Charlotte left me in no doubt from the outset that she found being a governess detestable and demeaning for a person of her intelligence and talents. She found it hard to repel the rude familiarity of her riotous and unmanageable wards and unreasonable that Mrs Sidgwick expected her, once lessons were over, to undertake hours of needlework hemming yards of cambric and making muslin nightcaps. She found it insufferable that she even had to make clothes for the children’s dolls! I was not entirely sympathetic because I had offered Charlotte a route out of such misery by encouraging my brother Henry to propose to her in the March of 1839. I had been confident she would accept because my brother was a very eligible young man of twenty-seven who had newly become a curate in Sussex. She knew enough of him to know that he would be a good and kind husband. Moreover, Henry had intimated to her that, should they marry, he was prepared to have me stay with them so that Charlotte and I could enjoy our friendship to the full.
Yet amazingly Charlotte had declined his offer, saying that even the teaching she hated could not drive her into making a loveless marriage. Her refusal seemed madness to me, and, given her unhappiness as a governess, I hoped to make her rethink the matter that autumn. In October I borrowed Henry’s carriage so that I could take her for a holiday to Bridlington on the East Yorkshire coast. Charlotte had never seen the sea before and she revelled in its rough roar and swirling mix of green and blue and foam-white, but I got nowhere on the subject of her marrying my brother. I am sure that was because in the summer her father had acquired a new curate called Mr William Weightman. This handsome and constitutionally cheerful twenty-three-year-old seemed a far more attractive proposition than my brother. He had found no problem in charming Charlotte’s eyes with his rosy cheeks, blue eyes and fine auburn hair and in delighting her ears with his clever wit and his romantic tales.
I confess that I was also not immune to Mr Weightman’s charms. I remember in particular a night when Charlotte, Emily, Anne and I all went to hear him speak at the Mechanics Institute in Keighley. He spoke not just with learning but also with wit and vigour, and then, on our long walk back to Haworth, he entertained us so well that the time flew and I could scarce believe it was midnight when we reached the parsonage. Emily teased me that she would have to become our chaperone if I continued to spend time with him. This annoyed Charlotte, who told me that she did not mind him finding troops of victims amongst young ladies as long as I was not one of them. I responded by saying that her interest in my feelings for the curate must indicate she had herself been smitten by Cupid’s bolt. This she denied but not, I thought, convincingly. Perhaps to offset his charisma – and so perhaps weaken his impact – we took to nicknaming him ‘Miss Celia Amelia’ because he blushed very easily. Somehow calling him this made his presence among us seem safer. Once it became clear that he had no intention of seriously courting Charlotte, she took against him and began denigrating his character. I found this unsettling because he was a good man and I mourned his loss when he caught cholera from working among the poor and died in the September of 1842.
In the March of 1841 Charlotte moved to enter the employ of a family called White, who lived in Upperwood House in Rawden, near Leeds. Her experiences there served to convince her that she lacked the patience to be an effective governess and that she was not cut out to live in other people’s houses. She informed me that Mr and Mrs White were civil enough and the children – a boy of six and a girl of eight – reasonably well disposed towards her, but this did not alter the fact that her role was inadequately paid. She felt her life was being wasted. I was not surprised to hear from Charlotte how she had begged her father not to make her return when she visited home that Christmas. She made much of the fact that Emily’s health had collapsed as a result of her work at Law Hill and of how equally unhappy Anne was. The outcome was that their aunt agreed to provide £100 from her savings so that all of her nieces could set up their own school in Haworth.
It was what happened next that made me realize how much I had let my love for Charlotte blind me to her selfishness. She rejected a kind offer by Miss Wooler to let her take over her school, though it had a good reputation and required little in the way of investment. Instead she persuaded her father that, prior to her and her sisters opening a school, he should permit her and Emily to go to Brussels, where they could improve their French and German. Thus Charlotte committed Emily, who had no desire to leave home, to go abroad and simultaneously condemned Anne to unnecessary months of further slave labour as a governess. Was not this shockingly selfish behaviour? Moreover, in the light of what subsequently happened, I do not believe that Charlotte ever intended creating a school. All she really wanted was to use her aunt’s money to fund an adventure for herself.
