Charlotte’s source of comfort while she struggled with her religious beliefs and sense of identity at Roe Head was her imagination. Both Charlotte and Branwell continued to harbour literary ambitions and in 1837 they wrote to two of the greatest poets of the day with samples of their poetry: Branwell to William Wordsworth and Charlotte to Robert Southey, in response to which she received his discouraging reply and appears, for a time at least, to have resolved to abandon her poetic ambitions. However, while she may have resolved not to seek fame and fortune as a poet, she continued to write, producing a large number of poems during her time at Roe Head.
Towards the close of 1837, an incident occurred at the school that must have recalled to Charlotte’s mind her time at Cowan Bridge and her elder sisters’ illnesses and subsequent deaths. Since that period, Charlotte had experienced a feeling of dread whenever anyone of her acquaintance suffered from those symptoms that might be associated with consumption (a dread that was to afflict her for the rest of her life). She must, therefore, have been overtaken by a sense of panic when her sister, Anne, fell ill, losing her voice and apparently experiencing trouble breathing. Inevitably, Charlotte recalled the final illnesses of her two elder sisters, and was therefore deeply distressed when Miss Wooler appeared to dismiss Anne’s symptoms as nothing of concern. The event led to a dispute between Charlotte and her employer, and the two sisters returned to Haworth, where Anne recovered. Though she had severely reprimanded Miss Wooler for her attitude towards her sister’s illness, and resolved not to return to Roe Head, the two were reconciled somewhat before Charlotte’s departure, and in January 1838, she agreed to return to her position as teacher.
Charlotte remained an employee of Roe Head school for much of the year that followed, but she continued to suffer with extensive bouts of depression, accompanied by hypochondria -possibly exacerbated by the fact that Anne, following her bout of illness, had not returned to Miss Wooler’s school, and Ellen, who lived within visiting distance of the school, was then away from home; hence Charlotte must have felt even more isolated. She refers in a letter to Ellen to the ‘weeks of mental and bodily anguish’ she suffered, and eventually, following medical advice, she returned to Haworth in order to try and recover her spirits. The time she spent at the parsonage in Haworth appears to have had the desired effect, and she subsequently returned to Miss Wooler’s school, which had now moved to Dewsbury Moor, a few miles from its original location. Eventually, however, Charlotte felt that she could no longer endure her life as a teacher, and, before departing for Haworth for the Christmas vacation in 1838, she informed Miss Wooler that she would not be returning.
Though she was deeply unhappy for much of her time at Roe Head, her experiences there exerted a powerful influence on her later fiction. Governesses and teachers feature in all of Charlotte’s novels – a motif for which she drew on her own personal experiences. As well as teaching at Miss Wooler’s school at Roe Head, she also worked as a governess for two families: in 1839 for three months for the Sidgwicks at Stonegappe in Lothersdale, and in 1841 for the White family in Rawdon. The position of governess was one of the only ways in which a woman of Charlotte’s class could hope to earn a living in the nineteenth century, but it was often arduous and poorly paid work. Charlotte struggled to adapt to the role of governess and the hardships it frequently entailed. The life of the governess was a lonely one: governesses ranked above the household servants, yet were not considered part of the family, nor likely to be treated as such. Such was Charlotte’s experience with the Sidgwick family, as she detailed in a letter to her sister, Emily, concluding that a governess’s lot is indeed a hard one: ‘I see now more clearly than I have ever done before that a private governess has no existence, is not considered as a living and rational being except as connected with the wearisome duties she has to fulfil.’ Mrs Sidgwick made no effort to befriend Charlotte, and was defensive when Charlotte complained of the children’s behaviour. This attitude is replicated by the Ingram family in Jane Eyre. Blanche Ingram, Jane’s rival for Rochester’s affections, describes the governesses of her own childhood thus: ‘half of them detestable and the rest ridiculous, and all incubi’, while her mother declares, ‘I have suffered a martyrdom from their incompetency and caprice.’
