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- Herausgeber: Lives and Letters
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
Muriel Spark always regarded the Brontés with a novelist's eye. As Boyd Tonkin argues in his lively introduction, written for this new edition, the Brontés inspired Spark at the very beginning of her own career, but not in a straightforward way. Through her critical and biographical work on the Brontés, Spark identified not only their achievements but also their flaws and failings, and thereby began to define, as Tonkin puts it, her own best route. As she herself said, in a piece recorded for the BBC at Emily Bronté's grave in 1961, 'I was fascinated by [Emily's]; creative mind because it's so entirely alien to my own'. This book, first published in 1993, collects Spark's essays on the Brontés, her selection of their letters and of Emily's poetry. Evident throughout are Spark's critical intelligence, dry wit, and refusal to sentimentalise – qualities that gave her own novels their particular appeal. At the same time, The Essence of the Brontés is Muriel Spark's tribute to the sisters whose talents placed them on a stage from where they could hypnotize their own generation and, even more, posterity.
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THE ESSENCE OF THE BRONTËS
A COMPILATION WITH ESSAYS
MURIEL SPARK
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Many of the Brontë letters first appeared in Mrs Gaskell’s LifeofCharlotteBrontë (1857). Others are taken from the text of TheBrontës:TheirLives,FriendshipsandCorrespondence (vols. 1–4 of TheShakespeareHeadBrontë) edited by T.J. Wise and J.A. Symington (1932) (rep. Basil Blackwell 1980). For permission to reprint these letters, grateful acknowledgements are due to Messrs Basil Blackwell, Oxford.
The letters selected have been printed in full except in a few cases where irrelevant text has been omitted; in such cases the omissions have been indicated.
For valuable assistance concerning the text of these letters the editor is deeply indebted to the late Mr H.K. Grant, Hon. Librarian of the Poetry Society.
The text for ‘Emily Brontë: Her Life’ is taken from EmilyBrontë:HerLifeandWork, Muriel Spark and Derek Stanford, London, 1953, and New York, 1966.
Selections from Emily Brontë’s poetry first appeared in SelectedPoemsofEmilyBrontë, edited by Muriel Spark, London, 1952.
The ‘Bookstand’ piece was originally broadcast by the BBC on 16 April 1961. ‘My Favourite Villain was originally broadcast on the BBC Light Programme ‘Woman’s Hour’, 12 October i960.
For permission to use the amended variation on the text of Emily Brontë’s poems, acknowledgements are due to C.W. Hatfield’s CompletePoemsofEmilyBrontë and the publishers of that work, Columbia University Press and Oxford University Press.
INTRODUCTION
MURIEL SPARK AND THE BRONTËS
Boyd Tonkin
In 1976, by then long resident in Italy, Muriel Spark resumed a correspondence with her old friend Hugo Manning. One letter from Rome thanks him for the gift of a book about the Brontës. For the fêted and garlanded writer, now in her late fifties and 14 novels into a career that would comprise 22 in all as well as short stories, drama and autobiography, the book brought back memories. It sent her to a time when she had nothing and had, so far, done almost nothing of the work that she truly valued. To Manning, a poet, journalist and fellow spiritual seeker whom she had known and liked in her penniless Kensington bedsit years of the early 1950s, she recalled ‘my days of Brontë study’, along with ‘all the poverty, adventure and hope that went with them’.
That mellow reminiscence conjures up the picture of striving apprentice author learning from the Haworth sisters in a spirit of humility, emulation and admiration. True, for three or four years after 1949, the Brontës’ lives and works became something of an obsession for Spark. Among the four siblings, it was the author of WutheringHeights who most directly engaged her. A BBC television script from 1961 confesses that ‘For many years I was intensely occupied by Emily Brontë – almost haunted’. Already a divorced mother, but separated from her son Robin (who lived with her parents in Edinburgh), Spark had bounced around shabby post-war London from room to room and job to job – most notably, as the secretary of the Poetry Society and editor of its journal PoetryReview. Tethered to this shambolic and penurious Bohemia, she dreamed of the proud autonomy that would allow her to flourish as a woman and an artist. No wonder the sibyls of the West Riding appealed.
Her first book, published in 19 51, was ChildofLight, a ‘reassessment’ of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley still strikingly modern in its perceptive rescue of the author of Frankenstein from the shadow of her husband and parents. By the time of its appearance, however, the Brontës had taken charge. Spark’s plan for a joint biography to partner a new edition of Anne’s works came to nothing. Still, from that project she salvaged an edition of the family’s letters, published in 1954. She also edited an edition of Emily’s verse (1952) and then, partly in collaboration with poet and critic Derek Stanford, her lover, collaborator, fellow-adventurer and (for a while) soulmate, produced a wider critical-biographical study (1953). These were fringe productions, researched and edited on a shoestring by aspirational young literati under the patronage of shiftless rogues and mavericks. The phrase ‘labour of love’ does indeed apply. But, as with Spark’s co-dependent link to the erratic and exasperating Stanford, other emotions came into play as well.
Turn to what she wrote about the Brontë sisters, and – as so often with Spark – every presumption will be overthrown. (She did have some sympathy to spare for drifting and bibulous brother Branwell, so like the London literary barflies she knew, but says little about him except to note that ‘his great misfortune was that he was a man’ – and thus exempt from his sisters’ elevating struggle.) Page by waspish, probing page, she does not hail a trio of role models or genuflect before a family of sainted path-finders. Quite the opposite. Spark tends to take the Brontë greatness as read, save for a warm appreciation of the ‘traditional aspects’ of Emily’s verse against the unjustified neglect of ‘anthologists’.
Instead, she fires at the Yorkshire heroines a sceptical salvo of reservations, qualifications, caveats and critiques. From her impatience with Charlotte as a bossy ‘impresario’ who turned her family into catchpenny melodrama, and her disgust with Emily’s ‘perverted martyrdom’, through to her verdict, as late as 1992, that poor overlooked Anne was in the end ‘not good enough’, a querulous, suspicious or even downright hostile note recurs. Spark may love the Brontës and their work, but that does not mean she likes them very much.
