Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives

by John Sutherland

  During the 1870s the Trollopes undertook two trips to Australia and New Zealand, where their son Fred was a sheep-farmer. Travel enriched the settings of his later fiction and it was on one of these steamship voyages, from New York to London in 1875, that Henry James, a fellow passenger, jotted down a pen portrait of his indomitably productive friend (of whose fiction, none the less, he had few good things to say):

  The season was unpropitious, the vessel overcrowded, the voyage detestable; but Trollope shut himself up in his cabin every morning for a purpose which, on the part of a distinguished writer who was also an invulnerable sailor, could only be communion with the muse. He drove his pen as steadily on the tumbling ocean as in Montagu Square [his home after 1875].

  The thing he feared more than death, Trollope once told his son Henry, was idleness. Anthony never had that gift, his lazy brother Tom observed. He wrote more novels than his readers could swallow and stuffed the manuscripts in his desk drawers for posterity. Following a trip to Ireland in September 1882, he suffered a stroke and died in a London nursing home. Bulletins were issued and the nation mourned a loved figure. He left some £26,000 (‘commendable but not magnificent’ by his reckoning of such things). The publication of his frank Autobiography was held back until after his death. It took the best part of a century before his reputation as a novelist recovered from its damaging revelations about the ‘mechanical’ way he wrote his novels. A commemorative stone to his memory was laid in Westminster Abbey, disgracefully belatedly, in 1993.

  FN

  Anthony Trollope

  MRT

  The Last Chronicle of Barset

  Biog

  N. J. Hall, Trollope: A Biography (1991)

  41. Grace Aguilar 1816–1847

  Sympathy is the charm of human life.

  Well known in her lifetime as a pioneering writer on Judaism – still consulted, if not much read – Aguilar was the author of seven works of popular fiction, the bulk of them published posthumously by her mother. The Aguilars were a Jewish family, emigrating from Portugal in the eighteenth century to England. Grace was born in Hackney, where her father was in business. After a crippling attack of measles when she was twenty-one, Grace, never strong, passed the remainder of her short life as an invalid. Morbillivirus and maternal love made her a novelist, in the same way that a badly set broken ankle, and another estimable Victorian mother, made Anna Sewell the author of Black Beauty.

  Aguilar was, through her improving novels for girls, an arbiter of what should be the young woman’s ‘proper behaviour’. It boils down to a first commandment – ‘Honour thy Mother’. Especially effective as a conduct-manual, with a sweet coating of fiction, was Home Influence (1847), which went through thirty editions in Britain in twenty years, and had a formative influence on the burgeoning American market for improving domestic fiction for teenage girls. The home was their university, and the matriarch its dean. The word ‘Mamma’ occurs in Home Influence, I would guess, ten times as often as in any other novel of the period. Described in its subtitle as ‘A Tale for Mothers and Daughters’, Home Influence was the only one of Aguilar’s novels to see print during her lifetime. It was accompanied by a reassuring Preface from the Jewish mother to allay the suspicions of Christian mothers.

  Aguilar was better at action within the home than outside it. One of the least convincing scenes in Victorian fiction is that in Home Influence where the heroine’s father, a General, falls victim to a native’s assegai – dying, none the less, in a condition of extreme and voluble piety. The Devon setting of Home Influence reflects the fact that Aguilar was, after 1828 (when her consumptive father, was forced to retire), brought up there. Her landscape descriptions are a strength and her seascapes particularly strong. However, she died in Frankfurt, where she had been taken in the vain hope of recovering her health. Exactly why the bulk of her innocuous fiction (but not her writing on Judaism) was held back from publication during her lifetime is mysterious. A Mother’s Recompense, the sequel to Home Influence, was published posthumously in 1851, and Woman’s Friendship in 1850. Both are stories of domestic life which centre on mother and daughter relationships. In a century plagued with ‘surplus women’ (i.e. more eligible females than there were male partners for them – a fact revealed by the decennial censuses) there was, for many young Victorian women, nothing else than women’s friendship on offer. And, of course, uplifting reading.

