A Wish for Wings

Mary’s letter spoke of some of the pictures & cathedrals she had seen—pictures the most exquisite—& cathedrals the most venerable—I hardly know what swelled to my throat as I read her letter—such a vehement impatience of restraint & steady work. such a strong wish for wings—wings such as wealth can furnish—such an urgent thirst to see—to know to learn—something internal seemed to expand boldly for a minute.

—Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey, August 7, 1841¹

In the summer of 1841, while working as a governess in her second and final position, Charlotte began planning to open a school with her sisters, despite the fact that none of them particularly cared for teaching or scheduling or structure or young people. They probably assumed that being able to organize things their own way would make up for the nuisance of having to admit pupils.

That September, Miss Wooler, Charlotte’s former teacher and employer at Roe Head, wrote to say her sister had decided to give up her school at Dewsbury Moor, and offered the Brontës the chance to take it over.² It was an established institution in a familiar region, fully furnished; if they had actually wanted a school, it would have been a godsend. However, although Charlotte asked Aunt Branwell to loan them money for the undertaking, the scheme never quite took hold. This is as indicative of Charlotte’s ambivalence about teaching as anything else. To buy some more time, Charlotte decided she and Emily should go study abroad to enhance their qualifications.

It’s true, the credentials of a foreign institution and improvement in their French, German, and music would have made the Brontës’ school more prestigious. But really, Charlotte had been bitten by wanderlust. Mary Taylor, one of her school friends, had been regaling her with stories as she traveled around Europe, and Charlotte was intrigued. In a letter to Emily, Charlotte even suggested she intended to seek employment and remain abroad rather than returning home. With the help of the Taylor family, the Brontës found a pensionnat—a school for locals and boarding pupils—in Brussels in the rue d’Isabelle. It was run by a married couple who taught German, French, and Italian, and would allow the sisters to give English lessons. Patrick, Emily, and Charlotte traveled through London, crossed the Channel, and arrived in Belgium in 1842. Charlotte was twenty-six, Emily was twenty-four. It was a pivotal moment in Charlotte’s life; her experiences there would pervade her work until her very last novel.

WHEN I arrived at Ithaca College for my freshman year as a music major, I had lofty expectations of dazzling my teachers and classmates. I had coasted through chorus rehearsals and voice lessons for years, and I expected to find the formal, full-time study of music as easy as playing for my family in the living room. Unfortunately, I realized after a semester that I was definitely not cut out to be a professional musician.

Much like Charlotte valued education but hated teaching, I loved music but hated practicing. The solitary drudgery, the monotonous repetition—I had what Charlotte had called “a vehement impatience of restraint & steady work.” No performance would ever be perfect, and nothing less would ever be good enough. Not for my ambition, not for my pride, not for the casting directors of the world, or the bright lights of old Broadway. The fact that there was no easy road in the direction I had always wanted to go turned me off the whole idea for good. This has been a bit of a lifetime problem.

To console myself for the disintegration of my dreams (and to distract myself from the fact that I was a spineless, inadequate quitter), I spent hours every afternoon and weekend in the library’s A/V center watching rented DVDs on a tiny television, wearing scuzzy communal headphones. I watched film noir classics, went through a Woody Allen phase, saw every Shakespeare adaptation in the catalogue, and plowed through entire TV seasons with barely a break for meals. Looking back on it now, I realize I probably should have gotten screened for depression or anxiety or seasonal affective disorder or all three, but my denial was too strong. The numbing experience of staring at small screens in total isolation held comfort. By January I had abandoned every single aspiration that had brought me to Ithaca in the first place.

I knew I had to do something if I was going to stay, unwilling to face the hassle of transferring schools and braving the unknown all over again. In the fall of my sophomore year, when the information session for The Ithacan, the college newspaper, rolled around, I showed up to pitch a movie review. Seeing my name in print a week later was thrilling. And I hadn’t needed to interact with another human being to make it happen! More than that, my brain had actually enjoyed the workout; the challenge of capturing the film and evaluating how well it had been done shook me out of my stupor. I’d gotten excited about something that wasn’t a weekend library Welcome Back Kotter marathon!

I took my first review and a paper on a Handel oratorio that had been excoriated by my music history professor to a meeting with Barbara Adams, an assistant professor and local arts critic, to see if she’d let me take her Writer as Critic course. I recently uncovered the note in which I asked for the meeting, the first of many I would write to my personal Miss Wooler. She proofread it for grammar and syntax, corrected my misuse of “hopefully,” and wrote “Yes!” at the bottom. Over the course of the next few years I received Barb’s thorough (and sometimes painful) revisions, corrections, and requests for more information, and our relationship shaped me and my writing as nothing else has. With her support, I would go on to graduate with a writing minor, become a TA in academic writing, intern at a major book publisher, and never again confuse “less” and “fewer.”

