Romancing Miss Bronte

by Juliet Gael

  They eased her onto the sofa, and Charlotte hovered over her, tears running down her face, nervously fidgeting first with the lap blanket and then the pillow under Anne’s head, in an effort to make her sister comfortable.

  “Take courage, Charlotte,” Anne said. “You will not be alone. Ellen will be a sister to you, and God will not abandon you.” She quieted her sister’s busy hands and whispered, “Thank you for bringing me here. I am happy, and God has blessed me with a gentle death.”

  At that moment, the clock in the parlor chimed the hour and the chambermaid called to them through the half-open door that dinner was being served in the dining room. When Charlotte turned back to Anne, she was dead.

  She was buried at Scarborough in St. Mary’s churchyard on a cliff overlooking the bay, wearing the pretty green-sprigged dress she had purchased a few days before. Only Charlotte and Ellen were there to mourn, along with Miss Wooler, their old schoolmistress from Roe Head, who was summering in her house in North Bay.

  Charlotte’s father wrote, urging Charlotte to remain with Ellen in Scarborough for the sake of her own health, but the town was far too gay to suit her mood. They moved farther down the coast, to a quiet fishing village where the waves crashed and thundered against the cliffs and seagulls haunted the empty beach.

  From there, far away from the throng, Charlotte resumed her correspondence with Mr. Williams in London:

  Had I never believed in a future life before, my sisters’ fate would assure me of it. There must be Heaven or we must despair, for life seems bitter, brief, blank. To me, these two have left in their memories a noble legacy. Were I quite solitary in the world—bereft even of Papa—there is something in the past I can love intensely and honor deeply, and it is something which cannot change—which cannot decay—which immortality guarantees from corruption.

  A year ago, had a prophet warned me how I should stand in June 1849—how stripped and bereaved—had he foretold the autumn, the winter, the spring of sickness and suffering to be gone through, I should have thought—this can never be endured. It is over, Branwell—Emily—Anne are gone like dreams, gone as Maria and Elizabeth went twenty years ago. I have buried them one by one, and thus far God has upheld me.

  The fact is, my work is my best companion—hereafter I look for no great earthly comfort except what congenial occupation can give.

  Then, with her emotions still raw, she picked up the pen again and returned to Shirley.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Charlotte tilted the tall looking glass to catch her full reflection. The black silk dress trimmed in velvet had seemed smart enough back in Haworth, but here in London none of her clothes seemed quite right. She had poured over patterns with Ellen and gone through two dressmakers, worrying herself sick over fashions and fittings, always questioning her own judgment and never fully trusting that of anyone else. Every attempt at a more fashionable style would eventually send her scurrying back to safety behind the familiar neat and tidy look.

  Whatever she did, she always felt herself lacking.

  She stepped back from the mirror and turned to the side. The folds of the full skirt swung gracefully with her step, and the close-fitting corsage showed off her tiny waist to advantage. The high bodice was cut slightly loose, to give the illusion of breasts; other women padded their bosoms, but Charlotte would not. In a nervous gesture of which she was unaware, her hand crept to her neck, to the jet mourning brooch, her sole adornment. To anyone who met her, it served as a solemn reminder of the events that had shaped her life during the past year.

  Returning home from Scarborough that summer had proved to be a test of bravery in the face of intolerable pain. In the past, home had been a haven. Now there were too many empty rooms. Every evening after Martha and Tabby had retired upstairs to their room at the back of the house, and Arthur had come and gone, with the dogs settled down before the fire, a profound silence filled the parsonage. She would try to imagine them sitting with her, Emily on her stool before the fire, Anne in her chair, but all she could see was the deep vault and the dark earth where they now lay. Her only prop was a faith that seemed miserably inadequate to her grief. “I cannot avoid this,” she would say to herself as she squinted through her spectacles at some trivial piece of handiwork, her vision often blurred by tears. “I must endure it,” she would say, and then suddenly, with no provocation, the guilt and pain would start to rise.