  FN

  Grace Aguilar

  MRT

  Home Influence: A Tale for Mothers and Daughters

  Biog

  ODNB (Nadia Valman)

  42. The Brontës: (Patrick 1777–1861); Charlotte 1816–1855; (Branwell 1817–1848); Emily 1818–1848; Anne 1820–1849

  The children did not want society. To small infantine gaieties they were unaccustomed. They were all in all to each other. Mrs Gaskell

  The most resonant name in women’s fiction of the mid nineteenth century is also the strangest. It originates with a remarkable father. One of ten children of a poor farming family, he had been born Patrick Prunty (sometimes spelled ‘Brunty’). The name is common to this day in Co. Down, Northern Ireland. Patrick was born in the region, on St Patrick’s Day in 1777, of mixed Protestant and Catholic parentage. He gave early evidence of a quick mind. It led, by the hardest of educational routes, to the young Irishman’s registering in 1802 at Cambridge University, with a view to ordination in the Church of England. ‘Pruntys’ were not common in that exalted place, particularly those with the bog still sticking to their trotters.

  There were problems with the name ‘Patrick Prunty’ – a name which had the same sinister resonances with English congregations as, say, ‘Gerry Adams’, or ‘Martin McGuinness’ would have 200 years later. In 1798 there had been bloody uprising in Ireland led by the ‘Society of United Irishmen’, egged on by France (currently at war with England). Ireland and the Irish were not trusted – or liked – by the English middle classes in 1802. At this period Patrick, prudently (given his future career in the Church of England) renamed himself ‘Brontë’. He distanced himself further from his Ulster origins with a diaeresis, or umlaut – a mark associated with Germany, not Ireland, a country where umlauts are as rare as the venomous snakes which St Patrick banished from the island.

  There are two suggested reasons for the Revd Brontë’s choice of a new name. The word is an anglicisation of the ancient Greek for ‘thunder’, which, with his newly acquired classical learning, may have tickled the young Cantab’s scholarly amour-propre. The more plausibly suggested reason is patriotism – to England, that is. Admiral Lord Nelson had been appointed Duke of Brontë in 1799 by Ferdinand, King of the Two Sicilies and Infante of Spain, grateful for the nautical hero’s exploits against Napoleon. Short of renaming himself ‘the Revd John Bull’, Patrick could not have decontaminated himself more effectively of any disloyal Hibernian affiliation.

  By his own formidable efforts – publishing pious verse and two morally improving short novels on the way – he rose in the world into the middle ranks of the Anglican Church, holding a string of curacies until by 1812 he was eligible enough to marry well. His bride, Maria Branwell, was the daughter of a Cornish parson. After nine years of marriage, in which she bore six children, Mrs Brontë would die of an obscure cancer in 1821, aged thirty-seven. Hers was the first Brontë death in the parsonage at Haworth to which Patrick had been appointed perpetual curate. The church served a small mill town in the West Riding of Yorkshire. It was a hugely spread-out parish, involving much walking up steep hills and down dales for the minister and, when they grew up, for his district-visiting daughters. Emily particularly loved the Yorkshire ‘wilderness’ (Mr Earnshaw, it will be recalled, walks sixty miles back from Liverpool bringing baby Heathcliff to Wuthering Heights).

  In the confines of the Haworth parsonage, the Revd Brontë and his children – five daughters and one son, Patrick Branwell (1817–48), the great hope of the family – lived, wrote and died. It was a handsome building from th
e outside but inside it was a happy hunting ground for the tubercular bacillus. If ever anyone wanted to establish the connection between consumption and literary genius, wind-whipped Haworth is prime evidence. The widowed Patrick made clumsy and unsuccessful attempts at remarriage, and eventually the running of the house was taken over by his sister-in-law, Miss Elizabeth Branwell. A woman in her mid-forties and of evangelical disposition, she was not liked by the elder girls. She seems, however, to have had a soft spot for Anne, the youngest girl, who was less wild than her siblings.

