I was crushed. I nursed my hurt feelings all through the (terrible) movie and said goodbye abruptly afterward. The next day when her name flashed up in a Gchat window, I didn’t hurry to click to it. When I finally did, she was apologizing for not knowing how to say sooner that she only liked me platonically, but that she liked me a lot. What could I do? I’m sure I said something nonchalant and hid behind jokes about what a terrible couple we would have made, like she was the clueless one for thinking I thought it would work. I was grieving and simultaneously trying to act as if it hadn’t occurred to me there was even anything to grieve over. I figured if I could stick around, eventually she might succumb to what I hoped was charm, and not just dogged neediness. Nothing in our dynamic actually changed—we still chatted all day and cooked together, sat knee to knee on the couch, and planned road trips during movie marathons. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought we still were dating, just not particularly demonstrative. Meanwhile my heart was grumbling rebelliously from inside its carbonite prison.
What I most appreciated about Shirley (besides the Sapphic undertones and how glad Shirley and Caroline are to exclude men from their picnics) was Charlotte’s sense of humor, delivered in sly asides to the reader and in the sillier plot devices. Mistaken identity and long-lost relatives have rarely been played so straight-facedly. This was also the first time I’d seen adult female friendship portrayed in any Brontë novel—Jane Eyre, Cathy Earnshaw, and Agnes Grey all have to make their own ways in the world, but Caroline and Shirley have one another to lean on. They get to socialize without chaperones or romantic prospects. They’re not rivals or competitors (though a sketchy sort of love triangle does form around them, thanks to the inevitable intrusion of men); they’re just friends, who read poetry and plan trips and sometimes sit quietly outdoors together, probably with one’s head in the other’s lap or casually holding hands or whatever. I’m not picky.
I think part of why I took Preeti’s rejection so hard was that I find female friendship challenging generally. Not that I don’t crave it, but that I don’t often have the emotional currency to sustain it. Charlotte Brontë excelled at female friendship. She may have compartmentalized her friendships, or maintained them primarily through letter-writing, but they were profound nonetheless.
Charlotte’s best friends included Ellen Nussey, Mary Taylor (who later moved to New Zealand), their teacher Miss Wooler, and eventually the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell. Though Charlotte initially attempted to indoctrinate Ellen into the Brontë literary lifestyle by inundating her with reading lists while they were at school together, she eventually gave up and found plenty to discuss with “almost the only, and certainly the dearest,” friend she had outside her family circle.6
Her correspondence with Ellen is full of local nothings: how the journey was, whether the new cuffs were becoming, their health, the weather, traveling logistics. It’s delightful to see her mind at play, but it also becomes strange as her homebody epistolary life began to coexist with her extraordinary literary one. Charlotte and Anne had made a pact with Emily that nobody should know the true identities of the Bells. However, Ellen was suspicious, having seen Charlotte correcting proofs of Jane Eyre. By mid-1848, she was even bold enough to ask Charlotte about her work in progress, which Charlotte pretended not to understand, replying, “Your naivety in gravely inquiring my opinion of the ‘last new novel’ amuses me: we do not subscribe to a circulating library at Haworth and consequently ‘new novels’ rarely indeed come in our way.”7 (In addition to the novel she was in the middle of writing, Charlotte was at that point regularly receiving whole boxes of books and periodicals from Smith, Elder & Co.) Resolute, Charlotte kept their secret from Ellen until Emily’s death in December of that year.
Charlotte was one of the greatest literary artists in history, yet you would never know from most of her letters to school friends that she had ever even thought of writing—much less been writing constantly since childhood. In one letter Charlotte lectures her publisher on the best way to spend the funds the Brontës had set aside for publicity and printing costs; in another, written the same day, she thanks Ellen graciously for sending a bonnet, and updates her on the welfare of family servants and pets. She drops literary luminary Elizabeth Gaskell a line to commiserate about a critic who’d reviewed them both, and in her next note, nags Ellen about which train she’ll be arriving on and complains of boredom.