  She found escape in her characters, Shirley and Caroline. At the beginning they bore traces of Ellen and, especially, Mary; with Emily and Anne gone, they became a way to give life to companions now in the grave. Motherless herself, she created a mother for Caroline—albeit clumsily. Against a background of political change and social struggle, she explored the complex psychological landscape of Woman’s needs, her impotence and powerlessness.

  In Shirley, she probed the injustices that enraged and embittered her. She exposed the silliness of men of the church, the pathetic alienation of spinsters—a future she feared would be her own. Throughout the novel ran a current of hostility and alienation between men and women, an image of her own painful relationships. Nothing was resolved at the end. There were no proposals for radical change because Charlotte had no solutions, not for her own life nor anyone else’s. In the end, she simply married off Caroline and Shirley to imperfect men, leaving them to struggle on in an imperfect society.

  With the publication of Shirley, her fame only grew brighter. Charlotte thought the book somewhat sad and bitter, but her publisher had expressed himself satisfied, and now the reviewers had taken hold of the work. If they found less to excite, they also found less to condemn.

  George Smith and his mother had quickly written to invite her to their home in Bayswater. Charlotte had preferred to face her critics in London rather than rattle around in an empty parsonage in the dead of winter. She told herself that her father was accustomed to solitude. Certainly he grieved, but for all he knew, they were still there, all three sisters, marching around the table so quietly that he never heard them, solemnly whispering their stories, no more intrusive on his life than a shadow.

  Mrs. Smith and her daughters had been let in on the secret that the timid country clergyman’s daughter was the notorious author of Jane Eyre, and they had been scrupulously attentive since her arrival. They put her up in an elegantly appointed room with richly colored chintz curtains and upholstered chairs, where she awoke in the dark of morning to the sound of a maid scratching around in the grate starting a fire. A fire in the morning! A warm room in which to dress! Each evening, she returned to find costly wax candles lighted beside her tester bed and on the washstand—such luxuries! There were extravagant dishes of venison, turbot with asparagus, and meringues à la crème, although Charlotte ate like a bird. Theater, exhibitions, and sightseeing excursions were planned for her entertainment, but the excitement wore her down. They gave a dinner party for her to meet her idol, the great Thackeray, and she trembled in his presence and dared not speak a word.

  Charlotte stepped up closer to the mirror to check her delicate silver-and-jet earrings, and a pale, haggard face stared back. The whirl of events had left her unable to sleep at night, and now she felt a headache coming on. With nervous hands she tidied up the dressing table, neatly arranging her brush and comb, her tortoiseshell jewelry box, making sure that everything was in its proper place before she went down.

  The morning room always bore a faint trace of rosewater mingled with smoke from the crackling wood fire. The city seemed remote, emitting only a low, sustained note, as though from a distant organ. It was a pleasant, peaceful room, with the furniture comfortably arranged, and Charlotte had hoped to have a few moments alone before breakfast, but George’s mother was already at her desk. Charlotte had found her to be faultlessly even-tempered, rather stern perhaps, but by no means unkind. She possessed the serenity and self-assurance Charlotte had observed in women who had borne many children by men they loved, and who loved them in return. She had observed this ser
enity in Monsieur Heger’s wife. It was a nature Charlotte envied and grudgingly admired.

  “Good morning, Miss Brontë,” Mrs. Smith said brightly, with a quick glance at the dark circles under Charlotte’s eyes. “Did you sleep well?”

  “Quite well, thank you,” Charlotte said with a forced smile.

  “Last night was bitterly cold. I do hope your room was warm enough.”

  “Yes, it was, thank you,” Charlotte nodded. “Much warmer than that to which I am accustomed.”

  “Is it too warm, my dear?” she asked pleasantly. “Is it stuffy?”

  “Not at all. I’m most comfortable, ma’am. Truly I am.”

  “Very well, then,” she said and returned to her correspondence, sorting through papers and opening envelopes with a cheery briskness.

  Charlotte glanced about the room for the newspapers, which were always laid out for her to read, but this morning the table was conspicuously bare. Shirley was to be reviewed that day in the Edinburgh Review, and Charlotte immediately suspected that they had hidden it. In that case, the review must have been bad.

