Romancing Miss Bronte

by Juliet Gael

  Charlotte waved the letter under her nose. “We have news. From Aylott and Jones.”

  Emily laid down her book and looked up.

  “I’m afraid the sales have been disappointing. They’ve only sold two copies of the book.”

  “Two? That’s all?”

  Charlotte turned over a wicker laundry basket, tucked up her skirts, and sat down beside her sister. “However,” she hurried to say, “it has finally been reviewed.” She unfolded the clippings that had been enclosed in the letter. “By the Athenaeum and the Critic.” She peered over her spectacles at her sister and said with a smile, “Don’t be so glum, Emmy. The reviews are good. The Critic’s review is positively eulogistic.”

  “Is it?” Emily said quietly. Charlotte knew she was trying to hide how much it meant to her.

  “Yes, truly, dearest. They call our poems genuine and fresh.” She leaned forward, laid her hand on Emily’s knee, and beamed up at her. “But the lion’s share of praise goes to Ellis Bell, and that’s as it should be.”

  Charlotte read the reviews aloud. The critics hailed Emily’s poetry as “an inspiration which may yet find an audience in the outer world … a fine quaint spirit which may have things to speak that men will be glad to hear—and an evident power of wing …”

  Charlotte glanced up from time to time to watch how Emily’s face—always so sullen and grave—came alive at this praise. It was all the more meaningful because the critic knew nothing about her.

  “And there’s something else,” Charlotte said as she passed the letter and the reviews to Emily. “There’s a gentleman who wants our autographs. A Mr. Enoch from Warwick. He bought one of the only two copies sold.”

  Emily smiled broadly. “We have an admirer?”

  “Yes, we do, and I think we should oblige Mr. Enoch as quickly as possible. He may very well be the only admirer we’ll ever have.”

  That evening, after their father and the servants had gone up to bed, they took up a sheet of fine stationery and signed the names of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. Then Emily took out her penknife, whittled her quill to a perfect point, and began the task of making a clean, legible copy of Wuthering Heights.

  Although she would never admit as much to her sister, Charlotte had been deeply impressed by the powerful human drama of Wuthering Heights, the passionate love between Heathcliff and Cathy, its peculiar inevitability and mythic quality. She was familiar with many of Emily’s Gondal poems and old narratives from which her sister had drawn her novel, but the final work had indeed haunted her—not merely because of its brutality and amorality, but because of its undeniable power. It had forced her to recognize the sad inadequacy of her own novel.

  The Professor had been finished, but the work had left her deeply unsatisfied. For all the silent love she had carried for Heger and the never-voiced heartache of separation and loss, she had not come close to expressing the power of her feelings. She had taken up the voice of her male protagonist and given very little of herself to the French lacemaker, and all her passion was lost somewhere in between. She had painted a superficial portrait, a simple narrative of wish fulfillment, when what she had wanted to produce was something urgent, true, and personal. Instinctively, she was seeking a narrative—impassioned like poetry—that might paint the workings of memory and the unconscious mind, all the powerful formative forces of her whole experience fused into images, emerging symbolically in the fullness of the imagination.

  That summer, throughout the long, warm evenings as she sat near the open window darning her father’s socks or mending one of Emily’s petticoats, her thoughts returned to images that had always given her so much pleasure: a grand Gothic hall in an isolated place, a subservient young woman and a master. But as the ideas gave birth to a story, a new kind of heroine emerged. This young woman would have passion and soul—she would be a governess perhaps, poor and plain like herself, but neither slavish nor meek in spirit. She would be inferior in rank to her master, but in every other way his equal. She would name her Jane Eyre.

  Chapter Eight

  Toward the end of August Charlotte accompanied her father on the forty-mile journey to Manchester to have his eyes examined. The surgeon declared the cataract sufficiently hardened to be removed, a procedure that would need to be done without anesthesia; they would administer only a little belladonna to desensitize the eye. Afterward, her father would be confined to bed in absolute darkness and stillness for at least a month.