What is going on here? A sentimental or conventional reader might expect the hero-worship due to stalwart godmothers in art from a successor who indirectly took the profit from their pains. Yet Spark – never in any way sentimental or conventional – sees flaws, marks limits and scolds follies at every turn. Many of her assessments read not so much like a cool appraisal as a family quarrel, bitter and intimate. She may deplore the Brontës’ posthumous encirclement by soppy ‘legend’ and unfounded speculation. Yet Spark herself reaches the point where she can say about Emily that ‘if she had not died of consumption, she would have died mentally deranged’. This, we feel, is strictly personal.
So Spark’s involvement with the Brontës as critic, editor and fragmentary biographer does not take the form of simple homage or tribute. It serves instead as an exorcism or perhaps an inoculation. She has to get the sisters out of her system, if necessary by ingesting as much of their unquiet spirit as will protect her against fixture attacks. In the essay on the Brontës as teachers – impossible to read now without thinking of Miss Jean Brodie, whose Prime would arrive in 1961 – Spark writes that ‘genius, if thwarted, resolves itself in an infinite capacity for inflicting trouble, or at least finding fault’. That ‘thwarting’ and its rancorous side-effects seemed to dog her at this period. As Martin Stannard’s exemplary biography of Spark puts it, ‘In her art and life she demanded acknowledgement while receiving little in either sphere. She was not breaking through as a major poet and Stanford was hesitant about marriage.’ In her early thirties, stalled on more than one front, the fledgling poet, not-yet-novelist and woman of letters found in the Brontës both a deeply tempting path through hardship to glorious achievement – and the wrong road for her. She inflicted trouble and found fault with them, the better to define her own best route.
This intimate dispute had tangled roots. On Spark as both poet and critic, the rebooted classicism associated with T.S. Eliot in his post-war pomp cast a sort of spell. Already separate in outlook and aesthetics, she had via the Poetry Society and its ramshackle hangers-on had quite enough of the surreal balderdash of the ‘Neo-Romantic’ movement. Her pen was from the first, as Auden wrote of Christopher Isherwood’s, ‘strict and adult’. In her visit to Haworth churchyard for the BBC she would remark – in cooler, more balanced terms than the lonely striver of a decade previously could muster – on the gulf between Emily’s dedication to ‘primitive forces of life and death’ and her own fictional art of ironic, analytic miniaturism, developing like ‘cells in a honeycomb’.
The great erotic rhapsodies in JaneEyre and WutheringHeights would not so much leave her cold as chill her with the risks of a self-effacing surrender. For Charlotte, as she notes with no sign of any approval, ‘the submission of a strong personality to one even stronger signified love on the highest level’. So much for Mr Rochester. As for Heathcliff, in a Woman’sHour broadcast in 1960 about her ‘Favourite Villain’, she calls him a ‘real Prince of Darkness’ and – crucially – ‘a kind of moral hypnotist’. Only by these critical acts of exorcism, we sense, did Spark believe that she could snap out of the Brontë hypnosis. She had both to face down her tempters, and transform or convert them.
Hence the somewhat eccentric discussion of WutheringHeights. Spark deems Emily a ‘natural celibate’ in search of a ‘mystical union’ and a woman who ‘does not appear to have needed any object of amorous and sexual attention’. Many readers of Emily’s novel, a work devoured and adored since 1848 by young readers who crave a life that revolves around ‘amorous and sexual attention’, will be baffled by this judgment. It is certainly not a self-portrait of the author who wrote it. When Spark writes that ‘it is a generally observed fact that Emily’s men and women appear to be “sexless”’, the jaws of Cathy and Heathcliff’s devotees will hit the floor. But such a wayward judgment might contain a glimpse of what Spark then hoped she could, or should, become.
Spark views Emily as a mystic without a vocation, indeed a nun manquée, who in the absence of true faith ‘became her own Absolute’ and sacrificed her life to this blasphemous self-image. However strained the reading, Spark stuck by it. In CurriculumVitae, her selective memoir from 1992, she calls the Emily essay ‘my most closely reasoned piece of non-fictional prose’. To her, Emily in effect committed suicide through self-neglect and so yielded up her own life and gift on the altar of Romantic narcissism, since Romanticism always drives its acolytes towards the ‘test of action. So ends the ‘impassioned superwoman, not a mighty self-fashioner but a frail consumptive on the windswept winter moor who shuns doctors and refuses medicine. And yet, ‘In an earlier age, Emily Brontë would most possibly have thrived in a convent’.
Here’s the nub: Spark’s ‘haunting’ by the sisters coincides with her gradual transition from unbelief to Christian faith. Spark had never felt close to the creed of her Jewish forebears. Yet by 1949 she could tell Stanford that ‘I shall set out on a pilgrimage… searching for Faith’. As warnings, rivals, tempters, the Brontë clan and their archetypal pantheism served as stages along that path. If Nature and Imagination were their gods, the gods had failed. Step by step, she sought an ecclesiastical rock rather than a moorland cairn. As she shuttled between the bedsits of Kensington, she also began to frequent its churches: first Anglican, from 1952, and then Roman Catholic. She was confirmed into the Church of England in 1953 but a year later had already moved along to Rome. For a while after her reception into the Church, she even thought of becoming a nun.