  “Forgive me for disturbing you, ma’am …”

  Mrs. Smith met her gaze with a solemn, wide-eyed look. “Oh, my dear, you’re not disturbing me in the least. We know you prefer a quiet morning.”

  “Has the paper arrived?”

  “What paper is that, my dear?”

  “The Edinburgh Review.”

  “Oh!” she exclaimed innocently. “Oh, it’s not here?”

  “I believe Mr. Lewes’s review of Shirley was to appear today, was it not?”

  “Perhaps it’s been mislaid,” she replied, then quickly went back to her paperwork, avoiding Charlotte’s prying gaze.

  “I would very much like to read it,” Charlotte said after a long hesitation.

  Mrs. Smith sat back with a sigh. “Miss Brontë, I confess that George asked me to keep it from you. He was afraid it would upset you, and he didn’t want your day marred by unpleasantness. Perhaps you might like to read it this evening, after George returns.”

  There it was, Charlotte thought. Another poor review. She struggled to put on a brave face. “It is most kind of you, but I would prefer to read it now.”

  Mrs. Smith rang for the parlor maid, who then returned, slightly out of breath, with the paper on a silver tray.

  George Henry Lewes had been one of those critics whose wild enthusiasm for Jane Eyre had prompted him to initiate correspondence with Currer Bell through her publishers, but his zeal often took the form of bombastic lectures on her failures. He had urged her to cultivate the mild-mannered, highly polished style of Jane Austen to counteract her tendency to melodrama and her overcolored imagination. Charlotte felt it was very much like urging a fish to fly, and in her replies she passionately defended the Romantic ideals to which she and Emily had clung, and her conviction that clarity and common sense did not always yield the heart’s truth.

  But what had given her most cause for concern was his claim to have solved the mystery of her identity, and his careless refusal—despite her pleas—to judge her strictly as an author, not as a woman.

  Now, as she adjusted her spectacles and unfolded the large tabloid sheets with tremulous hands, she thought he must have been brutal indeed to write something that her publisher deemed should be hidden from her.

  “We take Currer Bell to be one of the most remarkable of female writers—that she is a woman, we never had a moment’s doubt,” he wrote.

  Yet, a more masculine book has never been written! Shirley exhibits ever more of Currer Bell’s Yorkshire coarseness and rudeness than its predecessor; it is the very antipode to “ladylike”—which is all the more shocking since we know it to be a fact that the authoress is the daughter of a clergyman! Woman, yes—but not, we suspect, mother. For this proof, we cite the preposterous story she weaves around the heroine Caroline, who, it is revealed, was senselessly abandoned as a child by her mother. Currer Bell! If under your heart had ever stirred a child, if to your bosom a babe had ever been pressed, never could you have imagined such a falsehood as that! … Shirley is not quite so true as Jane Eyre; and it is not so fascinating. The characters are almost all disagreeable and exhibit intolerable rudeness of manner. Unmistakable power is stamped on various parts of it, but it is often misapplied. Currer Bell has much yet to learn, especially, the discipline of her own tumultuous energies …

  For a long while Charlotte struggled to remain hidden, screened behind the broadsheets. She was helpless to check the tears that flushed down her face, gathering in her mouth, at her chin, dripping silently onto her black silk gown. There was something absurdly ironic about the moment, the force of her feelings, the loneliness and lovelessness bursting forth at a time and place when they must at all cost be suppressed. She could not put down the paper. Mrs. Smith would look up. And then she would be exposed—vulnerable, sensitive, so pathetically womanish.

  She thought, If I just sit here long enough and allow all this to pass, and my tears to dry …

  There was the sound of rustling skirts and the tread of steps on the carpet.

  “Miss Brontë?”

  Mrs. Smith moved aside a cushion and settled her broad self noisily onto the sofa. “Now, now,” she said matter-of-factly, “you must not allow them to excite you so.”

  Charlotte lowered the paper and quickly folded it away.

  “I do apologize. I’ve been quite rude, haven’t I?” Charlotte mumbled as she fished a handkerchief from her sleeve.

  “Nonsense.”

  “This is precisely what you were trying to spare me.” She dabbed at her eyes and cast a look up at Mrs. Smith that was so appealing, so wanting of affection, that it was impossible to remain unmoved.

