Shorter travelled to Banagher in the spring of 1895 and managed to persuade Arthur Nicholls (then in his seventies) not only to give him access to many of the treasured manuscripts he had kept to himself for forty years and sell some to Wise, but to sell him the copyright on any material that he was to handle for publication, including copyright (and therefore veto) on any of Charlotte’s letters to Ellen Nussey that Ellen might seek to publish. Whether or not Nicholls quite understood the extent of the powers he was handing over (he had been confused about the difference between “copyright” and “permissions” when Mrs. Gaskell’s biography was in production), the result of his sudden change of policy was that Clement Shorter and his heirs maintained control over the Brontë literary estate well into the 1970s.
Interested parties such as Nicholls and Ellen Nussey (not to mention Monsieur Heger in Brussels) must have been amazed when a “Brontë Society” was formed in 1893, one of the first ever associations of its kind, which two years later opened a small museum of manuscripts and relics in a room over the Yorkshire Penny Bank at the top of Haworth’s Main Street. When Nicholls died in 1906, at the ripe age of eighty-seven, his widow sold some items from his remarkable collection straight to the Society, and much of the rest of the material was disposed of in two large auction sales, one in 1907 and one in 1916 after her death. In the meantime, Haworth had become such a draw for tourists that the Parsonage became difficult for any parson to live in quietly, and in 1927 the Ecclesiastical Commission put the building up for sale. It was bought by a local worthy, Sir James Roberts, specifically so that he could donate it to the Brontë Society, and the following year the Brontë Parsonage Museum opened, then as now one of the most hauntingly atmospheric writers’ house museums in the world.
—
FOR ALL HIS TALK of respecting the wishes and privacy of a dead friend, Constantin Heger proved an unpredictable respecter of them himself. What he felt in 1856 on perusing Charlotte’s agonised love-notes and carefully extracting anodyne passages for Elizabeth Gaskell’s use is impossible to say, but once that had been done, he may have thought there was no good reason—and perhaps some danger—in keeping the originals.
His wife obviously took a different view: the danger in “those letters” might lie in their not being available as evidence, hence her removal of the fragments from the bin and reconstruction jigsaw-wise. Madame Heger is said to have kept her actions secret (exactly as Madame Beck would have done), showing the letters to her daughter Louise only after the latter had attended a lecture in Brussels, in about 1868,*3 explicitly connecting their family with the characters in Villette and criticising their treatment of the Brontë sisters. Louise said that the letters were at that time kept by her mother in a compartment of her jewel box, flat, one imagines, as the intricate mending with gummed strips and thread shows no signs of having been disturbed.
Louise, who was just a toddler when the Brontë sisters arrived at the Pensionnat in 1842 and who lived until 1933, acquired the letters at her mother’s death in 1890, but kept them secret in turn. She said that when she told her father about them, he was surprised to discover that they still existed and he tried to throw them away again, but, like her mother, she managed to thwart him. Like many details and dates in Louise’s account, this is hard to square with the other evidence. Why would Monsieur Heger ever have thrown the letters away in anger, if he seemed happy to show them and quote them to Elizabeth Gaskell in 1856?
And other evidence indicates that the letters were not kept strictly secret, nor did Monsieur think them destroyed in the 1860s. In 1869 Thomas Westwood, an employee of an Anglo-Belgian railway company who had lived in Brussels for twenty years and whose wife and wife’s cousin were former pupils and friends of the Hegers, told a correspondent that Villette was “truer than the biography” and that “the one true love of [Charlotte Brontë’s] life was M. Paul Emanuel.” Westwood himself was in possession of one of Charlotte’s school essays, presumably given to him by a member of the family. “M. Paul Emanuel has quite a bundle of them,” he said. Westwood makes it clear to his correspondent, whose curiosity had been piqued, that Constantin Heger had ceased to be very secretive or discreet about his association with the famous authoress and had “told the whole story” to Westwood’s wife’s cousin: his drawing out of Charlotte’s talent, her growing obsession with him, “an enforced parting” when the violence of her feelings became understood, and her despairing letters to him afterwards. “He told the story,” Westwood said, “and, I am sorry to say, he showed the letters also. He is a finished specimen of a Jesuit, but with all that a worthy & warm-hearted man.”
