In the run-up to the bicentenary of Charlotte Brontë’s birth on 21 April 1816, there has been a renewed surge of wonder at this young woman who speaks so intimately across time – “Reader, I married him” – that she binds “Reader” to her. Jane Austen became the prime literary celebrity a few years ago, but in recent years that kind of glory has shifted to Charlotte, whose anniversary is being celebrated with new biographies and a collection of stories inspired by Jane Eyre; exhibitions in New York, London and Haworth; and television and radio programmes, including a Radio 3 series acknowledging Charlotte as not only a novelist but also one of the great letter-writers in our language.
Brussels has emerged as a current site of inspection. Charlotte went there, accompanied by her younger sister Emily, in 1842 and she returned alone for a second year in 1843. The idea was to improve her French and German with a view to opening a school at the parsonage in Haworth, but a stronger motive was to travel.
“[S]uch a vehement impatience of restraint & steady work,” she wrote to her friend Ellen Nussey from her situation as a governess in Yorkshire in August 1841, “such a strong wish for wings . . . – such an urgent thirst to see – to know – to learn – something internal seemed to expand boldly for a minute – I was tantalized with the consciousness of faculties unexercised . . .”
At the Pensionnat Heger, in the now buried rue d’Isabelle at the bottom of the Belliard steps that lead down from the park to the old city, Charlotte had the luck to find a born teacher in M Constantin Heger. Her devoirs for “Monsieur” – he would set topics for her French composition – show the leap she took as a writer. In one piece a poor artist approaches a patron, declaring: “Milord, je crois avoir du Génie” (“My lord, I believe I have genius”). It’s an impassioned baring of the soul, with a thin fictional cover, asking her teacher to promote her gift. A poem, written in English, shows the impact of his seeing her for what she felt herself to be. As the laurel descends on the head of a pupil, named Jane, she feels the successive pulse of “Ambition” and “a secret, inward wound”. It was an illicit passion, because Monsieur was married to the school’s head. It was also a creative love, for his wilful, fiery character would light up the heroes of her novels.
Is there anything new to say about the Brontës, the most written about of literary families? Ever since the intimate vehemence of Jane Eyre’s voice burst on the Victorian scene in 1847, the mysteriously gifted Brontës have piqued the public’s curiosity. Claire Harman’s graceful, intelligent and meticulously researched biography returns us to the loss that looms so large in the Brontë story. This is the “classic” line, laid down by Mrs Gaskell’s enduring Life of Charlotte Brontë, published in 1857, two years after her friend’s death at the age of 38. Charlotte’s five siblings had all died before her, and Mrs Gaskell, at the outset, stares at the row of family tombstones rearing up in the graveyard opposite the Brontë parsonage in Haworth. These premature deaths cast a shadow of doom over Charlotte from birth. Harman, at the outset, fixes on another kind of tragedy in the summer of 1843 when Charlotte was alone in Brussels.
The headlights go up on a fact Mrs Gaskell suppressed: Charlotte’s hopeless love for her “master”, her first and keenest literary mentor. This love, we assume, was the substance of Charlotte’s confession in the Cathedral of Saint Michel and Sainte Gudule, near the pensionnat. Here, an anti-Catholic daughter of an Anglican clergyman is driven to unburden to a Catholic priest, and though he tells her that le bonheur of confession should not be available to her, she is “determined” to speak – “a real confession”, she confided to Emily.
The confessional cubicles of the cathedral are still there, as is the Protestant church where Charlotte and Emily worshipped, but for a long time it was assumed there was nothing much to see of Brontë sites. In 2000 this was disproved by a Dutch investigator, Eric Ruijssenaars, in Charlotte Brontë’s Promised Land, ably followed by Helen MacEwan with detailed topography and vivid detail about sleeping arrangements and food – pistolets for breakfast and pears from the garden cooked in wine – in The Brontës in Brussels (2014). MacEwan leads a vibrant Brontë Society in Brussels which offers tours of the sites, including a visit underground to what remains of where Charlotte and Emily lived, studied and taught.
Claire Harman’s dominant story is about an obsession. This is the Charlotte who writes to Monsieur that she is “the slave of a fixed and dominant idea which controls the mind”. In stressing her reckless emotions, Harman diverges from Mrs Gaskell’s portrait of a well-conducted, dutiful woman who put the needs of others before her own. Four surviving letters that Charlotte wrote to Monsieur after she left Brussels are indeed “heartbreaking”, but also, in Harman’s view – not unlike the understandable view of Mme Heger – outrageous.
Here is a Charlotte who is something of an epistolary “stalker”. Though Harman is too sensitive to state this bluntly, that word does jump out with startling boldness. We are confronted with a question of manners: Charlotte’s pursuit as a pain to the Hegers and a threat to their school. All the same, we can’t be sure what happened between Monsieur and this pupil. Given his proneness to stir girls’ emotions, with a report of girls weeping in his classes, we cannot know how far Monsieur had invited Charlotte’s response (though all would agree that he had not expected to awaken passion on the Brontë scale). If he was implicated, if he went in for emotional manipulation of his pupils, then Charlotte’s letters read as a courageous response to what today we would recognise as a teacher crossing the boundary of stimulation and playing on a pupil’s wish “to be forever known”. Her eloquence is part of what she is saying: displaying her gift, she begs him to continue her “master” in the sense of mentor.