Eventually, I became the go-to critic for campus theater productions and indie movies at the cinema downtown. Writing didn’t come easily, exactly, but the process was satisfying and I was pleased with my work. My voice showed up on the page. Even if it didn’t completely fill that void of anxiety, or assuage the fear that sent me scurrying away from every opportunity to forge human connection, it felt like a foothold. I still hid, and I still procrastinated, but writing would turn out to be one thing I was willing to work for.

BRUSSELS was not what Charlotte and Emily expected. It was strange for two sisters in their twenties to be schoolgirls again, especially when they’d had so little experience with formal schooling to begin with. Then, too, it was a dramatic shift from their insular Haworth village. The Flemish customs and pervasive Catholicism were strange and offensive to their deeply Protestant sensibilities. Charlotte and Emily kept to themselves at the pensionnat and struggled to communicate. As Charlotte’s French improved, her opinion of Catholics worsened, and she began her acquaintance with the man on whom inveterate Brontë fans have hung their hopes for decades: Constantin Heger, teacher of French and literature. His wife, Zoë, monitored the day students and the twelve pensionnaires who boarded in the rue d’Isabelle. Charlotte described Heger as

a man of power as to mind but very choleric & irritable in temperament—a little black, ugly being with a face that varies in expression, sometimes he borrows the lineaments of an insane Tom-cat—sometimes those of a delirious Hyena—occasionally—but very seldom, he discards these perilous attractions and assumes an air not above a hundred degrees removed from what you would call mild & gentleman-like.3

Emily and Charlotte’s schoolwork included French devoirs, or essays, many of which survive intact with Heger’s comments and corrections. This was the first time someone outside the family had read their writing—the first time they’d even written with the intention of being read by an adult, much less an expectation of being challenged to improve and revise. Their imaginations had always held free rein at home; they’d invented collaboratively and spontaneously. Now they were confined to designated prompts and the strictures of correct spelling and grammar—in a foreign language, no less. It chafed.

Both Charlotte and Emily found ways to inject their characteristic wit and energy into what might have been tedious assignments, some of which Heger appreciated, some of which he appeared to find vexing.4 While Charlotte thrived on the critiques, motivated by Heger’s intensity and charisma, Emily resented the interference. In 1841, M. Heger gave the Brontës an “invitation and reply” assignment. Here is Emily’s note from a music teacher to her student:

Dear Miss,

It would have been, in truth, a great pleasure for me had I been able to accept your invitation; but in a life like mine, our inclination cannot always be followed, and unfortunately the day of your party is, of all the days of my week, the busiest.…

But when I suffer a disappointment, I ordinarily seek some compensation in return; and at present, I console myself with the thought that if I am denied the opportunity to exhibit my small talent, at least, I will not undergo the mortification of witnessing the poor results of my work with you; because I have heard that you are to play a piece on this occasion, and forgive me if I advise you (out of pure friendship) to choose a time when everyone is occupied with something other than music, for a fear that your performance will be a little too remarkable. Still, I would not want to discourage you. Good day, and good luck with all my heart.5

The stealthy rudeness of the subtext here—“I may miss out on the concert, but at least I won’t have to hear what a terrible musician you are”—makes it my favorite piece of writing by Emily Brontë. I’ve read some speculation that we can’t know for sure whether the sass was intentional, but I would wager Jane’s first kiss with Rochester against the ridiculous idea that Emily wasn’t being deliberately snarky.

The devoir of Charlotte’s that most touches me was one of the last she wrote in Brussels; she’d attempted to give her notice and return home but been talked out of it by M. Heger. She wrote this “Letter from a Poor Painter,” in which she provides a snapshot of an oddball’s life I deeply relate to. Writing in the character of a young artist to a wealthy patron, she says,

Milord, I lived for a long time with others without any thought of comparing myself with them; throughout my early youth, the difference that existed between myself and most of the people around me was, for me, an embarrassing enigma that I did not know how to resolve. I believed myself inferior to everyone, and it grieved me. I believed it my duty to follow the example set by the majority of my acquaintances… yet all the while I felt myself incapable of feeling and acting as they felt and acted.… People found me always clumsy, always boring. There was always excess in what I did; I was either too wrought up or too cast down; without meaning to, I showed everything that passed in my heart, and sometimes storms were passing through it.6

