Romancing Miss Bronte
Page 30
She stayed until the end of January, to see Villette published and make sure gift copies were sent to Ellen and other friends. On the way back she stopped in Manchester to spend several days with her new friend the author Elizabeth Gaskell and her family. Elizabeth’s little girls were beautiful, boisterous miniatures of their good-natured mother, of whom Charlotte was growing increasingly fond. It was the kind of genial domestic scene that contrasted so sharply with her own sad family life, and she returned home in a despondent frame of mind. It was February and the ground was frozen black and hard.
Barely had she disentangled herself from Tabby’s embrace and untied her bonnet when her father launched into a tirade about Arthur. He tailed her into the dining room and hovered over her while she knelt down to greet the dogs, and while Martha lit the coals in the grate, he recounted how Arthur had sent off his application to the missionary society.
“Put him in quite a pickle, as he was forced to request a recommendation from me.”
“I’m sure you spoke fairly of him, Papa.”
“Fair! I was indulgent! Sang his praises and breathed not a word of his perfidy. I should like to see him gone. I wish him no ill but, rather, good and wish that every woman may avoid him forever unless she should be determined on her own misery. All the wealth of the Australian gold mines would not make him and any wife he might have happy.”
“So he intends to serve in Australia.”
“Indeed. It’s all settled.”
“I see.” She spoke in a subdued voice. It struck her how intensely unhappy he must be to cut ties with England and voyage so far away. She had a brief flash of Arthur on a ship in a storm sailing to the colonies: the ending she had envisioned for Paul Emanuel in Villette. But that was fiction. The thought of Arthur drowning in an attempt to escape his unhappiness was not how she wanted things to end.
“I’ll bring you a nice cup of tea, miss,” Martha said as she brushed the coal dust from her hands. She lingered, hoping to catch more of the conversation, but Charlotte sent her back to the kitchen and then settled herself on a stool before the fire to warm her hands. Her father stood beside her in his worn-out coat and his slippers, chewing on his cold pipe and bristling with rancor.
“You know we had the bishop and the school inspector here.”
“Did it go well?”
“I do wish you had been home. I was quite overwhelmed, Charlotte. But the visit went well—that is, until the end when they were all here for tea. I addressed that man, that odious reprobate, I spoke to him with civility, but he sat there during tea throwing dark looks at me, doing his best to look glum and dejected, and then he dared to speak sharply to me! I cannot forgive him this sort of treatment in public!”
“I am sorry, Papa. That is regrettable,” Charlotte said quietly, “since he is a good man at bottom—”
“Good? Good?!”
“Well, it is a sad thing that Nature has not put goodness into a more attractive form.”
“Into the bargain he managed to get up a most pertinacious and needless dispute with the school inspector.”
“Oh my,” she sighed. “Up to his old tricks again.”
“I count the days until he is gone and I can live my life in peace.”
“When does he leave?”
“At the end of May. We shall be rid of him forever.”
“Here’s Martha. Oh, good, she’s put out the biscuits I brought from London. We’ll have a nice tea, Papa, without any more talk of Mr. Nicholls. Come now. Sit down. You mustn’t excite yourself any further.”
When her father retired to his study, Charlotte immediately wrote a letter to Ellen, urging, “You must come quickly, dear Ellen. Please try to arrange your schedule. There are matters I must confide to you—I need not tell you the subject. The situation here at home is most trying. Try to stay long enough to be here when the reviews of Villette come out.”
Charlotte sat on the bed in her nightgown and a heavy shawl, her knees tucked under her chin, while Ellen brushed her hair in the way that always calmed her, with long, soothing strokes. It was an intimate ritual they had shared since their schoolgirl days.
“You can do much better than poor Mr. Nicholls, you know. Really, you would be throwing yourself away. You’re Currer Bell. You cannot marry just any old goose.”
“I have my own objections, of course I do. But this isn’t what concerns Papa. He only sees the situation in terms of himself. His pride would be offended. Not mine. His.”
“Charlotte, if he came from an old family, with a good name, it wouldn’t be so bad. But to be poor and with nothing else? You’d be taking a step down in society.”
“May I remind you that Papa’s family has no claims to distinction. He comes from a poor Irish farming family, just like Arthur does. Doesn’t it strike you as hypocritical? All our lives, the wealthy landowners here have looked down on us because we were so poor. And now he treats Mr. Nicholls with contempt for the same reason.”
Charlotte heaved her shoulders in a sigh. She lifted a soft brown coil of hair and ran her fingers through it. “I think I’m losing my hair.”
Ellen rapped her skull with the brush. “You are not losing your hair. You don’t have feelings for him, do you?”
“I don’t love him in the least. But if you had seen him the night he proposed to me—. I can’t forget his face, it still lingers in my mind—this man I have known for years, always so stern and hard-featured, crumbling before my eyes. I’ve never seen a man look like that, and I promise you, it’s not easily forgotten. I believe he does love me—I believe he loves me truly and deeply.”