Blanche Ingram describes the tricks that she and her sister used to play on their governesses, and indeed in her own experience, Charlotte found the children to be as unwelcoming as their mother, referring to them in her letter to Emily as ‘riotous, perverse, unmanageable cubs’ and in a letter to Ellen as ‘a set of pampered, spoilt, turbulent children, whom I was expected constantly to amuse, as well as to instruct’. It is here we find the originals of the spoilt and precocious children of Brontë’s fiction – John Reed and his sisters, Adèle Varens (although the endearing Polly in Villette is probably a representation of Elizabeth Gaskell’s daughter, Julia, to whom Charlotte became particularly attached on a visit to Gaskell and her family). Contemplating her future at the close of 1839, it is hardly surprising that she declares, ‘I hate and abhor the very thoughts of governess-ship.’ In a later letter to her publisher, she expounded on the difficulties of a governess’s existence. She refers to ‘a life of inexpressible misery’ in which the governess was ‘tyrannized over, finding her efforts to please and teach utterly vain, chagrined, distressed, worried – so badgered so trodden-on, that she ceased almost at last to know herself, and wondered in what despicable, trembling frame her oppressed mind was prisoned’. The letter is suggestive of the extent to which Charlotte felt she had lost her identity whilst working as a governess: once again, she had been forced to adopt a mask, to perform a role against which she inwardly railed.
Shortly after her return to Haworth following the conclusion of her employment with the Sidgwick family, Charlotte received a marriage proposal from Ellen Nussey’s brother, Henry. Responding to his proposal, she writes: ‘I have no personal repugnance to the idea of a union with you – but I feel convinced that mine is not the sort of disposition calculated to form the happiness of a man like you,’ concluding, ‘I will never for the sake of attaining the distinction of matrimony and escaping the stigma of an old maid take a worthy man whom I am conscious that I cannot render happy.’ To Ellen, she confessed, ‘I […] never could have that intense attachment which would make me willing to die for him – and if ever I marry it must be in that light of adoration that I will regard my Husband.’ Charlotte was almost twenty-three when she received Henry’s proposal of marriage: old enough to consider spinsterhood a distinct possibility in the nineteenth century. A few months later, she rejected another proposal of marriage, this time from the Reverend David Pryce, who, after meeting her once, wrote to her declaring his attachment and asking for her hand. It was hardly surprising, given their brief acquaintance, that she rejected his offer. Her account of this event to Ellen Nussey, however, suggests that she was resigned to, indeed even welcomed, the possibility of spinster-hood: ‘I am certainly doomed to be an old maid,’ she declared, continuing, ‘Never mind. I made up my mind to that fate ever since I was twelve years old.’ Her attitude towards marriage is reinforced in a later letter to Ellen Nussey, in which she declares,
Not that it is a crime to marry – or a crime to wish to be married – but it is an imbecility which I reject with contempt – for women [who] have neither fortune nor beauty – to make marriage the principal object of their wishes & hopes & the aim of all their actions – not to be able to convince themselves that they are unattractive – and that they had better be quiet and think of other things than wedlock.
Marriage was undoubtedly a problematic institution in the nineteenth century: for much of the period women retained barely any legal rights once married, effectively becoming the property of their husbands. Nevertheless, marriage offered the possibility of financial security and an escape from the drudgery of the life of a governess. Indeed, marriage, for many Victorian women, was not only desirable but essential: few women had the privilege of an independent income, and employment opportunities, for middle- and upper-class women in particular, were extremely limited. Romantic love was therefore frequently less of a consideration in the decision to marry than in today’s world. Unmarried daughters were frequently perceived as a burden on their family, and would often be left to make their own way in the world in the event of their father’s death (any inheritance generally passing to the eldest son). Cases of respectable, middle-class unmarried women finding themselves in the workhouse were not uncommon. When Charlotte rejected Henry Nussey, Patrick Brontë was already in his sixties, and she must have anticipated a time when she would not only be obliged to earn her own living, but to provide a roof over her head as well. Despite this, she appears at this period at least to have subscribed to a wholly romantic view of marriage, and to have dismissed the practical implications of spinsterhood, believing fervently that to marry without love would be inherently wrong (an attitude that anticipates the heroine’s rejection of St John Rivers in Jane Eyre).