Me too, Charlotte, me too. “Incapable of feeling and acting” like other people might as well have been my high school yearbook quote. Brontë scholar Sue Lonoff, who undertook the vital task of transcribing not only the extant Belgian essays, but deciphering Heger’s corrections, suggests this is clearly a heartsick Charlotte’s attempt to get Heger’s attention. Through the passion of her prose and the strength of this artist’s sentiments, Charlotte is speaking from the heart. She was also entirely capturing the way I have always felt, ever since it dawned on me that I looked differently or played differently or spoke differently or even read differently than other people. Charlotte’s description of self-transformation gives me hope. She continues,

Finally a day came (I was eighteen) when I opened my eyes and glimpsed a heaven in my own soul. Suddenly I realized that I had a force within that could serve as a substitute for that noble calm which I had so much admired.… I became a painter and a dreamer.

At twenty-one my dreams dissipated. I do not know what voice it was that cried in my ear, “Rouse yourself! Leave your world of phantoms, enter the real world, look for Work, confront Experience, struggle, and conquer.” I arose, I wrenched myself away from that solitude, those dreams that I had loved, I left my country, and went abroad.7

I wish I had known these essays existed when I was younger; I would not have become a painter, but I might have been motivated by the way Charlotte embraced “a substitute for noble calm” (i.e., creativity), or her frank acceptance of the necessity of struggle in order to succeed. I am always looking for an easier, less turbulent path instead of sticking to my guns and, as she puts it, “tak[ing] my degree in the school of Adversity.”⁸

JUST before graduating from high school, I had begun dating James, a sweet, daydreaming kid who liked to climb trees and work on his family’s farm. He was more interesting than my usual romantic leads—he would debate the merits of fantasy novels and even agreed that they needed to be more feminist. He was silly, and he was kind. Unlike the brick walls at whom I’d thrown myself over the past four years, I could be assertive and independent with him. He wasn’t threatened by me, but he also wasn’t a pushover. I didn’t have to feign (or hide) my excitement.

After a sunny and romantic summer, we decided to stay together as we faced our respective university and gap-year obligations. Plenty of people will tell you it’s a bad idea to take your high school boyfriend along to college, that long-distance relationships rarely work out, that you’re going to grow and change so much that it’s doomed to failure. And you might as well explain astrophysics to a pet rock as get an eighteen-year-old in love to believe any of it. I packed the family car for upstate New York, he hopped on a plane. We spoke nightly when he was near a phone on his Colorado wilderness course. We wrote letters, we pined, we bickered, we broke up, and we got back together again.

By my junior year, things with James were both better and worse than they’d ever been. We’d shared a house during the previous summer on his family’s farm—a bug-filled cottage, really—and found one another’s domestic habits mutually off-putting. I was too controlling, he was too passive, nobody did the dishes. But we’d made it through, talking constantly about the future to take our minds off the unpalatable present. Moving to New York City had been my greatest ambition since I was nine; James liked to travel but didn’t want to live so far from home after he graduated. To my mother’s dismay, I repackaged my big-city hopes like they were just an idea I’d had one time. I would finish college and spend a year in New York; James would finish school the following spring and we’d get married and start a family. We thought we’d spend a semester studying abroad in London together, so we could finally be in the same place at the same time. That August, just when I should have started pulling together my application, I saw the flyer.

“Study Abroad in India,” it said, and I stopped, transfixed. One of the best friends I’d made in my neighborhood was Indian, and I’d always been fascinated by her parents’ home country. Later on, a friend of my dad’s had introduced the whole family to Bollywood movies and their flashy exuberance—they are 1950s MGM on steroids, Busby Berkeley with unlimited leeway. Their maximalism would give Bob Fosse a stroke. Their stylized romance is unparalleled. I wanted to see the country that had created them, to be immersed in India’s folktales, its food, its music, its artwork, but it had never seemed remotely possible. I didn’t even have a passport—nobody in my family did.

That urgent thirst Charlotte felt when she read Mary Taylor’s letters, I felt looking at this flyer.^* I wanted Something Else, something that would light me up in a new and extraordinary way. The thing that would fulfill me the way falling in love was supposed to. That would come between me and whatever I was hiding from each weekend in the A/V department. I decided I would find that thing in India. James was surprised and disappointed, but said he understood and would see me when I got back. The Brontës went to Brussels for language and culture; I went to India with no coherent plan.

