When Mrs Gaskell published her life of Charlotte Brontë in 1857, she painted so vivid a picture of life at Haworth parsonage, and of the talented, short-lived family who dwelt within its walls, that every Brontë biography written since has been based upon it.
A hundred years have gone by, the biography is still unsurpassed, but during the intervening time much has come to light about the early writings of the young Brontës, proving that from childhood and on through adolescence they lived a life of quite extraordinary fantasy, creating an imaginary world of their own, peopled with characters more real to them than the inhabitants of their father’s parish. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall were all famous novels and their authoresses dead when Mrs Gaskell came to write about them. What she did not realize was that none of these novels would have come into being had not their creators lived, during childhood, in this fantasy world, which was largely inspired and directed by their only brother, Patrick Branwell Brontë.
Neither Mrs Gaskell nor Mr Brontë suspected that under the parsonage roof there were manuscripts, written by Branwell and Charlotte, which ran into many hundreds of thousands of words—far more than the published works of Charlotte, Emily and Anne. Although, on examination, Branwell’s manuscripts show that he did not possess the amazing talent of his famous sisters, they prove him to have had a boyhood and youth of almost incredible productivity, so spending himself in the process of describing the lives and loves of his imaginary characters that invention was exhausted by the time he was twenty-one.
Mr Brontë, their father, writing to Mrs Gaskell after she had published the biography of his daughter Charlotte, told her: ‘The picture of my brilliant and unhappy son is a masterpiece.’ He did not understand, any more than Mrs Gaskell, that the ‘brilliance’ existed to a great extent in his own imagination, the pride of a lonely widower in the extraordinary precocity and endearing liveliness of a boy whose supposed genius disintegrated with the coming of manhood; whose unhappiness was caused, not by the abortive love-affair described by Mrs Gaskell with such gusto, but by his inability to distinguish truth from fiction, reality from fantasy; and who failed in life because it differed from his own ‘infernal world’.
One day, perhaps, all the manuscripts which poured from Branwell’s pen will be transcribed, not for the Brontë student only, but for the general reader. One day the definitive biography of this tragic young man will be published. Meanwhile, many years of interest in the subject, and much reading, have prompted the present writer to attempt a study of his life and work which may serve as an introduction to both. If it brings some measure of understanding for a figure long maligned, neglected and despised, and helps to reinstate him in his original place in the Brontë family, where he was, until the last years of disintegration, so loved a person, then this book will not have been written in vain.
Daphne du Maurier
Cornwall, 1960