In a letter to Ellen Nussey from 1840, Charlotte clarified her views on marriage:
Do not be over-persuaded to marry a man you can never respect – I do not say love, because I think, if you can respect a person before marriage, moderate love at least will come after; and as to intense passion, I am convinced that that is no desirable feeling. In the first place, it seldom or never meets with a requital; and, in the second place, if it did, the feeling would only be temporary: it would last the honeymoon, and then, perhaps, give place to disgust, or indifference, worse perhaps than disgust. Certainly this would be the case on the man’s part; and on the woman’s – God help her, if she is left to love passionately and alone […] I am tolerably well convinced that I shall never marry at all.
The letter demonstrates an awareness of the potential dangers of marriage, particularly for a woman: divorce was all but impossible to obtain, and in any case was widely perceived, in accordance with the teachings of the Bible, as contrary to God’s will ( What […] God hath joined together, let no man put asunder.’)7 For Charlotte, it seems, the danger was hardly worth the risk, and she appeared resolved to remain, as she termed it, an old maid’. In The Professor, Frances Crimsworth declares, An old maid’s life must doubtless be void and vapid,’ yet despite the frustration Charlotte evidently felt with the life of a teacher or governess, she evidently preferred these options to the possibility of marriage to a man whom she did not love.
Charlotte’s second stint as a governess began in March 1841, when she was aged twenty-four, and was hardly more successful than her first. Again she was made to feel like an outsider among both the servants of the house and her employers, complaining to Ellen, ‘I find it so difficult to ask either servants or mistress for anything I want.’ The children, too, were proving difficult for Charlotte to manage – at once over-indulged and over-familiar. Homesickness added to Charlotte’s woes, though her employers at least allowed, indeed encouraged visits from Charlotte’s friends and family. The homesickness and troublesome children rendered the position of governess highly distasteful to Charlotte, while the long working hours left her with barely enough time to correspond with friends and family, let alone indulge her creative instincts and the literary ambitions that she still harboured. Charlotte’s dislike of her work, but the compulsion she felt to undertake it, are indicative of the limited choices available to women seeking respectable work in the mid-nineteenth century. ‘I have no natural knack for my vocation,’ she wrote to Ellen Nussey. ‘If teaching only – were requisite it would be smooth and easy – but it is the living in other people’s houses – the estrangement from one’s real character – the adoption of a cold, frigid – apathetic exterior that is painful.’ As a governess, Charlotte was again required to play a role, to disguise her true self behind a mask; while she welcomed the mask she would later adopt to disguise her identity as writer, the mask of governess, like that of teacher, was intolerable to her.
In response to the deep frustration and unhappiness she felt in her post as governess, Charlotte began seriously to consider the possibility of opening a school with her sisters. She left her position with the White family at the end of 1841 intending to pursue this plan, which would potentially offer a means of making money that was infinitely preferable to the work of a governess, and which would enable the family to remain together. As part of this scheme, Charlotte resolved to improve the planned school’s chances of success by spending some time on the continent, in order to develop her language skills. She decided on Brussels, and secured positions for herself and Emily as pupils at Madame Heger’s pensionnat. Her experiences in Brussels, and in particular her relationship with Mme Heger’s husband, Constantin, marked a pivotal period in her life, and one that was to exert a considerable influence on her fiction.