Though Shirley was based on Emily Brontë, and Caroline (very loosely!) on Ellen, their friendship was likely derived from Charlotte and her friend Mary Taylor (whose family also served as inspiration for Caroline’s neighbors, the Yorkes). Charlotte and Mary talked about politics, women’s rights, and more intellectual subjects—including her books. Mary is funny and sharp, less fastidious-seeming than her contemporaries. After leaving Brussels, she worked as a tutor in Germany, then packed up and moved to New Zealand, where she opened a store, built herself a house, and stayed for nearly fifteen years. Her letters are distinguished both by their energetic nature and by the fact that she knew about Charlotte’s publishing efforts much earlier than anyone else. After receiving a copy of Jane Eyre, she wrote,
It seemed to me incredible that you had actually written a book. Such events did not happen while I was in England. I begin to believe in your existence much as I do in Mr. Rochester’s. In a believing mood I don’t doubt either of them.…
I will scold you well when I see you.…
I have lately met with a wonder of a man who thinks Jane Eyre would have done better marry Mr. Rivers! He gives no reasons—such people never do.8
Charlotte cheekily mentioned this letter to Margaret Wooler in August, saying, “I heard from Mary Taylor in June.… She expressed pity for my comparatively dull, uneventful, and unoccupied existence.”9 When Mary finally read Shirley, she wrote to Charlotte,
What a little lump of perfection you’ve made me! There is a strange feeling in reading it of hearing us all talking. Shirley is much more interesting than J. Eyre—who indeed never interests you at all until she has something to suffer. All through this last novel there is so much more life & stir that it leaves you far more to remember than the other.10
But here is why I’m really obsessed by Charlotte’s friendships with Ellen, Mary Taylor, Miss Wooler, Laetitia Wheelwright, and her other intimate correspondents: these relationships, which she established as a young girl, sustained her for nearly thirty years.
In my own thirty years, I have retained maybe one friend from each stage of my life—middle school, high school, college—and that’s it. Handfuls of acquaintances, with names and faces I recognize and would be happy to see again if I ran into them on the train, but the kinds of friends you keep informed of your daily activities? I could list them on an index card. I could tear the index card in half and share it with the hermit who lives in the Inwood Hill Park caves and gets his mail at Dunkin’ Donuts. I socialize with neighbors at the dog park and am friendly with my coworkers, but I rarely join them for parties or meet up after hours. I don’t seem to keep up with many people. Sometimes it just doesn’t occur to me. Other times I’m deliberately cocooned inside my work or my own head and everyone else fades to the background. But then I feel sad, because when I resurface, I realize nobody tried to keep in touch with me either.
There are times when I totally understand Charlotte’s feelings of being stuck, facing either isolation in a country home that she loved or the fatiguing overstimulation of the city’s literary scene. And I understand her sense of inadequacy when her friends sent her boxes of books and magazines. She always wrote W. S. Williams and George Smith to say thank you and share her opinions of the contents, but she felt she had nothing to give them in return—not even an engaging account of rural life. What was a lecture at the Mechanics Institute going to offer the cosmopolitan literary gentlemen? What commentary could someone marooned in a tiny village offer on politics or current events?
My best friend, Sally, and I met in high school; sh
e sends cards and care packages for every holiday you could possibly imagine, from St. Patrick’s Day to Labor Day. Last time I saw her, I planned to make up for the unanswered pile of cards by treating her to dinner. Over dessert, she presented me with a bag of goodies and a card. Evidently it was Friendship Day. Sally and I often celebrate how easily we pick up where we left off when we finally do manage a visit or a late night of ice cream and TV bingeing, but it’s bittersweet.
In college, I was part of a trio of best friends who thrived when we lived in the same building. But we barely even survived a semester of sharing an apartment—too much togetherness, rapid life changes, and mismatched habits sent us off the rails just after the winter break. After graduation, it took two years of living in the same city before I ran into one of them on the street and had the presence of mind to apologize for having been so passive-aggressive and distant.* She was gracious enough to forgive me, and we reestablished a warm, if occasional, friendship. She invited me to her wedding a few years later, and I was touched and happy to see her. But I noticed something else—she was surrounded by her bandmates and her family, friends from adulthood and childhood and everywhere in between. People loved her, and wanted to share her joy. When I thought about my future hypothetical wedding, I felt hard-pressed to name more than a handful of people I wanted there. Do I lack empathy? Is it that I just don’t like many people? Am I too irascible? I feel deficient and wrong, but there it is.