Westwood had been given one of the devoirs (he didn’t say which one) and another of them—Charlotte’s essay, “L’Amour Filial”—was given to Heger’s colleague at the Athénée, Charles-Henri Randolphe, in August 1876. By 1894 someone called Tamar possessed Charlotte’s gift to Constantin, Ashburnham Church on the Valley-Land*4 (it was sold on to a collector), and “E. Nys” owned “The Spell” (and was probably the person who had it expensively bound)—it is now in the British Library. The family seem indeed to have been handing their manuscripts out fairly freely, and in 1894, four years after Madame Heger’s death, and presumably at Monsieur Heger’s instigation, they began to release Brontë devoirs for publication in magazines. And yet, when Clement Shorter went to Brussels in 1895 on the trail of manuscript material, he was not granted an interview, and his inquiries were answered on a calling card by Claire Heger, the second-youngest daughter: “Doctor Heger regrets not possessing any letters whatever of Charlotte Brontë, having given them to friends of England a number of years ago.”
Among Brontë memorabilia given by the Hegers, before 1890, to another ex-pupil called Marion Douglas were Emily’s and Charlotte’s gifts to Madame on departure from the Pensionnat in 1842, The North Wind and Watermill, also two less explicable items, a photograph of Patrick Brontë and a lock of Charlotte Brontë’s hair.*5 The photograph could have been sent at any time after the early 1860s—they were sold as souvenirs in Haworth, even before Patrick Brontë’s death—but the lock of hair would be hard to account for, unless given or sent to Monsieur Heger by Charlotte herself. In Shirley, Caroline Helstone relates how she took such a keepsake from Robert Moore:
He was sitting near the table…on the temples were many such round curls. I thought he could spare me one: I knew I should like to have it, and I asked for it. He said, on condition that he might have his choice of a tress from my head; so he got one of my long locks of hair, and I got one of his short ones. I keep his, but, I dare say, he has lost mine. It was my doing, and one of those silly deeds it distresses the heart and sets the face on fire to think of: one of those small but sharp recollections that return, lacerating your self-respect like tiny penknives, and forcing from your lips, as you sit alone, sudden, insane-sounding interjections.
Could this reflect what happened in real life? So much in Charlotte’s novels is confessed or exposed under the veil of fiction.
—
IN HER Life of Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell related how, in her presence, someone once challenged Charlotte about the scene in Jane Eyre when the heroine “hears Rochester’s voice crying out to her in a great crisis of her life, he being many, many miles distant at the time. I do not know what incident was in Miss Brontë’s recollection when she replied, in a low voice, drawing in her breath, ‘But it is a true thing; it really happened.’ ” It was the loss of her sisters, Gaskell imagined, that Charlotte was thinking of, the “cries, and sobs, and wailings” of the wind around the sepulchral Parsonage that appeared “as of the dearly-beloved vainly striving to force their way to her,” in the manner of Cathy’s ghost at the windows of Wuthering Heights. True though this might have been to the intensity of Charlotte’s bereavement, a different cause probably stood behind that most striking and thrilling passage in Jane Eyre, one that, when she was writing the book, with her sisters still at her side, was overpoweringly alive to h
er: the calling of her soul to that of her Master.
