Charlotte Brontë

by Claire Harman

  The small mouth and set of the chin in Charlotte’s 1833–4 portraits of Anne are reproduced (along with her hairstyle) in the clumsily naive painting Branwell made of all three sisters at about the same time, which, due to accidents of fame and fate, has become one of the most powerful author images ever created: The Brontë Sisters. When did he paint it? We have only Mrs. Gaskell’s remark to go on, when Charlotte showed her the picture on her first visit to Haworth in 1853: “Miss Brontë brought down a rough, common-looking oil-painting, done by her brother, of herself,—a little, rather prim-looking girl of eighteen,—and the two other sisters, girls of 16 and 14, with cropped hair, and sad, dreamy-looking eyes.” Charlotte provided the information about her age and that of the “two other sisters”—not known by name to Mrs. Gaskell at this stage—and presumably the picture had been kept in its frame or on battens at this date, as, when Mrs. Gaskell saw it, Charlotte was “upholding the great frame of canvas, and consequently standing right behind it,” which allowed the visitor to see a “striking” resemblance, despite the passage of years.

  If, as seems likely, the portrait was intended as a practice piece for Branwell, it could not have raised high hopes for his future professionally. Like all his pictures, it shows little sense of perspective or the relation of one object to another—even of one limb to another—and it would be hard to find a worse depiction anywhere of a hand under a book on a table. But, for all its technical shortcomings, Branwell has caught a potent stillness, a tension in his remarkable siblings, the “sad dreamy-looking eyes” of all three: Charlotte’s elder-sister apartness, Anne’s abstracted air, Emily’s penetrating, melancholy stare straight at her brother—and at us.

  Mrs. Gaskell describes “a great pillar” in the centre of the picture, referring to the place where Branwell had originally included a self-portrait, later painted over (or scrubbed at with solvents), leaving a pale column and spectral form in the background. Branwell painted another group portrait of himself and his sisters—and left himself in the picture on this occasion—at about the same time, of which only the depiction of Emily survives, cut out from the larger canvas in an arch-topped shape.*6 The composition (as we know from a crude photograph that was taken before its destruction) showed the siblings as bookish gentry, standing around a table on which lay some books, papers and a dead game bird. Anne and Charlotte are to the left, Emily to the right and Branwell between them, holding a gun. The picture used to hang on the stairs at Haworth Parsonage, but perhaps only after the siblings were all dead. It was described in 1858 by a visitor as “a shocking daub, not up to the rudest sign board style” and was still intact at Patrick Brontë’s death in 1861, when it was inherited by Arthur Bell Nicholls and taken to Ireland the same year. At what date Nicholls cut out the picture of Emily and destroyed the rest is uncertain, but he clearly thought little of this and Branwell’s other effort since The Brontë Sisters was found after his death stored negligently on the top of a wardrobe, unframed, folded, cracked, ruined. Perhaps the Gun Group was destroyed because it featured Branwell, whom Nicholls only knew from 1845 onwards and for whom he had no feelings other than disgust.*7

  The same 1858 visitor who was so unimpressed by the Gun Group quizzed the locals about the Brontës and was disappointed by hearing from all sides (except their loyal servant Martha Brown) that “the girls were so plain. When I asked the old woman in the book shop which of them was the best looking, she shook her head and said there was not much to choose amongst them in that respect—The Sexton thought Anne the best looking, but indeed he could not say much for her looks.” Anne was always spoken of as the prettiest of the Brontë sisters, though none of them was ever called beautiful, in fact people seemed quite keen to make unpleasant remarks about their looks, even after they were famous and might have been awarded some retrospective idealisation. Benjamin Binns thought Emily looked ugly as well as haughty, and that “a large protruding tooth added to her peculiar aspect”; Charlotte was said to have “many teeth gone” and to be “extremely insignificant and even displeasing” in appearance, “not pleasant.” No wonder she told Ellen she had made her mind up at the age of twelve that she was “doomed to be an old maid.” Branwell was, by Charlotte’s own account, better-looking than any of the girls—“Nature had favoured him with a fairer outside, as well as a finer constitution than his Sisters”—but even Branwell was thought to be more charismatic than handsome, with his wild red hair, long nose and receding chin. The sense of not being attractive haunted Charlotte all her life, and was a further goad to seeking a ruthless sort of independence.

