1844–5
On the morning that the packet steamer took Charlotte back across the Channel, 2 January 1844, the town she was coming home to was astir with excitement at the opening of a new day school in the Church Lane building. It was a proud if anxious occasion for Patrick Brontë, his latest move to fight back against the growing influence of Dissenters in the parish. In Charlotte’s absence, he had secured a curate for Oxenhope and rented a room in which services could be held (to save parishioners the long walk to St. Michael’s). The day school was another attempt to nurture allegiance to the Established Church.
There was also a new curate in Haworth since Charlotte was last at home, an Irish graduate of Trinity College Dublin called James Smith, who had arrived in March 1843 (and whom the gossips had claimed was Patrick Brontë’s secret drinking companion). Smith was energetic, but no substitute for William Weightman, and his temperament was too volatile to seem entirely trustworthy.*1 The incumbent was better pleased with his new schoolmaster, Ebenezer Rand, who was only twenty-three but learned and ambitious, and who managed to attract 170 pupils to the day school within the first six months. The usual excitement attending the arrival of a highly eligible young man in a small town was short-lived, for Rand seems to have come to Haworth already intending to marry a woman called Sarah Bacon, which he did that spring, and soon afterwards his reasonable request for an assistant at the school was answered by her appointment as schoolmistress at £20 per annum. Thus he both frustrated local spinsters by not being properly in want of a wife, and must have caused disappointment at the Parsonage with the swift disposal of a job which any of the Brontë sisters would have been glad to take.
Charlotte was made very much aware of her father’s increased agitation and distraction, and of the deterioration in his sight during her two years abroad, evident in the large, messy characters of his handwriting at this date. In February 1844 Reverend Brontë was putting off visiting the Taylors at the Manor House in Stanbury until there was a thaw, “as my eyes, are very weak, I cannot, very well, go out whilst the snow, is on the ground.” His parish work fell largely on the shoulders of the curate, Mr. Smith, and the household was left to Emily and Charlotte to run.
Charlotte sought to reassure him about her future by reviving the long-discussed plan for the girls to start up their own school at the Parsonage. She seemed newly motivated in that direction, and the diploma from Monsieur Heger could not have failed to impress her father. But privately Charlotte was terribly despondent and deflated after the heightened emotions of her departure from the rue d’Isabelle. “[T]here are times now when it appears to me as if all my ideas and feelings except a few friendships and affections are changed from what they used to be,” she wrote to Ellen three weeks after getting home; “something in me which used to be enthusiasm is tamed down and broken—I have fewer illusions—what I wish for now is active exertion— a stake in life—Haworth seems such a lonely, quiet spot, buried away from the world—I no longer regard myself as young, indeed I shall soon be 28—and it seems as if I ought to be working and braving the rough realities of the world as other people do.” Ought to be working, and could have been: Charlotte’s return to Yorkshire, diplomaed and tri-lingual, had prompted interest in her as a teacher and soon after getting home she had received an invitation to run a large boarding school in Manchester for the impressive sum of £100 a year (which school and by whom is not known).*2 She dismissed the offer for what sounded like a rock-solid reason: her father needed her at home. But was that a valid explanation for passing up an opportunity like the one in Manchester, especially when Emily was at home now for good? Without casting doubt on Charlotte’s genuine concern for her father’s welfare, she was very capable of overlooking it when she really wanted to do something (such as return to Brussels after Aunt Branwell’s death) and capable also of using it as an excuse for inaction, as she did on many occasions over the next years.
She knew she could not bear to go back to being a governess again, and, although the practical difficulties of setting up her own establishment gave Charlotte many welcome reasons to stay in touch with Constantin Heger, in discussing them with her father, she saw only how unlikely it was that they could afford to convert the Parsonage into a school, or persuade anyone to send their children to it. She seemed in a state of suspended animation, waiting to be rescued by someone or something. And although she wrote to one of her former Belgian pupils (whom she now addressed fondly as “My dear little Victoire”) that she was “not likely” ever to return to Brussels, she told Heger that as soon as she had the money, she would come back to see him, “if it is only for a moment.” “Oh it is certain that I shall see you again one day—it really has to be.”
She must have begun writing to him almost as soon as she was home, and he replied—not ardently, not quickly, but still, he replied. Perhaps this led Charlotte to think that the thing she wanted most—constant access to Heger’s mind and possession of his attention—might be possible after all. “I look on your letters as one of the greatest joys I know,” she told him unequivocally. “I shall wait patiently to receive them until it pleases and suits you to send them.” By the time she wrote that, in July, she had already incurred Heger’s displeasure for sending “a letter which was hardly rational” (now lost). She swore such a performance would not be repeated (she lied), but at the rue d’Isabelle, Heger must have realised that all his worst fears about Charlotte were turning out to be true. She was obsessed with him, woefully dependent on his attention and behaving more like an incubus than a friend. He didn’t answer.
None of Heger’s letters to her and only four of Charlotte’s to him survive from what must have been a fairly copious and almost entirely one-sided correspondence. These heartbreaking documents, three of which were torn up at some date and then very carefully mended, are possibly the most wrenching examples of unsolicited, unrequited love laments in our whole literature, “a record of romantic love…that has never before been rivalled,” as Frederika Macdonald described them soon after their publication in 1913. Except that, of course, they were not written as literature. Charlotte Brontë transferred much of the passion and yearning and heartbreak mapped out here into her novels, but she lived it first.
The first of the surviving letters, written on 24 July 1844, was already far into their correspondence and refers to Heger’s request that she should not write to him again out of turn, a mild enough restriction, given that “letter which was hardly rational” earlier in the year. By writing to him at all on 24 July, Charlotte was breaking the compact, but imagined there had to be some pressing professional reason for his uncommunicativeness—the end of term, the exams. Pathetically, she protested that she didn’t want to “add an atom to the burden…But all the same I can still write you a little letter from time to time—you have given me permission to do so.” It’s clear that Charlotte can’t believe Heger is deliberately ignoring her, can’t believe that his feelings for her could have changed so significantly—or that she could have misinterpreted them in the first place.
