The Bronte Sisters

by Catherine Reef

  Anne Brontë, wrote Smith, “was a gentle, quiet, rather subdued person, by no means pretty, yet of a pleasing appearance. Her manner was curiously expressive of a wish for protection and encouragement, a kind of constant appeal which invited sympathy.” Anne proved that appearances can deceive, because her new book was not only frank, but downright shocking.

  The Tenant of Wildfell Hall begins in the village of Linden-Car, where everyone seems curious about Helen Graham, the woman who has come to live in the old stone mansion called Wildfell Hall. Helen is the mother of a five-year-old boy, and apparently she is a widow, but she remains aloof from village society. Her dark beauty entrances a young farmer named Gilbert Markham, yet Helen resists growing close to him. When Gilbert presses her to know why, she gives him her diary to read. This diary reveals Helen’s secret—that her real name is Helen Huntingdon, and her husband lives.

  Helen Graham’s resistance to his friendship puzzles Gilbert Markham in Anne Brontë’s novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

  Helen has written in the diary about her life before marriage and her attraction to handsome Arthur Huntingdon. She was determined to marry Arthur despite her aunt’s warning that he was “destitute of principle, and prone to every vice that is common to youth.” Helen believed that he would mend his ways if she set a good example, but she discovered her mistake too late, after she and Arthur were married.

  Anne Brontë shied away from nothing when describing Arthur Huntingdon’s nights of drinking with his wild, wasted friends. “There are scenes in which the author seems to pride himself in bringing his reader into the closest possible proximity with naked vice,” one critic wrote about Acton Bell’s novel, “and there are conversations such as we had hoped never to see printed in English.” These scenes shock few readers today, but no novelist before Anne Brontë had described drunken behavior in such a straightforward, realistic way:

  Mr. Hattersley burst into the room with a clamorous volley of oaths in his mouth. . . . Arthur placed himself beside poor Milicent [Helen’s friend], confidentially pushing his head into her face, and drawing in closer to her as she shrunk away from him. He was not so noisy as Hattersley, but his face was exceedingly flushed, he laughed incessantly, and while I blushed for all I saw and heard of him, I was glad that he chose to talk to his companion in so low a tone that no one could hear what he said but herself.

  When he was not drinking, Arthur amused himself by telling Helen about his past loves and bringing her to tears. At last he aroused her anger and provoked her to say that if he had told her these stories sooner, she never would have married him. When Arthur laughed and claimed to know Helen better than she knew herself, she responded with action rather than with words. “Without another word I left the room and locked myself up in my own chamber,” she wrote in her diary. Arthur begged to come in, but Helen kept the door locked until morning.

  This was another scene that made readers gasp, because it was the rare Victorian wife who would have denied her husband entry into her bed. To do so was a bold statement of female independence. “The slamming of that bedroom door fairly resounds through the long emptiness of Anne’s novel,” commented a writer of a later generation, May Sinclair.

  Helen endured her unhappy marriage until Arthur started luring their little son into his habits, giving the child wine in order to “make a man of him.” Helen tried keeping little Arthur in the nursery while the men were drinking, but when his father wanted the boy with him, she had to comply. Husbands had custody of the children in a marriage, just as they took possession of their wives’ property. The words of Sir William Blackstone, an eighteenth-century legal scholar, were still true in Victorian England: “In law, the husband and wife are one person and the husband is that person.”

  To protect her son, Helen left. A divorce was out of the question. She had no right to one, and even if she did, she had no money to pay for it. Besides, in a divorce Arthur would take their child. Her only option was to run away, and in doing so break the law. She turned for help to her brother, who helped her settle at Wildfell Hall. There she supported herself and her son by painting, using an assumed name. Like Mrs. Collins, the curate’s wife who visited Haworth parsonage, Helen lived independently and protected her son from his father’s bad habits.

  Emily Brontë made this portrait of her beloved dog Keeper.

