At the crisis of Anne Brontë’s second and last novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, her heroine Helen finally decides to leave Arthur Huntingdon, her drunk abusive husband. She’s put up with a lot. But now he’s trying to ruin their son, teaching him to swear and be horrid to his mother and pouring booze down his throat; he is four. It’s supposed to ‘make a man of him’.
When Helen flees her marriage, she has to make a woman of herself. She moves into Wildfell Hall, which is half in ruins, like her life. She swaps her hateful married surname for her mother’s maiden name, and the ostentatious clothes her husband liked in favour of the ‘plain, dark, sober’ clothes she likes. This is useful, too, because in these dark clothes she can disguise herself as a widow. She is killing off her husband in her mind. She is remembering who she was before she married him. Knowing this day would come, she’s secretly taught herself to paint. She finds a dealer in London, adopts another pseudonym and starts turning out commercial landscapes. She works out how to evade the village’s prying gossips. She learns not to let anyone get too close, not even her brother, Frederick Lawrence, who has helped her find this place of safety, and especially not the handsome young gentleman farmer, Gilbert Markham, who keeps popping round. Helen becomes self-sufficient. She won’t owe anyone anything, not again. She won’t be vulnerable, not again. She learns how to mother her son, Arthur, teaching him that being a man is not about liquor and swearing, but about intelligence and kindness. And when Gilbert’s mother Mrs Markham criticises her mothering, she lets rip. Why should girls be brought up like hothouse flowers, while boys are encouraged to go out in the world to get ‘experience’? Experience only means boys are encouraged to be bad, and when men are bad, women get hurt. This line of argument doesn’t win Helen any friends. But she doesn’t care. She works hard, and gains independence (financial, emotional, creative). Most courageously of all, when Huntingdon gets ill, she risks everything to go and nurse him, to be with him when he dies. And when she decides she might like to marry again, she chooses Gilbert, who is worthy of her love – and this time, she proposes to him.
Helen has made a woman of herself.
Back home in London, working my way through a tottering stack of Brontë biographies, I become convinced Anne knew how to write about Helen making a woman of herself because she did it too, transforming herself from the baby of the family, a delicate, gentle girl who grew up full of fear, never thinking she’d amount to anything, into a talented teacher, a bold thinker and an extraordinary writer.
In the past fortnight I’ve read every word Anne left behind. I had hoped it would take longer, but Anne really hasn’t left many traces. I’m a bit stunned by how much of what she said has been lost. Only five of her letters survive, though she wrote many more. This is bad. Trying to work out just how bad, I open a biography of Virginia Woolf and find that she left nearly four thousand letters. Even Charlotte left around 950. All the prose Anne wrote as a child is gone. Many of her poems are missing too, as well as, possibly, the start of a third novel. If she wrote a diary, it no longer exists. But she and Emily wrote a ‘diary paper’ every four years, a brief update on their lives which they would fold up and squirrel away in a tin box like a time capsule, to look at when it was time to write the next. If they were together, they wrote them jointly; if apart, they wrote one each. Two of Anne’s are left, and two of the joint ones. Four pieces of paper. Compared with Woolf’s fat volumes of diaries, it’s not much. Even Sylvia Plath’s journals make up an impressively chunky book, and she only lived a year longer than Anne did, and some of her journals were destroyed. Of course there are also letters about Anne, and reminiscences of her; there are some of her books with her revealing marginalia; there are her things, which are surprisingly eloquent; and there are heaps and heaps of scholarship about her family. Yet Juliet Barker writes that the known facts of Anne’s and Emily’s lives ‘could be written on a single sheet of paper; their letters, diary papers and drawings would not fill two dozen’. It’s very discouraging. How can so little be known about a member of one of the most famous families in history? The library shelves are groaning with books about the Brontës. Some biographers daringly follow their own hunches (sometimes into wild and dubious conjectures), while the so-called ‘laundry list’ biographers scrutinise all the tiny, daily details (sometimes missing the big picture). And no one agrees on anything. Even the colour of Anne’s hair!
All the biographers rely heavily on a few contemporary sources, so I go back to those. Charlotte’s school friends, Ellen Nussey and Mary Taylor, actually knew Anne. But they both seem to have axes to grind. And they don’t agree either. The first biography was written by Elizabeth Gaskell who was friends with Charlotte, but they only met after Anne had died. Anne’s father outlived her, but he wasn’t chatty. Nor was Arthur Bell Nicholls, the curate who became Charlotte’s husband. Maybe this is reassuring. Would I want people poking about in my stuff 170-odd years after I died? Absolutely not. By most (but not all) accounts Anne was a private person. So maybe I should be pleased for her. But I’m not. I’m frustrated. Because I’m nosy and because I feel quite ardently about her, and I wish she would stop slipping out of view.