I stayed with a wonderful host family, who took me to neighborhood parties and did the best they could with a headstrong American who perplexed them by sleeping late and walking out in the midday heat. I made friends with roguish Indian men on motorcycles and danced in discotheques until unseemly hours with women in jeans and sari tops, smoked Gold Flake cigarettes, drank too much Kingfisher, discovered gin and tonics at rooftop bars. I bargained joyfully for bags and jewelry out of bus windows and even negotiated the price of a nose piercing in Udaipur.

The program that hosted me offered an anthropology overview and an intro to sociology course, along with practicums in the arts, from music to miniature painting. In the survey courses, I struggled to memorize names and dates from India’s expansive history and failed to comprehend experiential research practices. The only class where I did well was Hindi, out of the sheer excitement of learning to think anew and the opportunity it gave me to speak more freely at my homestay and in the streets of Jaipur. If memorizing folktales recounted by my homestay hosts and their friends had been a class, I would have gotten better grades. I still felt awkward around my fellow American students, but despite my whiteness and my garish taste in salwar khameez color combinations, I felt at home in Jaipur. At least for the first couple of months. Maybe it was because for once in my life there was a perfectly valid explanation for feeling foreign: I was very foreign, and there was no way to camouflage it. But I also had my hosts, who gave me a comforting home base, something Charlotte never managed to find for herself in Brussels, or London, or anyplace other than Haworth, really.

I even wrote a column for my college newspaper, “Indian Immersions,” documenting my embarrassing Western naïveté in five-hundred-word installments. Rereading those columns now is like hearing my younger self on tape—high-pitched and glib, thinking I had anything more than an entry-level perspective on India or the people I met there. I wonder if Charlotte felt the same way about those devoirs—she wrote with broad strokes, tackling big topics like Genius or The Philosophy of Life, despite her lack of worldliness. Most of these essays survived in Heger’s effects, not hers, so maybe she wasn’t terribly proud of them. But in her work (and a little in my own) I also hear something else: the foundation of the writer in progress.

Following their initial six-month stay as students, Emily and Charlotte were asked to stay on as teachers at the pensionnat—Charlotte to teach English, Emily to give music lessons. With some misgivings, since Emily was already homesick and Charlotte despised practically everyone, they agreed. A few months later, their Aunt Branwell died. The sisters raced home to Haworth and went into mourning. Constantin Heger sent a letter to Patrick Brontë in their wake, expressing his condolences and giving a report of the sisters’ progress during their stay. He praised their accomplishments and their “love of work,” and suggested he would be willing to offer one or both of them positions at the pensionnat if they returned to Brussels.9 He sounds stuffy and a little pompous. I wish we had more evidence to bring Heger to life, outside of Charlotte’s guarded letters to Ellen Nussey and Elizabeth Gaskell’s underwhelmed reporting. I want to be persuaded of his charisma, to see what Charlotte saw.

After a respectable period, Charlotte traveled alone back to Brussels while Emily stayed at the Parsonage to run the household, remaining in Haworth for the rest of her life. Anne and Branwell returned to their posts as governess and tutor to the Robinson family at Thorp Green. Though Charlotte enjoyed teaching English to Heger and his brother, she had another compelling reason for staying. She had fallen in love. We have no hard evidence Heger was anything but sincere and teacherly to her, but I somehow doubt Charlotte was the type to bestow her heart without some kind of invitation. Charlotte’s unrequited affection and contempt for the rest of the pensionnat exacerbated her discomfort in Brussels. She wrote to Branwell in May of 1843,

As for me I am very well and wag on as usual, I perceive however that I grow exceedingly misanthropic and sour… the fact is people here are no go whatsoever.… I can discern only 1 or 2 who deserve anything like regard—This is not owing to foolish fastidiousness on my part—but to the absence of decent qualities on theirs—they have not intellect or politeness or good-nature or good-feeling—they are nothing—I don’t hate them—hatred would be too warm a feeling.… The black Swan Mr Heger is the sole veritable exception to this rule… from time to time he shews his kind-heartedness by loading me with books—so that I am still indebted to him for all the pleasure or amusement I have.10

The characters and stories of Angria continued to provide her with an escape from what troubled her, as they did when she was despondent at Roe Head. I wish she could have tapped back into the sense of wonder and awe that sent her abroad. She had been so eager to experience the sights and sounds of the world, but she couldn’t overcome the typical Brontë homesickness, which was made even worse by solitude.