  In the summer of 1834, and presumably under the guidance of John Bradley, Charlotte had a moment of triumph and deep gratification when two of her pencil drawings were accepted by the Royal Northern Society for the Encouragement of the Fine Arts for their annual summer exhibition in Leeds. Her subjects were Bolton Priory and Kirkstall Abbey, neither done from nature, though both places were close by and well known to Charlotte. She had a special fondness for Kirkstall Abbey, as it was where her parents had become engaged, and she had visited Bolton Abbey with Ellen only the previous summer; but she still preferred to make copies from other people’s work (Bolton Priory is based on an engraving based on a drawing by Turner from 1809—a very long way round from “life”). The whole family went proudly to see her drawings, displayed alongside a selection of old masters from the county’s private collections and new work by contemporaries of the very highest standard.

  The exhibition in Leeds was the high point of Charlotte’s artistic career, for she never exhibited again, sold or attempted to sell any artwork. Strangely, the very thing that she had once wished for—a commission from a publisher to make illustrations for a book—came in 1848 when her own publisher, having heard of her youthful ambition, suggested she should illustrate an edition of Jane Eyre. But it was a suggestion she hastily refused. “I have, in my day, wasted a certain quantity of Bristol board and drawing-paper, crayons and cakes of colour,” she told William Smith Williams, but “I see they have no value.” In the novel she wrote in 1852, her heroine also looks back with puzzlement at works she formerly laboured over: “elaborate pencil-drawings finished like line-engravings; these, my very eyes ached at beholding again, recalling hours when they had followed, stroke by stroke and touch by touch, a tedious, feeble, finical, school-girl pencil.” It was a harsh judgement of her younger self, a bitter memory too of wasted time.

  —

  “WE ARE ALL about to divide, break up, separate,” Charlotte told Ellen at the beginning of July 1835, contemplating the seismic change that faced her; “Emily is going to school Branwell is going to London, and I am going to be a Governess.” “Branwell is going to London” seems to have been a premature announcement: he had geared himself up to apply to the Royal Academy of Art as a student, and drafted a letter to the secretary, though whether it was ever sent is open to doubt.*8 Instead of asking what the admission procedure might be, Branwell characteristically assumed an insider’s tone:

  Where am I to present my drawing?

  At what time—?

  and especialy [sic]

  Can I do it in August or September?

  Branwell’s approach certainly lacked subtlety—is indeed like something his father might have written, with the father’s bold disregard of obstacles. Perhaps the whole idea was more Patrick Brontë’s pipedream than Branwell’s. He was writing of it proudly to Mrs. Franks in early July, as if nothing stood in the way: “It is my design, to send my son…to the Royal Academy, for Artists, in London.”

  Did the family truly think that Branwell could succeed as a painter? The results were never encouraging, yet Branwell was always encouraged, as if they all wished to corroborate any illusions he might have about his talents, nurture them assiduously. The project of Branwell seemed less to do with the only son making a living as making a name that the family could all take pride in.

  Meanwhile, Charlotte was doing her father’s job for him and prescrib
ing a dutiful and self-sacrificial course of action for herself. The need to prepare for work was urgent, and work for the girls meant teaching in some form. After years of resistance to leaving home, and at the advanced age of seventeen, Emily was going to Roe Head to get some formal education, but how would the cost be met with the family’s resources stretched to their limits launching Branwell? It so happened that the marriage of Miss Wooler’s sister Marianne that summer opened up a vacancy on the Roe Head staff, and the place was offered to Charlotte with the understanding that her wages would be withheld in lieu of Emily’s fees. Charlotte saw her fate sealed. “I should have to take the step sometime,” she told Ellen, announcing her imminent departure from home, “and ‘better sune as syne,’ ” adding that loath though she was to go, it was better to go somewhere that she knew, to an employer whom she liked and in the company of a sister whom she loved and was anxious to monitor, than to risk a worse situation, which any other would be. Miss Wooler undoubtedly meant to do Charlotte a favour: she knew the family’s circumstances and her former pupil’s character and might well have intended this job as a chance for Charlotte to acquire, among friendly colleagues, some of the social and pedagogical skills she would need if she were ever to make a living as a teacher.