What surprised me most was that she was also prepared to do this at the very time when her brother Branwell needed her most, because he was increasingly turning to drink to drown his sorrows at his blighted career. Far from securing a bright future for himself, he had been reduced, after a brief unsuccessful time as a tutor in the Lake District, to taking on the menial role of a booking clerk at Sowerby Bridge Station on the newly opened Leeds-Manchester Railway. He begged her not to leave him and yet she ignored him.
I disliked the selfishness that Charlotte had shown, but I still took pleasure in seeing her happy again and I hoped that her venture abroad might bring her the success that her talents warranted. Early in the February of 1842 Mr Brontë escorted her and Emily to Brussels via London. Charlotte wrote to me about their excitement at experiencing the capital for the first time. On their first morning in the city her father had taken them to see St Paul’s Cathedral and, from its magnificent dome, they had been able to see the whole of London stretched before them, with its great river, its beautiful bridges, and its many fine churches and open squares. Charlotte said it was as if her spirit, long imprisoned, shook loose the wings that had been cruelly fettered and she, who had never truly lived, was able to taste life for the first time.
However, their stay proved short – just three days – because their father lost no time in booking them a berth on a steam ship bound for the Continent. A small boat carried the two sisters by night to where they could board it. According to Charlotte, the river was black as ink and a chilly wind blew in their faces so in her imagination it seemed as if they were being rowed on the River Styx to the Land of Shades. Nevertheless, she enjoyed every minute of the voyage across the Channel, feeling the sea breeze on her face, experiencing the heaving waves, watching the encircling sea birds, and gazing at the white sails of other ships in the distance. From Ostend they travelled by coach via Ghent to Brussels. Charlotte was later to recount her impressions of this journey in her novel The Professor, saying that such was her exquisite enjoyment of her new freedom that everything seemed picturesque, even though the landscape was flat, the scenery was plain, and the buildings they saw no more than hovels.
Once in Brussels their father enrolled them for half a year at a Catholic girls’ boarding school or ‘pensionnat’ run by Madame Zoe Claire Héger in the Rue d’Isabelle, and then returned home. According to Charlotte, Madame Héger was a short and stout woman of thirty-six with strikingly blue eyes and a kind smile and her efficiently run school had much to commend it. The food was abundant and good, the lessons were arranged so as not to overtask any pupil, and there was time set aside for healthy recreation. Unfortunately, once the initial excitement wore off, neither Charlotte nor Emily were happy. They made the mistake of refusing to disguise their strong Protestant views and this led them to becoming as isolated as if they had been marooned on a desert island. In response they judged their fellow pupils to be unfriendly and selfish. Charlotte also complained to me that the girls were academically weak and lacking in self-control, and that her teachers were dull and unworthy. The one exception was Madame Héger’s husband who taught rhetoric at the school and who had been a former professor at the Athenaeum.
Monsieur Constantin Georges Romain Héger was five years younger than his wife and just seven years older than Charlotte, and very much a man in the prime of life. From what I have been able to gather, his velvet black hair, piercing violet-blue eyes, Roman nose and delightful smile combined to make him very striking, though Charlotte, in her usual acerbic manner, initially poked fun at his appearance, saying he was a little black ugly being who totally lacked any social graces. She said his dogmatic Catholicism made him so very choleric and irritable that he reminded her of an autocratically insane tomcat. However, her dislike of his manner soon changed to admiration because his intellect shone in comparison to any previous man she had met. Then she viewed him through new eyes and realized that he had physical presence too.
Under his skilful tutelage both sisters made prodigious progress and I suspect much of their later skill as novelists arose from his teaching. Charlotte jokingly referred to herself as a cow that was being permitted to munch fresh grass again after months of eating only dry hay. It was not long before Professor Héger began offering Charlotte private lessons, though this generated spiteful rumours among her fellow pupils about their relationship. They saw that Charlotte, although far from beautiful, possessed a youthful attractiveness that the prematurely aged Madame Héger lacked and a mind that was infinitely more beguiling to a man of her husband’s intellect. It did not go unnoticed that Charlotte began changing how she dressed, wearing more fashionable garments that she knew the professor would like. Understandably Madame Héger was not entirely happy about what was happening but she acceded to her husband’s request that Charlotte and Emily should stay on and become assistant teachers at the school once their six months as pupils were over. I think this was because she was essentially a kind-hearted woman, but the decision proved very unwise.