Her Brontë immersion accompanied the crises and journeys that would re-make the jobbing literary aspirant into a lifelong, and deeply original, novelist. Her pilgrimage to faith met other obstacles. Slowly, painfully, she broke with Stanford. Over-use of Dexedrine – a kind of amphetamine – plunged her briefly into paranoid delusions in which T.S. Eliot played a bizarrely prominent part. But by 1952 she had won the Observer’s Christmas short-story competition (out of 7,000 entries) for ‘The Seraph and the Zambesi’, which draws on the natural wonders she had seen in Southern Rhodesia during her ill-fated marriage. It is, as Stannard writes, ‘a surreal Nativity story, but it is also about her own rebirth’. Her introduction to the Brontë letters picks out the ‘element of storm’ as a key to the sisters’ art, with ‘some cataclysmic event of nature’ put to work as the ‘sympathetic manifestation of some inner, personal tempest’. This is just how Spark’s own career in fiction gets under way, but – a defining proviso – with a supernatural agent imported to lift the scene beyond merely human dread or desire. By then, approaching 34, Spark had outlived Emily and Anne Brontë, if not yet Charlotte. Now her angelic ‘seraph’ rises above the thunderous cataract. Heathcliff, of course, must haunt the moorland rocks forever.
At this stage Spark seems to yearn, seraph-like, to rise high above the ferment. To do so she must both imbibe and become immune to the Brontës, a ‘tribe’ so near to her and yet so far. Her presentation of them strenuously keeps its distance from identification or idolatry, precisely because both attitudes might come so readily. Charlotte, as instigator and manager of the Brontë family myth, comes under criticism for the relentless self-dramatisation which makes mountains out of molehills and a spectacle out of ‘every triviality of her daily existence’. Emily, meanwhile, suffers from ‘aloofness and unsociability’, not to mention the ‘misanthropic turn of mind’ disclosed by her love for animals.
Perhaps the lady doth protest too much. The Brontës, after all, offered Spark a mirror or a reflecting pool that might have swallowed her whole. Look at the letters that she selected, and at many points they read almost like a displaced manifesto for their editor. After her double bereavement, with Emily and Anne gone, Charlotte writes that ‘The faculty of imagination lifted me up when I was sinking… its active exercise has kept my head above water since’. Defiantly, she proclaims to G.H. Lewes that ‘Out of obscurity I came, to obscurity I can easily return’, and that ‘I cannot, when I write, think always of myself and of what is most elegant and charming in femininity’. She also tells Lewes that ‘I wished critics would judge me as an author, not as a woman’. As for the despised governess’s celebrated apologia in JaneEyre, it would have struck as resonant a chord with Spark at this time as with any other reader. ‘Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! I have as much soul as you – and full as much heart!’
Yeats wrote, in the year of Muriel Spark’s birth, that ‘We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.’ Her beef with the Brontës represents a quarrel with herself. Out of it came a ‘vocation’ at least as intense as theirs but, in her terms, less self-consuming and self-worshipping. In later years, when the intimate threat posed by the sisters had passed, an underlying affinity comes back into plain sight. Spark’s renewed connection with Hugo Manning helped to plant the seed for the semi-autobiographical novel LoiteringwithIntent (1981). Its novelist heroine Fleur Talbot suffers less confusion, isolation and near-despair than her creator. Fleur does, however, espouse a view of fiction as a quest to realise a myth of the self that sounds almost Brontëan. For her, ‘Without a mythology, a novel is nothing. The true novelist, one who understands the work as a continuous poem, is a myth-maker’. At such moments Spark surely stands beside and behind her heroine rather than passing judgment in hindsight on a deceived younger self.
In 1988, with AFarCryfromKensington, Spark returned to her apprentice years. In that novel, her reconciliation with the sisters feels more complete. Its heroine Nancy Hawkins at one point slips into an explicitly Brontë-esque state of alienation and hallucination on a London bus. ‘I felt like Lucy Snowe in “Villette”,’ she reports, ‘who walked, solitary in Brussels on a summer night, among the festival crowds’. By this time the muse of comedy – classical, balanced, ironic comedy – has long prevailed for Spark. The delusions, the fixations, of youth arouse sympathy but carry no risk. No longer seducers, tempters or antagonists, the Brontës can serve as odd, beloved friends again.
Foreword
More than most authors, especially those of the nineteenth century, the Brontës were aware of themselves as personalities. They fully understood the dramatic properties of their position. Charlotte, the spokeswoman of the tribe, never failed to present a picture of dramatized loneliness and scenic effects when writing about her family. It was as if she knew that their family situation and their talents placed them on a stage from where they could hypnotize their own generation and, even more, posterity. Their lives, even apart from their writings, formed a work of art. Haworth Parsonage overlooked the graveyard. Life bordered on death. Three lonely girls, a morose widowed father and a frantic brother, in the first half of the nineteenth century, was a perfect scenario.
In this book I have put together my own writings on the Brontës together with a selection of family letters and a selection of Emily’s poems.
Charlotte’s letters have been chosen with the express intention of presenting a “Brontë autobiography’. I found, when I first chose these letters for my book, TheBrontëLetters (1954), that they lent themselves to a dramatic story-telling arrangement. Charlotte put the family personality into these letters, most of which were addressed to her friend, Ellen Nussey.
In 1857, only two years after Charlotte’s death, Mrs Gaskell’s LifeofCharlotteBrontë was read as avidly as any of Charlotte’s novels. The Brontë story itself had started to become a national phenomenon.
After the second edition of my BrontëLetters was published I received a charming and strange letter which seemed to confirm my conviction that Charlotte as impresario had by the 1860’s already succeeded in vividly promoting not only the Brontë works, but their lives, their melancholy, their tragedies, as a romantic representation.
Dec. 11th 1967.
Dear Muriel Spark,
Your book ‘The Brontë Letters’ has just come my way, & I have been much interested in it.
My Mother, Mrs. Dean, née Elizabeth Berridge, who died in 1933 at the age of 81, was at school in Yorkshire, & she told me that Ellen Nussey came several times & read Charlotte Brontë’s letters to the pupils. It is interesting to think that perhaps some of the letters in your book may have been read to my Mother by the recipient.
I am now in my eightieth year, & I thank you for the pleasure you have given me.
Yours sincerely, Dorothy D. Dean
It is always moving to have contact with someone who has had contact with history. But apart from that, I was, and still am, intrigued by this renewed evidence that Ellen Nussey was well aware of the gripping narrative value of the Brontë situation. The plays and films were to follow.