  They remained in Manchester, and Charlotte spent the next few days finding lodgings in town and hiring a nurse. By the end of the week she was sitting in a stifling-hot waiting room while the surgeon cut into her father’s eye.

  Finally the door opened, and an assistant ushered her into the back surgery. Her father was sitting up, both eyes bandaged. They had removed the high white neckcloth he habitually wore, and it seemed to Charlotte that they had stripped him of his pride and rectitude. As his sight had diminished, he had sat in the gloom of his study, increasingly irascible, impatient, and demanding, so that at times Charlotte had felt his presence like a weight upon her slight frame, tied to her at every moment of the day, keeping her as much a prisoner as he had become. Now, with his long pale neck exposed and his eyes swathed in gauze, she was alarmed by how vulnerable he seemed, how this powerful man had been reduced to a childlike helplessness.

  “The operation was successful,” the doctor announced with solemn reassurance. “His sight will soon return to normal. I must say, Miss Brontë, your father was quite courageous. Truly, he was an exceptional patient. Very steady. Didn’t so much as flinch.”

  “Remarkable,” Patrick boomed, “what our surgeons are able to accomplish these days.” Then, gesturing blindly in the air: “My cravat, Charlotte. Get me my cravat. If I sit like this for much longer I’ll catch a cold for sure.”

  Charlotte found the long strip of white silk and wound it carefully around his neck. She helped him while he fumbled with his coat and guided him down the steps and outside, to the waiting carriage. He was more than six feet tall, and she came just above his elbow.

  When the carriage jerked into motion, Charlotte reached for her father’s hand and gripped it firmly.

  “Everything’s going to be fine now, Papa,” she said with quiet relief.

  “Oh, Charlotte,” he said in a solemn voice, “would that it were so easy to remove sin from the heart as it is to remove a hardening of the eye. With a sharp scalpel and a little burning, and several weeks in confined penitence, we see clearly again—no sin hardening the heart, nothing to cloud the light of Christ.”

  She gave his hand a squeeze. Suddenly the anxiety that had weighed on her for days—anticipating his surgery, the fear of losing him, the troubles of caring for him in his blindness—swept through her with a rush of emotion, and tears flooded her eyes.

  The nurse was quiet and efficient, and there was little for Charlotte to do except prepare their meals. She was not much of a cook, but she managed to put food on the table and no one complained. For most of the day she sat at the window, where a few rays of light filtered through the gap in the curtains. She would knit for a few moments, and then she would pause and stare into the darkness for long hours, until the light began to fade and it was time to prepare their tea. There were no distractions, no one to inconvenience her or make demands on her, and in the quiet hours she turned to her imagination. This was her most precious companion, her great comforter—a means to defy the harsh reality of her existence. In her imaginary world she could change the natural order of things; life could be keenly enjoyed and needs fully satisfied. Over the long days spent in a sunless and silent room while Charlotte waited for her father’s eyes to heal, Jane Eyre would make herself seen and heard.

  Charlotte had little control over what emerged. She believed in the supremacy of the unfettered imagination. The inspired poet never paused for reflection, did not think about unity; ideas came naturally. In that peculiar light of creation she returned to her chil
dhood, to long-suppressed memories of their days at Cowan Bridge. To Maria and Elizabeth, her long-dead sisters.

  Maria had been ten when she went away to Cowan Bridge. After their mother’s death, Aunt Branwell had kept the house and ruled the servants, but Maria was the one whose counsel they heeded, whose model of goodness they followed. She was wise beyond her years and the most beloved of them all. It wrenched Charlotte’s heart to see her go. Eight-year-old Charlotte had stood on the tiny garden plot in front of the parsonage watching Maria and Elizabeth wave good-bye from the back of a cart, Maria wearing her own pale brand of courage and a determination to accept any hardship Providence threw her way. Watching her, Charlotte thought of a lamb driven off to slaughter, a sweet-faced girl with long, skinny legs dressed in a straw bonnet and a thin blue cloth coat, gifts from the charity ladies in Haworth. She gripped a small, scuffed bag. No one would have guessed by looking at her how powerfully intellectual and talented she was.