I’m on safer ground with Anne’s work. When I reread her two novels, the blistering preface she wrote explaining The Tenant of Wildfell Hall to its hostile critics, and her fifty-nine poems, Anne speaks out loud and clear. It can be dangerous to assume anything about a writer from her work, but Anne did write autobiographically. Charlotte said Agnes Grey was ‘the mirror of the mind of the writer’, while The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was an attempt ‘to reproduce every detail (of course, with fictitious characters, incidents, and situations)’ of what happened to their brother.
A lot of stories have been told about Anne, and the more I learn about her, the more I dislike the way she was forced into particular roles, both in her life and in her afterlife. Her work has such clarity, such vigour, that it feels like an act of resistance, a way of pushing back against being turned into a character in someone else’s story, especially a minor character who doesn’t have many lines and makes an early exit. I want to try to see Anne through the stories she told, not the stories told about her. Anne’s fiction reveals a lot about how she saw the world. Sometimes she wrote to fulfil wishes. Sometimes she tried out lives she might want to live. Sometimes she turned difficult experiences to good use. Sometimes she defied fate. One afternoon in the library, with dusty books stacked around me like a fort, I realise what upsets me most about Charlotte saying Anne was always preparing for early death is that it dooms her, it traps her in one story, and not a good one. Can her story be told another way?
I decide to look at Anne through the women and men who shaped her, and the women she shaped, on the pages of her books, to try to find out how she made a woman of herself, how she ripped up the story she was supposed to live and became the artist of her own life.
Anne never knew one of the women who shaped her most: her mother, Maria Brontë, née Branwell, died when she was just twenty months old. Twenty months is very young to remember anything, but a life-changing event can sometimes stick. My seventies childhood is a haze of brown and orange, but I remember my brother being born, when I was twenty-one months old. When I imagine what it might have been like if my first big event was a death, not a birth, I start to get a sense of the weight of Anne’s loss, its unbearable heft. Every Sunday, in church, Anne saw her mother’s memorial stone, with its stark, ominous line from Matthew – ‘Be ye also ready: for in such an hour as ye think not the Son of Man cometh’ – warning that death could come for her at any moment. Anne was the baby, the one who needed a mother most. Did she already suffer from asthma? She certainly had it later on in life, but no one knows when it began. If she was a child who sometimes found it hard to breathe, she might have seemed, as Charlotte later said, ‘delicate all her life’, and maybe that’s one of the reasons Charlotte thought it couldn’t be long before Anne stopped breathing altogether.
I look at pictures of Anne next to pictures of Maria and I’m struck by how alike they look. They both have the same cherubic faces, the same curls, the same rosebud mouths. When Anne was very young, Charlotte said she saw an angel at Anne’s cradle, and from then on, Anne’s role in the family was fixed; she was sweet, lost and ethereal, halfway to being an angel herself.
Anne’s mother also comes over as a saint in the early biographies. In the very first, published in 1857, The Life of Charlotte Brontë by Elizabeth Gaskell, Maria is a ‘little, gentle creature’ who was ‘gentle, delicate’, full of ‘tender grace’, ‘feminine modesty’ and ‘deep piety’ and ‘always dressed with a quiet simplicity of taste, which accorded well with her general character’. Gaskell had an agenda. She wanted to tell the critics who called Charlotte’s books coarse and unwomanly that they were wrong, that Charlotte wasn’t a bad woman but a martyr whose life was so tough that she couldn’t help it if some of it ended up on the page. Gaskell started by giving Charlotte a suitably angelic mother.
It’s only one of the ways Gaskell skewed the story. Now I see why everyone who writes about the Brontës has to grapple with her Life: it didn’t just come first, it’s also fantastic. I speed through it like a novel. Which it more or less is, because Gaskell never lets facts get in the way of a good story. When a visitor asked Patrick, the Brontës’ father, how much was true, he said, ‘Mrs Gaskell is a novelist, you know, and we must allow her a little romance, eh?’ The publishers of the mighty Shakespeare Head edition of the Brontës’ works agreed; in 1859 they reprinted it alongside the novels, as though it was fiction too.