It was the first time she had expressed these sentiments aloud, and the words were difficult to speak. She had received other proposals of marriage in her younger years—Ellen’s brother Henry and that lively little curate from Dublin who’d followed up his one visit to the parsonage with a letter asking for her hand—but neither man had loved her truly and deeply, or even loved her at all.
“But you don’t feel the same,” Ellen said.
“No,” she said sadly. “I do not.”
“All the better. It would be quite unfortunate if you did.”
There was a certain complacency in Ellen’s manner and a touch of self-importance. The sort of attitude that drew lines to keep others out. Ellen had drawn a circle around Charlotte, Charlotte’s father, and herself. Arthur was excluded, exiled to the land of the unworthies.
Arthur was too numb to feel the puzzled stares of the churchwardens who sat around the table in the upstairs meeting room of the Black Bull. Michael Merrall wore a grieved expression, and William Thomas tugged at his beard the way he did when something perturbed him. Wind hammered the rain against the windows.
Arthur was saying, “I have for some time felt a strong inclination to assist in ministering to the thousands of our fellow countrymen in the colonies. These men have been in a great measure deprived of the means of grace. I would hope to remedy that by my service in the missionary society.”
It was clear to all of them that he had memorized his short speech. He fell into silence and stared sullenly at an invisible spot on the smoke-darkened wall.
“Tell us why you’re going. Truthfully, sir. What has happened?”
Arthur spoke quietly. “I can no longer remain here.”
“Has anyone asked you to go? Are you being forced out?”
“There are some who would wish it so.”
“Speak plainly, sir. There’s been a terrible quarrel between the two of you. Is it Mr. Brontë’s fault?”
He shook his head firmly. “It is my own fault. Only mine.”
“Do you blame Mr. Brontë?”
“I do not. If anyone is to blame in the matter, it is I.”
“Are you leaving willingly?”
Arthur shook his head, and his eyes swelled with tears. “I do not leave willingly. It saddens me greatly.”
Amid all this turmoil, Villette was published. On the whole, the reviews were positi
ve, as Charlotte had predicted. Mr. Williams clipped them from the London newspapers and posted them to her.
From the Literary Gazette:
This book would have made her famous, had she not been so already. It retrieves all the ground she lost in Shirley, and it will engage a wider circle of admirers than Jane Eyre, for it has all the best qualities of that remarkable book, untarnished, or but slightly so, by its defects. Viewed as a whole, there is so obvious an advance in refinement without loss of power, that it would be invidious to qualify the admiration with which Villette has inspired us by dwelling upon minor faults.
G. H. Lewes reviewed it for the Leader. Charlotte thought he showed himself exceedingly generous:
Here, at any rate, is an original book. Every page, every paragraph, is sharp with individuality. It is Currer Bell speaking to you, not the Circulating Library reverberating echoes. How she has looked at life, with a saddened, yet not vanquished soul; what she has thought, and felt, not what she thinks others will expect her to have thought and felt; this it is we read of here, and this it is which makes her writing welcome above almost every other writing. It has held us spell-bound.”
Critics called it “powerful” and spoke of its “well-observed, picturesque characters” depicted in a “masterly way,” of descriptions of nature “as good as Turner to the mind’s eye,” of its “delightful freshness, forceful sentiments.” “Brain and heart are both held in suspense by the fascinating power of the writer,” said one. The Athenaeum thought that M. Paul, that “snappish, choleric, vain, childlike and noble-hearted arbiter” of Lucy Snowe’s destiny, was a “brilliantly distinct character.” Detractors complained of its morbidity and improbabilities, and at the same time lauded its “redeeming beauties and surges of passion.”
When a batch of newspaper clippings arrived from Cornhill, Charlotte would wait until the evening to bring it to her father, and she and Ellen would settle in his parlor for tea. Ellen thus was included in the tight circle of Currer Bell’s intimates—which was quite another thing from being Charlotte Brontë’s friend. With her father’s eyesight deteriorating once again, Charlotte simply edited out any negative passages as she read the reviews to him. It was the way she had always dealt with him.
She was understandably vexed when Mr. Grant swooped down on them one evening during tea, sounding the alarm of a caustic review in the Guardian.
“Have you not seen it, Miss Brontë?”
“I have not, sir.”
“Well then, you must inquire immediately. Perhaps your publisher has withheld it in order to avoid wounding you.”
“Mr. Grant, I am indeed indebted to my publishers for all I know of the favorable notices. The hostile notices I leave to the care of my friends, and they never fail to disappoint me. Come, please, sir, do sit down and have a cup of tea and tell us what you know.”
“Well, I’ve not seen the review myself, but Mrs. Grant’s cousin who resides in London read it and was most shocked. Here, I have her letter.” He reached into his hat, withdrew a note, and unfolded it. Charlotte threw an uneasy glance at her father, who sat rigid with his mouth frozen in a downward thrust.
“She was kind enough to copy the phrases of interest. She says the reviewer calls the book stern and masculine and says that your—or, rather, Currer Bell’s—vocation is in depicting ‘suppressed emotion and unreturned affection’ …”
At this Charlotte recoiled inwardly. She felt her cheeks grow warm, but she was intent on keeping her smile pleasant and cool.