  The diary ends at this point, but the story continues. Helen learns that Arthur Huntingdon is gravely ill, and she goes home to nurse him. She can do little for this sick man as he lies in pain and torment,unable to repent. “What is God—I cannot see Him or hear Him?” Arthur asks. “God is only an idea,” he says. To deny faith was to make a bold admission in the Victorian period. From a religious writer like Anne Brontë, this was a statement of despair. Arthur dies a tortured soul. A year passes before Gilbert Markham, the farmer, seeks Helen Huntingdon to learn if he has a future with her.

  Because it was by Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall taught moral lessons. It warned against choosing a mate for looks rather than character, and it showed clearly what happens to people who give themselves up to drinking. Nevertheless, its unblinking scenes of vice were what caught people’s attention. “There seems in the writer a morbid love for the coarse, not to say the brutal,” remarked one reviewer. “There is a coarseness of tone throughout the writing of all these Bells, that puts an offensive subject in its worst point of view.”

  The comments hurt, but Anne defended her book by taking aim at a society that covered up anything it wished not to see. “If there were less of this delicate concealment of facts—this whispering ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace, there would be less of sin and misery,” she wrote in the preface to the second edition of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. She assured her readers that men like Arthur Huntingdon did indeed exist. “If I have warned one rash youth from following in their steps,” she wrote, “or prevented one thoughtless girl from falling into the very natural error of my heroine, the book has not been written in vain.”

  She knew that men like Huntingdon existed, because she had one for a brother. Patrick Brontë tried to limit his son’s drinking and drug use by locking Branwell up with him in his bedchamber at night, but the hours of forced sobriety brought on the condition known as delirium tremens, which is characterized by shaking, confusion, and hallucinations. Charlotte confided to Ellen Nussey, “Papa—and sometimes all of us have sad nights with him.”

  In September 1848, Francis Grundy went to Haworth to see his old friend from the Luddendenfoot railroad station. He took a room at the local inn, ordered dinner for two, and sent word to the parsonage for Branwell to join him. When he answered a knock at his door, though, he let in not Branwell, but Branwell’s father. “He spoke of Branwell with more affection than I had ever heretofore heard him express,” Grundy wrote, “but he also spoke almost hopelessly.” The Reverend Brontë warned that Branwell had been ill in bed, but said that he would be coming shortly.

  Patrick Brontë departed, and soon Grundy saw Branwell peering around the edge of the door. His head “was a mass of red, unkempt, uncut hair, wildly floating round a great, gaunt forehead; the cheeks yellow and hollow, the mouth fallen, the thin white lips not trembling but shaking, the sunken eyes, once small, now glaring with the light of madness.” Branwell “looked frightened—frightened of himself,” Grundy noted, but a couple of brandies and some dinner restored “something like the Brontë of old.” When the time came to part, Grundy left his friend “standing bareheaded in the road, with bowed form and dropping tears.”

  Branwell was sicker than anyone imagined. Tuberculosis had taken hold in his lungs, and alcohol and opium had weakened his body and mind. A few days after Grundy’s visit, on Sunday, September 24, with his family gathered around his bed, Branwell died. He was thirty-one years old. His sisters felt sorrow mixed with relief. “I do not weep from a sense of bereavement,” Charlotte admitted, “but for the wreck of talent, the ruin of promise, the untimely dreary extinction
of what might have been a burning and shining light.” She added, “I had aspirations and ambitions for him once.”

  The Reverend Brontë had nurtured hopes for Branwell, too. Crying out, “My son! my son!” he rejected all comfort. “My poor father naturally thought more of his only son than of his daughters,” Charlotte could not resist mentioning. Yet Francis Grundy thought that Patrick Brontë had let his son down. “That Rector of Haworth little knew how to bring up and bring out his clever family, and the boy least of all. He was a hard, matter-of-fact man,” Grundy said. “So the girls worked their own way to fame and death, the boy to death only!” Branwell died knowing nothing of his sisters’ literary success. “We could not tell him of our efforts for fear of causing him too deep a pang of remorse for his own time mis-spent, and talents misapplied,” Charlotte said.