I want to snap her out of it, to tell her she has only this chance to make a life for herself, far from home and its conventions and restrictions. Take a walk! Write something! Paint! Here are your wings! Fly! But then, my India journal is full of days where everything was strange and noisy and hot and difficult and I sound like a brat. My last month or so was basically a list of museums I would never get to visit and complaints about everything—no matter how much I wanted to revel in my adventurous life as a temporary ex-pat, I was lonely, overwhelmed, and disconnected. After I moved out of my homestay family’s house for the independent study portion of the semester, often my only adventure was walking to the corner shop for chocolate and Diet Coke before retreating to the hotel. Even though I loved my teachers and was well aware this was the opportunity of a lifetime, I also felt the irresistible urge to hide and run out the clock. My time in Jaipur was full of contradictions—admiring the history and grandeur, loathing the street harassment and heat. I was caught between expectant ambition and debilitating anxiety. Wings, and the effortless flight they promise, aren’t to be had just for the wishing.

I think it wasn’t in Charlotte’s nature to be happy away from home, surrounded by strangers and strange ways. But I imagine she would have been the first to recognize how beneficial her time at the pensionnat was for her future career. However disheartened we both became during our times abroad, we each gained necessary skills, a new appreciation for the comforts of home, and a more evolved ability to withstand criticism.^* As my semester in Jaipur neared its conclusion, what I wrestled with most was the feeling I’d failed—and failed hard—at my first capital-R romance.

Charlotte went to Brussels and fell in love. I went to India and fell out of it. We had both picked the wrong men. The security of a high school sweetheart’s affection couldn’t compete with the intoxication of independence, or with those Indian men and their motorcycles. James and I were on opposite schedules, moving in different directions, and the long-distance phone calls that began as a treat had become an expensive chore. Plus, James’s playfulness was also immaturity; he was still merrily climbing trees, barefoot in a bathrobe while I was confronting the future, whatever it held. His disregard for public opinion, which I had found so liberating after high school, wasn’t so attractive to me as adulthood loomed on the horizon.

We broke up over the phone, which was tacky but unavoidable—the alternative was dragging it out for weeks. I sat on the rooftop of the guest house where I was staying and watched neighborhood kids play with kites in the dusty street below as I told him I wanted to stay friends and apologized for his staggering phone bill. Later, I found out he launched into a new relationship immediately. When I heard about it, I left angry voicemails and petulantly asked for my tokens and letters back, despite having rebounded with a muscular man with tribal tattoos named Vivek who took me out in his Humvee to the remixed sounds of “Hotel California.” A few years later, long after the dust settled, one unfortunate night my entire family and I ended up right next to James and his family at a play; his relatives were cordial to me, but he switched seats to get as far away from me as possible. A few days later I got a spiteful email in which he unleashed all the hurt and rage he must have been feeling months and months before; I responded with a mix of penitence and confusion—I was sorry, and had behaved badly, but we were both better off. I never heard from him again.

IN early October of 1843, Charlotte finally gave her notice. Afterward, she wrote to Ellen:

Monsieur Heger—having heard of what was in agitation… pronounced with vehemence his decision that I should not leave—I could not at that time have persevered in my intention without exciting him to passion—so I promised to stay a while longer.…

I have much to say Ellen—many odd little things queer and puzzling enough—which I do not like to trust to a letter, but which one day perhaps or rather one evening—if ever we should find ourselves again by the fireside at Haworth or Brookroyd with our feet on the fender—curling our hair—I may communicate to you.11

Oh to be a fly on the wall by that fireside! I must be satisfied with the echoes of this moment in Jane Eyre and Villette, I suppose, though I feel so curious I can hardly contain myself. After three more months, Charlotte overrode Heger’s objections and departed for Haworth and home. When she arrived, she wrote,

Dear Ellen,

I cannot tell what occupies your thoughts and time—are you ill? is someone of your family ill? are you married? are you dead? if it be so you may as well write a word to let me know—for my part I am again—in old England. I shall tell you nothing further till you write to me.