The Life reveals as much about Gaskell as it does about Charlotte. Because although Gaskell looked like a domestic goddess (she was a minister’s wife, a mother of four and an active philanthropist, always rolling up her sleeves to help someone in need), she wrote out of a welter of grief and guilt. She turned to fiction after her baby son died of scarlet fever and she ‘took refuge in invention to exclude the memory of painful scenes’. She wasn’t just grieving her son, but her other losses, starting with her mother, who died when she was a baby, and the six brothers and sisters who died before she was born. Gaskell always knew life was fragile. Her aunt brought her up in Knutsford (basically Cranford) and it was all very loving and cosy and chocolate-boxy (except when her aunt had to deal with her violent husband, and when Gaskell had to make painful visits to her father and his new family). She had a good education, and married a good man. But her brother drifted. Without money or support, he found his options so viciously limited that all he could do was risk his life at sea. He never returned. Just vanished, off the coast of India. No one knows if he drowned, had an accident, killed himself or just decided to disappear. Gaskell’s novels are full of dead mothers, dead children and thwarted men, so for her, Charlotte’s story was catnip.
But as I learn more about the real Maria Brontë, she seems gutsier, more interesting and much less sweet than Gaskell makes out.
She was born Maria Branwell, in sunny, fun Penzance, into a big family. They were comfortable and well off; her father was a grocer and tea merchant, and one of her brothers became town mayor. Pale, petite and clever, Maria wasn’t in any hurry to marry. Her parents died when she was in her twenties, and she and two sisters stayed on in the family home until their uncle, who owned the house, died, and they had to find somewhere else to live. Maybe Maria wanted to shake up her life, because instead of appealing to any of her ten siblings, she bravely travelled four hundred miles, from balmy Cornwall to cold, rugged Yorkshire, to help run her aunt and uncle’s school. Her pluck was rewarded; she met Patrick Brontë, a young, ambitious, Cambridge-educated clergyman, tall and handsome, with a husky Irish accent. He wooed her strenuously. Who wouldn’t be impressed by a man who walked ten miles to take you out for a walk, then walked ten miles back? Whether Maria liked Patrick’s moral stamina, or his leg muscles, when he proposed, in the romantic ivy-covered ruins of medieval Kirkstall Abbey, she said yes. She was twenty-nine.
Gaskell compares Maria’s love letters to Juliet’s speeches to Romeo, but Maria wasn’t an innocent, smitten teenager; she was an independent woman who knew her own mind and she warned her fiancé, ‘For some years I have been perfectly my own mistress, subject to no control whatever.’ She prepared for marriage by reading a book called Advice to a Lady, by making a wedding cake, by flirtatiously threatening ‘My Dear Saucy Pat’ with ‘a real downright scolding’ and by declaring her love as candidly as her daughters’ heroines ever did:
you possess all my heart. Two months ago I could not possibly have believed that you would ever engross so much of my thoughts and affections, and far less could I have thought that I should be so forward as to tell you so.
Maria knew love was a leap of faith and she was ready to jump:
I am certain no one ever loved you with an affection more pure, constant, tender, and ardent than that which I feel. Surely this is not saying too much; it is the truth, and I trust you are worthy to know it.
He was. They married on 29 December 1812, and they were happy. When she turned thirty, Patrick wrote her a tender birthday poem, opening with the alluring invitation, ‘Maria, let us walk, and breathe, the morning air’, where birds sing and ‘The primrose pale, / Perfumes the gale.’ They had a girl, Maria, in 1813, and a year later, another girl, Elizabeth, named after Maria’s older sister. That year, they moved to Thornton, a lively town in West Yorkshire.
Their little house is still there; it’s now an Italian cafe called Emily’s. I visit it one cold bright day. Sun streams through the windows, into the drawing room where, by the fireplace, Maria gave birth to four more children in four years – Charlotte in 1816, Branwell in 1817, Emily in 1818 and finally Anne on 17 January 1820. I check with the waiters. Is this hearth The One? It is. I sink into a squishy sofa, exactly where Anne was born. Over the years, the house has been a butcher’s shop and a restaurant. It was lovingly restored by the crime novelist Barbara Whitehead, then sold again, rented out, flooded, renovated again, and through all this, the fireplace survived. As I drink my cappuccino, and eat my tiny, perfect cannoli, sweet with ricotta and vanilla, it feels wonderful that the house is alive, a family home (the couple who own it live upstairs), full of books and chatter. I imagine Maria sitting where I am sitting, her baby in her arms, when Patrick told her he’d got a new job. It came with a bigger house, and Haworth was only six miles away, so they could still see their friends. In April 1820, they set off in a convoy of horse-drawn carts. Patrick walked, sometimes lifting one of the children out for fresh air, and Maria held three-month-old Anne in her lap.
