In Search of Anne Brontë

by Nick Holland

  Once more, Charlotte seems to misunderstand her sister’s feelings. It is true that Anne often struggled with religious doubts, but she had found a way to conquer these doubts, and her strong faith would give her a happiness and inner calm that Charlotte herself could never find.

  Charlotte took it upon herself to be judge, jury and indeed executioner of her sisters’ works. Two years after their death, she wrote:

  It would not be difficult to compile a volume out of the papers left me by my sisters, had I, in making the selection, dismissed from my consideration the scruples and the wishes of those whose written thoughts these papers held. But this was impossible; an influence, stronger than could be exercised by any motive of expediency, necessarily regulated the selection. I have then, culled from the mass only a little poem here and there.6

  With so much material that we know to have existed now missing, we must make our own judgement on how ‘little’ this culling was. Some have said that it may have been Emily and Anne themselves who destroyed their work as their deaths approached, but this can be questioned. Emily, who undoubtedly was unwilling for her name to enter the public domain, would not even admit she was ill until hours before her death, and Anne had pledged to put her work before the world, to expose the truth, warts and all, whatever the public may think of it.

  In Charlotte’s 1850 ‘Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell’, the veil was finally lifted. She named her sisters to the world, yet at the same time she commenced her control of their reputation. She and her sisters had been hurt by the criticism that had been levelled at them, and she would now defend them in the way she thought best. Unfortunately, this was not by letting their writing do the talking, but by portraying them as simple, uneducated women who did not know what they were doing; if they had offended anyone, they had done so accidentally. Charlotte knew this analysis to be erroneous, of course, but she considered it the best path to take.

  Whilst these actions may be understandable, if not completely condonable, her conduct towards The Tenant of Wildfell Hall would immeasurably damage Anne’s reputation. We have seen how little regard Charlotte had for the novel, and in fact she suppressed its re-publication after Anne’s death. By 1850, she was working with Smith, Elder & Co. on a reprinted collection of her sisters’ works, but on 5 September 1850 she wrote to W.S. Williams:

  ‘Wildfell Hall’ it hardly appears desirable to preserve. The choice of subject in that work is a mistake – it was too little consonant with the character, tastes, and ideas of the gentle, retiring, inexperienced writer. She wrote it under a strange, conscientious, half-ascetic notion of accomplishing a painful penance and a severe duty. Blameless in deed and almost in thought, there was from her very childhood a tinge of religious melancholy in her mind … As to additional compositions, I think there would be none as I would not offer a line to the publication of which my sisters themselves would have objected.7

  This last line is telling. The obvious inference is that there are, or were, other works, but Charlotte did not think Anne and Emily would have liked them to be published. For this reason poetry, prose and letters from Anne and Emily, perhaps even the beginnings of a successor to Wuthering Heights hinted at by Newby, were consigned to the ashes.

  The story of the Brontë sisters did not end with Anne’s death. Even during Anne’s illness, Charlotte had started work on her second novel for Smith, Elder & Co., Shirley. This was followed by a further novel, Villette, borrowing from her time in Belgium, and The Professor, which would finally be published posthumously.

  Shirley is of particular interest to Brontë lovers, as in it Charlotte gives a portrait of her sisters in the guise of its two heroines. Shirley Keeldar is Emily and Caroline Helstone is Anne. In Chapter 9 of the novel, the character Jessy Yorke, herself based on Martha Taylor, the sister of Charlotte’s friend Mary, describes Caroline, by which we can read Anne, thus:

  ‘She is nice; she is fair; she has a pretty white slender throat; she has long curls, not stiff ones – they hang loose and soft, their colour is brown but not dark; she speaks quietly, with a clear tone; she never makes a bustle when moving; she often wears a gray silk dress; she is neat all over.’

  Shirley was started in 1848 when all three sisters were healthy, but it was completed in very different circumstances. It is believed that Charlotte had planned to kill the character of Caroline in the book, but by the time she reached the fatal Chapter 24, entitled ‘The Valley of the Shadow of Death’, Anne herself had died. Charlotte could not bear to see her die again; in print, at least, she could save her, even though it meant changing the course of the book itself. Throughout the chapter Caroline is dying, seemingly of tuberculosis, but in a moving twist she miraculously recovers and goes on to live a happy life and eventually marry the man she loves.

  Charlotte was deeply affected by Anne’s death, and she suffered frequent bouts of illness and depression. With the encouragement of her publishers, however, she became less reclusive and began to make appearances in London literary society, making friends of writers such as William Thackeray, Elizabeth Gaskell and Harriet Martineau. In the last year of her life, Charlotte was to find the happiness that had so long eluded her.