  Three weeks later, Charlotte was driven off to Cowan Bridge by her father, and then late in November little Em, who was only six, was sent away to join them.

  She recalled her first meal the day of her arrival. A bowl of rice pudding was passed down to her. Charlotte took a mouthful and gagged.

  The girl next to her gave her a sly look and whispered, “I know, it’s sour. The milk’s always sour here. But if you don’t eat it they won’t give you breakfast, and the bread’s the only tolerable thing you’ll get all day. The only thing that isn’t rotten, I mean.”

  Charlotte looked down the table to her sister Maria.

  If Maria swallows, I shall swallow, she thought, forcing another spoonful to her lips. Maria was chattering away to the girl next to her and didn’t seem to be bothered by the disgusting concoction. The second spoonful stuck in Charlotte’s throat. She watched another girl spit hers into a handkerchief; Charlotte did the same and emptied her handkerchief in the yard when they went outdoors.

  This was a charity school, and Charlotte expected frugality; her own home was austere and sparsely furnished, and she had watched Aunt calculate the flour and meat down to the penny. But the parsonage was a clean, tidy place and their food was properly cooked. Here, despite all the tricks she pulled on herself, summoning up images of roast pigeon or treacle or holding her breath while she chewed, there was nothing she could do to keep the food down. The hot pot was not beef but only fat, gristle, and potatoes, boiled to the color of slate. There were always disgusting things floating in the porridge, hairs and unidentifiable bits you couldn’t chew. One night, after the others were asleep, the girl in the bed next to Charlotte’s whispered that she had seen the cook take the ladle out of the pig-swill tub and use it to measure out the milk. They were all hungry, and one girl was quite skilled at stealing bread, but this Charlotte refused to do.

  Every Sunday they traipsed two miles through snow and wet fields with wooden pattens strapped to their thin-soled shoes to attend Reverend Wilson’s morning service, often staying for the afternoon one as well. They sat shivering through long hours of prayer in the damp church, their lips blue and fingers numb. Their feet never dried out, and at night their toes were raw and stiff from the cold.

  Beatings were to be expected, although there seemed to be no justice in them. Maria, sharp and clever as she was, often forgot to clean her nails or tie her pinafore, so she was frequently under the cane, even when she was very ill and had barely the strength to stand. This turned Charlotte’s stomach; she burned with indignation and longed to cry out in rebellion.

  She remembered watching her sister drag her thin legs over the side of the bed, reaching for her dress.

  “But I deserved it, Charlotte.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “But I did. I’m far too careless about my appearance, and that will not do in a governess. It’s for my own good.”

  “You’re ill, Maria. How can they expect—”

  Maria began to cough, deep, rasping coughs that brought up blood and stained her handkerchief a sharp crimson red.

  “I cannot bear seeing you treated like this.”

  “Don’t be weak, Charlotte. It’s silly to say you cannot bear what it is your fate to bear.”

  No one wanted to hear her complaints, not God nor Mr. Wilson, the director—they were, after all, one and the same. She would certainly never complain to her father.

  Charlotte was a grave and industrious child, and her needlework was always meticulous, which seemed to please the teachers. She thought if she was quiet enough, and small and plain enough, they would not take notice of her, although she suspected that every hint of feeling was visible on her face. It would become her habit to look down so that people could not read her mind.

  It required a steely fortitude to make it through the winter. Maria grew weaker and weaker, and in February she was sent home. With the changing winds of spring, a fever swept through the school. The girls fell ill with terrifying rapidity, and the doctor pressed Reverend Wilson to remove them from the premises to a healthier location. Grudgingly he consented; those who were still left standing would be whisked away to a town on the Lancashire coast. It was all done in great haste. As they waited on the front lawn for the carriages to be loaded, Charlotte saw Elizabeth, too weak to walk, emerge from the school on the arm of a strange, dour-faced woman. She was lifted into a gig and driven away. Charlotte, in a panic, broke away and found Miss Andrews to beg an explanation; she was told only that her sister was too ill to accompany them and had been sent home.

