marriage on the grounds that her suitors were “too dull” or “beneath her.” She wrote despairingly in 1844, “My youth is leaving me, I can never do better than I have done, and I have done nothing yet,” but she kept writing.
Thus, in 1847, she had the pleasure and terror of informing her father that the novel “Jane Eyre,” published under the name Currer Bell, that was being extolled by Dickens and Thackeray, read and discussed everywhere, was in fact her work. At first the reverend irritably waved the book away, but after hearing the reviews, grudgingly took a look at it, remarking, “Children, Charlotte has written a book and it is a better one than I expected.”
This biography, to borrow dry praise for a work of excellence, is also a better one than might be expected, given the way Charlotte Bronte’s life seems to cry out for absurdly romantic interpretation. Dramatic, clear, brilliantly well researched, Gordon’s book brings a seriousness of interest that all too often is lacking in contemplations of Bronte’s extraordinarily narrow and yet wild upbringing. The dilemmas confronting Charlotte as a writer and as a human being constrained by an unequal society are real and persistent. All of us must steer a course between subservience to convention and yielding absolutely to our desires. Either way, something will inevitably be sacrificed.
Lyndall Gordon demonstrates that Charlotte Bronte’s solution was to conceal beneath a disguise of insignificance not only passion-that was evident in every paragraph she wrote-but also a proud, measuring intelligence and a formidible will. Gordon reveals a woman who really was capable of writing those revolutionary words that Jane Eyre-“that brazen Miss,” as one contemporary critic called her-spoke to the lordly gentleman, Mr. Rochester. “I have as much soul as you and full as much heart. . . . It is my spirit that addresses your spirit just as if both had passed through the grave and we stood at God’s feet equal-as we are!” This vision, of a woman who dares to proclaim her equality and a man who dares to welcome it, is Charlotte Bronte’s gift, rarely acknowledged, to modern life.