  Arthur Bell Nicholls, her father’s curate, proposed to her in 1853, but Charlotte was shocked and rejected him outright, and Patrick was also furious at his assistant’s impertinence. Charlotte writes of how Nicholls then resolved to leave for Australia as a missionary. She wrote to Ellen of his last sermon at Haworth. He stood shaking in the pulpit, unable to speak, before the congregation had to help him out of the church, many of them in tears. Charlotte later found him outside the church ‘sobbing as women never sob’.8

  In the end, Nicholls moved not to Australia but to another parish. He refused to give in and continued to write to Charlotte and her father. A year later he returned to Haworth, and Charlotte, moved by his persistence if still professing little liking for him, accepted his proposal. In June 1854 they married and went on honeymoon to Arthur’s native Ireland. To her surprise, Charlotte enjoyed married life and fell in love with her husband. She soon became pregnant, but as all too often in the Brontë story, her happiness was to be short lived. Charlotte suffered hyperemesis gravidurum, or excessive morning sickness. After weeks of wasting away she became physically unable to eat or drink. Her distraught husband of less than a year was by her bedside as she died, aged 38, on 31 March 1855. Patrick Brontë had outlived all of his six children.

  Charlotte had become highly regarded, and even famous, in her own lifetime, something that neither Anne nor Emily would ever experience, but her actions regarding The Tenant of Wildfell Hall would see Anne relegated to her sister’s shadow for over a century. Anne’s second novel had been hugely successful, selling far more copies than Wuthering Heights, but at the height of its success it disappeared from public view. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was not reintroduced until ten years after Anne’s death and four years after Charlotte’s, by which time it had largely been forgotten about, even by the growing numbers of Brontë lovers, many of whom were already making literary pilgrimages to Haworth.

  On the occasions when this work of brilliance was spoken of, it was often by people who regurgitated Charlotte’s view that it was a mistake that did not deserve to be published, a book altogether too coarse and brutal. This view continued, largely unchecked, for over 100 years. Even many supposed supporters of Anne would not think of challenging this prevailing view of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

  Sir Linton Andrews was a journalist and academic, and chairman of the Brontë Society for twenty-four years from 1945. He was seen as a champion of Anne at this time, and yet even he said that Anne had been too coarse, too unrealistic in her portrayal of Huntingdon. In 1965 he writes that ‘A father determined to teach his little son to drink wine, gin and brandy, to use foul language, and to hate and despise his mother, seems over-drawn.’9

  It is a view that few people today would concur with. In Sir Linton’s cosy post-w
ar world it seemed absolutely impossible that a man would allow his child to swear, let him drink or encourage him to hate his estranged wife. Anne was in this, as in many things, well ahead of her time.

  A talent as great as Anne’s could not stay in the shadows forever; she was much more than just an appendix to the story of Charlotte and Emily. One of the earliest signs of a reappraisal was Anne Brontë: A Biography, written in 1959 by Winifred Gérin. Gérin would later also write biographies of Branwell, Emily and Charlotte, and she was awarded the OBE for services to literature, but her first act was to restore the reputation of Anne.

  Anne was also discovered and lauded by a new generation of feminist writers and scholars in the latter half of the twentieth century. They recognised both of her novels, but especially The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, as proto-feminist works of fiction. In a time when women had a clearly defined role, one of servitude and domesticity, Anne refused to be confined to the societal norms. She used her books to promote equality of the sexes, a more rounded education for girls and greater rights for married women. This recognition of Anne as a pioneering feminist writer dates back as far as 1913, when the writer and suffragette May Sinclair stated that the slamming of Helen’s door against her husband in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall had reverberated throughout Victorian England.10 It has reverberated ever since, bringing her to the attention of a new generations of fans.

  Elizabeth Langland’s Anne Brontë: The Other One, published in 1989 and part of a series of books on women writers, took a feminist critique of Anne’s work, revealing how insightful and revolutionary it had been. Emily and Charlotte created wonderful and powerful works of fiction, novels that will forever be read and loved, but Anne turned an unflinching spotlight upon the world as it truly was: ‘Thematic innovations place her in the forefront of feminist thought in the nineteenth century even as her formal and technical innovations demand that we look again at her contribution to the English novel.’11

  To 1840s polite society, it was unthinkable that a woman should have the final say on whom she married, but not to Anne, and not to her character Helen Lawrence:

  ‘He is come on a very important errand – to ask your hand in marriage, of your uncle and me.’

  ‘I hope my uncle and you told him it was not in your power to give it. What right had he to ask anyone before me?’12

  Helen makes a very unfortunate choice of course, and a revelation at the start of Chapter 34 was particularly shocking to many readers: ‘It is not enough to say that I no longer love my husband – I HATE him! The word stares me in the face like a guilty confession, but it is true: I hate him – I hate him! – But God have mercy on his miserable soul.’13

  These lines were truly unique in 1838, they must have led to many a gasp among readers, and they still have power today, the power of truth. It was the truth that Anne always sought in her writings, and it is the truth in her work that is helping it secure a resurgence in her popularity. Readers across the world are now placing Anne where she belongs, alongside her sisters Charlotte and Emily, and in the very first rank of nineteenth-century writers.