  “My dear, it is Mr. Lewes who owes you an apology. It was most thoughtless of him to write some of those things, although I do believe he does not intend it so—George tells me he is a great admirer of yours. But he is a rather pedantic young man, quite full of himself like all these brilliant literary men, and I fear he would be stunned to think he has wounded you so.”

  A deep shudder shook Charlotte’s tiny frame. “When my sisters were alive, we would laugh over this kind of thing.”

  At the mention of her sisters, Mrs. Smith understood that the tears were about much more than a review of her book.

  George’s mother was not the caressing kind, and when she reached to pat Charlotte’s knee it was roughly, rather like whacking a cushion, but the intentions were heartfelt.

  “Now, now, dry those tears and let’s have an end to all this.”

  But the emotions had taken their toll, and Charlotte’s head was pounding. She raised a hand to her temple; her face had drained of all color.

  “I’m afraid I’m not feeling well,” she whispered. “I think I should like to retire to my room.”

  “By all means. Indeed, you do look weary, Miss Brontë.” Mrs. Smith rose as Charlotte slid from the sofa and headed for the stairs. “I’ll send the maid up to draw your curtains.”

  Mrs. Smith had to ring twice for the maid before the girl arrived, wide-eyed and out of breath.

  “It’s Miss Brontë,” the maid apologized. “I found her in the upstairs hall, wandering around in a terrible state. She said she was confused by all the doors and couldn’t find her room. I showed her to her room, ma’am, but she looked frightfully pale, like she might faint.”

  Mrs. Smith hurried upstairs and stood listening for a moment at the door. When she heard the unmistakable sound of retching, she knocked lightly and entered. Charlotte was bent over the washstand, heaving violently with each convulsion. Mrs. Smith closed the door and strode across the room, slipping an arm around Charlotte and untangling the strands of dark hair that had fallen into her face.

  “Here, here, let me help you,” she commanded gruffly. “I’ve nursed four children through worse than this, and a dying husband.”

  She snatched a towel from the rack beside the washstand, dampened it with water from
the pitcher, and pressed it to Charlotte’s head.

  “Take a deep breath, my dear. There. There. That’s better.”

  When the nausea was calmed, she ordered Charlotte out of her dress and into bed. Once the curtains were drawn and the maid had gone, Charlotte opened her eyes to see Mrs. Smith approaching with a basin of water. She pulled up a chair beside the bed.

  “I beg you not to tell Mr. Smith about this,” Charlotte murmured. “I should not like to upset him.”

  “I shall tell him only that you were overtired and needed to rest.” She wrung out a cloth and laid it over Charlotte’s forehead. “Now lie still and try to sleep.”

  “My dress …” Charlotte murmured.

  “I’ve sent it down to have it sponged clean.”

  “You are very kind.”

  “My compliments to your dressmaker.”

  Charlotte’s eyes fluttered open. “Do you approve?”

  “It’s very becoming … done up very nicely,” she replied. “Simple and elegant.”

  “You must not bother yourself with me,” Charlotte said. “I’m quite accustomed to being alone.”

  “Indeed, my dear, too accustomed. You should be alone as little as possible.”

  Charlotte fell still, and after a moment she felt the clasp of cool, damp skin as Mrs. Smith placed a hand in hers, and gave it a brisk, reassuring squeeze.

  George Smith blew into the entry hall on a gust of wintry wind, shaking the damp drizzle off his hat before he passed it to the manservant.

  “Where are they?” he asked as he shed his heavy coat and untwined the wool scarf from his neck.

  “Upstairs in the drawing room, sir.”

  “Did my flowers come?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good.”

  George knew the effect the Lewes review would have on Charlotte, with the heartless references to her spinsterhood and lack of maternal instinct, and the merciless harping on the lack of delicacy in her writing; he anticipated a rough evening ahead. But as he climbed the stairs, he could hear the soft murmur of easy conversation and laughter coming from the drawing room. To his surprise, when he opened the door he found his mother and Charlotte sitting beside the fire, happily chatting away in the manner of old friends.