The intimacy issues I’d never faced in a romantic relationship (because I was never honest or open enough to confront them) are all over the place in my platonic friendships. When you have no ability to navigate confrontation, you never work through the bumps and scrapes of daily close-knit acquaintance, so friendship is either superficial or drifts away over time. I did find a group of female friends in grad school, thanks to the closeness of workshops and the rigors of working in the department office. I hadn’t experienced that kind of intimacy since high school theater productions. We stayed up late for program events, decorated for the winter ball like the prom committee I was never on, and I almost forgot to feel like an outsider. But then, after a year of being entertained and supported on a daily basis by these insightful, hilarious women, I let our once-daily text messages lapse into silence. I never vented my irritation over canceled brunch plans or being on our phones at dinner. I found myself becoming standoffish. Now I can see it as a defense mechanism; I didn’t want to work through what was bothering me because that would mean voicing what was bothering me, which might mean they would reject me before I even had a chance to ghost out of their lives forever. Around the time we were all confronting the end of grad school and the beginning of the unknown, instead of huddling with them to face our uncertainties together, I was dismissive and brusque. I wanted no part of their fears about what was coming next, because then I would have to confront the terrifying fact that I had no idea what was coming next. Instead of commiserating, I belittled their uncertainty and kept them at arm’s length. When my warmest, most openhearted friend moved out of state to start her next chapter, which she’d decided to do without telling me, I found that I was left behind. I miss her and her nurturing friendship every day.
Someday, I’d like to have the kind of friend—or be the kind of friend—who stays in touch regularly without finding it a burden. I am sometimes very afraid I will never be able to develop or maintain these kinds of bonds; that I am too gruff or judgmental or detached or arrogant. I’m often disinterested in the minutiae of people’s lives, and I mask my feelings with humor when I should be sincere. Maybe I just lack the constancy to have the friendships I see other women having all around me in life and in literature. I love to see fictional characters be vulnerable—it’s almost the fastest way to my heart—but I’m rarely able to achieve it myself. Maybe I don’t deserve a Shirley. It’s natural to grow apart from people, or to need new friends who meet us where we are, but I don’t want to be incapable of putting down roots or letting my guard down. Were she able to read these words, Charlotte might say something like what she once wrote to W. S. Williams:
We all—except the arrogant and self-confident—despise ourselves very thoroughly sometimes; objects of our own withering scorn, we have every one been on occasion.…
A bad account—yet I believe there is hardly a human being breathes but might say as much.11
While Shirley seems to showcase that rare wide-open friendship that endures, despite conflict, disagreement, and romantic rivalry, Charlotte’s epistolary friendships also help me see that close acquaintances can be maintained in small doses. And it bears remembering that she wrote Shirley as an homage to a beloved sister—there’s no way to compete with those lifelong bonds. My mother is one of four sisters, and has always had the knack of making and keeping female friends. It’s one of the many social skills she possesses that I envy, along with making small talk without screaming inside.
But back to Shirley. The second volume opens with a chapter titled “The Valley of the Shadow of Death” and an ominous proclamation: “The future sometimes seems to sob a low warning of the events it is bringing us.”12 Afterward, the cheery sunlit novel falters and dims; Caroline falls ill, Robert Moore is injured by the local rabble after a labor dispute boils over, and Shirley must suffer the arrival of unpleasant relatives. The halcyon days of social teas and local festivals and mocking idiotic curates are no more. Why the sudden shift?