  Who knows what further revelations time will bring? We may find long hidden letters or poems, or even a photograph. One possible photograph of Anne recently came to light, and if genuine it is the only photographic portrait of both Anne and Emily. It was found in a Paris collection and shows three sisters posing in front of a brick wall. On the back is written: ‘Les Soeurs Brontë’. The photograph has proved controversial, not to say divisive. It is a photograph on glass, and such technology was not available until the 1850s, after Anne and Emily had died. However, many earlier daguerreotypes were copied on to glass in this period, and the picture has a faint mark around its periphery and distortion in the corners as though it is a copy of a picture that had originally been in a frame.

  The three girls in the photograph are purported to be Charlotte, looking directly into the camera with piercing eyes, and next to her Emily with her arm around the shoulders of Anne, both of whom are looking towards Charlotte. Some say the ladies do not resemble the portraits we have of the Brontës, while others see very close resemblances to both descriptions and pictures of the sisters and to undisputed photographs of their cousins, the Branwells. A close-up inspection of the eyes and nose of the ‘Charlotte’ figure in the photograph shows a remarkable similarity to the same features in Branwell’s ‘pillar portrait’. Some have noted that ‘Charlotte’ and ‘Emily’ have hats, rather than bonnets, that were not worn in England in the 1840s, yet photographs from Belgium, where the sisters had spent time, dating from this decade show women with very similar head wear. It will be impossible to prove the authenticity one way or the other, but it makes a fascinating conundrum for Brontë lovers.

  Anne Brontë is an intriguing if enigmatic woman, and her quest for honesty and truth, come what may, led her to reveal a lot of herself in her writing. In many ways we can understand Anne better than even Charlotte did, who from the earliest years was blinded to the talent that her sister possessed. Was she really perpetually calm and quiet? We hear Ellen say that Anne could talk very well when she had to. Charlotte portrayed Anne as being dour and sad, yet Anne’s novels are full of wit and humour, and her character was attractive enough to win the lifelong love and affection of her pupils in the Robinson household. Anne herself writes, under the guise of Helen: ‘Smiles and tears are so alike with me; they are neither of them confined to any particular feelings: I often cry when I am happy, and smile when I am sad.’14

  Anne, through great self-control, often hid her feelings in real life, only to release them in her writings. For this we can all be grateful. Anne continues to win new fans, and successive generations are finding that Anne speaks directly to them, and of their concerns, far more than either of her sisters. Anne Brontë was a great writer, but much more than that, she was a woman full of love for humanity, full of hope for the future and full of courage.

  Notes

  1. Barker, Juliet, The Brontës, p.595

  2. Barker, Juliet, The Brontës, p.594

  3. Rhodes, Philip, ‘A Medical Appraisal of the Brontës’, Brontë Society Transactions 1972, p.108

  4. Brontë, Charlotte, Introduction to Selections Of Poems By Acton Bell, published 1850

  5. Ibid.

  6. Brontë, Charlotte, Introduction to Selections of Poems by Ellis Bell, published 1850

  7. Smith, Margaret (ed.), The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, Volume 2, p.581

  8. Smith, Margaret (ed.), The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, Volume 3, p.168

  9. Andrews, Sir Linton, ‘A Challenge by Anne Brontë’, Brontë Society Transactions 1965, p.28

  10. Sinclair, May, Introduction to The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, published 1914

  11. Langland, Elizabeth, Anne Brontë: The Other One, p.60

  12. Brontë, Anne, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, p.108

  13. Brontë, Anne, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, p.243

  14. Brontë, Anne, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, p.101

  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

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  University Press, 1995)

  Alexander, Christine (ed.), Tales of Glass Town, Angria, and Gondal (Introduction) (Oxford World’s Classics, 2010)

  Atkinson, E., Haworth in the Brontë Era, B.H. Babbage’s Visit to Haworth (Keighley, 1998)

  Barker, Juliet, The Brontës (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1994)

  Brontë, Patrick, A Funeral Sermon for the Late Rev. William Weightman, M.A. (Halifax, 1842)

  Chitham, Edward, A Life of Anne Brontë (Blackwell, 1991)

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  du Maurier, Daphne, The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë (Penguin, 1972)

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  Gérin, Winifred, Charlotte Brontë (Oxford University
Press, 1967)

  Gérin, Winifred, Emily Brontë (Oxford University Press, 1971)

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  Langland, Elizabeth, Anne Brontë: The Other One (Palgrave Macmillan, 1989)

  Lemon, Charles, Classics of Brontë Scholarship (The Brontë Society, 1999)

  Lemon, Charles, Early Visitors to Haworth: From Ellen Nussey to Virginia Woolf (The Brontë Society, 1996)

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  Lister, Philip, Ghosts & Gravestones of Haworth (Tempus, 2006)

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