But they’d barely got settled into the Parsonage at Haworth when Maria collapsed with a pain in her stomach. It was cancer of the uterus, probably made worse by all the pregnancies. She was ill for seven and a half horrific months during which, Patrick said, ‘Death pursued her unrelentingly’. In her love letters, she’d worried that ‘My heart is more ready to attach itself to earth than heaven’. Nine years of marriage and six children hadn’t made her a more quiescent clergyman’s wife, and she refused to slip serenely away. She questioned her fate and her faith, and it hurt Patrick to admit that ‘the great enemy … often disturbed her mind in the last conflict’, and when she died it was ‘not triumphantly’. Of course it wasn’t. She was only thirty-eight, and she was terrified of what would become of her family; her anguished last words were, ‘Oh God, my poor children!’
I wonder if Anne heard her say it. She was at her mother’s deathbed after months of being told to creep around the Parsonage and play quietly, starved of attention as her mother lay dying and Patrick nursed her, when he wasn’t working at his demanding new job. Anne wrote about her early childhood when she was twenty-seven, in a long, intense autobiographical poem called ‘Self-Communion’, composed over five months of unflinching reflection. I go to the British Library to have a look at the manuscript. I have to request it in advance, I have to be vouched for, and once I have it in my hot little hands, I have to sit at a desk where I can be watched while I read it. None of this prevents me becoming enchanted. It wasn’t published in Anne’s lifetime; in fact it wasn’t published at all until 1900, in a limited edition of just thirty copies. Which seems appropriate, as it is so raw and exposed, a distillation of Anne’s life rather than a straightforward story. Anne remembers being ‘a helpless child’, ‘feeble’, frightened, gullible, timid and frantic for ‘protecting love’, which is her ‘only refuge from despair’. Her earliest memories must have been of her father poleaxed by grief; of her oldest sister, seven-year-old Maria, bravely trying to stand in for their mother; of her aunt Elizabeth coming to help but hoping to get back to Penzance as soon as she could. In ‘Self-Communion’, Anne describes wanting to be loved and wanting to love, overwhelmed by a ‘love so earnest, strong, and deep / It could not be expressed’. She pictures herself, as a toddler, as a ‘Poor helpless thing!’ whose loss has left her utterly disorientated: ‘Where shall it centre so much trust …?’ Like ivy that ‘clasps the forest tree’, she wonders, ‘How can it stand alone?’
As Anne got older, she would drive herself to stop being the ivy and become the tree. She would struggle for independence, creating an imaginary world with Emily. She would force herself to work hard at school. She would battle with asthma and with deep gloom. She would leave home at nineteen and get a job before any of her siblings, and when she lost it she would refuse to be daunted and get a better post, at double the salary, and stick at it and succeed. She would write and write and push herself to find out what kind of writer she was. She would get Branwell a job and he would mess everything up so she would have to resign. Back in Haworth in her twenties, she would work at her poetry and get it published, along with her sisters. At twenty-six, she would write her first novel, Agnes Grey, an exposé of what it was like to be a governess, before Charlotte covered the same ground in Jane Eyre. Both novels would be published in 1847, along with Emily’s Wuthering Heights. Then Anne would tackle Branwell’s drinking and drug addiction in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, published in 1848.
Anne did become the tree, not the ivy. But she also worked hard to understand her roots. Virginia Woolf said it best: ‘We think back through our mothers, if we are women.’ Woolf also lost her mother when she was young, and she also found it hard to understand who she came from. She brought her mother back to life in To the Lighthouse in the character of Mrs Ramsay, a matriarch who nurtures everyone, her husband, her children, her household and her guests, with food, with advice, with knitwear, with love. At first Mrs Ramsay seems to be the heroine. But as Woolf wrote the novel, she was beguiled by another character, Lily Briscoe, who rebels against Mrs Ramsay because she wants to be an artist. The book changes, then, from an ode to Woolf’s mother into an argument with her. Woolf’s sister Vanessa said it was like meeting their mother again, but grown up and equal, so she could argue with her. Woolf said that after writing it she finally stopped seeing her mother’s ghost. She found it incredibly liberating. She became more confident about pursuing a different path to her mother’s, and she was able to write her vivid, searing polemic, A Room of One’s Own, which could almost be Lily’s manifesto.
Anne didn’t know her own mother as well as Woolf did hers. She never got to read Maria’s letters – only Charlotte did that, in 1850, when she was the only one of Maria’s children left alive. The letters were ‘yellow with time’, and she read them ‘in a frame of mind I cannot describe’. She found them ‘sad and sweet’ and her mother’s mind ‘fine, pure, and elevated’ and most of all, she wrote, ‘I wish she had lived, and that I had known her’. Anne pieced together a sense of her mother from scraps and stories – just like I’m doing now, except Anne had to do it because you have to know who you come from so you know who you want to be.
On the pages of her novels, Anne thought back through her mother. Agnes Grey follows Anne’s life as a governess fairly closely. At Agnes’s first job the children are violent and unmanageable. Her second set of pupils are a tomboy, Matilda, and a flirt, Rosalie, who tries to thwart Agnes’s romance with the lovely, clever curate Edward Weston. Agnes’s father dies, and Agnes sets up a school with her mother, Alice. Then Weston reappears, just in time for a happy ending.
Alice Grey is a lot like Maria. She has also married a man with very little money – declaring that ‘she would rather live in a cottage with Richard Grey than in a palace with any other man in the world’ – and she also has six children. She is sweet and practical and so affectionate that when Agnes is trying to keep her pupils in line, she thinks the worst she can do is to threaten not to kiss them goodnight. She’s astonished that they don’t care. This passage just aches with Anne’s longing for a mother to kiss her goodnight.
But it isn’t all sweetness and light. Agnes has to muster all her courage to fight her mother for independence. She wants to go away and earn her own living. Her parents think she’s too young. She only gets her way because they need her earnings. Her father’s made a dodgy investment and they’ve become very poor. Agnes feelingly describes how, ‘Our clothes were mended, turned, and darned to the utmost verge of decency; our food, always plain, was now simplified to an unprecedented degree …; our coals and candles were painfully economised’.
Anne’s family got suddenly poorer too, when Maria’s annuity of £50 a year ended with her death. Anne was writing on paper scrounged from any which where, wearing clothes that were hand-me-downs from her sisters or gifts from her godmothers, and so cold that she always sat (as Agnes does) with her feet on the fender to keep warm.
All this would have upset Maria, had she lived. Maybe it would even have changed her mind, and made her rewrite the one thing she ever wrote for publication. I was excited when I found out Maria had written an essay. It was never published but it proved she had literary ambitions, and it set an example for her daughters, showing women could write. I hoped the essay would be fantastic. Then I read it.
‘The Advantages of Poverty in Religious Concerns’ isn’t just bad prose; it’s pious cant about how poverty is good because the poor don’t have the same temptation to sin, and because, unable to afford a proper education, they’re more open to the Bible’s simple truths. Maria thinks ‘poverty … will tend to increase and strengthen our efforts to gain that Land of pure delight, where neither our souls nor bodies can possibly know pain or want’. Ugh. What if you’re stuck in a land of pure undelight where your body knows pain and want all too well, and your soul does too, because who can think of God and grace on an empty stomach? Maria admits it is ‘an evil to hear the heartrending cries of your children craving for that which you have it not in your power to give them’, but she thinks Christian charity will step in if things get really bad. It’s true that Patrick’s friends helped him with the debts he’d piled up paying for medicine and nursing for Maria, and with his children’s education, so, yes, she was right; charity does step in. But for the Brontës it just wasn’t true that ‘poverty which is sanctified by true religion is perhaps the state most free from care and discontent’. Patrick was full of care and discontent as he made himself badger his friends for handouts and beg his employers for more money. Anne had enough religion for ten women, but she could have been a lot more carefree and contented (and useful to society, for that matter) if she hadn’t had to worry about money every day of her life. I think she was disappointed by her mother’s essay too, and when she wrote about what it was like to be poor, actually poor, she was arguing with Maria. She was telling her there was nothing good about poverty. And her book, which starts as a portrait of a perfect mother, becomes instead the story of a heroine who has to argue with her mother to become her own woman, to become the tree, not the ivy. It’s hard not to see in this Anne robustly disagreeing with her mother, too.
Maybe we never stop arguing with our mothers. Maybe it’s how we know who we are. It’s easier to argue with your mother if she’s around, and up for it. It’s much harder if she is unloving and inadequate, or if, as with Anne and Woolf, she is gone. Woolf realised – and perhaps Anne did too – that if you lose your mother, you also lose the chance to argue with her. The danger is that instead you spend your life trying to live up to a mother who is both dead and perfect.
Charlotte’s novels are haunted by perfect mothers. In her 1849 novel Shirley, she writes a heroine, Caroline Helstone, who is motherless and desperate for love. Caroline gets her heart broken, pines and declines. On the verge of death she is (spoiler alert) reunited with her long-lost mother. She swiftly recovers, as if her mother has literally kissed her better. Charlotte wrote this part of the novel after Anne died. Caroline is supposed to be Anne, virtuous and untainted, like the baby who was visited by angels. Charlotte even gives Caroline’s mother the maiden name of Grey, as if setting a trail from Caroline to Agnes to Anne. Writing in the depths of her grief, Charlotte thought that bringing their mother back from the dead was the absolute best present she could give Anne. Unfortunately, the plot twist ruins Caroline. She’s not the most vital character to start with, and after the reunion, she dies on the page. My heart goes out to Charlotte, but I wish she hadn’t done it.
I also wish Charlotte hadn’t summoned up her mother again in Jane Eyre. Jane is a much better character than Caroline, more conflicted and audacious, but even she loses vividness when she encounters her lost, seraphic mother. It happens when she is in crisis. She’s found out – at the altar – that her fiancé, Rochester, is already married. He’s dragged her home to meet the mad wife he’s been hiding in the attic. And now he wants her to run away with him. And maybe she should. She loves him. She fancies him. She’s got no family to be ashamed of her living in sin, she’s already decided she doesn’t want to be a martyr like her (dead and perfect) friend Helen Burns, and she hates the hypocritical faith she was taught at school. Maybe it’s time to throw off the shackles of religion and move into Rochester’s love nest on the shores of the Mediterranean. But then she sees her mother.
It’s not actually her mother. It’s the moon.
I watched her come … She broke forth as never moon yet burst from cloud; a hand first penetrated the sable folds and waved them away; then, not a moon, but a white human form shone in the azure, inclining a glorious brow earthward. It gazed and gazed on me. It spoke to my spirit: immeasurably distant was the tone, yet so near, it whispered in my heart –
‘My daughter, flee temptation.’
‘Mother, I will.’
And off Jane goes. She doesn’t leave because she’s solved her moral dilemma herself, but because her mother’s sprung out of the moon to tell her what to do. It’s very weird, and maybe Charlotte knew that, because a few pages later she fudges it by saying Jane’s real mother is Nature. But Jane’s not interested in nature worship. She’s stumbling about the dark, cold moor, homeless and desperate, and she’s going to take any steer she can get. If Charlotte had written this scene so that Jane wished so hard for her mother that she saw her in the moon, it would be moving and Jane would still have some agency. But Charlotte couldn’t resist a supernatural voice. For me, this takes away some of Jane’s power.
I don’t think Anne liked it either. When she and her sisters wrote their novels, they competed as much as they collaborated. They talked to each other on the pages of their books, reworking each other’s stories, shaping the same raw material into different forms, working at the same problems and trying out different solutions. Anne’s take on Charlotte’s mother-in-the-moon episode is in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Anne’s heroine, Helen, is motherless too, and when she leaves her husband, she also wants her mother. But unlike Charlotte, Anne doesn’t give her heroine any visions or voices. Helen reaches for her mother in a very practical way; she takes her mother’s maiden name. It’s a good idea, because she’s a fugitive now, from her husband and from the law. But it’s also risky because it’s a name her husband surely knows, and might make her easier to find. She takes the risk because she wants something of her mother’s with her as a talisman, to keep her safe. I find this tiny moment of Helen aching for her mother, like a child reaching up to grab her mother’s hand as she crosses a road, incredibly poignant.
It’s only one of the ways Anne thinks back through her mother in the novel. Her most innovative decision is to make the heroine a mother. The popular novels of Anne’s day most often ended at the altar. They didn’t follow their heroines into marriage or motherhood. And mothers were often absent or dead. But the swooning, virginal, helpless heroines of Gothic novels like The Castle of Otranto and The Mysteries of Udolpho were giving way to characters like Becky Sharp and Oliver Twist who managed to make themselves up from scratch, make their own homes, find their own place in the world. Novelists wrote motherless protagonists because so many women died young (in 1850, the average life expectancy in Haworth was twenty-six), but also because killing off a character’s mother was a shortcut to throwing them into terrifying dangers and exhilarating freedoms. All Charlotte’s heroines are orphans. Almost every child in Wuthering Heights loses at least one parent. Anne was the only Brontë who wrote protagonists with families. Helen has lost her mother but is close to her aunt and uncle, and forges a relationship with her brother, and marries a man with a comfortable, bustling home life. Agnes grows up with both her parents, and her mother – a rare survivor! – is still alive at the end of the book. Most of all, Anne dared to put a mother centre stage and, even better, she didn’t make her perfect. ‘I am no angel,’ says Helen. She has faults, she has desires, and it takes her a while to grow into becoming a mother. But when she does, it emboldens and empowers her. Motherhood makes her a heroine.
When I get out my battered hardback of the novel, I’m struck by the way Helen’s motherhood is the first thing you notice. She’s on the cover, a pen-and-ink wash in muted reds and greens. Helen ignores dashing Gilbert and gazes at her son. Her eyes are chips of coal, her dress is black and black hair flies out of a black veil. She is mesmerising. I was given the book by my aunt, who was a gifted painter, which might have been one reason she wanted me to read the book. But I like to think it was because she was rigorously honest, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is, as much as anything, a novel about telling the truth. I got the book at twelve, too young to appreciate it, but I remember the heroine on that cover, and the way she stared at her son as if he was literally pulling a string that tied him to her heart.
Helen’s adventures in motherhood are all the more intrepid because she doesn’t have a mother of her own. Like Anne, she lost her mother when she was very young, and she doesn’t remember her. She invokes her when she’s trying to persuade her aunt to let her flirt with debonair Mr Huntingdon. ‘All the mammas smile upon him,’ she wheedles. Her aunt isn’t moved. ‘Unprincipled mothers may be anxious to catch a young man of fortune without reference to his character’ but she won’t let Helen fall into that trap. Helen seizes on the mention of unprincipled mothers, because she believes Huntingdon had a terrible mother. If he’s bad, it’s because she spoiled him, so it’s not his fault. When she marries him, ‘his wife shall undo what his mother did!’ Helen has a lot to learn. Huntingdon doesn’t want to be mothered by his wife. When Helen tries it, he rebels and gets more dissolute than ever, and she finds she’s backed herself into a corner and can only get more prim and joyless. When their son is born she tries so hard to stop Arthur turning into his father that she becomes a ‘cross mamma’, who is ‘too grave to minister to his amusements and enter into his infantile sports’. His ‘bursts of gleeful merriment’ alarm her. ‘I see in them his father’s spirit and temperament,’ she writes, ‘and … too often damp the innocent mirth I ought to share.’ Unable even to enjoy playing with her son, on her fourth wedding anniversary, she feels ‘weary of this life’ and wishes she could die but knows that ‘I cannot wish to go and leave my darling in this dark and wicked world alone’.
But then something shifts. Huntingdon starts trying to wreck little Arthur, amusing himself by encouraging him ‘in all the embryo vices … and … all the evil habits’. He tries to spin this as a criticism of Helen’s parenting, saying ‘he was not going to have the little fellow moped to death between an old nurse and a cursed fool of a mother’, so Helen is forced to watch her son learn ‘to tipple wine … to swear … and to have his own way like a man, and [send] mamma to the devil’. Huntingdon cruelly tells her she is ‘not fit to teach children, or to be with them’, that she has ‘reduced the boy to little better than an automaton … broken his fine spirit with [her] rigid severity; and [will] freeze all the sunshine out of his heart’. It’s the darkest moment of the book because she knows he is not entirely wrong. But she resolves that ‘this should not continue; my child must not be abandoned to this corruption’. She can suffer, but she doesn’t want her son to. Because she’s a mother, she makes the heroic decision to leave.
That’s when Helen starts to become a good mother – and that’s what makes Gilbert Markham fall for her. He watches her argue with his mother over how to bring up boys (Mrs Markham is yet another character who claims a stiff drink will put hairs on little Arthur’s chest), and he wonders if maybe he was ‘a little bit spoiled’; he starts to question himself, and soon he’s head over heels in love.