Then, too, we might take in the fact that French freed her to say things she might not have said in English, which makes her final words to Heger, a PS in English, a point of no return. “Out of the fullness of the heart, the mouth speaketh”. To bare her feelings in her own language, rooted in the eloquence of the King James Bible, touches her so strongly that she adds something which no naked eye noticed until it was blown up by a cameraman filming the letters in a small, dark room at the British Library two years ago. I was reading the postscript aloud and the cameraman was filming over my shoulder when suddenly he exclaimed, “What’s this?” Blown up on screen, what had looked like the full stop at the end of this leave-
taking turned out to be a minute heart.
This invisible message to Heger is tantamount to Mr Rochester calling to Jane across an impossible space. Harman believes that Rochester’s call was something that Charlotte Brontë experienced, and it’s the artistic finale to a biography that opens with her act of confession in Monsieur’s home town.
In this narrative, the sequel to Charlotte’s pushy obsession with M Heger is her “impertinent” behaviour, some years later, towards her London publisher, the handsome young George Smith, when she leans forward in a carriage with her hands on his knees. At this moment, after a London party, she is teasing Smith about marriage to a beautiful poetess. Harman suggests that Smith would not have liked Charlotte’s gesture – he said long after her death that he liked her best when she was in Yorkshire – yet there’s much other evidence that he enjoyed her company when they were together, to the extent of inviting her to accompany him on a trip to Edinburgh and then urging a Rhine journey. Though excited by the prospect, she was prudent enough to back away from the Rhine, fearing his mother would not like it.
Smith was put out by her portrait of him as the princely but imperceptive Graham Bretton in Villette (Charlotte’s 1853 novel, named after her fictionalised Brussels); this was because the heroine, Lucy Snowe, comes to prefer a choleric French master. In fact, it was part of the teasing relationship between Brontë and Smith that he had asked her to include him in this novel.
Surviving facts about Charlotte Brontë are so abundant that a definitive biography is impossible. As Lucasta Miller has shown in her brilliant and witty book The Brontë Myth (2001), one approach succeeds another. Harman is a superb biographer – she has composed wonderfully vivid portraits of Fanny Burney and Jane Austen in particular – and there is ample evidence for a cooler portrait of Charlotte Brontë. The challenge (it’s the challenge all biographers have to face) is that our subjects are complex and can be inconsistent. Charlotte’s character, tested by loss and her power to turn loss to gain, is, like all great drama, open to endless interpretation.
Brussels again is a crucial site for Deborah Lutz, whose scrutiny of nine objects in The Brontë Cabinet includes a chapter on the letters to M Heger. Concentrating on material detail, Lutz retells the amazing history of these letters: how Monsieur tore them up; how Mme Heger fished the fragments out of her husband’s waste-paper basket and sewed or stuck the fragments together, and how she kept them in her jewellery box for the next fifty years. Lutz suggests that the reason the Hegers’ daughter gave for keeping the letters, that the amour was all on Charlotte’s side, “doesn’t feel like the whole truth”. The history of stitching and storing in the jewellery box “has a tinge of obsessiveness to it, as if the troubled relationship between the two women” remained as active for Zoë Heger as it did for Charlotte.
A selection of objects is a form of biography that surrenders narrative momentum for the sake of physical intimacy through relics – a very old form of intimacy. Letters, walking stick, portable desk, dog collar, sampler, locks of hair and other posthumous relics are examined intently for marks, stitches and scratches. Might a scratch on Emily’s desk-box be the residue of initials? “Was this a message from the dead . . . ?” Lutz asks. Here are close-ups of the Brontës’ lives through objects they handled and made. It is in a way a collection of essays, opening out from each object to encompass events in the family’s lives and, more widely, to see the objects in the context of their times.
I especially delighted in the chapter on the tiny booklets that the Brontë children put together and wrote themselves under noms de plume, what Lutz aptly calls the “micro-tomes”. Book-making was part of their fantasy lives. “Rather than just a holder of ‘content’ or text to be read, like today’s electronic books, books were things to be manipulated, made personal, appreciated in a tactile way.”
Where the Cabinet invites us to inspect, touch and even smell a collection of treasures, a different kind of closeness may be found in Reader, I Married Him. It’s a terrific set of stories by some of our leading novelists, each of whom engages with a chosen aspect of Jane Eyre. Everyone entranced with Mr Rochester will love “Dangerous Dog” by Kirsty Gunn, in which a fitness instructor, at once alarmed and courageous, tames a fearsome pit bull terrier, confounding the bullies who torment him. And all who enjoy a pained laugh will relish Linda Grant’s “The Mash-Up”, about a disastrous wedding where the Jewish bride and Persian groom are stymied by obstacles. In “The Orphan Exchange”, Audrey Niffenegger dreams up a heartfelt lesbian version of the solace Jane finds in Helen Burns at the cruel Lowood school. In a masterly contribution by Jane Gardam a girl presses her grandmother about her marriage, feeling her way past barriers of time and modesty into a recessed past where there is a glimpse of marital passion. It bears on Jane Eyre’s confidence that: “No woman was ever nearer to her mate than I am: ever more absolutely bone of his bone, and flesh of his flesh.”
All these stories and both new biographies testify to the live legacy of an author with her finger on the pulse of our feelings. The longer I’ve lived with Charlotte Brontë, the more I’ve come to admire her honesty, in letters and in novels that clasp her characters close enough to hear their hearts beat.
Lyndall Gordon’s Charlotte Brontë: a Passionate Life
Tracy Chevalier (9 April) and Claire Harman (10 April) will be appearing at the Cambridge Literary Festival. Details: cambridgeliteraryfestival.com
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This article appears in the 05 Apr 2017 issue of the New Statesman, Spring Double Issue