Despite increasing popularity during her own lifetime, Brontë can hardly have foreseen the legacy she would leave behind in terms of the public fascination with her life and work. As well as the continued interest in her writing, there remains an ongoing fascination with the life of the author, indicated by the perennial popularity of Brontë biographies, as well as by the flourishing Brontë tourist industry in Haworth. The Brontë home – the parsonage in the West Yorkshire village of Haworth – was converted into a museum in 1928, when it was purchased by Sir James Roberts and donated to the Brontë Society, and attracts thousands of visitors every year, anxious to witness for themselves the place where some of the most famous works in English literature were written, and where the Brontë family lived and died. The Brontë parsonage museum not only allows the interested tourist in to the place where the Brontë sisters composed all seven of their novels, along with their poetry and juvenilia, but also includes items such as the sofa on which Emily died, items of clothing worn by the sisters, and locks of Charlotte’s hair. The nearby moors are largely untouched by the modern world, and remain much as they would have been during the lifetimes of the Brontës. Visitors to Haworth can call at The Black Bull, the public house frequented by Branwell Brontë, and follow the ‘Brontë walk’, passing by ‘Brontë falls’ and over the ‘Brontë bridge’; Emily Brontë is alleged to have stopped to rest on the chair-shaped rock by the falls, and a few miles across the moors from Haworth stands the ruined farmhouse Top Withens, rumoured to have been the inspiration for Wuthering Heights, though there is no direct evidence to support this. There is a plaque in the church where Patrick Brontë preached for forty years to mark the Brontë family vault where all the family, with the exception of Anne, were interred (though much of the church was rebuilt in 1879). In the graveyard that stands between the church and the parsonage are the graves of many of the Brontës’ friends and acquaintances. There is a sense, then, in which the world of the Brontës is almost tangible to the modern visitor to Haworth, perhaps accounting for some of the intense and continuing interest in the lives of Charlotte Brontë and her family.
The relationship between the siblings has also proved a matter of much speculation – from the literary collaborations of the Brontë children, to Charlotte’s criticism of her sisters’ work following their premature deaths. The extent of this fascination is suggested by some of the conspiracy theories surrounding the lives of the Brontës. There has been speculation about Charlotte’s sexuality, for example, in light of her relationship with Ellen Nussey (though neither her letters nor her experience of marriage lend any credence to this theory), and in June 1999, the Daily Express newspaper carried on its front page a picture of Charlotte Brontë, with the headline ‘Did Charlotte Brontë Murder Her Siblings?’ In the same year, James Tully published a novel entitled The Crimes of Charlotte Brontë, in which Charlotte is directly implicated in her sisters’ deaths. Though fictional, it was originally intended as a factual work, but the publishers refused to publish it as such (in fact, the headline in the Express related to Tully’s novel). While such conspiracy theories may be dismissed as entirely lacking in foundation, they are nevertheless indicative of Brontë’s fame: her inclusion on the front page of a tabloid newspaper some one hundred and fifty years after her death speaks volumes about the extent to which she and her work have infiltrated the popular imagination.
The ongoing fascination with the life of the Brontës is further reflected in the large number of biographies focusing on their lives and work. The earliest biography of Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë, was written at the request of her father, Patrick Brontë, shortly after the death of his last surviving child, and was published in 1857. It has proved hugely influential, though the picture Gaskell paints of the author of Jane Eyre is somewhat problematic: Gaskell’s relationship with the author and the survival of many of those who knew her (including her father and husband) at the time the biography was written necessarily means that there are significant absences in the text (Brontë’s feelings for M. Heger, for example, are largely obscured, while a number of letters written by Brontë did not come to light until much later). Nevertheless, Gaskell’s account of Brontë’s life can be seen as largely responsible for creating the tragic-romantic image of the author and her siblings that prevails today. In a much later account, The Brontë Myth, Lucasta Miller observes that ‘with the publication of Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë, she became a legend,’9 noting that Brontë, in Gaskell’s biography, is portrayed as a ‘saintly heroine’.10 Elsewhere, Elisabeth Jay argues that Gaskell ‘may be said to have created, almost single-handedly, the myth of the Brontës.’11 There is a certain irony in the notion that Gaskell’s account serves to obscure the ‘real’ Charlotte Brontë, creating instead a kind of mythical, idealised version of the author, given the fact that Patrick Brontë desired Gaskell to produce an authorised account of his daughter’s life in order to address some of the rumours and speculation in wide circulation following her death. Numerous other biographies of the Brontës have appeared since the publication of Gaskell’s, creating a tradition that has served both further to elucidate, and to obscure their lives through the creation of a romanticised, often speculative, image of the family. In 1994, Juliet Barker published her extensive and detailed account in The Brontës, and this remains the seminal biography of the family.
Turning to Brontë’s writing, while her entire oeuvre is the subject of intense scholarly and critical debate, particularly since the 1960s and the explosion of second-wave feminist literary theory, it is her most successful novel, Jane Eyre, that retains the strongest hold on the public imagination. Since its publication in 1847, Jane Eyre has been repeatedly referenced – implicitly and explicitly – in other works: plays, films, novels and art. The process of reworking and retelling Brontë’s story of the poor, plain governess began shortly after the novel’s publication, and the Victorian period saw a plethora of works that allude to, engage with, adapt or draw on Jane Eyre – including an array of dramatic productions (eight of which were collected by Patsy Stoneman in Jane Eyre on Stage, 1848-1898, published in 2007), and a number of sensation novels (which draw on the more sensational elements of Brontë’s plot), along with feminist works such as Charlotte Perkins Oilman’s short story ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, which calls into question Brontë’s own pseudo-feminist position by focusing on the figure of the ‘mad’ wife and offering a sympathetic portrayal of her descent into madness – a state partially induced by her treatment at the hands of her husband.
The process of adapting and transformingJane Eyre continued in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with more than twenty film and television adaptations of the novel, numerous theatre productions (includingJane Eyre: The Musical, which premiered on Broadway in 2000) and an abundance of novels: in her 1995 Bibliography of works influenced by Jane Eyre, Patsy Stoneman lists some forty novels, and several more have appeared since. Some of these draw explicitly on the original text (Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair, for instance), while others engage more subtly with Brontë’s novel – Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca, Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale, and even J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, in which, as in Jane Eyre, the orphan-protagonist is forced to endure a miserable existence with uncaring relatives, before beginning a journey of self-discovery.
While echoes of Jane Eyre pervade contemporary literature and culture, the novel has been subject to varying interpretations by adaptors and scholars. Screen adaptations in particular tend to emphasise the romantic aspects of the story. The character of the heroine is frequently transformed from ‘plain’ Jane into the stereotypical beautiful heroine, and Rochester into a brooding, romantic hero: the 1996 film version, directed by Franco Zeffirelli, used the tagline ‘This year’s most romantic love story’. Scholarly criticism, however, has increasingly highlighted the more problematic aspects of Brontë’s narrative – in particular the author’s representation of the mad wife, and Jane’s equally problematic (from a feminist perspective) union with Rochester at the conclusion of the narrative.
Charlotte Brontë’s life and works have resulted in a legacy that it is difficult to overestimate and which shows no signs of abating. The wealth of material inspired by Jane Eyre alone forms a direct retort to Southey’s assertion that ‘Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life: and it ought not to be.’ Literature was to become the business of Brontë’s life, and her life and works in turn have become profitable businesses themselves.