  Charlotte and Emily, and their two elder sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, suffered a wretched spell at the Cowan Bridge Clergy Daughters’ School, which inspired the hellish, typhoid-ridden Lowood. In Jane Eyre it is pictured as sadism institutionalised:

  we had no boots, the snow got into our shoes and melted there; our ungloved hands became numbed and covered with chilblains, as were our feet: I remember well the distracting irritation I endured from this cause every evening, when my feet inflamed; and the torture of thrusting the swelled, raw and stiff toes into my shoes in the morning. Then the scanty supply of food was distressing … From this deficiency of nourishment resulted an abuse, which pressed hardly on the younger pupils: whenever the famished great girls had an opportunity, they would coax or menace the little ones out of their portion.

  Anne, the baby of the family, and asthmatic, was spared Cowan Bridge. ‘Gentle’ is one of the few defining epithets applied to her as a girl. In one of her brief spells of formal education, Anne won a ‘good conduct’ medal – an award which one strains to imagine decorating the juvenile breasts of Emily, Branwell or Charlotte.

  In 1825, the two elder sisters died of consumption, the disease which was to rage through the family. The Revd Brontë decided, wisely, to educate the surviving daughters himself with the aid of tutors. For the next five years they were free to range at will in the well-stocked parsonage library. They were stimulated by the books they found – Scott’s romances and Byron’s poems notably. Around 1826, the three sisters, together with the brilliant but wayward Branwell, began secretively to write long serials about imaginary worlds. This ‘web of childhood’ was initially inspired by games with Branwell’s toy soldiers. The narratives ranged as far abroad as Africa, featuring Napoleonic and Wellingtonian heroes. At least one of the serials, that involving the fantastic kingdom of Gondal, was kept going by Anne and Emily until as late as 1845. Charlotte, always the most worldly of the sisters, gave up her parallel Angria saga in 1839.

  In 1831 Charlotte went for eighteen months to a more congenial school at Roe Head. Emily and Anne followed. Charlotte went on to teach there for a while. At puberty, Anne is recorded as undergoing a religious crisis. Whether these were denominational ‘doubts’ is unrecorded – but they subsided. She was always the least troubled of the sisters. Charlotte seems to have been more steadfastly devout: everyone remembers the first words in Jane Eyre – ‘there was no possibility of taking a walk that day’; many fewer the last words – ‘Amen; even so come, Lord Jesus!’ Emily, on the evidence of Wuthering Heights, seemed happy to live her life without Lord Jesus coming into it overmuch. The last lines of her novel could be read as doubting the existence of any afterlife whatsoever:

  I sought, and soon discovered, the three headstones on the slope next the moor: the middle one grey, and half buried in heath; Edgar Linton’s only harmonized by the turf and moss creeping up its foot; Heathcliff’s still bare.

  I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.

  No last day trumpet, it seems, will come to wake them. There was now the necessity for the sisters to do something with their lives. In the absence of some other man, they could expect no financial support after the death of their curate father (ironically, though, he was destined to outlive them). Oddly, none of the Brontë girls – although handsome, as Branwell’s portraits attest, and gifted, as their writing attests – seemed able, or willing, to enter marriage, despite what must have been an ample supply of eligible young clergymen in their circle.

  In 1838 Emily became a teacher governess at a school near Halifax, Law Hill, and in 1839 Anne and Charlotte went as governesses to private families. Charlotte’s first two positions were short and unhappy. Docile Anne was the least unhappy. She also left in fiction the most realistic account of how humiliating the work was for a well-bred, highly intelligent young woman, superior in every way to her employers. Anne’s first employment, aged eighteen, was with the Ingham family at Blake Hall, near Mirfield. The children were spoilt and malicious and she was dismissed after a year. It’s nice to think that the Inghams lived to read their nasty selves portrayed as the odious Bloomfields, in Agnes Grey. ‘Gentle’ and ‘dutiful’ as she may have been, Anne does not gild the governess’s life with Jane Eyreish romanticism. She is more of Jane Fairfax’s party (in Emma) that it is the domestic English slave trade. Particularly stomach-turning is the depiction of young Tom Bloomfield torturing (‘fettling’) birds. When Agnes remonstrates, she is blandly informed that she is a servant and should mind her own business – ‘by gum!’