Charlotte and Emily arrived in Brussels in February 1842 and took up residence as pupils at the pensionnat – Charlotte returning to formal schooling at the age of twenty-five. A few months later, in a letter to Ellen Nussey, she detailed her first impressions of the school and its staff, revealing that she was vastly happier as a school pupil than she had been as a governess, despite being far from home and somewhat isolated as a Protestant amongst Catholics. Charlotte was somewhat suspicious of Catholicism, and a number of her letters are suggestive of distinctly anti-Catholic feelings (in a later letter to Ellen, she scathingly refers to Catholicism as ‘a most feeble childish piece of humbug’). She also reveals in her letter to Ellen her first impressions of Constantin Heger. Though her description of him is far from suggestive of a romantic infatuation, his characteristics as described by Charlotte bear a resemblance to those of her later fictional heroes-Jane Eyre’s Rochester and Villette’s Paul Emanuel – and her lengthy discussion of his character is clearly suggestive of her developing feelings for him:
[H]e is a professor of Rhetoric a man of power as to mind but very choleric & irritable in temperament – a little, black, ugly being with a face’ that varies in expression, sometimes he borrows the lineaments of an insane tom-cat – sometimes those of a delirious Hyena – occasionally – but very seldom he discards these perilous attractions and assumes an air not above a hundred degrees removed from what you would call mild & gentleman-like.
Compare this to Lucy Snowe’s description of Paul Emanuel in Villette:
A dark little man he certainly was; pungent and austere. Even to me he seemed a harsh apparition, with his close-shorn, black head, his broad, sallow brow, his thin cheek, his wide and quivering nostril, his thorough glance and hurried bearing. Irritable he was; one heard that, as he apostrophised with vehemence the awkward squad under his orders.
There can be no doubt that Charlotte had in mind her former master when she created the character of Paul Emanuel, and the problematic heroes of her other novels undoubtedly also owe something to her attraction to M. Heger.
Charlotte appears to have settled reasonably well in Brussels. She strove hard to improve her language skills, and though she suffered some attacks of homesickness, they were not frequent or entirely unbearable – no doubt partly a result of the fact that Emily had accompanied her, while Mary Taylor and her sister were also resident in the city at this time. Hence she was not entirely removed from friends and family despite the unfamiliar setting. In the summer of 1842, the sisters accepted a proposal from Mme Heger to teach English and music at the school. Though the positions were unpaid, they were given free bed and board in return, as well as continued tuition in those areas in which they wished to improve themselves.
In November of that year, Charlotte and Emily received news of their Aunt Branwell’s illness and subsequent death, and returned to Haworth immediately. Their aunt’s death followed those of Mary Taylor’s sister, Martha, and Patrick’s assistant curate at Haworth, William Weightman, who had become a close family friend. ‘[H]ow dreary and void everything seems,’ Charlotte wrote to Ellen in response to this spate of deaths – a terrible foreshadowing of the grief that was still to come. While the sisters were at Haworth, Constantin Heger wrote to Patrick Brontë expressing his regret at the circumstances that had called them home, and declaring a ‘fatherly affection for them’. He talked positively of the sisters’ progress, and of what might still be achieved were they to continue their studies. A short time later, and no doubt partly in response to Heger’s letter, Charlotte once again set off for Brussels, this time alone (Emily remained at Haworth, unable to bear to be parted from the family and moors once again), to once more take up the position of teacher at Mme Heger’s pensionnat.
Charlotte’s solitary return to Brussels sparked speculation among some of her acquaintances regarding her motivation, and it was rumoured that she had a romantic interest there. She of course disputed this, but there can be little doubt that her return to Brussels was at least in part motivated by her feelings for M. Heger. In attempting to quash speculation about a possible forthcoming union, she declared to Ellen that she ‘never exchange[s] a word with any other man than Monsieur Heger’ – an assertion that takes on new significance in light of her later letters to her old master. However, though she was welcomed by the Hegers on her return, Charlotte’s sense of isolation and homesickness developed over the coming months, becoming almost unbearable during the school’s summer vacation, when she spent much of her time alone. Her feelings for Constantin Heger increased, and she experienced a growing sense of antipathy towards his wife. Upon Charlotte’s return, Heger and his brother-in-law took English lessons with her: a reversal of their former pupil-teacher relationship, which is echoed in the shifting power relations between Charlotte’s heroes and heroines in her novels. At the heart of much of her fiction is the question of power in the relationship between a man and a woman: Jane Eyre is Rochester’s employee, and subsequently his wife, but there is a distinct shift in the relationship between them following the fire at Thornfield, which leaves Rochester blind and consequently dependent on Jane; in Shirley, Louis Moore is tutor to the wealthy eponymous heroine, but again the relationship is reversed when Shirley marries her former tutor at the conclusion of the novel; questions of power also pervade the relationship between Lucy Snowe and Paul Emanuel in Villette.