There was indeed, she argued, a real necessity for her to keep in touch with him. She was anxious that she might forget French, she said, so was setting herself half a page a day to memorise and recite aloud, a process that let her imagine they were “chatting” together. Keeping up her fluency was not just a matter of intellectual pride but had a poignant personal motive, which Heger can’t have been comforted to hear: “for I am quite convinced that I shall see you again one day—I don’t know how or when—but it must happen since I so long for it, and then I would not like to stay silent in your presence—it would be too sad to see you and not be able to speak to you.” How like a ghost this makes her sound, a revenant appearing before him but condemned to silence.
What she really wanted to tell Heger was that she had not given up her true ambition:
I fear nothing so much as idleness—lack of employment—inertia—lethargy of the faculties—when the body is idle, the spirit suffers cruelly. I would not experience this lethargy if I could write—once upon a time I used to spend whole days, weeks, complete months in writing and not quite in vain since Southey and Coleridge—two of our best authors, to whom I sent some manuscripts were pleased to express their approval of them—but at present my sight is too weak for writing—if I wrote a lot I would become blind.
Heger would of course have remembered the thick glasses from behind which Miss Brontë’s penetrating gaze was projected, her bent form straining over a book, her uncertain apprehension of his approach, and changed expression when she was sure of it. But this claim of incipient blindness (in step, in sympathy, in competition, with her father?) must have sounded neurotic, as it partly was.
This weakness of sight is a terrible privation for me—without it, do you know what I would do, Monsieur?—I would write a book and I would dedicate it to my literature master—to the only master that I have ever had—to you Monsieur…That cannot be—it must not be thought of—a literary career is closed to me—only that of teaching is open to me—it does not offer the same attractions—never mind, I shall enter upon it and if I do not go far in it, it will not be for want of diligence.
Heger kept this very personal and confiding letter, talked to Elizabeth Gaskell about it twelve years later and copied out this passage for use in Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte (where it was duly printed)—but he did not answer it. Charlotte began to wonder—hope—if perhaps it had gone astray, and on 24 October took advantage of Joe Taylor’s return to Brussels to send Heger another letter, deliberately simple and cheery, to make sure of a reply this time and to present herself as busy, buoyant and normal—not a postal stalker, in other words. Her artificial optimism is painful to read:
I am not going to write a long letter—first of all I haven’t the time—it has to go immediately—and then I am afraid of bothering you. I would just like to ask you whether you heard from me at the beginning of May and then in the month of August? For all those six months I have been expecting a letter from you, Monsieur—six months of waiting—is a very long time indeed! Nevertheless I am not complaining and I shall be richly recompensed for a little sadness—if you are now willing to write a letter and give it to this gentleman—or to his sister—who would deliver it to me without fail.
There was no reply to this letter either. Week after week went by in painful vigil, waiting for the post, which arrived at Haworth post office “from all parts” at noon each day and was dispatched from there at three. Charlotte had written about such a situation in “Passing Events” and in Jane Eyre, when “the long-looked-for tidings” from Mr. Rochester turn out to be a business note, but the strongest expression of this peculiarly female form of love-agony is expressed in Villette, and seems, like so much in that book, to reflect real experience:
My hour of torment was the post-hour. Unfortunately I knew it too well, and tried as vainly as assiduously to cheat myself of that knowledge; dreading the rack of expectation, and the sick collapse of disappointment which daily preceded and followed upon that well-recognised ring.
I suppose animals kept in cages, and so scantily fed as to be always upon the verge of famine, await their food as I awaited a letter…The well-beloved letter—would not come; and it was all of sweetness in life I had to look for.
Charlotte was expecting to see either Joe or Mary Taylor back from Brussels in November, but both postponed their returns for several weeks. Of course, Heger could have written at any time by post, but did not, and when Joe Taylor called at the Parsonage just after Christmas there was nothing by hand either. The disappointment felled Charlotte, but she hung on, waiting to see if Mary brought anything. A tender message, apologising for the silence and making amends, might have taken him longer to write…Mary might have been a more suitable emissary…there might even have been a gift to bring too, a token? But Mary, full of news, full of plans, full of advice as ever, arrived empty-handed. “I did my utmost not to cry not to complain,” Charlotte wrote, but once Mary had left, her resolve crumbled. Given so many opportunities to communicate, and doing nothing, could be interpreted only as deliberate cruelty on Heger’s part. She sat down to compose a searing, accusatory letter, letting him know what she was going through:
—I said to myself, what I would say to someone else in such a case “You will have to resign yourself to the fact, and above all, not distress yourself about a misfortune that you have not deserved.”
…But when one does not complain, and when one wants to master oneself with a tyrant’s grip—one’s faculties rise in revolt—and one pays for outward calm by an almost unbearable inner struggle.
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—
Forgive me then Monsieur if I take the step of writing to you again—How can I bear my life unless I make an effort to alleviate its sufferings?
She had reached a point where there was nothing for it but to be explicit, even if, as she was aware, “some cold and rational people” (i.e., his wife) “would say on reading it—‘she is raving’ ”:
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.
Monsieur, the poor do not need a great deal to live on—they ask only the crumbs of bread which fall from the rich men’s table—but if they are refused these crumbs—they die of hunger—No more do I need a great deal of affection from those I love—I would not know what to do with a whole and complete friendship—I am not accustomed to it—but you showed a little interest in me in days gone by when I was your pupil in Brussels—and I cling to the preservation of this little interest—I cling to it as I would cling on to life.
“Un peu d’intérêt”: sadly, it would indeed have sufficed Charlotte to have any word or friendly gesture from Heger at this stage, if only to perpetuate her hope in the recovery and regrowth of their relationship, but she deceived him, and herself, by suggesting that mere crumbs would suffice for long. She was right to say that she wouldn’t really have known what to do with “une amitié entière et complète”: the union she craved with Heger was one of souls; a possession, a haunting, a living-through, a sharing of ideas, intensely verbal, profoundly silent, an enveloping warmth of love and shared awareness of power. Sex too, no doubt, if their charged beings had ever been in contact with each other again. But anything so paltry as a conventional friendship, anything as quotidian as adultery even, was clearly not in her mind.