  One of the things Charlotte tried to comfort herself with was the thought that, at Mirfield, she would be so close to Birstall and Gomersal—walking distance from Ellen and Mary—and that they would visit her occasionally. In her three tormentingly long years at Roe Head as a teacher, though, she saw less of these two friends than one would have thought possible. Ellen’s brother George passed the school every week on his way to Huddersfield market, but scant use was made of this convenience to transport letters or messages from one girl to the other; and even when Charlotte begged for a note or signal from her friend—“just a scrap…do—do it will cheer me. any-thing”—Ellen was neither speedy nor very ardent in her responses. The truth was that Charlotte’s transition from young lady to working woman had degraded her socially, and Ellen was particularly sensitive to these striations, and how they might reflect on her own rather marginal position. As it turned out, Ellen never had to do a day’s paid work in her life, but often talked about the prospect of needing to fend for herself, hoping perhaps to inspire in others the pity that this idea stirred in her own bosom.

  Charlotte meanwhile was condemned to the retrograde step of returning to Roe Head as a teacher, which she did in late July 1835. “Duty—Necessity—these are stern Misstresses [sic] who will not be disobeyed,” the nineteen-year-old reasoned. But it did not make her one jot happier.

  * * *

  *1 And the accusations were groundless anyway: according to the Garrs, and Patrick himself, the Brontës ate plenty of meat.

  *2 Ellen Nussey, who tells this story in her “Reminiscences of Charlotte Brontë” (LCB 1, 594), said that the tradition of the Roe Head ghost “had a great charm for Charlotte.”

  *3 This window is still at the Red House.

  *4 Patrick Brontë was a member, and borrowed books for the whole family from its library.

  *5 Their father, on the other hand, had several photographs taken in later life.

  *6 Now one of the treasures of the National Portrait Gallery, London.

  *7 The Gun Group must have been considerably larger than The Brontë Sisters, as the Emily fragment is almost half the width, but takes up only a third of the lost original, judging from the evidence of the photograph. Tracings were also taken by John Greenwood, the Haworth stationer and friend of the family, which seem rather better than Branwell’s original. See Juliet R. V. Barker, “The Brontë Portraits: A Mystery Solved,” BST, 20:1 (1990).

  *8 Juliet Barker makes a strong counter-argument (in Barker, 226–32) to the assumption on many biographers’ parts that Branwell not only sent the letter but presented himself at the Academy in London that autumn, faced a humiliating rejection and loss of confidence, and wasted on drink and dissipation the money he had been given to support himself, all as described in an Angrian story he wrote later, of which only “incomplete and dismembered” fragments remain.

  FIVE

  The Double Life

  1835–7

  So, three years after leaving Roe Head as a schoolgirl, Charlotte went back there to teach, taking with her the reluctant Emily on the eve of her seventeenth birthday. It’s a mark of how much more urgent the issue of income and self-sufficiency had become for all the siblings that the reclusive middle daughter could be prised away from Haworth at all. Though, like Branwell, all three sisters felt themselves to be poets and artists, unlike him, they had to face the prospect of spending their lives in drudgery instead of pursuing their vocations. They approached this doom with outer fatalism and inner disbelief, perhaps hoping that Branwell, their representative in the greater world, would become so successful that teaching and governessing would turn out to be merely temporary aberrations.