The wavering line between fact and fiction seems to disappear altogether here, as does the distinction between what inspires a novel and how novels in turn affect life. In the late 1880s, Constantin Heger sat in his study in the rue d’Isabelle and wrote a charming letter to a former English pupil called Meta Mossman, to whom he felt he should apologise for the long delay in answering one of hers. He and his wife kept up many such friendships and correspondences; they liked to think of their past favourites as extended family, even when they had grown into women, wives, matrons. He hastens to reassure his young friend that, contrary to the evidence, she has not been forgotten by him:
although it is true that I have not written, I have nevertheless answered you frequently and at length, and this is how. Letters and the post are not, luckily, the only means of communication, or the best, between people who are really fond of one another: I am not referring to the telephone, which allows one to speak, to have conversation, from a distance. I have something better than that. I have only to think of you to see you. I often give myself the pleasure when my duties are over, when the light fades. I postpone lighting the gas lamp in my library, I sit down, smoking my cigar, and with a hearty will I evoke your image—and you come (without wishing to, I dare say) but I see you, I talk with you—you, with that little air, affectionate undoubtedly, but independent and resolute, firmly determined not to allow any opinion without being previously convinced, demanding to be convinced before allowing yourself to submit—in fact, just as I knew you, my dear [Meta], and as I have esteemed and loved you.
Here is the letter that Charlotte Brontë waited for all those miserable months in 1844 and 1845, the one she would have given almost anything to be handed by the Haworth postman; not the infrequent, testy notes that Heger sent so reluctantly, but an expansive, loving, intimate communication, wrapping the recipient in close and exclusive attention. He thinks of Meta Mossman as he sits smoking his cigar in the gloaming and works a form of magic for her, far away in England: I see you, I talk with you—with a hearty will I evoke your image.
In thinking it over you will have no difficulty in admitting that you yourself have experienced a hundred times that which I tell you about communication between two distant hearts, instantaneous, without paper, without pen, or words, or messenger, etc., a hundred times without noticing it, without its having attracted your attention, without anything extraordinary.
The question remains, was this the only time that worldly, wily Constantin Heger proposed a sort of emotional telepathy with one of his former favourites? Had he suggested something of the sort to Charlotte before they parted? Perhaps she felt she had “reached” him this way, when she said that Rochester’s call to Jane really happened. Was it his habit to attempt such mental communion across long distances and adverse circumstances?
Or had he simply been reading Jane Eyre?
* * *
*1 He was building a large extension on the lane side, to create a commodious dining room and office on the ground floor with a master bedroom above, a bath and indoor water closet (along with plumbing to the kitchen), all remarkable innovations.
*2 He later had the glass panes from this incorporated into picture frames (Miller, The Brontë Myth, 100). His photographs haven’t been traced.
*3 Louise said she was twenty-nine at the time, and she was born in 1839 (M. H. Spielmann, The Inner History of the Brontë–Heger Letters). On the whole, in her account to Spielmann, her dates and calculations are not very accurate.
*4 It is on display now at the Parsonage Museum.
*5 See Art of the Brontës, 385; notes to North Wind and Watermill. Other items in this stash of Brontëana included “a Brontë seal” and a sampler sewn by the Hegers’ English nanny, Martha Trotman.
Acknowledgements
The Brontë Parsonage Museum, Haworth, houses the largest and most important collection of Brontëana in the world and has been my frequent destination during the writing of this book. I would like to thank all the staff of the museum and library for their kindness and help, but especially the Collections Manager, Ann Dinsdale, whose expertise and lively interest in my subject has made every visit to the Parsonage Library a great pleasure. I would also like to thank Sarah Laycock for her unfailingly prompt and efficient answers to many queries and Linda Proctor-Mackley and Jenna Holmes for help along the way.
For the use of copyright materials and illustrations, and kind permission to quote from manuscripts in their collections, I would like to thank the Brontë Society, British Library, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds, City Archive of Brussels, Keighley Local Studies Library, National Portrait Gallery, New York Public Library, Pierpont Morgan Library and Royal Library of Belgium. Many individual members of staff at libraries, galleries and other institutions have generously given me their time, attention and professional expertise during the research for this book, and I would particularly like to thank Maria Molestina and the staff of the Manuscript Reading Room, Pierpont Morgan Library, New York City; Isaac Gewirtz, Lyndsi Barnes and Joshua McKeon of the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of New York Public Library; Elizabeth Denlinger of the Pforzheimer Collection, New York Public Library; Katie Thornton and Lucy Arnold of the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds; Rebekah Lunt and Fran Baker of the John Rylands Library, Manchester; Kirsty Gaskin of Cliffe Castle Museum, Keighley; Caroline Brown of Keighley Local Studies Library; Timothy Engels of Brown University Library; the staff of the Upper Reading Room of the Bodleian Library, Oxford; Dr. David Smith of St. Anne’s College Library, Oxford; and the staff of the Manuscript Room at the British Library. I am also very grateful to the staff of the Heinz Archive of the National Portrait Gallery, and especially to Tim Moreton, who in September 2013 arranged a private viewing for me of George Richmond’s portrait of Charlotte Brontë, not at that date on display in the gallery.