She begged him to write, and to tell her candidly if he had entirely forgotten her. There was no reply.
Mary Taylor, who had come back to Yorkshire preparatory to her momentous move to New Zealand, was concerned at the state her friend was in, but clear about the solution. In her robust and far-sighted view, financial independence was the only way for women to avoid not simply poverty but the sort of “self-suppression” that Charlotte was locked into. Such behaviour seemed perverse, as Mary told Mrs. Gaskell years later:
[S]he thought that there must be some possibility for some people of having a life of more variety and more communion with human kind, but she saw none for her. I told her very warmly that she ought not to stay at home…Such a dark shadow came over her face when I said “Think of what you’ll be five years hence!” that I stopped, and said “Don’t cry, Charlotte!” She did not cry, but went on walking up and down the room, and said in a little while, “But I intend to stay, Polly.”
Watching her friend pacing up and down like a caged animal (the image Charlotte herself used), Mary could only repeat that she should get away—and probably held out the offer of emigrating together, which would have suited Mary down to the ground. She had a low opinion of Reverend Brontë, describing him to Mrs. Gaskell as a “selfish old man,” the recollection of whom filled her with “gloomy anger.” Charlotte’s grim determination to sacrifice herself to his needs at this point seemed inexplicable, but what Mary didn’t understand (quite apart from Charlotte’s extremely strong family loyalties) was the depth of Charlotte’s misery about Monsieur Heger, or that, when she turned up at Haworth, Charlotte had been convinced Mary would have with her a letter from him.
—
BY THE TIME she saw Mary in late December 1844, Charlotte had been home almost a whole year, but had very little to report for it. She had taken over some of Aunt Branwell’s functions, including the sort of civilities that Emily would never have willingly instigated or performed, such as entertaining Ebenezer Rand and his wife to tea; and trying to be polite to Mr. Smith, who moved to Keighley that year, or to the new curate, Mr. Grant, who replaced him temporarily in Haworth. But the adoption of this matronly mantle was clearly a bad sign, as Mary Taylor recognised. Aunt Branwell had herself been notably reclusive, and since none of the current generation of Brontës had married or spread out to their own households, the effects of isolation became more and more concentrated. The Brontë family saw less of their remaining relations than one would think possible, given that there was no known breach with any of them. Patrick Brontë never travelled back to the old country, or invited any of his brothers, sisters, nephews and nieces; until his death in 1841 they had kept in touch sporadically with (but rarely saw) great-uncle John Fennell, who had lived nearby in Todmorden since 1819; there was correspondence with Eliza Kingston in Cornwall following Aunt Branwell’s death (prompted by business to do with Aunt’s will); and in the 1850s they received a visit from two of the Branwell cousins (possibly drawn at that date by Charlotte’s fame). That, as far as can be traced, was it, and that was obviously how it suited them.
With Emily, Charlotte walked on the moors until their shoes were worn almost out, talking over the school plan and their writing. Emily was enjoying an intensely productive period of poetry, and had begun copying her work into two separate notebooks—one called “Gondal Poems” and the other “E. J. B.,” as if to make a clear separation at last between one side of her work and another. That Anne knew about Emily’s surge in production and creativity is evident from her Diary Paper in 1845; Charlotte probably also knew by report—but she wasn’t shown any of her sister’s work.
Charlotte had got as far as having “cards of terms” for their school printed in August 1844 and sent some to Ellen to pass round her acquaintance and canvass interest. The cards made the project sound almost real: “The Misses Brontë’s Establishment for the Board and Education of a limited number of Young Ladies, The Parsonage, Haworth, near Bradford” was to offer, for the sum of £35 a year, full board and tuition in writing, arithmetic, history, geography, grammar and needle-work. Extras in French, German, Latin, music and drawing would be available at a guinea a quarter each and laundry was extra too. None of this was cheap, by the lights of the day,*3 and August was possibly not the best time of year to start looking for pupils. Forced to solicit for custom, Charlotte swallowed her disinclination to write to and call on suitable local families, but she hardly pursued the matter very far. Mrs. Busfeild of Keighley regretted, as did others, that she had already placed her daughters elsewhere and hinted that the price was a bit high, given the “retired situation” of Haworth (she didn’t need to add anything about the town’s lack of gentility). The Whites of Stonegappe, possibly rather surprised that Miss Brontë should be reviving their acquaintance, told her that if she had only written sooner, they might have sent their own daughter and recommended the school to Colonel Stott and his wife. As it was, those girls were all off to the Misses Cockills at Oakwell Hall in Birstall, an establishment whose success Charlotte had been watching carefully: Elizabeth Cockill had been one of her contemporaries at Roe Head.
Market forces were strongly at work in the burgeoning local school network. Patrick Brontë must have realised that it would be hard to keep a man of Ebenezer Rand’s ability in a place with so few opportunities for advance (the Rands left in 1845), but he had hoped to be able at least to support the schoolmaster’s post, and if possible to increase his salary, by voluntary subscriptions and the twopence per week fee that each pupil was charged. But when the new Wesleyan school in West Lane undercut the church school’s fee, Reverend Brontë was forced to lower his prices and go cap-in-hand again to the National Society for a grant. And when only £20 was forthcoming from that quarter to help the school through its second year, he had to keep petitioning local worthies for donations to keep it afloat. All this would have been difficult and distasteful, even for robust business people, as the Brontës were certainly not.
By early October 1844 the sisters had given it all up. “Every one wishes us well,” Charlotte told Ellen, “but there are no pupils to be had.” This outcome seemed to be a relief to everyone. Patrick Brontë, a man who disliked dining with his own children, can never have relished the idea of sharing his home with five or six teenage strangers (his willingness to consider it at all was a powerful mark of his goodwill); Emily had never been keen on teaching, or company—her vision had been of holidays and money; Anne was inured to her position at Thorp Green; and all three sisters wanted to write more than anything else. “We have no present intention however of breaking our hearts on the subject,” Charlotte concluded briskly.