  The sisters did not intend to governess for the rest of their lives. They made various unsuccessful attempts to publish their writing and had a plan, with the financial assistance of an aunt, to establish a school of their own (a dream which finds recurrent expression in Charlotte’s later fiction). With a view to preparing themselves, Charlotte and Emily went to Brussels in 1842 to study and teach at a boarding school. Charlotte, then twenty-six, fell hopelessly in love with the proprietor and head of the school, M. Constantin Héger, whom she later portrayed as the exemplarily correct, and morally admirable, Paul Emanuel in Villette. Her depiction of Mme Héger is less warm. The sisters returned to Haworth in 1842 and only Charlotte went back to Brussels for a second year at the Pensionnat Héger. Emily, the more poetically inclined sister, was most rooted to Haworth and Yorkshire and seems to have hated leaving it. For Charlotte, the Belgian experience was extraordinarily stimulating emotionally and intellectually, although clearly (as refracted through Villette’s Lucy Snowe) she disliked Brussels, despised Catholics, and suffered horribly from her unrequited passion for her incorruptible professor – suffering distilled into Rochester’s cat and mouse game with his governess Jane.

  In 1844 the school project fell through. It survives only as a forlorn fiction in the last paragraphs of Villette. At Charlotte’s initiative, Poems by ‘Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell’ (the androgynous names are significant) was published in 1846. It sold two copies, as legend has it. But it got worse. In 1847, Emily’s Wuthering Heights and Anne’s Agnes Grey were accepted by the notoriously dubious London publisher, Thomas Cautley Newby, who brought them out lumped together as an abysmally ugly three-volume set. The world took no notice. Charlotte’s The Professor (based on her Brussels experience, but with a stiltedly male hero) was turned down by the eminently respectable house of Smith, Elder and Co., but Jane Eyre was eagerly accepted and published in October 1847 to terrific success. The rogue Newby now published Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) with the implication that it was actually the work of ‘Currer Bell’ – i.e. Charlotte, who in point of fact disliked her sister’s book for its graphic depiction of Branwell’s dipsomania. She suppressed its republication after Anne’s death.

  Anne and Charlotte authenticated themselves by going to London to meet George Smith and other members of the literary world. Thackeray on this occasion met Charlotte whom he admired. She dedicated the second edition of Jane Eyre to him, sparking wild rumours that he was the original of Rochester (the only connection was that he, too, had an insane wife). This would be Anne’s only trip outside Yorkshire. Her life had been consistently drearier than those of her sisters who had, at least, seen foreign parts. After the horrors of the Inghams she had found a slightly mor
e congenial governess post with the family of the Revd Edmund Robinson, near York.

  At this point, in 1843, Anne’s career crossed, fatefully, with that of her brother. Branwell, having failed to get the hoped for place at university, went on to fail as a portrait painter. Even more catastrophic was his being dismissed from a clerical job with the local railway firm under the suspicion of embezzlement. Despite his known dissipations, Anne secured him a tutor’s position with her own employers, the Robinsons. Branwell was dismissed from that post for ‘proceedings … bad beyond expression’ – namely misconduct (vaguely specified) with Mrs Robinson. Mr Robinson threatened to shoot him. On his dismissal in 1845 he fell into a ‘spiral of despair’, which he medicated with opium and alcohol.

  Branwell died, of drink, drugs and galloping consumption, in 1848, aged just thirty-one. The hopes of the family – and some incomplete works of fiction, alas – went to the grave with him in the family vault at Haworth. As his legacy, Branwell left, in his sisters’ writing, two of the most vivid depictions of chronic alcoholism in Victorian literature. One is Hindley in Wuthering Heights; the other Arthur Huntingdon, in Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Wildfell’s mysterious tenant, ‘Mrs Graham’, is, it emerges, a refugee from the alcoholic hell her husband Arthur has created. Descriptions of drunkenness are common enough in literature. What is most powerful in The Tenant is the close description of the alcoholic death. Helen, the abused wife, and Arthur are brought together in his final hours. Quite aware it will kill him, Arthur demands strong drink. The consequence is delirious terror: