by Jessica Cox
Life at the parsonage following the death of Charlotte’s siblings was desolate, and the last surviving sibling’s grief at the loss of her family is palpable in her letters from this period. Addressing her publisher shortly after the death of her sister Anne, she refers to her recent losses: ‘They are both gone – and so is poor Branwell – and Papa has now me only – the weakest – puniest – least promising of his six children.’ Though Charlotte found solace in her faith following her siblings’ deaths, she nevertheless struggled to reconcile herself to the life of solitude that now lay before her. Her letters from this period refer to the monotony of her existence, and it is clear that she suffered from frequent and extended bouts of depression. However, the process of completing her next novel proved a cathartic one, writing assisting in assuaging her grief somewhat. She completed the manuscript by early September, and Shirley was published at the end of October 1849.
Shirley is an uneven, at times disjointed novel, arguably suffering from the influence on the author of two crucial events – one public, one deeply personal: the critical reception of Jane Eyre, and the deaths of Branwell, Emily and Anne. Stung by some of the criticisms of Jane Eyre, Charlotte took pains to try and improve herself as a writer with her next novel. The opening chapter of Shirley can be seen as a direct response to the accusations of melodrama and sensationalism that were levelled at Jane Eyre. Addressing the reader directly, the narrator proceeds:
If you think […] that anything like a romance is preparing for you, reader, you never were more mistaken. Do you anticipate sentiment, and poetry, and reverie? Do you expect passion, and stimulus, and melodrama? Calm your expectations; reduce them to a lowly standard. Something real, cool, and solid lies before you.
While the first chapter certainly proceeds in this vain, satirically portraying three curates, who ultimately play only a minor role in the novel, overall the assertions made in the opening of the novel are not borne out by the remainder of the text, which details the experiences of the two heroines, Caroline Helstone and Shirley Keeldar, their romantic attachments, and their proximity to the Luddite disturbances of the early nineteenth century. While Shirley is less sensational than Jane Eyre in many respects, like its predecessor it combines realism with romance, and these two elements of the text do not always sit comfortably with one another.
Brontë’s attempt to use her second published novel as a vehicle to respond to criticisms of Jane Eyre is also evident in the Preface she wished to include, a direct response to Elizabeth Rigby’s critical review of Jane Eyre. Like the first chapter of Shirley, the intended Preface, entitled A Word to the Quarterly’, is satirical in tone, yet the bitterness Brontë felt towards reviewers such as Rigby is evident: she concludes the Preface by advising her addressee to turn out and be a governess yourself for a couple of years – the experiment would do you good: […] two years of uncheered solitude might perhaps teach you that to be callous, harsh and unsympathising is not to be firm, superior and magnanimous’. Unsurprisingly, Brontë’s publishers refused to include the Preface, and she, in turn, refused to supply an alternative, declining either to reveal her true identity or to allude to her recent losses.
Shirley is also somewhat problematic in terms of its social commentary. It is ostensibly concerned with both class and gender issues, but Brontë’s engagement with these topics is far from straightforward. The novel was published a year after the Chartist disturbances of 1848, at a time when the issue of the rights of the working classes was a topic of much public debate and concern. However, while Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton, which was published the year before Shirley and with which there were inevitable comparisons, is set in the 1830s and 1840s, hence dealing directly with contemporary concerns about class uprising, Brontë elected to set her novel in the early years of the nineteenth century; thus she deals not with the issues surrounding the Chartist movement, but with the Luddite disturbances of the 1810s. The narrative’s social commentary in respect of class is therefore diluted by its historical focus.
The novel’s concern with the role of women in society is also problematic. Discussing possible topics for her follow-up to Jane Eyre, Charlotte wrote to William Smith Williams in a letter that reveals something of her rather ambiguous views on the emerging feminist movement:
I often wish to say something about the ‘condition of women’ question […] It is true enough that the present market for female labour is quite overstocked – but where or how could another be opened? Many say that the professions now filled only by men should be open to women also – but are not their present occupants and candidates more than numerous enough to answer every demand? Is there any room for female lawyers, female doctors, female engravers, for more female artists, more authoresses? One can see where the evil lies – but who can point out the remedy? When a woman has a little family to rear and educate and a household to conduct, her hands are full, her vocation is evident – when her destiny isolates her -1 suppose she must do what she can – live as she can – complain as little – bear as much – work as well as possible.
This ambiguity regarding a woman’s right to work manifests itself in Shirley. Like her creator, Caroline Helstone suffers from bouts of melancholy, brought on partly by her sense of her lack of usefulness. The question of how middle-class women, particularly unmarried women, might spend their time was an important one in the nineteenth century. Denied entry into public life, higher education and the professions for much of the period, they frequently spent time on domestic duties and social calls. Florence Nightingale, in a piece entitled Cassandra’ (written in 1852 but unpublished until 1928), lamented the social structures and gender ideologies that meant that middle- and upper-class women were prevented from performing fulfilling work, and argued that the idle nature of their lives was likely to cause acute mental distress, asking, Why have women passion, intellect, moral activity – these three – and a place in society where no one of the three can be exercised?’ She thus echoes Caroline Helstone’s experience in Shirley. Determined to overcome the feelings of melancholy and depression that are the result of her own perceived lack of useful activity and fulfilment, Caroline resolves to find work as a governess, but is dissuaded from doing so by her friends and family: as there is no financial need for her to work, they cannot comprehend why she would submit herself to the difficulties of a governess’s life, failing to recognise the significance of her desire for a useful, purposeful existence.
Brontë knew from experience the hardships governesses were subject to, and the objections raised to Caroline’s proposal are in many ways legitimate: the point Brontë sought to make was that women in Caroline’s position desired some kind of occupation or vocation, and should be entitled to it. Yet their options were extremely limited, and it is these limitations that she attempts to explore and to highlight through Caroline’s plight in Shirley. From a feminist perspective, however, Brontë does not offer any satisfactory solution to these problems. Indeed, the problem of how Caroline might usefully spend her time is ultimately resolved by her marriage to Robert Moore at the conclusion of the novel. The implication is thus that marriage represents an acceptable alternative to work, and that the problem of how women might usefully occupy their time is one that pertains only to single women: the married woman’s time would, she seems to suggest, inevitably be spent on wifely and maternal duties, and this would necessarily assuage any desire to work. Earlier in the novel, when Caroline expresses a desire for a profession, Shirley, echoing the conservative view of the time, argues that ‘hard labour and learned professions, they say, make women masculine, coarse, unwomanly,’ to which Caroline responds, ‘What does it signify, whether unmarried and never-to-be-married women are unattractive and inelegant, or not?’ The question supports the suggestion that Brontë is only concerned with the single woman’s right to work. While the view that marriage was sufficient occupation for women was prevalent at the time, Charlotte’s friend Mary Taylor was outraged by what she saw as a retre
at from the question of women’s right to work. Writing to Charlotte a few months after the publication of Shirley, she effectively accused her of betraying her sex:
I have seen some extracts from Shirley in which you talk of women working. And this first duty, this great necessity you seem to think that some women may indulge in – if they give up marriage & don’t make themselves too disagreeable to the other sex. You are a coward & a traitor. A woman who works is by that alone better than one who does not.
As with so much of her fiction, Charlotte’s views on women and work as expressed in Shirley were undoubtedly influenced by her own experiences: by the time Shirley was published, Charlotte was thirty-three years old; had she retained any hope of marrying, this must surely have been abandoned following the deaths of her siblings. She had long been concerned about her father’s health, and her sense of obligation to him would have prevented her considering any proposal that would lead to her removal from the family home at Haworth. It is therefore not entirely surprising that Brontë concerns herself with the plight of single women in Shirley.
While her own status as an unmarried woman appears to have influenced her portrayal of Caroline Helstone in Shirley, inevitably, Charlotte’s recent losses are also reflected in the novel. Having begun writing Shirley some months before Branwell’s death, she had completed a significant proportion of the novel by the time he died. The writing process was, however, interrupted by the spate of deaths, and by the time she returned to the work she was attempting to reconcile herself to her new position as the sole survivor of Patrick and Maria’s six children. She later confessed that ‘the last volume […] was composed in the eager, restless endeavour to combat mental sufferings that were scarcely tolerable.’ One of the effects of her siblings’ deaths while she was writing the novel was the inclusion of a number of fictional characters and episodes that are rooted in her own painful experiences. Gaskell claimed that the character of Shirley was based on Emily Brontë, as [she] would have been, had she been placed in health and prosperity’ (critics have speculated that the original of the novel’s second heroine, Caroline Helstone, was Ellen Nussey, Anne Brontë, or Charlotte herself). There is a nod towards Anne’s first novel in the naming of Mrs Pryor: her maiden name is Miss Gray, and we learn subsequently that her Christian name is Agnes. Returning to Shirley following the death of Anne, Charlotte began the third volume of the novel with the chapter entitled ‘The Valley of the Shadow of Death’, in which Caroline becomes seriously ill, and hovers for some time between life and death. Unlike Charlotte’s sisters, however, her heroine recovers from her illness – her recovery hastened by the revelation that Mrs Pryor is her lost mother. While reality had become almost unbearable for Charlotte by this point, her fiction provided a source of much-needed escapism: Caroline survives, as Emily and Anne had not; she is reunited with her mother, as Charlotte could never be. Indeed, there has been speculation that Charlotte originally intended that Caroline should die, but that she altered the plot of the novel in light of her sisters’ deaths. Having initially struggled to complete the novel, her writing now became a source of comfort and catharsis, as her private grief infiltrated and coloured her public writing, contributing to the somewhat contradictory nature of the novel.
Shirley’s disjointedness is emphasised in some of the reviews it generated, and is perhaps part of the reason it has failed to exert the same influence and fascination on generations of readers as Jane Eyre. There was general agreement amongst the first reviewers of Shirley on two points: firstly, that the novel was inferior to its predecessor; secondly, that it was the work of a woman writer. Aspects of the text were singled out for more severe criticism: the portrayal of the male characters; the reversal of the Jane/Rochester relationship through Shirley and Louis; and the opening chapter – which was particularly derided. Charlotte was somewhat disappointed with the response to Shirley, bemoaning the fact that it was ‘disparaged in comparison with “Jane Eyre”‘, when she had spent ‘more time, thought and anxiety’ on it. She was also, inevitably, somewhat distressed by the widely held assumption that Currer Bell was the pseudonym of a woman writer. Writing to James Taylor at Smith, Elder and Co. she confessed, ‘I imagined – mistakenly as it now appears – that “Shirley” bore fewer traces of the female hand than “Jane Eyre”: that I have misjudged disappoints me a little – though I cannot exactly see where the error lies.’ Henceforth, however, she would have to resign herself to the fact that her sex was known to readers and reviewers. While this may initially have been a source of some anguish, the resolution of this aspect of her public and private selves arguably enabled her to develop as a writer, and to produce, in her next and final novel Villette, her most mature work.
Final Years
Some of the difficulties Charlotte had faced in completing Shirley were to plague her again with Villette. Grief and her now relatively solitary life at Haworth contributed significantly to the writer’s block with which she perpetually suffered. In her biography of the Brontës, Juliet Barker argues that Haworth was far from being the obscure, isolated Yorkshire village imagined by Brontë mytholo-gists, noting that it was rapidly expanding in population at the time the Brontë family resided there, and that it was located within relatively easy distance of three major towns: Bradford, Halifax and Burnley. While this is undoubtedly true, in a letter to Ellen Nussey shortly after her return from Brussels, Charlotte herself described Haworth as ‘a lonely, quiet spot, buried away from the world’, and the popular image of Haworth stems in part from the largely self-imposed isolation of the Brontë sisters, who frequently eschewed society in favour of each other’s company. This is apparent in some of Charlotte’s earliest surviving letters: writing to Ellen Nussey in 1835 at the age of eighteen, she refers to her as ‘almost the only, and certainly the dearest friend I possess (out of our own family)’. Patrick Brontë, recalling his children’s early years at Haworth, notes, As they had few opportunities, of being in learned, and polished society in their retired country situation they formed a little society amongst themselves – with which they seem’d contented and happy.’ This ‘little society’ had survived into adulthood, but while this self-imposed isolation may have been welcome whilst her siblings lived, the loneliness of her existence quickly became apparent after their deaths. Even in the immediacy of her grief after Anne’s death, she recognised the change that would now inevitably take place. Discussing the future in a letter to her publisher, she writes:
May I retain strength and cheerfulness enough to be a comfort to [Papa] and to bear up against the weight of the solitary life to come – it will be solitary – I cannot help dreading the first experience of it – the first aspect of the empty rooms which once were tenanted by those dearest to my heart – and where the shadow of their last days must now – I think – linger for ever.
A few days later, she wrote to Ellen Nussey, ‘Solitude may be cheered and made endurable beyond what I can believe. The great trial is when evening closes and night approaches -At that hour we used to assemble in the dining-room – we used to talk – Now I sit by myself – necessarily I am silent.’ Brontë began her career as one of three writers, collaborating initially on the collection of poems, and advising and discussing their later fiction. She now had to learn to write unaided, without the help and advice of her lost sisters. Though her solitary life became gradually more endurable, she battled grief, solitude and depression of spirits for a long time following the deaths of her sisters, and her ability to write suffered accordingly. She had hoped that grief and loneliness might be assuaged by throwing herself into her work, but the solitude left her severely depressed and she found it difficult to concentrate on her writing. She was reluctant to spend any significant time away from Haworth, despite the effect this might have on her depressed spirits, as she was increasingly aware of her duty to her father as his last surviving child. Thus, Charlotte’s domestic role and her role as a writer once again appeared in conflict with one another.
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sp; While struggling to finish what would be her final completed novel, Charlotte was approached by her publishers and asked if she would consider editing a new volume of her sisters’ novels, Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey. She agreed, and this was to prove a painful but cathartic process that would ultimately assist in the overcoming of her writer’s block and enable her to complete Villette. If Shirley in some ways embodies Brontë’s struggle between her public self as writer and her private self as grieving sister, this is further emphasised in her treatment of her sisters’ works following their deaths. Writing the Preface for this new edition, Charlotte took it upon herself to issue a partial defence of her sisters’ works, which had come in for some criticism from reviewers (particularly Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall). Though her stated purpose was to ‘wipe the dust off their gravestones, and leave their dear names free from soil’, Charlotte was also keen to emphasise once again that Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell were three separate authors, and began the Biographical Note that was to introduce the edition by reiterating this. It was, perhaps, her desire to distinguish her own work from that of her sisters that led to her somewhat patronising and critical assessment of her sisters’ work. Discussing Wuthering Heights, she alludes to Emily’s ‘immature’ power of composition, echoing some of the critical reviews of that novel, and goes on to note that her sister ‘had no worldly wisdom’. In the ‘Editor’s Preface’ that followed the Biographical Note, she expands on what she perceives as the faults with Emily’s novel, reserving particular criticism for the characters of Heathcliff and Catherine, patronisingly declaring, ‘Having formed these beings, she did not know what she had done,’ and concluding that it was scarcely advisable to create characters such as Heathcliff.
