Take courage.
I couldn’t get the words out of my head. After I returned from Scarborough, I kept thinking about Anne, and, oddly, about a saying by the eighteenth-century Hasidic mystic Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, which I remembered every time I crossed the bridge over Anne’s favourite waterfall on the moors. As I gazed down at the seething torrents, I would think about Anne picnicking here, and about Nachman’s saying that ‘The whole world is a very narrow bridge; the important thing is not to be afraid’. Nachman was a tzaddik, a Hebrew word which literally means a righteous person, but also means a person who is like a superhero or an angel, always on the side of the oppressed. Like Anne, Nachman was a storyteller, writing captivating, weird tales alongside his religious commentary. He told his followers to talk to God outdoors (where ‘all the grasses join in his prayer’), but became anxious when God didn’t talk back. Like Anne, Nachman died of TB. It occurs to me that his narrow bridge is not so different from her narrow way, and that both Nachman and Anne wanted to inspire courage but knew that courage means nothing without fear. They knew that courage is not easy to find or to hold on to, that you might, at any moment, fall off the bridge and get swept away.
Charlotte almost fell after Anne’s death, but she took courage, and forced herself to finish Shirley, and did her best to defend her sisters to their critics, and most of all, she wrote her bravest, strangest, most conflicted book. Villette, published in 1853, has become my favourite of Charlotte’s novels. She had to write it alone, with no sisters to read it, ‘no opinion from one living being’. Written ‘darkly in the silent workshop of [her] own brain’, it has no Gothic melodrama (well, all right, there is a sort of ghost) and no happy ending. Its heroine Lucy Snowe is as angry and as consumed by self-hatred as Charlotte was. The survivor of a tragedy she won’t (or can’t) talk about, she lies to the reader, she withholds key information, and she tries so hard to crush her desires that she feels like she is driving a tent peg into her own head. Villette is constricted, frustrating and unpleasant. That’s why it’s so good. Jane Eyre is an innocent book; Villette is by a woman who has lived. In Villette, Lucy has to recognise her own ardour; to admit that it can no longer be contained; to try for happiness, at last; and to recognise that there is no closure, that life isn’t always fair, that moral choices are muddy, and there are no tidy endings, let alone happy ones.
Charlotte took courage again on a ‘dim June morning’ in 1854, when she took a leap into the unknown and married Arthur Bell Nicholls, even though she wasn’t sure about him, and even though Patrick objected vehemently. Charlotte found that she could and did love Nicholls, and even hoped to have their child. But she fell prey to hyperemesis gravidarum, extreme morning sickness, and nine months after her wedding, her coffin was carried up the same aisle in Haworth’s church where she had walked as a bride.
Patrick also took his youngest daughter’s last words to heart. After Anne died, he went on the warpath, as if trying to do something his most radical, most humane, most hopeful child would have been proud of. Anne would certainly have admired the rigour and clarity with which her father identified Haworth’s biggest problem: bad water. He organised a petition to demand a water supply to every house in the village, so it wasn’t just the wealthy who got fresh water. He kept campaigning until, in April 1850, an inspector turned up. Benjamin Herschel Babbage was appalled to find that the average life expectancy was twenty-six, as bad as the poorest, most overcrowded slums of London. In some ways it’s a wonder the Brontës lived so long. Babbage’s report is, jokes Steven Wood, ‘Victorian sanitation porn’, full of lurid details about how the shortage of privies (and the fact that most had no doors) was ‘injurious to health’ and ‘repugnant to all ideas of decency’; how, because there were no sewers, waste ran down the streets. ‘Bad as is this state of things’, Babbage agrees with Patrick that ‘perhaps the most crying want of Haworth is water’. Worst of all, since the graveyard didn’t have proper drainage, the corpses were literally seeping into what water there was.
Because Babbage closed down the churchyard, and put an end to burying people inside the church, when Patrick died at eighty-four, on 7 June 1861, his parish had to get special permission from the Secretary of State to bury him with his family (apart from Anne). Even then, his coffin had to be embedded in powdered charcoal and entombed separately from the others in brick or stone. For all that this was troublesome, Patrick might have been glad. He had got what he wanted. He’d changed his world.
Nicholls took courage too, when he proposed to Charlotte. In fact, he had to keep taking courage because she rejected him at first, and because he had to defy Patrick, who didn’t want them to marry. After Charlotte died, the two men became friends, but poor Nicholls found that Haworth’s board of trustees didn’t want him to succeed Patrick. He had to sell up quickly, auctioning off everything, including the table where Anne had written her two novels. In a grand and devastated gesture, he had Charlotte’s bed destroyed. He returned to Ireland, where he said he had buried his heart with Charlotte but managed to marry a very understanding cousin. (There is a story about the famous portrait of Charlotte by George Richmond, which hung above their sofa, falling on his new wife’s head while she was having a nap, and stunning her. It might be apocryphal but it feels true.) Nicholls was badgered by Brontë fans for the rest of his life.
As for the question Anne articulated for me, ‘What, Where, and How Shall I Be When I Have Got Through?’, I have been trying. Though she no longer appears in my dreams, I have been trying to grasp the thorn. To find my narrow way and stick to it. To write a new story when I don’t like the one I’m given. To expand my heart. To take courage.
On honeymoon in Ireland, we take a detour to Banagher, in County Offaly, where Charlotte spent her honeymoon. It is February, very cold and pretty bleak, and almost everything is closed, including the Friends of Asthma charity shop, and a multi-purpose establishment called William Lyons which seems to be not just a ‘Lounge Bar’ but also a wool buyer and seller of fishing rods and firearms. Nicholls’s old house is now a bed and breakfast called Charlotte’s Way. In the churchyard, we try and fail to find Nicholls’s grave. I remember Charlotte writing to her friend Margaret Wooler from Banagher to say, ‘My dear husband … appears in a new light in his own country.’ Having been so wary of marrying him she now feels glad she has made ‘what seems a right choice’.
As we leave Banagher, the sun breaks through for a moment and the River Shannon gleams gold in the twilight, and I can see how Charlotte would have been happy here. But then the clouds come down again, like the lid on a saucepan; sleet falls, and on the motorway, deep fog descends. We can only see a few metres ahead, just beyond the beam of the headlights. The sun is setting; soon it will be dark. My new husband is driving, I am navigating. And all we can do is keep going, hope that more of the road will become visible, hope to get to where we’re going, hope we like it when we do, and try to be brave.
And now, to quote Anne, I think I have said sufficient.