“… and, let’s see—where is it—oh, yes, he complains of a ‘cynical and bitter spirit’ and a lack of refinement. And this—this most outrageous insult of all: he says, ‘Lucy Snowe herself is Jane Eyre over again; both are reflections of Currer Bell; and for the reasons above given, though we admire the abilities of these young ladies, we should respectfully decline (ungallant critics that we are) the honor of their intimate acquaintance.’”
He folded the letter and tucked it back into his hat, his chest pumped with indignation.
“This is an unmanly insult, Miss Brontë,” he huffed, “and I shall be glad to write a scorching—yes, scorching—letter to the editor on your behalf.”
Charlotte could feel Ellen’s embarrassment, and a quick glance at her father noted the restrained anger in his jaw. She rushed in soothingly: “Mr. Grant, please, do let me pour you a cup of tea. We have an extra cup right here. Do sit down.”
He pulled up a chair and Charlotte said, “That was ever so considerate of you to alert me to this notice, sir, but I assure you, I know the critic in question, and he has every right to lisp his opinion of Currer Bell’s female characters. I do forgive him very freely—but I assure you I am not in the least perturbed at not meeting his standard for an intimate acquaintance. Now, your tea. I trust you’ll find it sweet enough.”
They had found her weakness—this issue about loving and being loved in return—but she had bared her soul bravely and willingly for all of them to see, because she believed it was important to reveal the truth about women’s hearts. So it was devastating when a woman with whom she had forged a fragile friendship revealed herself so utterly insensitive.
When Charlotte had stayed at Harriet Martineau’s home in Ambleside, she had observed with admiration the woman’s vigor and strength, watched her rise every morning at four and swim in the freezing lake waters before taking to her desk. As painful as it had been, she had listened with quiet tolerance to Miss Martineau’s atheistic views. For her own edification, Charlotte had sincerely implored Miss Martineau to be a truthful critic of her work. So when she received Miss Martineau’s letter she was expecting candid opinions, from one writer to another; but she did not anticipate this: “The merits are downright wonderful. As for the faults, I do deeply regret that your mind seems to be full of the subject of one passion—love. I think there is unconscionably too much of it (giving an untrue picture of life), and speaking with the frankness you desire, I do not like its kind.”
Then, the very next day, she received from Cornhill a packet containing a review in the Daily News, also written by Harriet Martineau:
The book is almost intolerably painful. All the female characters, in all their thoughts and lives, are full of one thing, or are regarded by the reader in the light of that one thought—love … so dominant is this idea—so incessant is the writer’s tendency to describe the need of being loved, that the heroine, who tells her own story, leaves the reader at last under the uncomfortable impression of her having loved two men at the same time…. It is not thus in real life. There are substantial, heartfelt interests for women of all ages, and under ordinary circumstances, quite apart from love.
After weeks of tortured reflection, Charlotte wrote a brief reply:
My dear Miss Martineau,
In compliance with your wishes, I return to you your letter. I have marked with red ink the passage which struck me dumb.
I know what love is as I understand it; and if man or woman should be ashamed of feeling such love, then is there nothing right, noble, faithful, truthful, unselfish on this earth, as I comprehend rectitude, nobleness, fidelity, truth, and disinterestedness.
The differences of feeling between us are very strong and marked, very wide and irreconcilable. It appears very plain to me that you and I had better not try to be friends. My wish is that you should quietly forget me.
Yours sincerely,
C. Brontë
Chapter Twenty-four
Villette’s success kept Charlotte’s spirits high that spring. The reviews continued to pour in, nearly all of them eulogizing in part, and with most criticism directed toward the book rather than her personal character. But in the absence of the old irritating speculation about her gender and identity, she was now forced to endure a different, even more cruel scrutiny—the kind that Mr. Grant had seized upon so enthusiastically. She had boldly dared to examine the psychology of a woman’s unhappiness—and everyone knew that this woman was herself.
To Lily Gaskell she had offered glimpses into her life in Brussels, but to no one had she ever whispered an intimation of love. It was quite unnecessary, since it was all there in the novel for everyone to read.
She could not know—indeed, it was a blessing that she would never know—how transparent she had made herself.
“Lily, you know George Smith. Is it true that he was the inspiration for Graham Bretton?”
“I’m sure he was.”
“Is the portrait true to life?”
“Very much like him.”
“What about that fiery little professor? He scolds her so abominably. Should you have fallen in love with him?”
“Well, one can see how Lucy Snowe did, when he alone had the power to see anything of her heart.”
“I do feel almost a sense of reverence for one who is capable of so much deep feeling.”
“Is she as sad in person?”
Elizabeth Gaskell put aside her embroidery and looked up at the Winkworth sisters. “I think she works off a great deal of her sadness into her writing and out of her life. I hope to have her to visit this summer. You will get a glimpse of her yourself.” She added with a smile. “Be forewarned. She does have a wicked sense of humor.”