Charlotte Brontë

by Claire Harman

  Heger kept this very personal and confiding letter, talked to Elizabeth Gaskell about it twelve years later and copied out this passage for use in Gaskell’s biography of Charlotte (where it was duly printed)—but he did not answer it. Charlotte began to wonder—hope—if perhaps it had gone astray, and on 24 October took advantage of Joe Taylor’s return to Brussels to send Heger another letter, deliberately simple and cheery, to make sure of a reply this time and to present herself as busy, buoyant and normal—not a postal stalker, in other words. Her artificial optimism is painful to read:

  I am not going to write a long letter—first of all I haven’t the time—it has to go immediately—and then I am afraid of bothering you. I would just like to ask you whether you heard from me at the beginning of May and then in the month of August? For all those six months I have been expecting a letter from you, Monsieur—six months of waiting—is a very long time indeed! Nevertheless I am not complaining and I shall be richly recompensed for a little sadness—if you are now willing to write a letter and give it to this gentleman—or to his sister—who would deliver it to me without fail.

  There was no reply to this letter either. Week after week went by in painful vigil, waiting for the post, which arrived at Haworth post office “from all parts” at noon each day and was dispatched from there at three. Charlotte had written about such a situation in “Passing Events” and in Jane Eyre, when “the long-looked-for tidings” from Mr. Rochester turn out to be a business note, but the strongest expression of this peculiarly female form of love-agony is expressed in Villette, and seems, like so much in that book, to reflect real experience:

  My hour of torment was the post-hour. Unfortunately I knew it too well, and tried as vainly as assiduously to cheat myself of that knowledge; dreading the rack of expectation, and the sick collapse of disappointment which daily preceded and followed upon that well-recognised ring.

  I suppose animals kept in cages, and so scantily fed as to be always upon the verge of famine, await their food as I awaited a letter…The well-beloved letter—would not come; and it was all of sweetness in life I had to look for.

  Charlotte was expecting to see either Joe or Mary Taylor back from Brussels in November, but both postponed their returns for several weeks. Of course, Heger could have written at any time by post, but did not, and when Joe Taylor called at the Parsonage just after Christmas there was nothing by hand either. The disappointment felled Charlotte, but she hung on, waiting to see if Mary brought anything. A tender message, apologising for the silence and making amends, might have taken him longer to write…Mary might have been a more suitable emissary…there might even have been a gift to bring too, a token? But Mary, full of news, full of plans, full of advice as ever, arrived empty-handed. “I did my utmost not to cry not to complain,” Charlotte wrote, but once Mary had left, her resolve crumbled. Given so many opportunities to communicate, and doing nothing, could be interpreted only as deliberate cruelty on Heger’s part. She sat down to compose a searing, accusatory letter, letting him know what she was going through:

  —I said to myself, what I would say to someone else in such a case “You will have to resign yourself to the fact, and above all, not distress yourself about a misfortune that you have not deserved.”

  …But when one does not complain, and when one wants to master oneself with a tyrant’s grip—one’s faculties rise in revolt—and one pays for outward calm by an almost unbearable inner struggle.

  Day and night I find neither rest nor peace—if I sleep I have tormenting dreams in which I see you always severe, always saturnine and angry with me—

  Forgive me then Monsieur if I take the step of writing to you again—How can I bear my life unless I make an effort to alleviate its sufferings?

  She had reached a point where there was nothing for it but to be explicit, even if, as she was aware, “some cold and rational people” (i.e., his wife) “would say on reading it—‘she is raving’ ”:

  all I know—is that I cannot—that I will not resign myself to the total loss of my master’s friendship—I would rather undergo the greatest bodily pains than have my heart constantly lacerated by searing regrets. If my master withdraws his friendship from me entirely I shall be absolutely without hope—if he gives me a little friendship—a very little—I shall be content—happy, I would have a motive for living—for working.