In compiling the present book I have decided to omit all my writings exclusively on Anne Brontë. In the 1950s I published articles on the poems of Anne Brontë and on Anne’s novels, AgnesGrey and TheTenantofWildfellHall, but I do not now agree with my former opinion of Anne Brontë’s value as a writer. I think her works are not good enough to be considered in any serious context of the nineteenth century novel or that there exists any literary basis for comparison with the brilliant creative works of Charlotte and Emily. But Anne had a distinctive personality. She is presented here as Charlotte presents her, a pale shadow, a girl saddened by loneliness and ill health, somewhat morosely religious. She was a writer who could ‘pen’ a story well enough; she was the literary equivalent of a decent water-colourist, as so many maidens were in those days.
I published a selection of Emily Brontë’s poems in 1952 with an introductory essay which I want to perpetuate. The selection was made on the basis of what I considered to be Emily’s best poems, but here again I sense a personal projection of the author’s spiritual life-force which is more condensed and direct, less diffused and spread out amongst different characters, than one finds in WutheringHeights.
Like many artists, Emily, and also to a decided extent Charlotte, had a social-behavioural problem. In them, it took the form of melancholy silence. We know that during their perod of adult-education in Brussels, they were invited to visit English homes, but the hostesses simply could not get any form of responsiveness out of them. It seems almost that they were in love with their loneliness, their northern melancholy. All the more, heart and soul, did they pour forth their feelings in the written page.
Death, that struck when I was most confiding
In my certain Faith of Joy to be
Emily’s lovely lines, whatever their ostensible intention – her poems were characterized frequently in the Gondal-myth sequences – have surely a sound of her own authentic spiritual experience.
I have entitled this book TheEssenceoftheBrontës, for the essence is what I intend to convey in the words of Charlotte and Emily Brontë themselves as well as in my own.
Muriel Spark
S. Giovanni in Oliveto December 1992
Illustrations
The Brontë ‘Gun Group’
Emily Brontë’s dog, Keeper
Ponden Hall, ‘Thrushcross Grange’
Emily Brontë, portrait by Branwell Brontë
The scene of WutheringHeights
Penistone Crags
1
The Brontës as Teachers
The Brontë ‘Gun Group’, drawing by Branwell Brontë (lefttoright Emily, Charlotte, Branwell, Anne) (bycourtesyofWalterScott)
Original watercolour of her dog, Keeper, by Emily Brontë (bycourtesyoftheBrontëSociety)
The Brontës as Teachers
The general feeling about the incursion into teaching of Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne Brontë is that it was little short of martyrdom. The letters of Charlotte, the diaries of Anne, the novels of both, abound with evidence that the experience of being teachers was an agony to all four. Nothing, we are given to understand, could be worse than to be a private governess, a tutor or a school teacher to such pupils as came the Brontës’ way; nothing worse than to be employed by such people as engaged the Brontës.
I am in sympathy with the view that their enforced choice of careers was a pity, (except that it provided marvellous material for fiction) and rejoice with everyone else that at least three of them discovered their true vocation in time to write their unique, unconformable books. But were the Brontës mere lambs among wolves when they set forth to teach? I suggest that if anything could equal the misfortune of their lot as teachers it was the lot of die respective pupils and employers of Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne.
Charlotte was die first to teach. Having practised for a while on her sisters she left Haworth Parsonage in 1835 to become a resident mistress at Roe Head school where previously she had been a pupil. Her formal education had covered little more than two years’ schooling supplemented by home tuition from her maiden aunt. When, just turned nineteen, she became a mistress at Roe Head, her main qualification as an instructor of the young was a protected upbringing; this was, after all, judged to be the highest qualification a girl could produce. The headmistress (that Miss Wooler who remained a lifelong friend to Charlotte) began by treating her as a friend. Charlotte stayed with Miss Wooler for over two years, but according to her letters and diaries she was miserable most of the time, as she well might be. Here is one of her diary entries:
All this day I have been in a dream, half miserable, half ecstatic … I had been toiling for nearly an hour with Miss Lister, Miss Marriot, and Ellen Cook, striving to teach them the distinction between an article and a substantive. The parsing lesson was completed; a dead silence had succeeded it in the schoolroom, and I sat sinking from irritation and weariness into a kind of lethargy. The thought came over me: Am I to spend all the best part of my life in this wretched bondage, forcibly suppressing my rage at the idleness, the apathy, and the hyperbolical and most asinine stupidity of these fat-headed oafs, and of compulsion assuming an air of kindness, patience and assiduity? Must I from day to day sit chained to this chair, prisoned within these four bare walls, while these glorious summer suns are burning in heaven and the year is revolving in its richest glow? Stung to the heart with this reflection I started up and mechanically walked to the window. A sweet August morning was smiling without … I felt as if I could have written gloriously … If I had had time to indulge it I felt that the vague suggestion of that moment would have settled down into some narrative better at least than anything I ever produced before. But just then a dolt came up with a lesson.
Now, all this did violence to Charlotte, who wanted to write, not teach. But what we are concerned with here is the effect of her frustration on the Misses Lister, Marriot and Cook, not to mention the unfortunate ‘dolt’ who interrupted Charlotte’s reverie. Were they all so unlike normal children, were they all such ‘fat-headed oafs’ that they failed to sense Miss Brontë’s contempt and fury? One cannot help feeling that they gained less from Charlotte’s instruction than she expended upon it by way of ‘suppressing my rage’.
But poor Charlotte was to fare worse. She presented herself in 1839 as governess to the children of a Mrs Sidgwick who, poor soul, did not dream she was about to harbour an eminent Victorian. Charlotte immediately transferred her dislike of the job to Mrs Sidgwick and her children, though she was not averse to Mr Sidgwick. Charlotte’s complaints were many and bitter: Mrs Sidgwick never left her a free moment to enjoy the spacious grounds and neighbouring countryside; Mrs Sidgwick would not allow the children, ‘riotous, perverse, unmanageable cubs’, to be corrected (a charge which Charlotte was to bring against her next employer and Anne against hers, somewhat contrary to notions of middle-class rearing of children in the 19th century); Mrs Sidgwick took Charlotte to task for sulking, whereupon Charlotte wept; Mrs Sidgwick expected Charlotte to love the children; and, final indignity, Mrs Sidgwick ‘overwhelms me with oceans of needlework, yards of cambric to hem, muslin nightcaps to make, and, above all things, dolls to dress’.
