In Search of Anne Brontë

by Nick Holland

  Ellen took an immediate liking to both Emily and Anne, sensing that there was something out of the ordinary about them. Of Anne herself she writes, ‘Anne, dear, gentle Anne, was quite different in appearance from the others. She was her aunt’s favourite. Her hair was a very pretty, light brown, and fell on her neck in graceful curls. She had lovely violet-blue eyes, fine pencilled eyebrows, and clear, almost transparent complexion.’9

  Following on from her observation of how Emily ‘talked very little’, Ellen continued, ‘She and Anne were like twins – inseparable companions, and in the very closest sympathy, which never had any interruption.’10

  Ellen also noted that whilst quiet in the parsonage, both Anne and Emily would come to life when on their beloved moors. She would remain a part of their lives, and become a true friend, until their very last days.

  Patrick was very impressed at the progress that Charlotte had made in her year at Roe Head, and his fears of a second Cowan Bridge were allayed, yet the funds were not there to allow Charlotte to continue her education or to send her sisters after her. A new plan was hatched where Charlotte became teacher to her younger siblings, passing on all the knowledge she had learned.

  Two years later, she would have the opportunity to put those teaching skills to good use. The head of the school, Miss Wooler, remembered her former pupil; she must have been very impressed with her abilities, for in 1835 she invited Charlotte to return to Roe Head, this time in the capacity of a teacher.

  It was Charlotte who initiated this offer, having read that the school had advertised for a teacher. Charlotte had been initially reluctant to seek any position, she felt at home again among her family, and some of the demons within her were at rest while she could pursue her writings with Branwell, Emily and Anne. In opposition to this instinct, she realised that she needed to contribute somehow to the running of the parsonage, and the offer that came back from Miss Wooler was very appealing in this aspect. Not only would Charlotte receive a salary, although it was very small even for the time, but as part of the deal one of her sisters would receive free schooling. In this way, there would be two fewer mouths to feed and clothe at the parsonage.

  As the eldest of the remaining sisters, it was naturally Emily who was awarded this scholarship. Branwell too was about to leave for pastures new, a helpful godparent having offered to pay for Branwell to train to be an artist at the Royal Academy Schools in London. By this time, however, the young man’s behaviour was already becoming erratic, and although he left for London, he never entered the Royal Academy. The Brontë family unit was being broken up, and it would never again fit together in the same way.

  Charlotte and Emily left on the near 20-mile winding coach journey to Mirfield on 29 July 1835. It was the day before Emily’s 17th birthday, and the parting must have been hard to bear for both her and Anne. Their idyllic childhood days of playing together, writing together, playing music together and revelling in a silence together were finally ended.

  Charlotte, as we shall see, was unsuited to the life of a teacher, but Emily was even more unsuited to the life of a pupil, even in a benign environment such as Roe Head. She missed the days spent baking bread with Tabby, she missed her pets, she missed the long walks on the moors and with that she also missed Anne, the sister who accompanied her on them.

  To talk of Emily ‘missing’ these things or of being homesick is to seriously understate the condition she found herself in. She could think of nothing else but what had been left behind, and she quickly sank into a deep depression. She would talk to nobody and ate and drank very little. For a horrified Charlotte, the memories of Maria and Elizabeth were returning. After only three months at Roe Head, she knew that action needed to be taken, and wrote urgently to her father, as she later described:

  Liberty was the breath of Emily’s nostrils, without it, she perished. The change from her own home to a school, and from her own very noiseless, very secluded but unrestrained and inartificial mode of life, to one of disciplined routine (though under the kindest auspices) was what she failed in enduring … Every morning when she woke the vision of home and the moors rushed on her, and darkened and saddened the day that lay before her. Nobody knew what ailed her but me – I knew only too well. In this struggle her health was quickly broken: her white face, attenuated form, and failing strength threatened rapid decline. I felt in my heart she would die, if she did not go home.11

  The letter home must have been even more strongly worded, for Patrick was left in no doubt that Emily was in real danger of dying. The demise of Maria and Elizabeth was still seared in his mind, and so Emily was recalled immediately and in October returned to Haworth, where she made a full recovery.