Her letters from the period of her second sojourn in Brussels hint at her increasing attraction to her employer; she makes frequent reference to trivial events that bring the two of them into contact, and hints at the possible suspicions of Mme Heger: in a letter to Emily, she writes, ‘I am convinced she does not like me – why, I can’t tell, nor do I think she herself has any definite reason for the aversion.’ Later, to Ellen, she confesses, ‘I fancy I begin to perceive the reason for this mighty distance and reserve.’ Though she does not elaborate, there is a hint here that Mme Heger suspects that Charlotte’s feelings towards her husband are more than they ought to be. In a later letter Charlotte writes of Mme Heger, ‘I no longer trust her’ – a feeling that was no doubt mutual.
Amidst increasing feelings of melancholy and homesickness, Charlotte strove to endure her time in Brussels. In spite of her tendency towards anti-Catholic sentiments, finding herself one day outside the Church of Ste Gudule, she entered and, apparently on a whim, visited the confessional. She details the event in a letter to Emily. The priest at first refused to allow her the privilege of confession, as she had admitted to him that she was in fact a Protestant. Eventually, however, he relented, and Charlotte tells her sister that, ‘I actually did confess – a real confession.’ She does not elaborate on the details of the confession, but it is possible that she admitted to the Catholic priest her feelings for Heger. Though she may have found the experience cathartic, she had no intention of considering a conversion to Catholicism, and is at pains to assure her sister of this, and for Emily to keep the anecdote from their father, lest he worry that she may be about to abandon her Protestant faith.
Though her letters from Brussels suggest that she often felt deeply unhappy there following her solitary return, she nevertheless refused to come home while she had no real plan of what she might do upon her return. Her reluctance to leave Brussels was undoubtedly increased by her continued attachment to Heger, though she must have realised that nothing could come of her feelings. Eventually, however, she felt that life in Brussels was no longer endurable, and took the decision to resign her post and return home. She informed Mme Heger of her decision, but, on M. Heger’s hearing of it, he sent for her and insisted she remain, which, inevitably, she agreed to do – for the short term, at least. Two months later, however, in December 1843, she finally resolved to resign her post and return to her beloved Haworth, believing that her spirits might lift when she was once more among friends and family.
Charlotte left Brussels and arrived home in January 1844. Despite being reunited with family and home, and later that year with Ellen and Mary, the overwhelming feelings of depression and despair continued to plague her. In a surprisingly candid letter to Ellen Nussey, she hints strongly at her feelings for her former master and employer: ‘I think however long I live I shall not forget what the parting with M. Heger cost me – It grieved me so much to grieve him who has been so true and kind and disinterested a friend.’ Although she was now separated from Heger, her feelings for him remained unresolved, and over the next two years she wrote him a series of increasingly despairing letters, in which she makes little attempt to disguise her true feelings for him. An unspecified number of these letters have not survived. The earliest known surviving letter remains as a result of the apparently jealous behaviour of Mme Heger. The letter was ripped up and discarded by M. Heger, but subsequently retrieved and reassembled by his wife. The content of the letter suggests that Mme Heger’s jealousy was not entirely without foundation, though there is no indication that Charlotte’s feelings for M. Heger were reciprocated. She writes, ‘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.’ She also discusses her desire to write a book and to dedicate it to Heger – ‘the only master I have ever had’. She concludes the letter in a similar romantic fashion: ‘It hurts to say goodbye even in a letter – Oh it is certain I shall see you again one day – it really has to be so.’