It sounds quite drastic. Certainly the patent misery of the new governess must have seemed so to Mrs Sidgwick who, from other accounts, is said to have been an amiable woman. No doubt she loaded on the needlework with a view to keeping Charlotte from brooding, to give her something to occupy her mind, for it is remarkable how often in those days melancholy was equated with vacancy of purpose and cheerfulness with a full life. Still, we cannot blame Mrs Sidgwick for being an average mediocre nonentity; she never claimed to be other. If anything was to blame it was the system which included needlework among other semi-domestic tasks in the normal duties of a governess. Unless we look upon Charlotte as a famous author, which we are not doing at the moment, the sewing was no real outrage. And whether it was any more degrading, any greater a bore, than is the supervision of conducted tours and school lunches to the present-day teaching profession, is a question.
This record of Charlotte’s brief sojourn with the Sidgwicks would be incomplete without the testimony of one of the Sidgwick pupils in later years, after Charlotte’s distaste for his family had been made public by Mrs Gaskell. He declared that ‘if Miss Brontë was desired to accompany them to Church – ‘Oh, Miss Brontë, do run up and put on your things, we want to start’ – she was plunged in dudgeon because she was being treated like a hireling. If, in consequence, she was not invited to accompany them, she was infinitely depressed because she was treated as an outcast and a friendless dependant.’ Since most of the Brontë victims were inarticulate, locked forever in the pillories of the Brontë letters and novels, I find this brief protest rather touching, coming from the otherwise mute and admittedly inglorious Sidgwick child.
As this was a temporary post Charlotte only had to endure it for less than three months. Before she left, one of the little Sidgwicks threw a Bible at her. He later became a clergyman.
Next comes Mrs White. Charlotte soon discovered that ‘she does not scruple to give way to anger in a very coarse, unladylike manner’. Charlotte preferred Mr White, in spite of her conviction that ‘his extraction is very low’. Meanwhile, she said, she was trying hard to like Mrs White. This effort was fruitful, notwithstanding Mrs White’s bad grammar of which Charlotte was critical, and the fact that Charlotte feared her to be an exciseman’s daughter. In the end, Mrs White won over the parson’s daughter, who came to admit that she was intrigued by the ‘fat baby’, and called her pupils ‘well-disposed’ though of course, ‘indulged’.
Behold now Charlotte in her last teaching post. The PensionnatHéger in Brussels is the scene, and Charlotte, having gone there to study French and German, has now become an English mistress in this school for young ladies. Her employer, Mme Héger, has grown rather suspicious of the English teacher and spies upon her; Charlotte apparently cannot think why. She prefers M. Héger. The schoolgirls are ‘selfish, animal and inferior’. And we are further delightfully informed that ‘their principles are rotten to the core’. Charlotte’s colleagues hate each other, and she them. So her letters go on. One of her fellow mistresses, worse than the rest, acts as a spy for Mme Héger, is false, is contemptible, is Catholic. In fact they are all Catholic, and in fact, as Charlotte writes to Branwell, ‘the people here are no go whatsoever’.
As the months proceed, Charlotte is giving English lessons to M. Héger, who seems well satisfied with her work and gives her presents of books occasionally. Charlotte declares that his goodness towards her compensates for the “deprivations and humiliations’ which are her lot, but on which she is not explicit.
But presently M. Héger takes to avoiding Charlotte, having first lectured her on the subject of ‘universal Bienveillance’. She, however, is no universalist; her bienveillance is focused on the object of her master whom she observes is ‘wonderfully influenced’ by his wife. With curious logic Charlotte now finds she can ‘no longer trust’ Mme Héger, and driven back to Haworth by that lady’s suspicions, proceeds to confirm them by writing a series of impassioned letters to M. Héger until he implores her to stop.
Let us now look at the teaching career of Branwell Brontë. At the age of twenty he joined the staff of a local school from which he retreated within six months. The small boys made fun of his red hair. After fortifying his dignity with a long interval of writing, painting, hard drinking and opium eating, he became tutor, in 1840, to the children of a Mr and Mrs Postlethwaite. Branwell’s view of his job can best be savoured from his own account of it written to one of his former drinking cronies:
If you saw me now you would not know me, and you would laugh to hear the character the people give me … Well, what am I? That is, what do they think I am? – a most sober, abstemious, patient, mild-hearted, virtuous, gentlemanly philosopher, the picture of good works, the treasure-house of righteous thoughts. Cards are shuffled under the tablecloth, glasses are thrust into the cupboard, if I enter the room. I take neither spirit, wine, nor malt liquors. I dress in black, and smile like a saint or martyr. Every lady says, ‘What a good young gentleman is the Postlethwaites’ tutor.’ This is a fact, as I am a living soul, and right comfortably do I laugh at them; but in this humour do I mean them to continue.
Branwell ends by saying that as he writes one of the Postlethwaite daughters is sitting close by…. ‘She little thinks the Devil is as near her….’
Branwell’s attitude to these folk, whatever else it amounts to, does make a welcome contrast with that expressed by his sisters in similar circumstances. The sons of the family he describes as ‘fine spirited lads’ – these being, no doubt, merely Charlotte’s ‘riotous, perverse, unmanageable cubs’ in a lighter aspect. And Branwell depicts Mr Postlethwaite as ‘of a right hearty, generous disposition’ and his wife as ‘a quiet, silent, amiable woman.’ But within a few months Branwell’s restless ambitions tore him from the Postlethwaites to visit Hartley Coleridge, and thence back to Haworth.