  Patrick, after talking to Emily and corresponding with Charlotte, soon realised that the breakdown was as a result of Emily’s character rather than any failings of the school itself. The terms of Charlotte’s employment still stood, and the benefit of schooling could now be passed on to Anne. Nevertheless, he paused before making the decision.

  After Emily had departed for school, Patrick had written to Elizabeth Franks, née Firth, and told her, ‘My dear little Anne I intend to keep at home for another year under her Aunt’s tuition and my own.’12 Could he now bring himself to go back on that pledge, and indeed could Anne, who had never been to a school, stand the regime of one better than Emily had? He knew that Anne was very like Emily in temperament, yet even weaker in health, whereas Emily had previously seemed to have a robust constitution.

  This was to be one of the first moments when Anne, then 15, showed another side of her character: a willingness to assert herself when she felt she had to, allied to a stubborn unquenchable desire to do what she thought was best for others, whatever the cost to herself. She loved being united with Emily again, but she also accepted that the offer of free schooling, and with it one less person to look after, was not one that a family such as the Brontës could easily turn down. She forced her father’s hand and begged him to let her take Emily’s place at the school. Her father must have been happy to see this spark within her, and he knew that she certainly had the academic and intellectual ability to be a successful pupil. Perhaps she wasn’t as frail and timid as he had thought after all? Convinced by her arguments, he sent Anne to Roe Head, where she arrived in late October 1835.

  Roe Head was a large, imposing three-storey building, high in the hills above Mirfield itself. Nearby was the main route between Bradford and Huddersfield, and down below in the valley bottom were the mills and factories that had transformed this area, belching out black smoke that drifted across the fields and plains of the River Calder. Many of these factories were owned by the nouveau riche parents of the girls who attended the school.

  As she stepped out of the carriage that had brought her, Anne must have known that she was entering a new world. Gone was the bare garden with her beloved currant bushes, and in its place were extensive grounds with a fountain in the middle. To the rear of the school, fields stretched away into the distance leading on to Robertown and Hartshead, the village that her father had told her about, and in which he and her mother had been so happy.

  Roe Head had been built as a private residence by the Marriot family and had first opened as a school in 1830, the year before Charlotte arrived as a pupil. Its co-founder and head teacher, Margaret Wooler, always known as Miss Wooler, was an imposing yet kindly woman. She was the daughter of wealthy parents herself, and she founded the school to provide a first-class education for the daughters of the increasing number of wealthy merchants in the area.

  It is said that Miss Wooler, at the time 43 years of age but appearing older, had a beautiful singing voice and was a great linguist, as well as possessing an ability to instil in her pupils a longing to learn.13 On that first evening that Anne was brought into the school, however, she would have found Miss Wooler seated in an ornate chair, looking straight at her new pupil in an effort to gauge her character. Behind Miss Wooler would have been the other teachers, fi
rstly Miss Wooler’s younger sisters Catherine and Eliza, and then Anne’s own sister Charlotte. How Anne’s heart must have leaped to see a friendly, well known and much loved face waiting for her, but her smile was met with a cold blank face and a hand outstretched as Anne curtsied before her.

  When Emily had arrived as a pupil, Charlotte wrote that ‘the idea of being together consoles us somewhat’,14 yet this had produced the opposite effect to that which she had intended, only making Emily more homesick until her health collapsed. Charlotte resolved not to make that mistake again, and from now she would keep propriety, always an asset she prized highly, to the fore. It wasn’t simply that she would treat Anne just like any other pupil, she would be even less friendly with her than the others, so that nobody could accuse her of favouritism. As always, Charlotte thought that she was doing what was best, but by the time she realised her mistake it was almost too late.