  Monsieur, the poor do not need a great deal to live on—they ask only the crumbs of bread which fall from the rich men’s table—but if they are refused these crumbs—they die of hunger—No more do I need a great deal of affection from those I love—I would not know what to do with a whole and complete friendship—I am not accustomed to it—but you showed a little interest in me in days gone by when I was your pupil in Brussels—and I cling to the preservation of this little interest—I cling to it as I would cling on to life.

  “Un peu d’intérêt”: sadly, it would indeed have sufficed Charlotte to have any word or friendly gesture from Heger at this stage, if only to perpetuate her hope in the recovery and regrowth of their relationship, but she deceived him, and herself, by suggesting that mere crumbs would suffice for long. She was right to say that she wouldn’t really have known what to do with “une amitié entière et complète”: the union she craved with Heger was one of souls; a possession, a haunting, a living-through, a sharing of ideas, intensely verbal, profoundly silent, an enveloping warmth of love and shared awareness of power. Sex too, no doubt, if their charged beings had ever been in contact with each other again. But anything so paltry as a conventional friendship, anything as quotidian as adultery even, was clearly not in her mind.

  She begged him to write, and to tell her candidly if he had entirely forgotten her. There was no reply.

  Mary Taylor, who had come back to Yorkshire preparatory to her momentous move to New Zealand, was concerned at the state her friend was in, but clear about the solution. In her robust and far-sighted view, financial independence was the only way for women to avoid not simply poverty but the sort of “self-suppression” that Charlotte was locked into. Such behaviour seemed perverse, as Mary told Mrs. Gaskell years later:

  [S]he thought that there must be some possibility for some people of having a life of more variety and more communion with human kind, but she saw none for her. I told her very warmly that she ought not to stay at home…Such a dark shadow came over her face when I said “Think of what you’ll be five years hence!” that I stopped, and said “Don’t cry, Charlotte!” She did not cry, but went on walking up and down the room, and said in a little while, “But I intend to stay, Polly.”

  Watching her friend pacing up and down like a caged animal (the image Charlotte herself used), Mary could only repeat that she should get away—and probably held out the offer of emigrating together, which would have suited Mary down to the ground. She had a low opinion of Reverend Brontë, describing him to Mrs. Gaskell as a “selfish old man,” the recollection of whom filled her with “gloomy anger.” Charlotte’s grim determination to sacrifice herself to his needs at this point seemed inexplicable, but what Mary didn’t understand (quite apart from Charlotte’s extremely strong family loyalties) was the depth of Charlotte’s misery about Monsieur Heger, or that, when she turned up at Haworth, Charlotte had been convinced Mary would have with her a letter from him.

  —

  BY THE TIME she saw Mary in late December 1844, Charlotte had been home almost a whole year, but had very little to report for it. She had taken over some of Aunt Branwell’s functions, including the sort of civilities that Emily would never have willingly instigated or performed, such as entertaining Ebenezer Rand and his wife to tea; and trying to be polite to Mr. Smith, who moved to Keighley that year, or to the new curate, Mr. Grant, who replaced him temporarily in Haworth. But the adoption of this matronly mantle was clearly a bad sign, as Mary Taylor recognised. Aunt Branwell had herself been notably reclusive, and since none of the current generation of Brontës had married or spread out to their
own households, the effects of isolation became more and more concentrated. The Brontë family saw less of their remaining relations than one would think possible, given that there was no known breach with any of them. Patrick Brontë never travelled back to the old country, or invited any of his brothers, sisters, nephews and nieces; until his death in 1841 they had kept in touch sporadically with (but rarely saw) great-uncle John Fennell, who had lived nearby in Todmorden since 1819; there was correspondence with Eliza Kingston in Cornwall following Aunt Branwell’s death (prompted by business to do with Aunt’s will); and in the 1850s they received a visit from two of the Branwell cousins (possibly drawn at that date by Charlotte’s fame). That, as far as can be traced, was it, and that was obviously how it suited them.

  With Emily, Charlotte walked on the moors until their shoes were worn almost out, talking over the school plan and their writing. Emily was enjoying an intensely productive period of poetry, and had begun copying her work into two separate notebooks—one called “Gondal Poems” and the other “E. J. B.,” as if to make a clear separation at last between one side of her work and another. That Anne knew about Emily’s surge in production and creativity is evident from her Diary Paper in 1845; Charlotte probably also knew by report—but she wasn’t shown any of her sister’s work.