Charlotte’s correspondence with me left me in no doubt that she was ecstatic about staying on at the school. Nothing else mattered. She ignored Emily’s heartfelt desire to return home and she appeared entirely unconcerned about what was happening to Anne and Branwell. So preoccupied was she with the professor that she was remarkably unaffected by the unexpected death of Martha Taylor, the sister of our friend Mary, when on a visit to see her, or by the news of William Weightman’s untimely demise. I was taken aback by how very resentful she was when she heard the news of her Aunt Elizabeth’s death in November 1842. Annoyance at having to return home outweighed any grief. Having paid their last respects, Charlotte wanted to immediately return to the pensionnat, but Emily made it clear she had had enough of Brussels.
Charlotte insisted she should return alone in January 1843, even though Branwell pleaded with her to stay. He was in a terrible emotional state. During her absence, friends of the family had secured his promotion to the post of stationmaster at Luddenden Foot, not far from Halifax, but he had been dismissed for a serious discrepancy in his station’s accounts. I think incompetence rather than theft lay behind the loss, but that did not alter the extent of his public humiliation. Charlotte harshly rejected his pleas for her support, saying she had to perfect her French and further study German.
What Charlotte wanted, of course, was to get back to her professor. She instructed Emily to look after their father, whose eyesight was failing badly, and directed Anne to take responsibility for Branwell. Since the autumn of 1840 Anne had been working as a governess to the daughters of the Rev. Edmund Robinson, a country landowner at Thorp Green Hall, a fine mansion set in acres of beautiful parkland about six miles south-east of Boroughbridge and about twelve miles from York. It was not an easy post because his daughters were very demanding. Her painful experiences were to provide rich material for when she later wrote her novel Agnes Grey. It says much for Anne’s capacity and good character in dealing with her awkward wards that her employer was prepared to take her brother on trust to educate his only son.
In March 1843 Charlotte wrote to me from Brussels, saying how much she missed having Emily with her because she was no longer able to intrude so often on the Hégers’ private life. Only much later did she confess to me why she had become no longer welcome in their home. Madame Héger had come across Charlotte and her husband locked in an embrace within a sequestered garden bower. Outraged by what she had seen, Madame Héger had understandably commanded her husband to abandon seeing Charlotte or face a public denunciation of his infidelity. I know this revelation of Charlotte’s wicked behaviour will upset and offend many and deeply lower her standing, but perhaps it is time that the world appreciates that it was her uncontrollable passion that subsequently fed into her writing and gave it its special magic. Without her all-consuming love for the professor, I think there would have been no portrayal of the intimate moods of young women for men like Rochester in Jane Eyre or Paul Emanuel in Villette. Her novels depict that a woman’s strongest desire is to find a man whom she can call ‘Master’ and this stems entirely from her own response to Professor Héger.
Charlotte defended her actions to me by saying that she had no choice in the matter once her heart took over. I can do no better than to provide you with the following extract from one of her letters to me:
At first I held him harsh and strange and his manner displeased me, but gradually I preferred him before all humanity. I saw his worth and goodness of heart. I was penetrated with his influence and I lived by his affection. He in turn ceased to see me just as a pupil. He put aside his faith and his marriage and he incited me to love him. He spurred me on by gesture, smile and half-word until he had gathered me near his heart. Before I knew what was happening, one day he held both my hands, then took me into his arms, and looked into my eyes with such a piercing love that I could not resist. He told me to take his love in the hope that one day I could share his life. How could I turn my back on such a hope? It is an imbecility, which I reject with contempt, for women like myself, who have neither fortune nor beauty, to make marriage the principal object of their wishes.
I was not prepared to condone her actions and reminded her that she had once written to me that what the French called une grande passion was just une grande folie. However, I let our friendship overcome my moral outrage.