  Anne was heartbroken by this reception, but she vowed not to show it. Emily had failed, but she would not fail. She would show them that little Anne, the baby of the family, the girl who they thought was so fragile, could be stronger than any of them suspected. She even made efforts to make friends with her classmates, like Ann Cook and Ellen Lister, and through her obvious kindness and good nature she succeeded, even if she was never as boisterous as her fellow pupils.

  Unlike the cramped accommodation that Cowan Bridge had offered, Roe Head was very spacious. The whole of the middle floor was used as accommodation, with the ground floor housing the school rooms and the upper floor unoccupied, although pupils often spoke of feeling an icy presence there and hearing the ghostly rustle of a dress sweeping by whenever they were on that floor. Every pupil had their own room, and it was the first time that Anne had enjoyed such a luxury, but it only served to increase her isolation and loneliness.

  During the day she could focus her mind on the lessons, whether given by Charlotte or one of the Woolers made no difference. Anne was there to learn, and learn she would. She committed herself fully to the lessons of the day, whether Italian or geometry. The classroom itself was spacious and beautifully furnished, with decorative wooden panelling below the ceiling and three bay windows, two at the front and one at the right-hand side, looking out over the attractive gardens. If Anne had allowed herself to, she could have seen the nature that she so loved, but she kept her head lowered and her eyes on her books.

  Her quick progress and natural ability was soon noted, and at the end of her first full year at Roe Head, Anne received a special prize from Miss Wooler. Her certificate read, ‘A prize for good conduct presented to Miss A. Brontë with Miss Wooler’s kind love, Roe Head, Dec. 14th 1836.’ The prize was a copy of the book The Improvement of the Mind by Isaac Watts. It is an eighteenth-century book, containing guides on how to learn languages, overcome prejudices and use logic to improve the mind and memory, and much more, it was testimony to Anne’s studious nature.

  Despite Anne’s scholarly success, she was hiding a dark secret. She was feeling increasingly alone and depressed, and in the dark moments of night-time, one thought above all others came constantly into her head: the dread moment of death and the judgement that was to come after it. All of Anne’s childhood was spent listening to the hard-line beliefs on judgement and damnation from her aunt, but she soon found them at odds with what she believed in her heart. She knew that she had to listen to her aunt and respect her views, but although she dare not say it out loud she found difficulty in believing in a harsh, unforgiving God and a world where the beauty of nature was subservient to the rule of man.

  At Roe Head she was introduced to an even more severe doctrine, that of Calvinism. All of the girls were required to attend Sunday services at Mirfield parish church, just over a mile from the school, although on other occasions they attended Hartshead church. The school was also visited by Reverend Edward Nicholl Carter and Reverend Thomas Allbutt, husbands of two further sisters of Miss Wooler who also taught at Roe Head from time to time. Many of these curates had Calvinist sympathies. This doctrine preached that some people were destined for heaven from birth. They were the elect. Others had no chance of ever attaining heaven and were doomed to damnation in the terrible fires of hell. Once a sin had been made, it could never be repaired and all hope was gone.

  These thoughts went round and round in Anne’s head. Blameless as others may see her, surely her hidden thoughts, even the questioning of the word of God as taught by the Calvinists, was enough to send her to eternal damnation? For Anne these fears were very real, all light and all joy in the world had been extinguished.

  She poured out this anguish in her poems written while at Roe Head. When writing about Gondalian characters, she writes of people trapped in towers and dungeons, waiting for their inevitable, unavoidable fate. One such example of this comes from October 1837, in the starkly bleak poem we mentioned earlier, ‘A Voice from the Dungeon’. It begins:

  I’m buried now; I’ve done with life;

  I’ve done with hate, revenge, and strife;

  I’ve done with joy, and hope and love

  And all the bustling world above.

  Long have I dwelt forgotten here

  In pining woe and dull despair;

  This place of solitude and gloom

  Must be my dungeon and my tomb.