Further evidence of Charlotte’s continued infatuation with Heger again comes courtesy of his wife, who sewed together the pieces of two subsequent letters that her husband had attempted to destroy. The first was written in October 1844, almost ten months after Charlotte’s departure from Brussels. Having heard nothing from Heger for several months, despite writing to him at least twice, she almost begs him to contact her: ‘I am counting on soon having news of you – this thought delights me.’ This letter too was to elicit no response, prompting her to write yet again, in January 1845, her tone increasingly desperate: ‘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 -1 shall be content – happy, I would have a motive for living – for working.’ Charlotte’s final surviving letter to Heger dates from November 1845 – almost two years after she had left Brussels. Again, her infatuation shows no sign of abating. It appears that Heger had written to Charlotte in response to her previous letter, though his letter does not survive, and neither does her initial reply, in which she apparently promised to write only every six months, though she berates him for this: ‘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.’ She continues, ‘I have tried to forget you […] 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.’ The final part of her letter suggests that her feelings had almost reached the point of obsession:
Your last letter has sustained me – has nourished me for six months – now I need another and you will give it me […] To forbid me to write to you, to refuse to reply to me – that will be to tear from me the only joy I have on earth – to deprive me of my last remaining privilege – a privilege which I will never consent to renounce voluntarily. Believe me, my master, in writing to me you do a good deed – so 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.
Whether Charlotte continued to write to her former master, or whether she finally accepted that he had no wish to continue their acquaintance, is unclear. Whatever the case may have been, her infatuation with Heger exerted a huge influence on her fiction: her portrayal of Rochester’s unfortunate marriage to Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre, Bertha’s subsequent death and Rochester’s union with Jane may well have been rooted in her romantic fantasies of Heger and her jealousy of his wife; while her final novel, Villette, published nine years after she left Brussels, along with the first novel she wrote, The Professor, owe an obvious debt to her time in Brussels and her relationship with Heger.
While Charlotte agonised over her separation from and lack of contact with Heger, there was a new arrival at Haworth in the form of Patrick’s newly appointed curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls, whom Charlotte would later marry. Nicholls arrived in Haworth in May 1845. Like Patrick Brontë, he was originally from what is now Northern Ireland. Charlotte’s first impression was of ‘a respectable young man’ (Nicholls was three years her junior). The following year, Ellen Nussey reported to her friend a rumour that Charlotte was to marry her father’s curate; Charlotte responded with disbelief:
[…] never was a rumour more unfounded […] I could by no means think of mentioning such a rumour to him even as a joke – it would make me the laughing-stock of himself and his fellow curates for half a year to come – They regard me as an old maid, and I regard them, one and all, as highly uninteresting, narrow and unattractive specimens of the ‘coarser sex’.
Charlotte seems to have retained this impression of her father’s curate for some time: the following year she wrote to Ellen declaring, ‘I cannot for my life see those interesting germs of goodness in him you discovered, his narrowness of mind always strikes me chiefly -1 fear he is indebted to your imagination for his hidden treasures.’ Given her earlier assertion that she could only marry a man she truly loved, her view of Nicholls did not seem to make him a likely candidate for her future husband, yet such was to be the case.
As Charlotte battled with her feelings for Heger and attempted to dispel the rumours relating to her father’s curate, her brother, Branwell, was fighting his own demons. Between 1840 and 1845, Branwell held a number of positions as he strove to carve out a successful career for himself. He remained optimistic about his chances of poetic success, encouraged by a meeting with Hartley Coleridge in 1840, but in the meantime he struggled to earn a living. He was dismissed from his post as tutor to the sons of Robert and Agnes Postlethwaite for reasons unknown (though Juliet Barker, in her biography of the Brontë family, speculates that he may have been involved in a sexual liaison with one of the servants, resulting in pregnancy), and again from his position as clerk at Luddenden Foot railway station in Calderdale in 1842 for carelessness, and subsequently appointed tutor to the Robinson family at Thorp Green, where Anne Brontë was working as governess. His appointment was to prove disastrous: in July 1845, he was fired – apparently as a consequence of his relationship with his employer’s wife, Mrs Lydia Robinson. In his despair, he turned increasingly to drink and opium. Branwell, like Charlotte, retained literary ambitions but, despite the publication of a number of his poems in local newspapers in the 1840s, it was becoming increasingly evident that he was unlikely to succeed, not only in a literary career, but in any capacity, and he was becoming a significant burden on his family