Madame Héger did not insist on Charlotte’s immediate departure because she understood that this might cause local gossip, which could damage the school’s reputation. Instead she monitored her every move. Charlotte wrote to me how she never knew when the professor’s wife might be observing her because of her silent shoes. By September such tactics had reduced Charlotte to a state of deep depression. In one of her letters she described to me how she so wished for death that she went on a kind of pilgrimage to a cemetery. Afterwards, she walked the narrow streets of the town until eventually she entered a Catholic church with a view to confessing her sins. She made her way into a box and knelt down. A little wooden door inside the grating opened and she saw the priest leaning his ear towards her. She told him she was a foreigner and a Protestant but he still let her make her confession. He wisely advised her to leave the pensionnat and so remove any further temptation to sinful thought. Her response was to say that it was impossible for her to leave the man she adored in the knowledge she would never see him again.
By letter I did all I could to persuade Charlotte to return to England. Our friend Mary Taylor added her weight to my arguments. Eventually we were successful and in October Charlotte told Madame Héger it was her intention to resign her teaching post and leave Brussels. This news was happily received. However, Professor Héger then intervened. He sent for Charlotte and, despite all the promises he had made to his wife, begged her to stay. Charlotte could not resist and acceded to his wish. Not surprisingly, a furious Madame Héger soon had this decision reversed. She gave out the news that a dire decline in Mr Brontë’s eyesight was forcing Charlotte to have to return home at Christmas.
By this time financial pressures had led my widowed mother to move out of the Rydings to a smaller house in Birstall called Brookroyd and it was to this new home that I invited Charlotte in the March of 1844. On that occasion we talked much of her final hours at the pensionnat. So raw was her emotional state that I can still recall our conversation almost verbatim.
‘As you know, Nell,’ commenced Charlotte, ‘it was expected that I should leave once I had bidden farewell to my pupils at the end of term. However, I tried to postpone my departure for as long as possible because I still clung to the faint chance that I might yet persuade Constantin to leave his wife. Each night I slept alone in a great empty dormitory surrounded by dark shadows and hoped he would come to see me. But he never did, and I do not know whether that stemmed from his own choice or whether his wife prevented him. Eventually the day came when Madame Héger would let me delay matters no longer and I had to leave. All in the household rose at the usual hour; all breakfasted as usual; all betook themselves to their normal routines, as if oblivious of my imminent departure. No one appeared to have a wish or a word or a prayer for me. My beloved was scarce a stone throw’s away from me in another room yet I could not go to him. I wanted to see him, to remind him of what we had shared, to recall our former intimacies, but I could not. Indeed, had he walked past me, I would have had to suffer him to go by because Madame would else have intervened. Morning passed and afternoon came and I thought I would have to leave without seeing him. I thought all was over and I felt quite sick. Then a child brought me a note from him.’
‘And what did it say?’ I said, curiosity overcoming my embarrassment at the nature of what she was confiding.
‘It said that he wanted to see me before I left and that he would come to the schoolroom at four o’clock. He asked me to be ready to speak with him at length, even though he knew our time together appeared to be over. You can imagine the turmoil this generated in my mind. I dared hope that I might yet acquire future bliss, and yet I also feared that his wife would somehow prevent him coming. And sadly my fear proved grounded in reality. When the appointed time arrived, there was no sign of him. At that moment all my life’s hopes were torn out of my heart by the roots.’
Charlotte broke into floods of tears and I did my best to comfort her. Once her sobbing had eased, she continued her account, saying, ‘A little before five Madame Héger summoned me to her room and, once we were together, she made sure we could not be overheard by closing not only the doors of her chamber but also drawing the shutters over the window. “He thinks you have already gone,” she told me. “Gone?” I said. “How could he think I would leave without speaking to him, without saying goodbye?” “Because I told him that was the case, Miss Brontë.” “Please let me see him before I go,” I begged. “Is not my departure enough of a victory? Let me see him lest my heart break! I have accepted that you are his wife and that I must leave. All I want now is a cordial word from his lips, a gentle look from his eyes. That would comfort me in my future loneliness. The interview can be as short as you dictate.”’
‘But Charlotte, how could you expect a wife to heed such a request?’