In writing about motherhood (and especially about single motherhood), Anne was plunging into one of the biggest controversies of the 1840s, and setting out her stall as a feminist. For early-Victorian women activists, motherhood was the front line. Their reluctant poster girl was Caroline Norton, a society beauty who got married at nineteen to George Chapple Norton, who hoped she’d be a docile and decorative wife. But she was tempestuous and clever, and an ambitious writer. Maybe the eleven-year-old Anne saw the portrait of ‘Fair Mrs Norton!’ printed in Fraser’s magazine in 1831. ‘We display her,’ said Fraser’s proprietorially, ‘as the modest matron making tea in the morning for the comfort and convenience of her husband’. I’m not sure about modest; Caroline looks languid and stunning, her hair coaxed up elaborately, her dress just slipping off her shoulders. Fraser’s fawned over her sparkling prose and glittering salons but they also warned that ‘a lady ought to be treated, even by Reviewers, with the utmost deference – except she writes politics, which is an enormity equal to wearing breeches’.
Caroline would end up writing a lot of politics. Her husband was jealous of her fame, and he was violent. Caroline stuck it out for eight years, until in 1835, when she was pregnant with her fourth child, Norton beat her so brutally that she had a miscarriage, and she left. In the years when Anne was incubating The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, the collapse of the Nortons’ marriage was reported, pruriently, in all the papers. Caroline found herself in a hellish fix. She wanted a separation and custody of her children. But in English law, married women didn’t exist. They were femmes couvertes, women ‘covered’ by their husband’s protection. This only worked if their husbands actually did protect them. Norton was doing the opposite. He accused her of having an affair. With the prime minister. Then he sued the prime minister. Because Caroline didn’t legally exist, she couldn’t defend her name in court or get anyone to do it for her. If someone else had slandered her, she could have got her husband to defend her. But he was on the attack.
Norton was laughed out of court. But he still had the children. Like Helen in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Caroline might have suffered silently if it was only her happiness at stake. But she couldn’t abandon her sons. It was motherhood that emboldened her to take on the whole vast monolith of English law. She campaigned for a bill that would give mothers the right to appeal for custody. Long before anyone said the personal was political, she told people her story, over and over, until they started to listen. The Infant Custody Act was passed in 1839. But cruel, wily Norton took their children to Scotland, out of reach of English law, where one child died. In a fiery campaign letter Caroline appealed to Queen Victoria as a fellow mother, to try to understand how it hurt to see her son in his coffin: ‘I believe men have no more notion of what that anguish is, than the blind have of colours.’
Caroline carried on campaigning. She had to, when women like her were being told that if they left their husbands they would be ‘plunged into a yawning abyss of horror, from which there was never more any escape – never more, never more’, as Ellen Wood put it in her 1861 potboiler East Lynne. ‘Oh, reader, believe me!’ she implored. ‘Lady – wife – mother! Should you ever be tempted to abandon your home, so will you awake.’
In 1863, Caroline wrote a novel she hoped would support her campaign. In Lost and Saved, Beatrice Brooke elopes with dastardly, moustache-twirling Montagu Treherne. When she falls ill, she begs, ‘let me die married …!’ so he marries her and she rallies. But when it turns out that she’s pregnant, Treherne admits their marriage was a sham – conducted by a fake priest – and scarpers. Beatrice’s father disowns her, so she has to fend for herself and her son but she can’t get a job because she has no ‘character’. Up to this point, Beatrice is so gullible and clueless that she lacks character in other senses too. But motherhood gives her the courage to get work, support her son, make up with her father and even find new love.
Yet Lost and Saved is not half as bold as The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. While Caroline’s experience showed that an innocent woman could marry in good faith, suffer abuse, lose her children and find no help from the law, she didn’t tell that story in her novel. Beatrice is not innocent (she elopes), Treherne doesn’t try to take her child, and if he did, she could fight him in court because their marriage isn’t real, so she still exists in English law. It was Anne who had the nerve to write about the very real predicament of women like Caroline.
As Anne tried to feel her way into writing Helen, to understand why she fought so hard to save her child, she must have remembered a story closer to home. Her mother’s eldest sister, Jane, had emigrated to America with her husband but found their marriage unbearable. After nine years, she returned to Penzance with her baby, but had to leave behind her four older children. As Maria lay dying, worrying about what would happen to her children, maybe she wondered how her sister could have done it, crossed the Atlantic and left her children to the mercies of a man she couldn’t go on living with herself. No one knows why the marriage broke down, but Jane must have felt pretty desperate to make that painful choice. Maria couldn’t choose. She had to leave her children to the perils of life without her. And her last words, ‘Oh God, my poor children!’, cast a shadow over every page of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and its story of a woman who is terrified for her son in a dangerous world, and who risks everything to take him to a place where she can mother him better.