  “Poor, brilliant, gay, moody, moping, wildly excitable, miserable Brontë!” Grundy lamented. “No history records your many struggles after the good,—your wit, brilliance, attractiveness, eagerness for excitement,—all the qualities which made you such ‘good company,’ and dragged you down to an untimely grave.”

  Branwell was barely laid to rest within the church at Haworth when Emily, and then Anne, showed signs of being ill. Their shortness of breath, constant coughing, and faint, speeding pulse pointed to tuberculosis. Emily appeared worse, but giving in to illness went against her nature. Even as she sickened and wasted away, Emily awoke at seven every morning and dressed herself. She went to bed at ten every night after putting in a full day of sewing, writing, practicing at the piano, and caring for the dogs. She permitted no “poisoning doctor” to come near her. Charlotte’s anguish mixed with wonder as she watched Emily’s iron will battling her weakening body. “I have seen nothing like it,” Charlotte said; “but, indeed, I have never seen her parallel in anything.”

  On the night of December 18, 1848, Anne and Charlotte saw Emily stumble and nearly fall as she went out to feed the dogs. They hurried to help her, but Emily turned them away and finished her task. The next day, barely able to speak, Emily finally asked to see a doctor, but there was nothing he or anyone else could do. She died at two that afternoon. Some accounts say she died on the sofa in the parsonage dining room, whereas others state she was carried upstairs to bed and died there. Whether death found her on the sofa or in bed, her devoted dog Keeper was at her side. Emily Brontë was thirty years old and had grown so thin that her coffin measured only seventeen inches wide. The carpenter said he had never made a narrower one for an adult.

  Emily Brontë is said to have died on the sofa in the dining room at Haworth parsonage, shown here as it looks today, but whether this is true is unknown.

  “Charlotte, you must bear up—I shall sink if you fail me,” Patrick Brontë said to his older surviving daughter. Charlotte locked away her sorrow during the day for her father’s sake, but it escaped at night, rousing her from sleep. Emily had been “torn from us in the fullness of our attachment, rooted up in the prime of her own days, in the promise of her powers,” Charlotte wrote. Emily’s early death, to Charlotte, was “like a field of green corn trodden down—like a tree in full bearing—struck at the root.”

  Then Anne came down with influenza at Christmas and failed to get better in the new year. The flu aggravated her cough, which sounded just like Emily’s, and she complained of a sharp pain in her side. Charlotte lost the will to write as she helplessly nursed Anne. She informed William Smith Williams of Smith, Elder and Company that Anne suffered through “nights of sleeplessness and pain, and days of depression and languor which nothing could cheer.”

  Patrick Brontë paid to have a specialist—an expert on consumption—come from Leeds to examine Anne. This medical man, Mr. Teale, prescribed cod liver oil and carbonate of iron, and he told Anne to get plenty of rest. He also consulted with the Reverend Brontë behind the closed door of the minister’s office. All her father said afterward was, “My dear little Anne,” but his few, simple words carried an ominous message.

  Ellen Nussey was a visitor in the parsonage when the doctor came. To Ellen, who had guessed the true identities of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, Anne looked “sweetly pretty and flushed and in capital spirits for an invalid.” Anne dutifully took her medicine, although it made her sick to her stomach. Charlotte noted that it smelled and tasted “like train oil.”

  Anne Brontë wrote this letter inviting Ellen Nussey to come to Scarborough. Anne employed a common practice called cross-hatching: after filling a page, she turned it to the side and wrote perpendicularly across the first lines. Cross-hatching allowed letter writers to save paper.

  Anne admitted to her fears privately, in poetry, and asked God for courage:

  I hoped, that with the brave and strong,

  My portioned task might lie;

  To toil amid the busy throng,

  With purpose pure and high.