‘Because my love overrode all logic. Madame Héger shouted at me, “Foolish woman! How dare you ask for anything from my husband! Do you think I as his wife will permit that to happen? You are a foolish and wicked young woman and you should be deeply ashamed of your behaviour here. He is not only a married man, but also a father. Would you seek to take my husband from me and deprive our three children of a father in order to satisfy your wanton passion? Do you have no shame?” I had the courage to reply, “I am not ashamed of what has passed between us. I know what love is and believe that, if men and women are ashamed of the resulting passion, then there is nothing left in life that is right, noble, faithful, truthful or unselfish.” To this she responded by saying, “There is nothing noble or truthful in your desire for a squalid little affair, Miss Brontë. I see nothing right in the way you have tried to selfishly turn my husband’s affections from a faithful wife.” Then she slapped me across the face in her fury and I saw beneath her mask she was quite heartless. Her blue eyes, usually so serene, flashed with anger.’
I could not help but side with Madame Héger’s view of the unworthinesss of Charlotte’s behaviour, but to my shame I did not voice that. Instead I let Charlotte continue with her unedifying confession. She shook her head as if still recoiling from the blow and said defiantly, ‘I retaliated by shouting back at her, “Let me alone! Keep your hand off me because in your touch there is a poisonous chill that paralyzes the heart and chills the blood.” She snapped back at me, “It is your touch that has poisoned the happiness of this house. Let me make it quite clear. You will leave here without ever seeing my husband again. I shall watch his every movement and my spies will keep you under equal observation. Your pursuit of my husband is over. Now get out of my presence and as soon as possible get out of my house.” I did as I was told, Nell, but I left behind my heart.’
Charlotte recommenced crying and I did all I could to comfort her, not only that day but throughout her visit. This seemed to make a difference, but when she travelled back to Haworth she soon returned to her depressed state. I visited her in June and again tried to raise her spirits. Emily also did what she could to comfort her sister, saying that they should revive the scheme of setting up a school in Haworth. She volunteered to run it if Charlotte undertook the teaching. I also undertook to promote the new venture among my circle of friends as best I could. For a time Charlotte spent hours planning its curriculum and designing advertisement cards that could be circulated by me. Sadly, these endeavours proved pointless for no parents responded to the publicity and eventually Charlotte wrote to me in October to desist my efforts. She said that no parents of any sense would ever see Haworth as a desirable location for their child’s education.
I was aware that initially there had been some correspondence between Professor Héger and Charlotte, but that he had soon stopped writing. Charlotte drew comfort from his last letter for six months and then became desperate for him to write again. I told Charlotte she must prepare for the fact that not only might he never write again, but also that his wife might ensure that he never received any letter she chose to write to him. Charlotte wept, saying her life would be pointless if that happened. I know not whether my surmise was correct or whether the professor had put aside his feelings for Charlotte but she never heard from him again. Charlotte expressed her continuing love by having the few books he had given her specially rebound. At intervals she sent letters, including on one occasion arranging for Mary Taylor to personally hand him one because she was passing through Brussels.
By the spring of 1845 I was far less sympathetic to her continued grief. Her affair had made me fully realize for the first time just how much Charlotte was always driven by what suited her own interests. She had treated both her family and his family very badly in her determination to have the man she wanted. I even began to be suspicious that part of Charlotte’s continued anguish did not stem from her continued passion for the professor but rather from her anger at having been out-manipulated and defeated by Madame Héger. I was not surprised a few years later to see her wreak her revenge on this poor woman by portraying her in Villette as the cruel, crafty and callous Madame Beck. I therefore determined to make one final attempt to stop Charlotte writing to Brussels. In the summer I invited her to help make alterations to my brother’s vicarage in preparation for his forthcoming marriage. He had newly become a curate in Hathersage, a small village in Derbyshire. Charlotte joined me there in July and her three-week stay helped revive her spirits sufficiently for me to achieve success. I like to think that the reason she later took the name Eyre from one of the brasses in my brother’s church for her novel Jane Eyre was to mark the importance of that stay and her decision to cease writing to her lost love.
Charlotte’s use of me as a confidante over her unrequited passion undoubtedly drew us closer together, despite my reservations about her behaviour. This was because she now recognized that she needed me and over the next couple of years she did all she could to present herself to me in a more favourable light. She sent letter after letter stressing that her time was now entirely given over to serving the needs of her increasingly frail father and an increasingly dissolute brother. When Charlotte had returned to Haworth from Hathersage, she had found to her surprise that Branwell and Anne were back at home. This was because Branwell had been summarily dismissed for having had an affair with his employer’s wife and Anne had felt no option but to resign her post in the circumstances. My feelings of sympathy for Charlotte were rekindled as she vividly portrayed the daily horrors of coping with Branwell’s emotionally volatile state. She said that her life had become a living hell, not least because she had no time to develop her own gifts.