My debts to the many Brontë scholars and biographers who have preceded me will be clear from the book’s notes and bibliography, but I would like to pay particular tribute here to the fine biographies of Charlotte Brontë by Lyndall Gordon, Rebecca Fraser and the late Winifred Gérin, and to Lucasta Miller’s seminal study of Brontë reception, The Brontë Myth. Dr. Juliet Barker’s magisterial work, The Brontës, which drew together a wealth of primary and secondary material about the family and their times and established a base of facts about them of unmatchable value and solidity, has been an invaluable resource, and I am also very grateful for Dr. Barker’s responses to my queries during the writing of this book. Christine Alexander’s extensive research into, and editing of, the Brontë juvenilia has been of inestimable value to me, not least for her expertise in deciphering and interpreting the minuscule handwriting used by the Brontë siblings in their earliest writings. I would also like to express my appreciation of the work of Christine Alexander and Jane Sellars in their fine edition of The Art of the Brontës and that of Victor A. Neufeldt in The Poems of Charlotte Brontë, Sue Lonoff in The Belgian Essays and, in various other critical and editorial capacities, Herbert Rosengarten, Edward Chitham, Patsy Stoneman, Tom Winnifrith, Sally Shuttleworth, Dinah Birch, Dudley Green, Stevie Davies, Marianne Thormählen and Janet Gezari.
But my greatest debt is to the scholarship of Margaret Smith, whose three-volume edition of The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, published between 1994 and 2004, has opened out to readers the full scope and significance of Charlotte Brontë’s correspondence. Smith published many items for the first time, corrected attributions, dates and readings, and set all of the letters in a context of impeccably researched annotation and commentary. Her edition has been the essential tool in my biography, as the fullest and most suggestive source to date of Charlotte Brontë’s behaviour and private opinions, and I am very grateful for her generous permission to quote from her work.
For their various contributions of information, encouragement and hospitality I would like to thank Janet Allen, Jay Barksdale, Kate Clanchy, Sarah
Fermi, Lyndall Gordon, Sir John and Lady Sue Harman, Alexandra Harris, Selina Hastings, Elliot Kendall, Deborah Lutz, Lucasta Miller, Patsy Stoneman, Marion Taylor and Robin Walker. Mark Bostridge has generously shared his ideas and opinions on the Brontës with me for the past three years, and I am very grateful to him for all our conversations on the subject, and for his ready provision of leads and information. In Belgium, the members of the Brontë Brussels Group, led by Helen MacEwan, proved most convivial and knowledgeable company on two visits, in 2012 and 2015, and I have found their website and blogs of constant use in my research. Helen has also given much friendly help and advice, especially about illustrations, for which I am very grateful. In Haworth, Marian Reynolds at Cherry Tree Cottage and Brenda Taylor and Carol at Ponden Guest House were welcoming hosts, while Steven Wood was extremely generous with his time and assistance, especially over maps and local history sources. He was the best possible guide to changes in the area over the past two hundred years, and walking Haworth moor with him in the autumn of 2014 was pivotally important to my research as well as a great pleasure.
I would like to thank Carolyn Dinshaw and Marget Long for being such charming companions at North Lees Hall in the summer of 2014. I would also like to thank the staff of Hollybank School, Mirfield (the site of Roe Head School); the staff of Red House Gomersal; and Jocelyn Hill, John Williams and Janet Allen at Elizabeth Gaskell’s House, Manchester.
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