With the sense of eternity upon him, King Lear referred contemptuously to the fickleness of popularity, and those who live by it he called ‘packs and sects of great ones/That ebb and flow by th’ moon.’ Such a lunar flux has scant relevance to the esteem in which the Brontës have been held for over a hundred years. It is now nearly a quarter of a century since that pioneer in modern Brontë studies, Miss Ratchford,1  lamented the torrent of biographies of the secluded Yorkshire family, the riddling ‘Keys’, ‘Vindications’, Freudian studies, and the steamy plays and novels insecurely based on their lives. So great was the number of books and monographs that Miss Ratchford noted with an understandable weariness that no other writers save Shakespeare and Byron had provoked so much attention as had Charlotte and Emily Brontë. The renaissance of interest in the Victorians since World War II has only served to swell the rushing stream of Brontë studies into a sometimes polemically raging flood.

The Haworth hagiography, like other saints’ legends, serves to objectify many of the mysterious aspects of man’s life, to exemplify the influence of the dark forces swaying that existence. Precisely because they make concrete what we sometimes dimly suspect or fear, these writings, like other hagiographies, have tended to be both scrupulous (even disputatious) about factual detail and irresponsibly speculative about motive. The bare facts are so literally improbable as to tease one into considering the lives of the Brontës themselves as some wild metaphorical statement of the Romantic conception of the world. Aside from the hundreds of thousands of persons who have read Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights, there must be an equal number of others, innocent of knowledge of the novels, who have been at least momentarily captured by the story of that gaunt parsonage and the Gothic lives of its inhabitants, and somehow made uneasy about the world in which it was played out. The fevers of Cowan Bridge; Tabby; the four children writing their stories of Angria and Gondal in the tiny room above the front door; Patrick Brontë, firing his pistols from the windows of his bedroom; the foreboding sound of the gravemason’s chisel in the churchyard; Keeper’s beating at the hands of Emily; Charlotte’s stay in the establishment of M. Héger; the three sisters with linked arms walking endlessly around the sitting-room table; the confrontation of George Smith by Emily and Charlotte; Emily’s dying gaze failing to recognize the sprig of heather brought her by Charlotte from the wintry moors; Anne’s gentle fading from life at Scarborough; the fatal pregnancy that ended Charlotte’s brief marriage; beyond them all the moor with its violent winds and gentle flowers, and its unchanging, recurrent cycle of seasons oblivious to the pathetic series of funeral processions as the family dwindled: the beads of the Brontë rosary slip easily through the fingers.

It would be an unimaginative mind indeed that was unstirred by the lives of the Brontës, and it would require a heart more steadfast than most would care to own to be unmoved by pity for them. Many of us have felt at some time as Swinburne did when he wrote in 1877: ‘From the first hour when as a schoolboy I read Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights I have always retained the first intense desire I felt then to know all that I might or ought to know about the two women who wrote them.’ Even Matthew Arnold, whose meeting with Charlotte was a somewhat qualified success, remembered it so vividly that it formed the centre of his elegiac poem, ‘Haworth Churchyard’, with its evocation of the ‘sisterly band’ and

Somewhat uncharacteristically, Arnold treated the sisters as persons rather than as metaphors for the creative spirit, and he was so moved by the sombre story of their lives that his habitually reserved muse soared at the thought of Emily,

Even the best of biography, however, may tend to serve history rather than literature, and one may be forgiven for wishing to return from their lives to the works of the sisters Brontë. One of the dangers of too great absorption with the biographies of writers is that their books are apt to be forgotten. There is another danger–and possibly a worse one–which is that the books may become important only so far as they can be taken as mirrors of the lives of their creators. Either the critic stresses only those aspects of the books that he can demonstrate as paralleling the life of the author, or he inverts the process and searches the novels for biographical fact, assuming that what occurs in the books must necessarily have an exact and literal precedent in the life of the writer. The possibility that diurnal life may undergo a sea-change in being transformed into art is discounted.

In spite of a widely held view that none of her novels quite equalled Wuthering Heights, it has been Charlotte who has almost monopolized the biographers and critics from the publication of Mrs. Gaskell’s Life to the present. This state of affairs is no doubt attributable to her life having been longer and more public than that of her brother and sisters, and to the fact that her correspondence has survived, as her family’s has not, so that the raw materials for biography have been more easily available. Consequently, it has been her works that have suffered most seriously from what might be called the Purple Heather School of Criticism and Biography. Her novels have been carefully documented to show the ‘originals’ of characters and locales, forgetting that Miss Brontë was a novelist, that she was neither camera nor tape-recorder, and that her purpose was not that of documented history. It was Charlotte Brontë herself who wrote to Ellen Nussey, warning her not to suppose that any of the characters in Shirley (her only attempt at a novel with historical background) were intended as portraits of real persons: ‘It would not suit the rules of art, nor my own feelings, to write in that style. We only suffer reality to suggest, never to dictate. The heroines are abstractions, and the heroes also. Qualities I have seen, loved, and admired, are here and there put in as decorative gems, to be preserved in that setting.’ [Shorter, 11:84.]