In fact the role of being a loving daughter and sister was not enough for her, even though she was pretending that was the case. There is a passage in her novel Shirley where the heroine says:
What am I to do to fill the interval of time which spreads before me and the grave? … I shall never marry … Other people solve it for them by saying: ‘Your place is to do good to others, to be helpful whenever help is wanted’ … Is this enough? Is it to live?
In secret Charlotte made writing her purpose for living. I am not saying that she did not help her father and brother but they were definitely not the priority, and, with typical selfishness, she demanded that her sisters should follow suit. It was agreed that no one would be told of this – not their brother or their father or me.
Charlotte used money the family could ill afford to secretly have a book of the sisters’ poetry published in May 1846 under the pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. The name ‘Bell’ came from their father’s new curate, the Reverend Arthur Bell Nicholls. Charlotte and Emily took the names ‘Currer’ and ‘Ellis’ from those of a local philanthropist and a well-known mill owner, while Anne used a name familiar to her from her time at Thorp Green Hall to become ‘Acton’. The poetry book did not sell but this did not deter Charlotte. She persuaded Emily and Anne to join her in producing a trilogy of novels. Charlotte based her first attempt at a novel on her time in Brussels, calling it The Professor. When this proved unattractive to any publisher, she wrote the far more impressive Jane Eyre, which also drew from her affair with Héger. Charlotte bullied Anne into writing a new novel called Agnes Grey based on the latter’s experience of being a governess, and knowing Emily’s love for the moors, Charlotte suggested to her the idea for the story which became Wuthering Heights. Messrs Smith and Elder agreed to publish Jane Eyre in October 1847. My first intimation of what Charlotte had been doing was when she brought the proofs of that book to Brookroyd in the autumn.
I was upset that Charlotte had not told me earlier, but accepted her excuse – that she was desperate to hide any success from Branwell, who had totally gone to pieces. I promised not to let anyone know that Charlotte was the book’s author and to hide from Emily and Anne that Charlotte had confided their secret to me. This was not an easy promise to fulfil because Jane Eyre proved an instant success with the public and the firm of T.C. Newby therefore published Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey in the December, giving out that Ellis and Acton Bell were just alternative names for Currer Bell. Rumours soon began to circulate that Currer Bell was actually Charlotte – this was not surprising in view of the correspondence between her and the publishers that was passing through the local post office. When I warned Charlotte that her secret was getting out, she was not amused and demanded that I help deny her involvement. This was what she wrote to me on 3 May:
I have given no one a right either to affirm, or hint, in the most distant manner, that I am ‘publishing’ – humbug! Whoever has said it – if anyone has, which I doubt – is no friend of mine. Though twenty books were ascribed to me, I should own none. I scout the idea entirely. Whoever after I have distinctly rejected the charge urges it upon me, will do an unkind and an ill-bred thing. The most profound obscurity is infinitely preferable to vulgar notoriety; and that notoriety I neither seek nor will have. If then any … should ask you what novel Miss Brontë has been ‘publishing’ – you can just say, with distinct firmness of which you are the perfect mistress, when you choose, that you are authorized by Miss Brontë to say that she repels and disowns every accusation of the kind. You may add, if you please, that if anyone has her confidence, you believe you have, and she has made no drivelling confession to you on the subject.
I did as I was told, but the publication of Anne’s second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, which appeared in July 1848, renewed the speculation.
Then a series of disasters struck. In the autumn I received a letter from Charlotte informing me that Branwell had died on 24 September. She had long been exasperated by the dissolute lifestyle that he had adopted, but that did not prevent her now mourning his loss. Unfortunately Emily caught a chill at his funeral and this led to what the doctor called ‘galloping consumption’. To everyone’s surprise it only took a couple of months to kill her. She died on 19 December, leaving Anne in particular inconsolable at her loss. When I heard that Anne had also been taken seriously ill, I travelled to Haworth to offer Charlotte my consolation and support. Little did I realize that my visit would uncover divisions within the Brontë family of which I had been totally unaware.