  Charlotte had got as far as having “cards of terms” for their school printed in August 1844 and sent some to Ellen to pass round her acquaintance and canvass interest. The cards made the project sound almost real: “The Misses Brontë’s Establishment for the Board and Education of a limited number of Young Ladies, The Parsonage, Haworth, near Bradford” was to offer, for the sum of £35 a year, full board and tuition in writing, arithmetic, history, geography, grammar and needle-work. Extras in French, German, Latin, music and drawing would be available at a guinea a quarter each and laundry was extra too. None of this was cheap, by the lights of the day,*3 and August was possibly not the best time of year to start looking for pupils. Forced to solicit for custom, Charlotte swallowed her disinclination to write to and call on suitable local families, but she hardly pursued the matter very far. Mrs. Busfeild of Keighley regretted, as did others, that she had already placed her daughters elsewhere and hinted that the price was a bit high, given the “retired situation” of Haworth (she didn’t need to add anything about the town’s lack of gentility). The Whites of Stonegappe, possibly rather surprised that Miss Brontë should be reviving their acquaintance, told her that if she had only written sooner, they might have sent their own daughter and recommended the school to Colonel Stott and his wife. As it was, those girls were all off to the Misses Cockills at Oakwell Hall in Birstall, an establishment whose success Charlotte had been watching carefully: Elizabeth Cockill had been one of her contemporaries at Roe Head.

  Market forces were strongly at work in the burgeoning local school network. Patrick Brontë must have realised that it would be hard to keep a man of Ebenezer Rand’s ability in a place with so few opportunities for advance (the Rands left in 1845), but he had hoped to be able at least to support the schoolmaster’s post, and if possible to increase his salary, by voluntary subscriptions and the twopence per week fee that each pupil was charged. But when the new Wesleyan school in West Lane undercut the church school’s fee, Reverend Brontë was forced to lower his prices and go cap-in-hand again to the National Society for a grant. And when only £20 was forthcoming from that quarter to help the school through its second year, he had to keep petitioning local worthies for donations to keep it afloat. All this would have been difficult and distasteful, even for robust business people, as the Brontës were certainly not.

  By early October 1844 the sisters had given it all up. “Every one wishes us well,” Charlotte told Ellen, “but there are no pupils to be had.” This outcome seemed to be a relief to everyone. Patrick Brontë, a man who disliked dining with his own children, can never have relished the idea of sharing his home with five or six teenage strangers (his willingness to consider it at all was a powerful mark of his goodwill); Emily had never been keen on teaching, or company—her vision had been of holidays and money; Anne was inured to her position at Thorp Green; and all three sisters wanted to write more than anything else. “We have no present intention however of breaking our hearts on the subject,” Charlotte concluded briskly.

  When she came to write about it in 1857, Mrs. Gaskell saw another powerful impediment to the furtherance of the school plan—Branwell Brontë, whose “occasional home…could hardly be a fitting residence for the children of strangers.” By 1845, Mrs. Gaskell believed, his sisters were “silently aware that his habits were such as to render his society at times most undesirable.” Bombarded with local gossip just eleven years later, Mrs. Gaskell came to the very reasonable conclusion that the Brontë sisters had heard the same “distressing rumours concerning the cause of that remorse and agony of mind, which at times made [Branwell] restless and unnaturally merry, at times rendered him moody and irritable.” Opium-eating was one of his recreations, alcohol another, poetry a third: between them, Branwell Brontë was prey to powerful mood swings. When he was home from Thorp Green in the summer of 1844, Charlotte had found his presence in the household very disturbing, and to Heger she had described him as “toujours malade.” “Ill” became the family euphemism for “drunk,” but as yet none of them apart from Anne had an inkling of what else Branwell was up to. Patrick Brontë, forever wishing to see the proper start of his son’s brilliant career, could only have been relieved that he had held down the job at the Robinsons’ for a whole eighteen months.