Miss Ratchford’s studies of the little books that Charlotte Brontë wrote as a child were a healthy corrective to some of the excesses of biographical speculation, for the emphasis was finally back on what Miss Brontë had written, rather than on what she had been and seen. In addition, Miss Ratchford was able to show that many of the characters and situations of the novels were prefigured in the Angrian writings, and that these antedated Miss Brontë’s acquaintance with some of the ‘originals’ of the novels.

Useful as these studies have been, they contain implicit pitfalls for the critic who merely substitutes originals in the Angrian stories for those in Charlotte Brontë’s acquaintance; in either case, little is said about the mature novels themselves. Even Miss Ratchford has sometimes fallen into the trap for which she has provided such attractive bait. In her remarks on Dr. John Bretton2 she identifies him as a ‘Zamorna’ character by his likeness to the Angrian hero-villain, and then suggests that he is a failure because he is not totally like Zamorna. This judgment deprives the author of the possibility of artistic (and personal) maturation, as well as negating the possibility that a character’s personality and function may be considerably more complex than the germ of its inspiration. Surely, what is important here is a consideration of how adequately Dr. John fulfils his function in Villette, not how exactly he coincides with a character from his creator’s early works.

In the past decade or so, there has been in the criticism of Charlotte Brontë, as in the criticism of other Victorian writers, an increased willingness to treat her novels as seriously conceived works of art, worthy of rigorous examination rather than rhapsodic appreciation, and deserving of a close scrutiny to determine what she has to say and the means by which she says it, how her novels manage to reduce the untidy flow of experience to the proportions and the order of art.3

Perhaps the conclusion to the last sentence will suggest my own attempt to answer the nagging question of what use to make of biographical material in looking at a novel. It would be a singularly foolish critic who refused to employ any tool that might be of use to him. Biography, however, may be a recalcitrant helper in understanding a work of art unless one keeps its limitations firmly in mind. It may serve to suggest why a particular character or event in a novel seemed of peculiar significance to the author, and it may point the way, therefore, to an understanding of the use she intended to make of it, but what it can never do is to show by itself the function of any part of a work of art. To put the matter in another way, biography may illuminate the process of creation, but it can never shed much light on the finished product. (If this seems unkind to those fine scholars who have done so much to document the facts of Miss Brontë’s life, the slight is unintentional, for I wish only to note the dangers of ill-applied biography in criticism.) Experience, whether personal or vicarious, whether in ‘real’ life or in literature (either the writings of other authors or the Angrian outpourings of one’s own youth), is the material of which fiction is made, obviously, but it need no more resemble the finished product than a mulberry leaf is like the silk embroidery into which it has been transformed. To point out the trees where the leaves grew that the silkworm ate is to say little of importance about the embroidery.

It may be worth saying, however, that a comparison, or contrast, of an event or acquaintance from the author’s life with its fictional counterpart may sometimes point the way to an understanding of what she was attempting, and even, occasionally, an understanding of what she did achieve. The problem of intent, as Mr. Wimsatt has been at pains to point out,4 is a complicated one, and one is never justified in confusing the author’s intentions with the effect of a work of art, but an understanding of what the author was attempting to do may often stimulate us to think about the work in ways we might otherwise neglect.

The following study, then, is an attempt to search out the themes that occupied Miss Brontë in her novels and to demonstrate how they are given artistic life; in short, to show how Charlotte Brontë attempted to speak ‘the language of conviction’ in the ‘accents of persuasion’.

*

Here I should like to record my gratitude for the helpful kindness shown to me during the writing of this book by the Princeton University Library, the Bodleian Library, and the British Museum, as well as my thanks for the financial assistance of the Princeton University Committee on Research.

Princeton, N.J.
March 1965

1 Fannie Elizabeth Ratchford, The Brontës’ Web of Childhood (Columbia University Press, New York, 1941.)

2 Pp. 229–34.

3 For some of the most illuminating critical studies, see the ‘Critical Bibliography’.

4 W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Monroe C. Beardsley, ‘The Intentional Fallacy,’ in The Verbal Icon (University of Kentucky Press, Lexington, 1954).