  None of them seems to have expected or wanted to marry out of the dilemma; indeed marriage seems to have been almost literally the last thing on the Brontë sisters’ minds. Spiritual communion, yes; love, sex, the sublime, yes; but the conventional female fate of marriage and motherhood does not appear either to have troubled or allured them much. Anne displayed a little wistfulness in her later teens, and her novels, like Charlotte’s, reflect a yearning for companionate marriage to an idealised mate. But however loathsome the thought was of having to “go out” into the harsh and humiliating working world, it was preferable to the state of feminine inertia—so consuming of the life of Ellen Nussey, for example—that overtook young women waiting to find someone to marry them.

  The return to Roe Head was dismal from the start. This time there was no discovery or novelty to alleviate the pain of leaving home, and no optimism about the future. This time it was the beginning of a life sentence for Charlotte. Emily’s position was also difficult because of her advanced age: at seventeen she was by far the oldest girl in a very small school, where some were as young as eight. Miss Wooler was in the habit of tutoring each new pupil separately before letting them join the general class, as a form of matriculation. This would have made Emily—tall, old and already painfully self-conscious and unhappy—feel particularly humiliated.

  Emily made no friends and kept aloof from the other girls, though she had to share a bed with one of them. Charlotte and she were divided by their very different statuses, though so close in age and so clearly longing to be with each other rather than with anyone else. Charlotte was perhaps sitting with her “at twilight, in the schoolroom” when Emily wrote the poems “The Bluebell,” “A little while, a little while” and “Loud without the wind was roaring,” all of which Charlotte said dated from this year.

  Where wilt thou go, my harassed heart?

  Full many a land invites thee now;

  And places near, and far apart

  Have rest for thee, my weary brow—

  There is a spot, mid barren hills,

  Where winter howls and driving rain

  But if the dreary tempest chills

  There is a light that warms again

  Emily lasted through only three months of school life. “Nobody knew what ailed her but me—I knew only too well,” Charlotte recalled years later. “The change from her own home to a school, and from her own very noiseless, very secluded, but unrestricted and in artificial [sic] mode of life, to one of disciplined routine (though under the kindliest auspices), was what she failed in enduring. Her nature proved here too strong for her fortitude. Every morning when she woke, the vision of home and the moors rushed on her, and darkened and saddened the day that lay before her.” Emily’s mental strain soon showed in physical collapse: “her white face, attenuated form, and failing strength threatened rapid decline.” It was like Cowan Bridge all over again.

  Charlotte reacted accordingly. Convinced that Emily’s life was in danger, she petitioned her father and Miss Wooler to let Emily go home immediately—and permanently. No
doubt she made a very strong case for this course of action, since it was exactly what she wanted to do herself. But there was no one to oversee her case so closely, or petition for her release. Emily went home; Anne was sent in her place; and Charlotte was obliged to keep to her grindstone. Aunt Branwell and Patrick Brontë must have registered with some anxiety the general tendency of the children not to cope for long with the outside world, but Miss Wooler was not sorry to see Emily go: she had found her queer and non-compliant.

  Back in Haworth, Emily recovered her spirits quickly and adopted a routine of helpful housekeeping (willingly taking on routine tasks such as baking and sweeping). She had only been allowed to go home on condition that she “studied alone with diligence and perseverance,” and so set about a course of self-education, making sure that she was seen learning her German vocabulary in public spaces like the kitchen (with her book propped up on the table as she kneaded dough) in order to leave her leisure hours as free as possible.

  Emily’s first job of every day was to feed the animals, and she saw no reason why they should not be treated every bit as well as their human companions. Better, in fact, if Charlotte’s surmise was right and she was saving the best cuts of meat for the dogs. In 1835 they had a grizzled Irish terrier called Grasper, of whom Emily made a characterful portrait. He was replaced sometime after 1837 by Keeper, a part-mastiff who grew to impressive proportions, was a magnificently off-putting guard dog and became devoted to Emily. There were also, at various times during the 1830s, at least two cats in the household, Black Tom and Tiger, a canary called Dick (presumably kept in a cage) and three tame geese. There had been a wild goose, which escaped, and a fledgling hawk that Emily had found injured on the moor and brought home. “Nero,” as she called him, became the subject of another lovingly detailed portrait.