  In fact, Branwell had been involved in a liaison with his employer’s wife almost from his arrival at Thorp Green, and the excitement and melodrama of it worked on his flammable temperament to very ill-effect. His success as a published poet in the local press had stoked his ego and ambitions, and it was in the character of half-discovered genius that he and Lydia Robinson began their affair. To his old friend Francis Grundy, with whom he had been out of touch for two years, Branwell described how it happened:

  This lady [Lydia Robinson] (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. My admiration of her mental and personal attractions, my knowledge of her unselfish sincerity, her sweet temper and unwearied care for others, with but unrequited return where most should have been given…although she is seventeen years my senior, all combined to an attachment on my part, and led to reciprocations which I had little looked for.

  Branwell’s aggravation when he was at home in the summer of 1844 was at separation from this Sybil, with whom he was in constant correspondence—a fact that can’t have escaped Charlotte’s notice, nor Anne’s. Anne is likely to have had suspicions about the relationship from the start, and must have had to endure many painful moments at Thorp Green resulting from it.

  Anne gave in her notice in the middle of June 1845, just before the Robinson family were about to go on their annual seaside holiday. Her inability to explain fully why she was resigning must have perturbed both her employer and her family, and have alerted Mrs. Robinson to the coming storm. She came home under this cloud, loyally silent, and didn’t tell Charlotte what was going on until the latter’s return from a holiday with Ellen in Derbyshire in July. By that time, Branwell had also arrived home, “ill” (“he is so very often owing to his own fault,” Charlotte reported angrily to Ellen; “I was not therefore shocked at first”). But this wasn’t a holiday from work or a routine bender: Anne had to explain that Branwell had been sacked by Mr. Robinson for “proceedings which he characterised as bad beyond expression.”*4 The Thorp Green gardener had apparently alerted his employer after surprising Mrs. Robinson and Branwell alone in a boathouse, and the tutor was dismissed at once in a furious letter from the injured spouse that charged him “on pain of exposure” to break off all communication with every member of the family.

  Lydia Robinson seems t
o have successfully represented herself to her husband as blameless after the exposure of her boathouse tryst, for the Robinsons continued their holiday in Scarborough after the crisis without undue disruption—Mr. Robinson even bought his wife a necklace. Back at Haworth Parsonage, Branwell also claimed innocence, of a kind, and “spoke freely” with his father on the subject, leaving the latter in no doubt that “intimacy” had taken place, but also that the blame lay squarely with the matron, whom Reverend Brontë described to Elizabeth Gaskell as a “diabolical seducer.” Whether the girls were as ready to exculpate Branwell was another matter: Anne was shocked and ashamed for her brother; Emily inclined to put the matter behind them all and move on. The person who felt most anger and mortification, and the one to whom Branwell felt the need to apologise by letter, was Charlotte, who was not just appalled by his behaviour but secretly furious at the ease with which he had been able to indulge his passions, while she was almost killing herself with the suppression of her own.

  In the novel she finished the following year, Charlotte’s violent feelings about Branwell’s adultery are articulated in an extraordinary outburst by the protagonist William Crimsworth, who reflects on having observed close at hand an example of “romantic domestic treachery”: “No golden halo of fiction was about this example, I saw it bare and real and it was very loathsome. I saw a mind degraded by the practice of mean subterfuge, by the habit of perfidious deception, and a body depraved by the infectious influence of the vice-polluted soul.” This, like the other eruptions of feeling in the book (and in Charlotte’s later novels), has the quality of a hell-fire sermon. Crimsworth leaves his job because the woman who has been trying to engage his affections, Mademoiselle Reuter (a thinly disguised portrait of Zoë Heger), is about to marry his employer, and he imagines that if they live under one roof, adultery with her will follow inevitably. Charlotte is here both sympathising with young men who might find themselves targeted by vicious and predatory females and blaming those who don’t take firm steps to avoid temptations in the first place. A young unmarried woman, by inference, has to be even more vigilant against her own passions. But that is not to say those passions, and adulterous impulses, don’t exist.