His next and last post as tutor came three years later. Anne introduced him into the household where she was employed as a governess. He was to teach the son of the house. His employer, Mr Robinson, was an aging invalid; Mrs Robinson was much younger. Branwell preferred Mrs Robinson. ‘This lady’, he wrote later, ‘(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.’ It took Mr Robinson two and a half years to confirm his suspicions, whereupon he wrote to Branwell, then on holiday, ‘intimating’ as Charlotte reported, ‘that he had discovered his proceedings… and charging him on pain of exposure to break off instantly and forever all communication with every member of his family’. Branwell insisted that Mrs Robinson returned his passion. Years afterwards, when Brontë biography began its voluminous course, she took occasion to deny it.
Anne’s post with the Robinsons was her second. The youngest Brontë proved the most patient of the four, and though by no means devoid of talent and the will to write, endured her teaching career for a longer period than the others. However, in proportion as she exercised restraint, so did her novels reveal exactly what she had restrained in the way of spleen. At the age of nineteen Anne took charge of the two eldest children of a Mrs Ingham. Before long, Charlotte was busy passing on Anne’s news: her pupils were ‘desperate little dunces’, ‘excessively indulged’, ‘violent’ and ‘modern’. Anne left this family after eighteen months’ attempt to cope with them; she was somewhat the worse for the experience.
Anne was twenty-one when she went to die Robinsons. Charlotte, who exaggerated most things, gave out that Anne was ‘a patient, persecuted stranger’ amongst ‘grossly insolent, proud and tyrannical’ people. Direct evidence from Anne has not survived beyond two diary fragments, the first of which commits her no further than ‘I dislike the situation and wish to change it for another’. (Her novels provide the usual terrible children.) She remained four years, during which time her pupils had become very fond of her. In fact, the Robinson girls continued to visit and write to Anne, long after she had left the family and her brother had been dismissed in disgrace from it. Anne’s only other direct comment on the job refers to her earlier dislike of it: ‘I was wishing to leave it then, and if I had known that I had four years longer to stay, how wretched I should have been; but during my stay I have had some very unpleasant and undreamt-of experience of human nature’. This last lament is taken to refer to Branwell’s intrigue with Mrs Robinson and can be found precisely stated in TheTenantofWildfellHall.
Emily, like her sisters, was nineteen when she set off to be a teacher of Law Hill School and it seems fairly certain that Emily was still nineteen when she did the sensible thing and returned. All we know of her stay at Law Hill is that she wrote a letter which, according to Charlotte, ‘gives an appalling account of her duties – hard labour from six in the morning until near eleven at night, with only one half-hour exercise between. This is slavery’. ‘I fear’, Charlotte adds, ‘she will never stand it’. Emily did not stand it. But the curious thing is, that during this period Emily’s poetic output was higher than at any other time, which seems to indicate that she was not entirely starved of leisure.
Emily did not long endure her job as a music-teacher at the Héger establishment. When she was called back to Haworth with Charlotte on the death of her aunt, Emily showed no desire to return with her sister to Brussels. Much has been made of the fact that M. Héger expressed approval of Emily (after she was dead and famous) declaring, somewhat ambiguously I have always thought, that she should have been a navigator. He also gave the opinions that she might have been a great historian and she should have been a man. Nowhere does he say that she should have been a music-teacher. And at the time, M. Héger felt moved only to inform Emily’s father, ‘She was losing whatever remained of her ignorance, and also of what was worse – timidity’.
For the three sisters it was torture while it lasted; for Branwell, fun while it lasted. Their frail constitutions were damaged and much of their creative energy dissipated in the uncongenial schoolroom. They did their best to earn a living in the only way open to them. But from the point of view which it has been my purpose to adopt, it might also be thought that genius, if thwarted, resolves itself in an infinite capacity for inflicting trouble, or at least for finding fault. It is demanding too much of genius to ask it to keep its personality out of anything; even the lesser talent can seldom do so.
Branwell’s conduct was unprofessional, to say the least. Charlotte was not, to say the least, proof against those states of mind which the most protected upbringing will not protect. Anne’s reaction was to hoard her resentment. Emily’s way, by far the most successful, was to get out of the predicament with all speed (and note: she shows no obsession in her work with the governess theme). The Brontës, however, gained ample revenge for all injustices real or imagined.
So one might, therefore, without compunction enquire whether their employers – the Sidgwicks and Inghams and Whites – did in fact fail in their duty to their employees; or were they merely unfortunate in crossing the Brontës’ path? I should say that if their sense of duty were wanting, it was to their children. And along with this thought comes the realization, supported from other sources besides the Brontës, that the wealthy middle class of England during the last century were willing to hand over their children to any young woman who came out of a clergyman’s home, neurotic or ailing as she might be.
The Brontës once planned to start a school of their own. The project, as mercifully for others as for themselves, came to nothing. Branwell’s wasted life gave a warning signal to his sisters, and miraculously they asserted their creative powers.
I have not depended on their novels to support this essay, since I believe that fiction is a suspect witness (and if it is not stranger than truth, it ought to be). But, of course, unmistakable versions of Brontë pupils and employers are to be found in the novels of Charlotte and Anne.
Perhaps the lesson to be drawn, for any writer with the necessary will of iron, who lacks only the opportunity to write, is that he should prove himself no good at anything else.
M.S.
2
Letters of the Brontës
edited and introduced by Muriel Spark
Introduction 27
THE LETTERS
1 Maria Branwell to the Rev. Patrick Brontë
August26th, 1812
2 Maria Branwell to the Rev. Patrick Brontë
November18th, 1812
3 Patrick Brontë to the Rev. John Buckworth
November27th, 1821
4 Patrick Brontë to Mary Burder
July 28th, 1823
5 Mary Burder to Patrick Brontë
August8th, 1823
6 Patrick Brontë to Mrs. Franks
April28th, 1831
7 Charlotte Brontë to Branwell Brontë
May17th, 1831
8 Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey
January1st, 1833
9 Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey
June19th, 1834
10 Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey
July4th, 1834
11 Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey
March13th, 1835
12 Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey
July2nd, 1835
13 Branwell Brontë to the Editor of Blackwood’sMagazine
December7th, 1835
14 Branwell Brontë to the Editor of Blackwood’sMagazine
April8th, 1836
15 Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey
May 10th, 1836
16 Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey
1836
17 Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey
1836
18 Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey
1836
19 Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey
1836
20 Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey
December6th, 1836
21 Branwell Brontë to the Editor of Blackwood’s
MagazineJanuary9th, 1837
22 Branwell Brontë to William Wordsworth
January19th, 1837
23 Robert Southey to Charlotte Brontë
March, 1837
24 Charlotte Brontë to Robert Southey
March16th, 1837
25 Robert Southey to Charlotte Brontë
March22nd, 1837
26 Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey
October2nd, 1837
27 Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey
January4th, 1838
28 Charlotte Brontë to the Rev. Henry Nussey
March5th, 1839
29 Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey
March12th, 1839
30 Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey
April15th, 1839
31 Charlotte Brontë to Emily J. Brontë
June8th, 1839
32 Charlotte Brontë to Emily J.Brontë
July—, 1839
33 Branwell Brontë to John Brown
March13th, 1840
34 Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey
April7th, 1840
35 Branwell Brontë to Hartley Coleridge
April20th, 1840
36 Branwell Brontë to Hartley Coleridge
June27th, 1840
37 Charlotte Brontë to William Wordsworth
1840
38 Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey
July14th, 1840
39 Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey
July 19th, 1841
40 Emily Brontë’s ‘Birthday’ Note
July 30th, 1841
41 Anne Brontë’s ‘Birthday’ Note
July30th, 1841
42 Charlotte Brontë to Elizabeth Branwell
September29th, 1841
43 Charlotte Brontë to Emily J. Brontë
November7th, 1841
44 Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey
May, 1842
45 Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey
1842
46 Branwell Brontë to Francis H. Grundy
October29th, 1842
47 Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey
November10th, 1842
48 Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey
January30th, 1843
49 Charlotte Brontë to Branwell Brontë
May1st, 1843
50 Emily Brontë to Ellen Nussey
May22nd, 1843
51 Charlotte Brontë to Emily J. Brontë
May29th, 1843
52 Charlotte Brontë to Emily J. Brontë
September2nd, 1843
53 Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey
October13th, 1843
54 Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey
November15th, 1843
55 Charlotte Brontë to Emily J. Brontë
December19th, 1843
56 Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey
January23rd, 1844
57 Charlotte Brontë to M. Héger
July24th,1844
58 Charlotte Brontë to M. Héger
October24th, 1844
59 Charlotte Brontë to M. Héger
January8th, 1845
60 Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey
July 31st, 1845
61 Emily Brontë’s ‘Birthday’ Note
July30th, 1845
62 Anne Brontë’s ‘Birthday’ Note
63 Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey
September8th, 1845
64 Branwell Brontë to Francis H. Grundy
October, 1845
65 Charlotte Brontë to M. Héger
November18th, 1845
66 Charlotte Brontë to Aylott & Jones
January28th, 1846
67 Charlotte Brontë to Aylott & Jones
February6th, 1846
68 Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey
March3rd, 1846
69 Charlotte Brontë to Aylott & Jones
April6th, 1846
70 Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey
June 17th, 1846
71 Charlotte Brontë to Aylott & Jones
July10th, 1846
72 Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey
December13th, 1846
73 Charlotte Brontë to Thomas De Quincey
June16th, 1847
74 Charlotte Brontë to Messrs. Smith, Elder and Co.
August24th, 1847
75 Anne Brontë to Ellen Nussey
October4th, 1847
76 Charlotte Brontë to W.S. Williams
October28th, 1847
77 Charlotte Brontë to G.H. Lewes
November6th, 1847
78 Charlotte Brontë to W.S. Williams
November10th, 1847
79 Charlotte Brontë to W.S. Williams
December21st, 1847
80 Charlotte Brontë to G.H. Lewes
January12th, 1848
81 Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey
May3rd, 1848
82 Branwell Brontë to J.B. Leyland
June17th, 1848
83 Branwell Brontë to John Brown
1848
84 Charlotte Brontë to Mary Taylor
September4th, 1848
85 Charlotte Brontë to W.S. Williams
July31st, 1848
86 Charlotte Brontë to W.S. Williams
October2nd, 1848
87 Charlotte Brontë to W.S. Williams
November22nd, 1848
88 Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey
November17th, 1848
89 Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey
December19th, 1848
90 Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey
December23rd, 1848
91 Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey
January15th, 1849
92 Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey
March29th, 1849
93 Anne Brontë to Ellen Nussey
April 5th, 1849
94 Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey
April12th, 1849
95 Charlotte Brontë to W.S. Williams
May27th, 1849
96 Charlotte Brontë to W.S. Williams
June4th, 1849
97 Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey
July14th, 1849
98 Charlotte Brontë to W.S. Williams
August24th, 1849
99 Charlotte Brontë to W.S. Williams
September21st, 1849
100 Charlotte Brontë to George Smith
October4th, 1849
101 Charlotte Brontë to W.S. Williams
November1st, 1849
102 Charlotte Brontë to G.H. Lewes
November1st, 1849
103 Charlotte Brontë to W.S. Williams
November20th, 1849
104 Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey
December4th, 1849
105 Charlotte Brontë to G.H. Lewes
January19th, 1850
106 Charlotte Brontë to Rev. P. Brontë
June4th, 1850
107 Charlotte Brontë to Mrs. Gaskell
August27th, 1850
108 Charlotte Brontë to G.H. Lewes
October17th, 1850
109 Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey
October23rd, 1850
110 Charlotte Brontë to James Taylor
November6th, 1850
111 Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey
December18th, 1850
112 Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey
April23rd, 1851
113 Charlotte Brontë to the Rev. P. Brontë
May30th, 1851
114 Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey
August25th, 1852
115 Charlotte Brontë to George Smith
October30th, 1852
116 Charlotte Brontë to W.S. Williams
November6th, 1852
117 Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey
December9th, 1852
118 Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey
December15th, 1852
119 Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey
December18th, 1852
120 Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey
April 6th, 1853
121 Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey
May27th, 1853
122 Charlotte Brontë to Mrs. Gaskell
June 1st, 1853
123 Charlotte Brontë to Mrs. Gaskell
July9th, 1853
124 Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey
April11th, 1854
125 Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey
August9th, 1854
126 Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey
December7th, 1854
127 Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey
January19th, 1855
128 A.B. Nicholls to Ellen Nussey
February1st, 1855
129 Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey
February21st, 1855
130 A.B. Nicholls to Ellen Nussey
March31st, 1855
Introduction
The letters of famous people can be placed into two categories: there is the type of letter which becomes itself a valuable contribution to literature through its wit, style or wisdom; another kind is that whose main importance lies in the provision of a background to its author’s life. Especially in the correspondence of great writers and poets, these two factors are very often combined; the letters of Coleridge and of Keats, for example, are at once works of literary delight and what are popularly known as human documents; while those of Jane Austen, written with the object of imparting domestic news in the most amusing possible manner, offer both an outline of the outward events of her life and a vehicle for her particular brand of irony.