  No hope, no pleasure, can I find:

  I am grown weary of my mind;

  Often in balmy sleep I try

  To gain a rest from misery,

  And in one hour of calm repose

  To find a respite from my woes,

  But dreamless sleep is not for me

  And I am still in misery.15

  This was written under a Gondal pen name, but it masked an all too real cry for help. Unfortunately, the one person who could have heard it was undergoing a crisis of her own.

  Charlotte quickly discovered that she hated life as a teacher. She had high standards for herself and despised others who failed to live up to them. The ‘scribblemania’ as she called her youthful Angrian writings had now become something much deeper and more meaningful to her. She felt her creative powers growing, and yet she also felt that the hours spent teaching were destroying the opportunity to indulge her talent as a writer. She longed to spend days around that table once more, writing with her sisters, yet instead she was in a noisy bustling classroom, with pupils constantly demanding her attention. Inevitably, memories of Cowan Bridge also returned. Depression grew within Charlotte, and this turned into a hatred of her pupils that she found hard to contain.

  Its outlet was her ‘Roe Head Journal’, a visceral attack on her life as a teacher and on the pupils before her. She often wrote it secretly when she should have been teaching lessons, and it is fortunate that neither Miss Wooler nor her pupils ever saw it. One entry begins:

  I’m just going to write because I cannot help it … A. Cook on one side of me, E. Lister on the other and Miss W in the background. Stupidity the atmosphere, school-books the employment, asses the society, what in all this is there to remind me of the divine silent, unseen, land of thought, dim now and indefinite as the dream of a dream, the shadow of a shade?

  There is a voice, there is an impulse that wakens up that dormant power, which in its torpidity I sometimes think dead … O, it has wakened a feeling that I cannot satisfy! A thousand wishes rose at its call which must die with me for they will never be fulfilled.16

  Elsewhere in the journal, Charlotte writes:

  The spirit of all Verdopolis … came crowding into my mind. If I had had time to indulge it, I felt that the vague sensations of that moment would have settled down into some narrative better at least than anything I ever produced before. But just then a dolt came up with a lesson. I thought I should have vomited.17

  Her hatred of her pupils inevitably led to a hatred of herself, as she revealed in one of her many letters from the school to Ellen Nussey:

  Don’t deceive yourself by imagining that I have a bit of real goodness about me … If you
knew my thoughts; the dreams that absorb me; and the fiery imagination that at times eats me up and makes me feel society, as it is, wretchedly insipid, you would pity me and I daresay despise me.18

  In another letter to Ellen, Charlotte too reveals the insidious influence of Calvinism upon her: ‘I abhor myself – I despise myself – if the Doctrine of Calvin be true, I am already an outcast.’19

  Thus it was that Charlotte, enveloped in her own self-hatred and grief, was blind to the sufferings of Anne in a way that she hadn’t been to Emily’s. She failed to notice that Anne’s health was growing more delicate, that her attacks of asthma were becoming more frequent, that she was eating less and becoming more withdrawn. Anne’s mental anguish was building to a physical collapse, and it would reach its head in late 1837.

  Anne, with her resistance lowered, suffered a severe attack of breathlessness, at first thought to be another recurrence of her asthma. She became unable to keep any food or liquid down and suffered prolonged episodes of terrible pain. It was then diagnosed as gastric fever, what we today call typhoid. At last Charlotte saw what was happening to Anne and stayed by her side as doctors came and went. She had shunned the only person at Roe Head who was close to her, and now she too was on the brink of leaving her.

  Medical assistance could only achieve so much, it was not only Anne’s body that was under attack, but her mind as well, and what she cared for most of all, her soul. As she lay wide eyed in her bed, one thought above all else was in her mind: she was going to die a sinner, she was going to be sent to hell, her soul was doomed. Anne knew what she had to do, just as the young Jane Eyre knows what she must do when the cruel headmaster Mr Brocklehurst, Charlotte’s depiction of Calvinist hypocrisy, tells her that the fires of hell await her and asks what she must do to avoid it. The young Jane replies, ‘I must keep in good health and not die.’20