  In Silverdale they were herded into a school with makeshift cots, but by then they were fewer than a dozen. The next afternoon their father arrived. They saw him marching toward them over a sandy dune, his black coat whipped by the wind, his features frozen with anger and fear so that it appeared he was wearing a mask. Emily thought they had done something wrong to anger him, but Charlotte knew he had come to save them. She flew into his arms.

  On the way home their father told them that Maria had died of consumption. Elizabeth survived only ten more days, and then the family vault in the church was opened again and they lowered the tiny casket down into the gloom until it came to rest beside that of her mother and Maria.

  After the burial service, as Charlotte walked back home behind her father, up the path through the cemetery with the icy wind flaying her cheeks, she realized that she was no longer concealed, tucked obscurely within the folds of the clan. God had thrust her into the forefront at the head of the dwindling band of children. He had done it intentionally. It had fallen to her, the puny one of the brood, to set an example at all times.

  When at last Charlotte settled down with her stub of a pencil and small squares of paper and began Jane Eyre’s story, she could barely keep up with her thoughts. She wrote in a white heat, stopping only to dash out to the butcher for a few chops and to boil some potatoes or butter some bread for their tea. Her father, ever the good patient, lay in silence. The nurse applied leeches to his temples, and then she knitted or dozed in her chair by his bed. No one asked Charlotte what she was doing with the empty, silent hours in the darkness.

  After several weeks the bandages were removed, but there were another two weeks of confinement in a sunless and quiet room. Finally the time came to pack up and go home. Patrick’s sight had been restored. By that time, Jane Eyre had fled her lover and Thornfield Hall. She had taken a carriage as far as her money had allowed her to go, and now she was on a strange road and Charlotte had no idea what would become of her.

  Charlotte packed the manuscript pages into her trunk; at the train station in Manchester she consigned it to the porter, then took a seat next to her father in the crowded compartment. On the journey home, while her father gazed out the window, Charlotte realized she had not even had the time to read what she had written. She would return home and stash it away on a shelf in her closet with other unfinished stories and pick up the monotonous activities of her busy life.

  It would be nearly a year before she would comp
lete the novel, and she would never fully understand that, in an attempt to capture her love for a man, she had created a myth. Jane’s lover would have Constantin Heger’s weakness for chocolate and cigars, his dark features, and an athletic physique that had the power to arouse her, but there would also be symbols of the father—powerful, distant, sightless—(she would say to him, “I shall keep out of your way all day, as I have been accustomed to do: you may send for me in the evening, when you feel disposed to see me, and I’ll come then; but at no other time”). There would be hints of the noble Zamorna of her childhood stories, her oldest and dearest hero, a tortured, complex man. With this rough material mined from memory and the subconscious she created Edward Rochester, a man of intelligence and sensitivities equal to her own, a man entirely beyond her social reach. He would be blinded at the end, but she would restore his sight; plain, small, and insignificant though she might seem, he would find that she could fascinate a man like him and win his heart.

  Her subconscious had understood—if she did not—that the obstacles to happiness were not merely external; it would take more than a slyly manipulative wife to thwart their union. Jane would be foiled by a violent, horrific creature, a madwoman, barely human at all. Although scarcely articulate, Mrs. Rochester would embody all the darkness of Charlotte’s psyche: fire, fear, blood, sensuality, the foreign and the exotic—all these things trapped and enclosed in a room in an attic in the past.

  Chapter Nine

  There was little at home that winter to excite Charlotte’s enthusiasm. She wrote frequent letters to Ellen, commenting with wry humor on the dreary events of life in Haworth. Mr. Nicholls had returned from Ireland without a wife and seemed to have no prospects of obtaining one. Although he had been fully ordained that year and could have sought a living of his own, he appeared to be quite content to tend to the business of his church school and play second fiddle to her father. Patrick secretly scorned his curate’s lack of ambition, but as Arthur was by all accounts conscientious and hardworking, Patrick refrained from voicing such cynical opinions and counted himself fortunate to keep Arthur in Haworth.