Charlotte wrote Shirley between 1848 and 1849. When she began, she was flush with critical praise for Jane Eyre, and the generally positive reception to her sisters’ work. But then, on the 24th of September, 1848, having suffered from advanced alcoholism and opium addiction since the Robinsons dismissed him, Branwell died in agony and despair. At his funeral, Emily caught a cold that weakened her never-strong constitution. Exasperating Charlotte and agonizing Patrick, she refused any medical treatment even as she worsened. Charlotte asked George Smith and W. S. Williams for advice, and even wrote a letter detailing Emily’s case to a London doctor on their recommendation. But Emily wouldn’t try the medicine he sent, or even describe her symptoms to her anxious sisters. On December 19, she died too. Her faithful dog, Keeper, followed the coffin to the church.
And though Charlotte imagined the worst was past, Anne soon began showing symptoms of the same consumptive illness. The water and the climate of Yorkshire was persistently inhospitable to the delicate Brontës—Patrick had been lobbying for years to get government officials to test the water quality, based on the infant and adult mortality rate of the village. Amid all of this loss and grief, Charlotte found herself quite unable to write. Her letters are short and full of symptoms and hope and dread, and she wrote far fewer of them than normal. When it looked like there might be hope for Anne’s recovery, Charlotte sent the first volume of Shirley to Smith and Elder for them to review. Anne convinced Charlotte and Ellen Nussey to accompany her to Scarborough, on the advice of physicians who thought sea air was beneficial for consumptives. In April of 1849, in the last letter Anne posted before they set off on their journey, she wrote to Ellen,
I have no horror of death: if I thought it inevitable I think I could quietly resign myself to the prospect.… But I wish it would please God to spare me not only for Papa’s and Charlotte’s sakes, but because I long to do some good in the world before I leave it. I have many schemes in my head for future practise—humble and limited indeed—but still I should not like them all to come to nothing, and myself to have lived to so little purpose.13
We haven’t talked about The Tenant of Wildfell Hall yet, but I should assure you now that her life was definitely not lacking in purpose—or at least not in achievement. Anne died in Charlotte’s arms on May 25, 1849, and was buried in Scarborough. According to Charlotte, with her last words Anne urged Ellen to be a sister to Charlotte in her place, and assured them both that she was glad death had come so gently.
From September to the following May, Charlotte lost her entire family, except for her father. H
ow was Charlotte to finish her wry, historical Yorkshire romp after such a year? How was Charlotte to take another breath or sit upright for more than a few moments at a time?! She stayed in Scarborough with Ellen for another week after Anne’s death, then returned home to Haworth, where she was greeted by her father, the family servants, and Anne’s and Emily’s dogs. The dogs, she said, looked at her like her sisters must be following close behind.14 Once she was back in the dining room that used to be full of her sisters’ conversation, listening to the silence that had replaced it, she came to a realization. She wrote to W. S. Williams in June,
Labour must be the cure, not sympathy—Labour is the only radical cure for rooted Sorrow—The society of a calm, serenely cheerful companion—such as Ellen—soothes pain like a soft opiate—but I find it does not probe or heal the wound—sharper more severe means are necessary to make a remedy. Total change might do much—where that cannot be obtained—work is the best substitute.15
Charlotte was never able to distance herself from the intensity of sorrow that interrupted the book’s writing in order to revise the whole. It explains the jumping narrative, the tug-of-war between the political and personal, the abrupt transitions from serious philosophical rumination to goofy Restoration comedy shenanigans, the breaking of the fourth wall. After the dramatic opening of the second volume, Caroline contracts one of those literary illnesses that wastes one away, attributable to grief over her mistaken belief that Shirley is to marry her beloved Robert Moore. Caroline observes, “I believe grief is, and always has been, my worst ailment. I sometimes think if an abundant gush of happiness came on me I could revive yet,” which prompts Shirley’s governess, Mrs. Pryor, to reveal theatrically that she is Caroline’s long-lost mother, Agnes Pryor, née Grey (Charlotte’s quiet nod to Anne).16 Agnes had been a governess before she married Caroline’s father and then left him when he turned out to be cruel and abusive. In an era of impossible divorce law and prevalent social stigma, she actually left, even though it meant the whole village would think she was an unfit mother and Caroline would be raised by a stern uncle.
A Girl Walks Into a Book Page 10