When she came to write about it in 1857, Mrs. Gaskell saw another powerful impediment to the furtherance of the school plan—Branwell Brontë, whose “occasional home…could hardly be a fitting residence for the children of strangers.” By 1845, Mrs. Gaskell believed, his sisters were “silently aware that his habits were such as to render his society at times most undesirable.” Bombarded with local gossip just eleven years later, Mrs. Gaskell came to the very reasonable conclusion that the Brontë sisters had heard the same “distressing rumours concerning the cause of that remorse and agony of mind, which at times made [Branwell] restless and unnaturally merry, at times rendered him moody and irritable.” Opium-eating was one of his recreations, alcohol another, poetry a third: between them, Branwell Brontë was prey to powerful mood swings. When he was home from Thorp Green in the summer of 1844, Charlotte had found his presence in the household very disturbing, and to Heger she had described him as “toujours malade.” “Ill” became the family euphemism for “drunk,” but as yet none of them apart from Anne had an inkling of what else Branwell was up to. Patrick Brontë, forever wishing to see the proper start of his son’s brilliant career, could only have been relieved that he had held down the job at the Robinsons’ for a whole eighteen months.
In fact, Branwell had been involved in a liaison with his employer’s wife almost from his arrival at Thorp Green, and the excitement and melodrama of it worked on his flammable temperament to very ill-effect. His success as a published poet in the local press had stoked his ego and ambitions, and it was in the character of half-discovered genius that he and Lydia Robinson began their affair. To his old friend Francis Grundy, with whom he had been out of touch for two years, Branwell described how it happened:
This lady [Lydia Robinson] (though her husband detested me) showed me a degree of kindness which, when I was deeply grieved one day at her husband’s conduct, ripened into declarations of more than ordinary feeling. My admiration of her mental and personal attractions, my knowledge of her unselfish sincerity, her sweet temper and unwearied care for others, with but unrequited return where most should have been given…although she is seventeen years my senior, all combined to an attachment on my part, and led to reciprocations which I had little looked for.
Branwell’s aggravation when he was at home in the summer of 1844 was at separation from this Sybil, with whom he was in constant correspondence—a fact that can’t have escaped Charlotte’s notice, nor Anne’s. Anne is likely to have had suspicions about the relationship from the start, and must have had to endure many painful moments at Thorp Green resulting from it.
Anne gave in her notice in the middle of June 1845, just before the Robinson family were about to go on their annual seaside holiday. Her inability to explain fully why she was resigning must have perturbed both her employer and her family, and have alerted Mrs. Robinson to the coming storm. She came home under this cloud, loyally silent, and didn’t tell Charlotte what was going on until the latter’s return from a holiday with Ellen in Derbyshire in July. By that time, Branwell had also arrived home, “ill” (“he is so very often owing to his own fault,” Charlotte reported angrily to Ellen; “I was not therefore shocked at first”). But this wasn’t a holiday from work or a routine bender: Anne had to explain that Branwell had been sacked by Mr. Robinson for “proceedings which he characterised as bad beyond expression.”*4 The Thorp Green gardener had apparently alerted his employer after surprising Mrs. Robinson and Branwell alone in a boathouse, and the tutor was dismissed at once in a furious letter from the injured spouse that charged him “on pain of exposure” to break off all communication with every member of the family.
Lydia Robinson seems to have successfully represented herself to her husband as blameless after the exposure of her boathouse tryst, for the Robinsons continued their holiday in Scarborough after the crisis without undue disruption—Mr. Robinson even bought his wife a necklace. Back at Haworth Parsonage, Branwell also claimed innocence, of a kind, and “spoke freely” with his father on the subject, leaving the latter in no doubt that “intimacy” had taken place, but also that the blame lay squarely with the matron, whom Reverend Brontë described to Elizabeth Gaskell as a “diabolical seducer.” Whether the girls were as ready to exculpate Branwell was another matter: Anne was shocked and ashamed for her brother; Emily inclined to put the matter behind them all and move on. The person who felt most anger and mortification, and the one to whom Branwell felt the need to apologise by letter, was Charlotte, who was not just appalled by his behaviour but secretly furious at the ease with which he had been able to indulge his passions, while she was almost killing herself with the suppression of her own.
In the novel she finished the following year, Charlotte’s violent feelings about Branwell’s adultery are articulated in an extraordinary outburst by the protagonist William Crimsworth, who reflects on having observed close at hand an example of “romantic domestic treachery”: “No golden halo of fiction was about this example, I saw it bare and real and it was very loathsome. I saw a mind degraded by the practice of mean subterfuge, by the habit of perfidious deception, and a body depraved by the infectious influence of the vice-polluted soul.” This, like the other eruptions of feeling in the book (and in Charlotte’s later novels), has the quality of a hell-fire sermon. Crimsworth leaves his job because the woman who has been trying to engage his affections, Mademoiselle Reuter (a thinly disguised portrait of Zoë Heger), is about to marry his employer, and he imagines that if they live under one roof, adultery with her will follow inevitably. Charlotte is here both sympathising with young men who might find themselves targeted by vicious and predatory females and blaming those who don’t take firm steps to avoid temptations in the first place. A young unmarried woman, by inference, has to be even more vigilant against her own passions. But that is not to say those passions, and adulterous impulses, don’t exist.