Yet it very often happens that a writer’s capacity for prose expression of a high order is jealously preserved for creative or critical work intended for publication; the letters of such writers fall mainly into the second category, that of biographical material. Forever open to the sentimentalizing of the curio-hunter and relic-worshipper, or to the theorizing of biographers, it is to this category that the Brontë letters, for die most part, belong. That is not to imply that the correspondence of this remarkable family is devoid of grace, humour and perspicacity, for it contains all these attributes. The distinction is a general one, and in making it I would like to distinguish also between an essential and a superficial employment of such biographical data. For where outstanding figures of literature are concerned, surely the greatest benefit to be derived from a study of their lives is that which penetrates the operation of the creative mind, interpreting the spirit which motivated it. Questions of environment and parentage, of those intimate details concerning love affairs, clothing, even diet, with which Brontë biography in particular abounds – all are secondary considerations if not focused on the existence of JaneEyre,Villette,WutheringHeights or TheTenantofWildfellHall. I have used the word ‘secondary’ rather than ‘irrelevant’ in this context since biographical material of the Brontës may be considered exceptional in one respect: the story of this family presents a dramatic entity and a progressive panorama, equal in range and emotional power to any of their own novels. It is not difficult, therefore, to understand why new Brontë biographies appear frequently, nor why theories, some in varying degrees of wildness, have been constructed round the thousand-odd Brontë letters in existence.
The dramatic side of the story having been recognized at an early date, it was inevitable perhaps that a protagonist should have been demanded; and natural, too, that Charlotte, whose letters form the great bulk of the family documents, should have become the leading character around whom her father, brother and sisters seem to move. Yet this assumption is really not justifiable. Most of the letters are Charlotte’s, but from what they tell us of her family, of their struggles, attitudes, triumphs and sorrows, it seems the more apparent that each member of the household is an unusual personality, despite the discrepancy of their separate achievements. It is not until we come to examine these figures, both in isolation and in their correlation to each other, that we can perceive in Emily’s aloofness and unsociability the qualities of profound poetic spirit; it is when we understand the frustrations and despair that Charlotte underwent, or the desires and foibles peculiar to her nature, that we discover the author of JaneEyre; only in the domestic scene can we find the clue to Branwell’s failure, and to the consistent disparagement of Anne’s achievements by Charlotte.
In making the following selection, I have tried to choose those letters most salutary to the clear presentation of the Brontë story, unencumbered by the mass of correspondence devoted to events extraneous to the main course of their lives. If this drama has no single protagonist, it has a pronounced motif – one that recurs constantly throughout the Brontë lives and works. This motif is the element of storm: time and again the sisters described some cataclysmic event of nature as a sympathetic manifestation of some inner, personal tempest. The theme first occurs in the shipwreck reference by their mother, Maria Branwell, in one of her letters; its pagan presence was felt by their clergyman father when he wrote of his wife’s death, ‘… another storm arose, more terrible than the former – one that shook every part of the mortal frame and often threatened it with dissolution. My dear wife was taken dangerously ill …’, and again, ‘One day, I remember it well; it was a gloomy day, a day of clouds and darkness, three of my little children were taken ill….’ The storm, whistling through the stone-flagged parsonage that overlooked the graveyard of Haworth, returned to sever the chestnut tree at Thornfield, in JaneEyre; it fastened on the grim outline of Wuthering Heights and slammed the inimical doors of Wildfell Hall. Not one of the Brontës but faced its spirit and implications.
Patrick Brontë, one of ten children of an Irish farmer, made his way to Cambridge University with £7 in his pocket. There, by means of a grant partly endowed by William Wilberforce and a reduction of fees by his college, he was able to take a Bachelor of Arts degree, and in 1806 was ordained. After occupying several curacies he met Maria Branwell, a young Cornishwoman of a clerical family, whom he married in 1812, and it was the children of this obscure Irish and Cornish alliance who came to achieve lasting recognition by readers of English literature.
Throughout the family correspondence Patrick Brontë makes many appearances, although few of his own letters exist. Those that bear his signature show him to be forceful and egotistical, with that pathetic naïvety which appears in his offers of marriage to Mary Burder after his wife’s death. It is known that he had eccentric habits, but these were means to his own self-expression; as far as the Haworth ménage was concerned, he behaved like a conventional Victorian paterfamilias. Whenever the question of domestic arrangements arose, whenever one or other of his children left home in pursuit of a career, and even in the matter of Charlotte’s marriage, it was always ‘Papa’s’ comfort that received the first consideration. Yet, for his time, he was not an unduly oppressive parent. He was immensely proud of his children’s attainments; and Mrs Gaskell in her LifeofCharlotteBrontë tells of his early recognition of the unusual qualities of their minds, and his attempts to elucidate them.