C Brontë

Haworth 1844

Write to me directly that is a good girl… 12

Years later, Heger’s son donated four letters from Charlotte to Heger to the British Museum and suggested there must have been several more that have not survived. In the earliest extant one, from July of 1844, Charlotte apologizes for a previous letter that was “hardly rational, because sadness was wringing [her] heart.”¹³ She promises to be patient until he writes back to her, dancing on the line between eager and desperate. In the second letter, from October, Charlotte attempts to seem casual and disinterested, ostensibly writing merely to ascertain if her earlier letter had in fact been delivered. In the third letter, written in January of 1845, she loses her cool—

Day and night I find neither rest nor peace—if I sleep I have tormenting dreams in which I see you always severe, always saturnine and angry with me.…

I submit to all kinds of reproaches—all I know—is that I cannot—that I will not resign myself to the total loss of my master’s friendship—I would rather undergo the greatest bodily pains than have my heart constantly lacerated by searing regrets. If my master withdraws his friendship from me entirely I shall be absolutely without hope—if he gives me a little friendship—a very little—I shall be content—happy, I would have a motive for living—for working.14

It’s uncharacteristic for Charlotte to allow herself to be so vulnerable, at least on paper. Brontë scholar Juliet Barker suggests it was writing in French that freed Charlotte from the constraints of modesty and self-restraint she would ordinarily be under.¹⁵ Charlotte comes to a close with, “I don’t want to reread this letter—I am sending it as I have written it,” which unconsciously imitates a letter written by her mother years earlier, who wrote to Patrick, “Enough of this; I must bring my pen to order, for if I were to suffer myself to revise what I have written I should be tempted to throw it in the fire, but I have determined that you shall see my whole heart.”¹⁶

Charlotte’s final letter, from November of 1845, makes reference to a lost letter to which Heger must have replied, for she says, “Your last letter has sustained me—has nourished me for six months.”¹⁷ Charlotte has regained some of her composure; while she still admits that thoughts of Heger intrude upon her every waking moment, she only asks for news of his children, his school, and himself. She also admits his extended silences leave her miserable.

Heger does not appear to have encouraged any future correspondence. In fact he tore Charlotte’s letters up and discarded them—they were found and stitched back together by his wife, Zoë, somewhat inexplicably. Did she anticipate needing them as proof? Did she perceive some attachment on her husband’s side, as Charlotte suspected? Or did she foresee Charlotte’s writing career? Brontë biographer Elizabeth Gaskell was able to gain access to these letters (or rather, to hear Heger read them aloud) and discussed them in her biography. She attempted to downplay the evidence of a young woman clearly in love with her married teacher that they contained. She noted that Heger seemed to have appreciated Charlotte’s talent, but she attributes the cooling off of the relationship between Charlotte and Zoë Heger to a difference of religion, delicately avoiding any further implications.18

As a love-struck teenager I so wanted to believe that Charlotte had a great love affair with a man she respected, although nothing on paper confirms Heger’s feelings toward Charlotte were anything other than fatherly. The sad truth is Charlotte probably never experienced a love scene as good as the ones she wrote—though of course neither has anyone else I’ve known.

Shortly after Charlotte came home, Anne Brontë resigned her governess position—she’d been working for the Robinson family for years. Branwell had been employed as the tutor to the family’s young sons, but was soon after fired for “proceedings… bad beyond expression,” which is the pre-Victorian euphemism for having an illicit affair with the mistress of the house.¹⁹ It was a scandal that, though hushed up by the Robinsons themselves, has essentially become Branwell’s legacy.

Home together again, the sisters once again discussed the possibility of opening their own school—this time planning to board pupils at the Parsonage. They even went so far as making advertisement cards and writing to their former employers to secure pupils. But by the end of the year the low response rate forced Charlotte and her sisters to realize the futility of their school plan—plus, let us not forget, none of them actually liked teaching. So, the sisters began to consider other ways of making money.

I’m genuinely sorry the Brontës’ experiences with private households killed off their enthusiasm for running a school—I like to imagine myself in Charlotte’s Roe Head classroom, or having a cup of tea together in the teachers’ parlor, even still. It occurs to me as I think back on the Brontës’ work that perhaps they did get their school. And they didn’t even have to admit any boarders! They just had to write, and to live. Thousands of people have read their work, and dozens of those people became writers, inspired to create brave heroines, tell unconventional love stories, reign over imaginary nation-states, or simply to write, no matter what.

I let my enthusiasm for the Brontës spill into everything I do, but especially teaching. When I talk to my students, I like to point to the Brontës as evidence that sometimes your first effort ends in disappointment. Sometimes your second effort tanks too. And even your third one. You may have to try one avenue, then another and another before you find the one that satisfies and sustains you. Charlotte’s desperation to forget Heger and take her mind off Branwell’s failures was likely a major factor in her next attempt at self-sufficiency: publication of the writing she and her sisters had been doing all along.