—
THE NEW CURATE who arrived in May 1845 was just in time to make the acquaintance of the Brontë family before they received the hammer-blow of Branwell’s fresh disgrace. Arthur Bell Nicholls was a rather straight-laced 26-year-old Irishman, just out of Trinity College Dublin. He had been born near Belfast but had lived since the age of seven with a childless uncle and aunt in Banagher on the Shannon, a name which can’t have failed to strike a chord with Charlotte, since she believed her hero Wellington (another Arthur) to have hailed from the same area. Nicholls’s arrival was welcome and overdue for hard-pressed Patrick Brontë and immediately relieved him of many duties and services, including the management of the school. Charlotte was able to report to Mrs. Rand after only a couple of weeks that Nicholls “appears a respectable young man, reads well, and I hope will give satisfaction.” On the whole, though, she was extremely out of patience with the type. Before their visit to Hathersage in the summer, Ellen had been trying to interest her in one of Henry Nussey’s clerical neighbours, a Mr. Rooker, but Charlotte wrote back sharply that any visit to her brother’s parish would not be on that account. “[He] must be like all the other curates I have seen,” she said, “and they seem to me a self-seeking, vain, empty race.” The Haworth area seemed to be suddenly overrun with curates: Joseph Grant in Oxenhope (where he was in charge of the grammar school), James Bradley in Oakworth and now Arthur Nicholls in the home church. James Smith in Keighley was these young men’s social leader and they could often be found together, in one another’s lodgings, or descending en masse on the Parsonage unannounced, as they did one afternoon in June 1845. Perhaps this noisy group ate too much (in Shirley, Charlotte includes a very funny but feeling description of a curate’s landlady being eaten out of house and home by him and his colleagues), they certainly talked too much—and Charlotte, seething over the teacups for a while at the presumption of these backwater boobies, suddenly let fly: “I pronounced a few sentences sharply & rapidly which struck them all dumb,” she told Ellen, with evident satisfaction. “Papa was greatly horrified also—I don’t regret it.”
Charlotte’s visit to Hathersage in July was an oblique reminder of what she had passed up in refusing Henry Nussey’s proposal six years earlier, for she and Ellen stayed at the Vicarage to which he was about to bring his new bride, handsome and rich Miss Emily Prescott. Charlotte felt not a single pang of jealousy of the new Mrs. Nussey; one feels she would always have much rather kept house with Ellen than with any man.
The holiday, which immediately preceded her hearing of Branwell’s disgrace, was full of gentle pleasures, not least discovering the beauty of the Peak District, whose limestone dales, dramatic escarpments and caverns full of rare Blue John stone had been a draw for the romantic tourist for decades. The handsome Vicarage, nestled in a group of houses around the hilltop church in a beautiful prospect of rolling greenery, was like a Haworth enskied. Ellen and Charlotte went by pony and trap to Castleton and the ruins of Peveril Castle (whose associations with Walter Scott’s novel Peveril of the Peak would have thrilled them) and a walk of about a mile through the fields outside Hathersage brought them to North Lees Hall, a small, battlemented stone house built in Elizabethan times. There the owner, a widow called Mary Eyre, told the young women of the ruined Catholic chapel nearby, showed them a tall cabinet decorated with heads of the twelve apostles and told them how a former mistress of the house had gone mad and been kept in a padded room on the top floor, where she died in a fire that had once damaged the house severely. In the parish church, they admired the ancient brasses of these Eyres, and the tomb of Damer de Rochester. Charlotte took it all in.
Back home, some decision had to be made about Branwell, who was keeping the household awake at night with his noisy despairing over Lydia Robinson. At the end of July he was sent to Liverpool and north Wales with his friend John Brown as minder, allowing the household at home a short respite. Emily was the only one to remain sanguine in the crisis, writing in her Diary Paper on her birthday, “I am quite contented for myself…seldom or ever troubled with nothing to do…and merely desiring that every body could be as comfortable as myself and as undesponding and then we should have a very tolerable world of it.” Emily’s contentment was partly to do with her continued pleasure in writing, which included her poems and “a work on the First Wars” of Gondal, now lost. “The Gondals still flo[u]rish bright as ever,” she reported to the little tin box, and it’s odd to see her, at the age of twenty-seven, with an absolutely undiminished enthusiasm for role-playing. Her account of a two-day trip to York with Anne in June makes the undiscovered genius sound positively childlike, from the very fact that it was “our first long Journey by ourselves” to the way they spent the excursion conspiratorially “in character” as their Gondal avatars.
Anne was in a less equable mood as a result of her recent experiences at Thorp Green, as Charlotte acknowledged in 1850: “hers was naturally a sensitive, reserved, and dejected nature; what she saw sank very deeply into her mind; it did her harm.” Having to resign her post after so many years of being resigned to it was less of an escape than a defeat; Branwell’s transgressions had also lost Anne the friendship of the younger Robinson girls and affected her chances of getting a good “character” from her former employers. Anne’s Diary Paper is peppered with questions and uncertainty:
[Charlotte] is now sitting sewing in the Dining-Room Emily is ironing upstairs I am sitting in the Dining-Room in the Rocking chair before the fire with my feet on the fender Papa is in the parlour Tabby and Martha I think are in the Kitchen Keeper and Flossy are I do not know where little Dick [the canary] is hopping in his cage—When the last paper was written we were thinking of setting up a school—the scheem has been dropt and long after taken up again and dropt again because we could not get pupils—Charlotte is thinking about getting another situation—she wishes to go to Paris—Will she go? she has let Flossy in by the bye and he is now lying on the sopha—Emily is engeaged in writing the Emperor Julius’s life she has read some of it and I very much want to hear the rest—she is writing some poetry too I wonder what it is about—I have begun the third volume of passages in the life of an Individual. I wish I had finished it—This afternoon I began to set about making my grey figured silk frock that was dyed at Keigthley—What sort of a hand shall I make of it? E. and I have a great deal of work to do—when shall we sensibly diminish it? I want to get a habit of early rising shall I succeed?…I wonder how we shall all be and where and how situated on the thirtyeth of July 1848 when if we are all alive Emily will be just 30 I shall be in my 29th year Charlotte in her 33rd and Branwell in his 32nd and what changes shall we have seen and known and shall we be much chan[g]ed ourselves? I hope not—for the worse [a]t least—I for my part cannot well b[e] flatter or older in mind than I am n[o]w—Hoping for the best I conclude Anne Brontë
Charlotte…wishes to go to Paris. This wish, clearly never put into action, shows Charlotte’s restlessness after Branwell’s return. “My hopes ebb low indeed about Branwell,” she confided to Ellen, only a few weeks later. “I sometimes fear he will never be fit for much—his bad habits seem more deeply rooted than I thought.” This is the first indication that Charlotte now understood her brother to be addicted to drink and, probably, opium as well. “It is only absolute want of means that acts as any check to him,” she noted with disgust. Mrs. Gaskell, relying on local sources other than Charlotte, one presumes, dated his full-blown addiction from this year: “In procuring it he showed all the cunning of the opium-eater. He would steal out while the family were at church—to which he had professed himself too ill to go—and manage to cajole the village druggist out of a lump; or, it might be, the carrier had unsuspiciously brought him some in a packet from a distance.”
Getting away from home again, and getting nearer to Brussels, held out to Charlotte a glimmer of hope in this otherwise bleak time. On the way back from Hathersage, she had shared a railway carriage with a man who looked so French that she felt emboldened to address him in the language. “He gave a start of surprise and answered immediately in his own tongue.” Hearing French again after so long “sounded like music in my ears,” as she confided to Heger a few months later. “Every word was most precious to me because it reminded me of you.”
In an overlooked remark made to her publisher’s editor two years later (in December 1847), Charlotte mentions “a brief translation of some French verses sent anonymously to a Magazine,” which was the only thing she had published by that date, besides her “little book of rhymes” (Poems, 1846) and Jane Eyre. The magazine has never been identified, but the work could have been her translation of Auguste Barbier’s poem about Napoleon, “L’Idole,” her only remaining attempt at “some French verses” of the right date, and could have been worked on and submitted to a periodical at any time in 1844 or 1845. This unidentified and anonymous publication, now lost, was Charlotte Brontë’s first appearance in print. It seems significant that after all her years of feverish ambition “to be forever known” as a poet, her solicitations of notice from Southey, Coleridge and others, her authorship of hundreds of thousands of words of prose and verse of her own, she finally made her debut as a translator of poetry from the French. Attracting the attention of a magazine editor through the work of Barbier (or Belmontet, André Chénier, Millevoye—whichever poet it was: she was interested in them all) would have been easier than getting her own “rhymes” published, but in 1844 and 1845 her priorities had shifted. Getting published was no longer a matter of lofty, distant personal ambition, but a way—perhaps the only way—to maintain communication with Constantin Heger. Sending him a magazine in which her translation appeared—undoubtedly of a text he had recommended to her in Brussels—would have made it almost impossible for him not to respond, surely? And the evidence of her intellectual and creative progress would have been a way of “proving” that he, and Madame, had misjudged her frantic need to correspond. She wasn’t a lovesick troublemaker, after all; she was a writer.
In their changed, unhappy household, each of the Brontë siblings was, separately and to a great extent privately, taking refuge in writing. They were all desperate for money and employment; indeed it is hard to see how Patrick Brontë could have afforded to have all four adult children back at home, not earning a penny. Writing, the old solace, now was also the only resource. Anne, as her diary makes clear, had almost finished a three-volume novel called “Passages in the Life of an Individual” (almost certainly the work that appeared later as Agnes Grey), and Emily must have started her own novel around this time. Branwell was convinced that fiction writing was an easy road to riches and had drafted about forty pages of a story called “And the Weary are at Rest,” from which he hoped to earn at least £200. He also saw publication as a way to win back favour with Lydia Robinson, with whom he was more obsessed than ever. On 25 November he sent Leyland a very personal poem for The Halifax Guardian under his usual signature, “Northangerland,” telling his friend, “I have no other way, not pregnant with danger, of communicating with one whom I cannot help loving.”
And, while Branwell’s effusion about his “Angel” appeared in the local paper, Charlotte was privately writing an early version of a poem just as personal and explicit about Constantin Heger, “I gave, at first, Attention close,” and working it into a novel of her own, called at this stage “The Master” (later known as The Professor), a painfully obvious piece of wish-fulfilment in which an overlooked, misunderstood and dutiful young teacher in Brussels wins the affections of her demanding superior, and is found to be a poet of strength and seriousness.
The story must have been well under way by the end of 1845, as she finished it in June of the following year. In line with the notes she made in Brussels and with Heger’s advice, she had decided to write a realistic story, putting aside “ornamented and redundant” style and depicting a male protagonist who would “work his way through life as I had seen real living men work theirs.” This immediately presented difficulties for someone who didn’t in truth know much about men’s working lives. Her Brussels experience could be adapted to fit, but more was needed, and her solution to the problem was to adapt some scenes and themes from her own stock of Angrian tales (notably “Ashworth” and “The Spell”) along with material from Branwell’s fraternal enemies story “The Wool is Rising,” which he had dashed off in a matter of days in the summer of 1834, at the very beginning of the Angrian chronicles. In it, Northangerland’s rejected son Edward Percy progresses through the business world with ruthless single-mindedness to establish a huge mill empire, enter Parliament and marry a princess. His younger brother William, initially tyrannised by Edward, breaks free and joins the army, but it was only the early scenes, of William’s oppression in his brother’s counting house and the bitter sibling strife between them, that Charlotte recycled in her novel.
That Charlotte felt the need to use anything so old and odd, and not of her invention, is extraordinary. It’s not as if she didn’t have hundreds of thousands of written words of her own to draw on, or that she couldn’t spin more at the drop of a hat. It’s not that she was trying to pay tribute to Branwell’s genius (his story doesn’t show any) or involve him collaboratively in her venture. It’s not likely that she even told him she was using it. What she seems to have been doing by grafting Branwell’s mill scenes on to the start of her narrative was trying to establish a more vigorous, masculine tone in a novel that is desperately anxious not to look like a piece of woman’s work and to distract attention from the story’s starkly autobiographical core. She was intending to submit it anonymously.
At another level “The Master” is a retelling, or correction, of what Charlotte felt had happened to her at the hands of Madame Heger. The plot and setting seem at many points like a literal transcription of Charlotte’s Brussels experience, with an almost photographic return to the Pensionnat’s airy salons, busy classrooms and shade-dappled garden, remembered lovingly shrub by shrub. But “The Master” wasn’t a simple form of revenge. Crimsworth is nothing like Monsieur Heger; he is like Charlotte—English, Protestant, proud, angry, impoverished, even though his situation in the school is a fantasy version of Heger’s before his marriage to Zoë Parent. Crimsworth is given the choice of two possible mates: the charming but guileful directrice, Mademoiselle Reuter, or the insignificant, independent, poor, plain Anglo-Swiss Protestant girl, Frances Henri, a person whom Crimsworth literally doesn’t see in the classroom for some time, and then quickly comes to love. Frances is even more of a self-portrait of Charlotte than Crimsworth, from her unshowy looks to her poems straight out of the author’s own notebooks. The resulting romance between these two authorial avatars is intense but hardly erotic.
“The Master” was a manuscript that Charlotte Brontë continued to work on for years, but that remained unpublished throughout her lifetime, much to her chagrin, as she felt, with justice, that parts of it were “as good as I can write; it contains more pith, more substance, more reality, in my judgment, than much of ‘Jane Eyre.’ ” The love story may have been unconvincing, indeed a little dull, but as she was writing it, a lifetime’s worth of unaired opinions, observations and grievances sprang to the tip of Charlotte’s pen and found powerful expression. These are fascinating moments, when the narrator is diverted into some tirade or violent digression, against adulterers, against drunkards, against mill-owners’ money-grubbing, like a bog bursting and bringing up “black moory substance” from deep below the surface. In the year when Friedrich Engels, only forty miles away in Manchester, was writing his Condition of the Working Class in England, Charlotte Brontë was putting into the mouth of her character Hunsden some extraordinary speeches about the state of England. Hunsden’s trajectory from rabble-rouser against Edward Crimsworth’s despotism (bringing to mind the real-life West Riding protests of the early 1830s against conditions in the mills) to owner of a fine old Elizabethan home in an area “whose verdure the smoke of mills has not yet sullied, whose waters still run pure” is narrated satirically by Crimsworth,*5 and the reader is not allowed to admire too much an undoubtedly liberal character, but Hunsden’s eloquence on the evils of the times seems like a satire-free zone, and a release of sincere feeling. He protests that Frances has no idea what England is really like and should test her idealism against facts:
Come to England and see. Come to Birmingham and Manchester; come to St. Giles in London and get a practical notion of how our system works. Examine the footprints of our august aristocracy see how they walk in blood, crushing hearts as they go. Just put your head in at English cottage doors, get a glimpse of Famine crouched torpid on black hearthstones; of Disease lying bare on beds without coverlets; of Infamy wantoning viciously with Ignorance, though indeed Luxury is her favourite paramour and princely halls are dearer to her than thatched hovels—
Just as striking is the way the novel deals with the subject of gender and the repression of women’s opinions, even their voices, by speculating on what is left unsaid. When Crimsworth praises Frances’s devoir and counsels her to cultivate her faculties, she replies not in words, but with a smile “in her eyes…almost triumphant,” which seems to mean the following: “ ‘I am glad you have been forced to discover so much of my nature; you need not so carefully moderate your language. Do you think I am myself a stranger to myself? What you tell me in terms so qualified, I have known fully from a child.’ ” No words are uttered; that would be unseemly, and, the author implies, somewhat redundant. Brontë is depicting a very familiar scene—a silent, apparently submissive woman (like her mother)—and showing its double-sidedness. The convention of not answering back allows able women a scornful superiority, flashing out in looks, in suppression of comment, withheld speech; quellingly disdainful, devastatingly critical, but always held in check. This pent-up power, secretly triumphant because unrealised, is the incendiary device at the heart of Jane Eyre, and of all Charlotte Brontë’s works. And through its identification and her precise observation of it, she presented something completely revolutionary.
—
AT SOME POINT in May 1845 Charlotte’s pulse had been set racing by the sight of Constantin Heger’s writing on a letter for her, an electrifying pleasure, though the content was not intended to gratify her. None of his letters to her have survived, but from her references to this one in November that year, we have to deduce that Heger sent some form of reprimand (not surprising, given the intemperance of her outburst in January) and stipulated that in future she should not write more frequently than twice a year, limiting herself to matters of family news and health. She must have replied to him on 18 May (that letter is also now lost), for exactly six months later she felt free to write again. She had obviously been thinking about what to say to him and probably drafting the letter many times in the interim:
The summer and autumn have seemed very long to me; to tell the truth I have had to make painful efforts to endure until now the privation I imposed upon myself: you, Monsieur—you cannot conceive what that means—but imagine for a moment that one of your children is separated from you by a distance of 160 leagues, and that you have to let six months go by without writing to him, without receiving news of him, without hearing him spoken of, without knowing how he is, then you will easily understand what hardship there is in such an obligation. I will tell you candidly that during this time of waiting I have tried to forget you, for the memory of a person one believes one is never to see again, and whom one nevertheless greatly respects, torments the mind exceedingly and when one has suffered this kind of anxiety for one or two years, one is ready to do anything to regain peace of mind. I have done everything, I have sought occupations, I have absolutely forbidden myself the pleasure of speaking about you—even to Emily, but I have not been able to overcome either my regrets or my impatience—and that is truly humiliating—not to know how to get the mastery over one’s own thoughts, to be the slave of a regret, a memory, the slave of a dominant and fixed idea which has become a tyrant over one’s mind. Why cannot I have for you exactly as much friendship as you have for me—neither more nor less? Then I would be so tranquil, so free—I could keep silence for ten years without effort.
Slave of a dominant and fixed idea which has become a tyrant over one’s mind: this was a penetrating self-analysis, and a “real confession” to make. How could Heger not have been arrested by it? Did he answer? Charlotte was expecting him to—the continuation of some kind of correspondence, however sporadic and circumscribed, seemed to be part of the compact. But what is also clear, as she draws towards the end of this monologue and faces another half-year of torment, is that Charlotte’s endurance was nearing its limit:
Your last letter has sustained me—has nourished me for six months—now I need another and you will give it me—not because you have any friendship for me—you cannot have much—but because you have a compassionate soul and because you would not condemn anyone to undergo long suffering in order to spare yourself a few moments of tedium…[S]o long as I think you are fairly pleased with me, so long as I still have the hope of hearing from you, I can be tranquil and not too sad, but when a dreary and prolonged silence seems to warn me that my master is becoming estranged from me—when day after day I await a letter and day after day disappointment flings me down again into overwhelming misery, when the sweet delight of seeing your writing and reading your counsel flees from me like an empty vision—then I am in a fever—I lose my appetite and my sleep—I pine away.
All this was in French, but she added a postscript in English: “I wish I could write to you more cheerful letters, for when I read this over, I find it to be somewhat gloomy—but forgive me my dear master—do not be irritated at my sadness.” Perhaps the articulation of her sorrow brought home to Charlotte the hopelessness of her situation, for the way she signs off has a poignant sense of intuiting it is for the last time: “Farewell my dear Master—may God protect you with special care and crown you with peculiar blessings.”
When this heartbroken letter first came to public notice in 1913, along with the other three remaining ones, they created a sensation with their hints of hidden scandal in Brontë’s life, or at the very least a shamefully inappropriate unrequited love. The motivations of Monsieur Heger’s children, who donated the letters to the British Library (it was the Library that then publicised them, not the family), seem exemplary: they wanted the letters preserved for their literary and biographical value. What happened to the letters between the dates of arrival at the rue d’Isabelle in 1844–5 and their preservation under glass in Bloomsbury sixty-nine years later is more difficult to piece together. The story told by Madame Heger to her daughter Louise was that Constantin tore up the letters after he had read them and threw them away, whereupon Madame Heger retrieved them from the waste-paper basket, mended them carefully—one with tiny gummed paper strips, two with thread—and preserved them in her jewel box for fifty years. Louise, who had been shown the letters by her mother, found them again after Madame’s death in 1890 and gave them back to her father, who, apparently, tried to throw them away again.
This account implies that the tearing up of the letters happened on or near receipt, as did their rescue from the bin and preservation by Madame Heger. Her motives, if she did this, would seem clear: the letters were ample proof of Charlotte Brontë’s irrationality, in case such was needed in future. But Heger showed or read the letters to Elizabeth Gaskell in 1856 when she interviewed him for her biography of Charlotte and copied out passages he felt happy for her to quote from. If they had been torn and mended at that date, Mrs. Gaskell would have been the first to notice. Her remark to George Smith that she should “deprecate anything leading to the publication of those letters” shows that she was conscious of the damage they could do to Charlotte’s reputation.
The letters themselves hold a great deal of information in their very paper, in the way that three of them were torn and in the ways they were folded. The torn ones look as if they were “in little pieces” before mending, but, in truth, they only needed two tears across from their original folded four-page form to make the correct number of fragments—casual disposal, in other words. The last one wasn’t torn at all, but was obviously kept on Heger’s desk for a while and used by him as a piece of rough paper. Next to Charlotte’s pleas—“I am in a fever—I lose my appetite and my sleep—I pine away”—he has noted the address of a cobbler.
Ignoring the tear marks and mending, something else is evident from the fold marks on the paper and signs of wear: these letters were folded again after they were read. They were stored somewhere, perhaps a pocket or drawer, that required them to be made smaller. They were not, in other words, torn up right away.
In the years after Charlotte became famous, Laetitia Wheelwright met her again in London and asked if she was still in correspondence with Monsieur Heger. Charlotte told her that she had ceased to write to him after Monsieur had mentioned in one letter that his wife didn’t like it, “and he asked her therefore to address her letters to the Royal Athénée, where he gave lessons to the boys.” Could this be true? Did Heger, subsequent to Charlotte’s last letter, really suggest that they could carry on a surreptitious correspondence, behind his wife’s back and against her wishes? For him to have suggested it seems as extraordinary as Charlotte thinking it an appropriate thing to pass on to Laetitia Wheelwright; yet Laetitia had no doubt of Charlotte’s veracity: “She said [it] with the sincerity of manner which characterised her every utterance.”
And what happened to the letters he wrote to her, “the only joy I have on earth”? Were they lost or destroyed in later years by Charlotte’s widower? Did she destroy them before or after her marriage? Like so much in that novel that seems to be a transposition of her own life, one scene in Villette is heavily suggestive of what Charlotte Brontë herself might have done. When Lucy Snowe comes to the realisation that she will have no more letters from Dr. John, she decides that they must be “put away, out of sight: people who have undergone bereavement always jealously gather together and lock away mementos: it is not supportable to be stabbed to the heart each moment by sharp revival of regret.” She makes a little roll of the letters, wraps them in oiled silk and inserts them into a bottle, to be stoppered, sealed and rendered air-tight by an “old Jew broker.” “In all this I had a dreary something—not pleasure—but a sad, lonely satisfaction. The impulse under which I acted, the mood controlling me, were similar to the impulse and mood which had induced me to visit the confessional.” In the evening, Lucy steals out into the Pensionnat garden and buries the bottle in a hole under the oldest pear tree. “I was not only going to hide a treasure—I meant also to bury a grief.”
*1 He was suspected of fiddling the accounts at his next parish, Keighley, and emigrated to North America in 1848 under a cloud.
*2 The only reference to it is in CB’s letter to Constantin Heger of 24 July 1844 (LCB 1, 358).
*3 And was £10 more than Charlotte had been considering only weeks before (see LCB 1, 363).
*4 Some commentators have suggested that Branwell’s “proceedings…bad beyond expression” might have involved sexual offences against his pupil Edmund Robinson, then fourteen, though Juliet Barker has countered this theory convincingly (Barker, 456–64).
*5 Whose name is the same as a beck and dale near Hebden Bridge.