  But God has fixed another part,

  And He has fixed it well;

  I said so with my bleeding heart,

  When first the anguish fell.

  A dreadful darkness closes in

  On my bewildered mind;

  Oh, let me suffer and not sin,

  Be tortured, yet resigned.

  Wanting a change of air, Anne talked of going to Scarborough, a vacation spot on the North Sea coast that she had visited as the Robinsons’ governess. Mr. Teale approved the trip, and Ellen Nussey agreed to go along and help Charlotte with Anne’s care. Ellen journeyed to Haworth on Wednesday, May 24. The next day, Anne said goodbye to her spaniel, Flossy, and to Emily’s Keeper. The Reverend Brontë, Tabby, Martha, and the curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls, saw the women off, knowing they might never again lay eyes on the living Anne. Nicholls held Flossy to prevent her from running after the carriage.

  Two days of train travel were exhausting for someone as sick as Anne, but she remembered Emily’s example and drew on the little strength she had left to be a cheerful companion. In Scarborough she rode in a donkey cart to the beach and ventured with Charlotte and Ellen onto the Cliff Bridge, an iron span that offered sweeping views of Scarborough and beyond.

  Spreading tuberculosis with every breath, Anne mingled with the healthy—with honeymooning couples and parents and young children. A deathly ill woman on holiday attracted less notice in the Brontës’ time than she would today. The Victorians believed that sea air and a change of scene had healing effects, so the sick—even some with contagious diseases like tuberculosis—commonly visited the coast and mixed with healthy vacationers.

  Scarborough’s scenic walkways and sandy beaches made it a popular vacation spot and spa among the Victorians.

  On Monday, May 28, Anne sat in a chair in their hotel room, looking out at the sea. She knew that she was dying. “Be a sister in my stead,” she counseled Ellen. “Give Charlotte as much of your company as you can.” When Anne grew too tired to sit, Ellen and Charlotte moved her to a sofa. “Take courage, Charlotte; take courage,” Anne whispered as she saw her sister break down. A little while later, she died. Anne, dead at age twenty-nine, was buried in a Scarborough churchyard. She was the only Brontë not laid to rest in Haworth.

  Four children had grown up together in the Haworth parsonage, turning to one another for friendship and support. Then, within the space of eight months, three had died. “A year ago—had a prophet warned me how I should stand in June 1849,” Charlotte reflected, “had he foretold the autumn, the winter, the spring of sickness and suffering to be gone through—I should have thought—this can never be endured. It is over. Branwell—Emily—Anne are gone like dreams.”

  nine

  “Out of Obscurity I Came”

  SOLITUDE, remembrance, and longing: these three shadowy companions settled themselves in Haworth, taking the places of Branwell, Emily, and Anne. Charlotte woke in the morning knowing they would be with her all day and keep her from a sound sleep at night. “Sometimes,” she told Ellen Nussey, “I have a heavy heart of it.” Yet she refused to be crus
hed. “I have many comforts—many mercies,” she added. “Still I can get on.”

  Charlotte clung to her writing as if it were a big, brawny friend, one with muscle enough to carry her through this current of sorrow. By September she could report a measure of progress to William Smith Williams: “Imagination lifted me when I was sinking, three months ago; its active exercise has kept my head above water since.”

  The work that pulled Charlotte out of her deepest grief was a new novel. Called Shirley, it was published in October 1849. Shirley was the kind of book that Mary Taylor liked best, because it dealt with social problems.

  Charlotte set her story in Stillborough, a fictional Yorkshire town. She had it begin in 1811, when the Luddites were smashing up factories in northern England. As the novel opens, local mill owner Robert Moore plans to modernize his plant, but he has been threatened. To the region’s working people, machines mean joblessness, hunger, and a loss of dignity. As one man remarks, “Invention may be all right, but I know it isn’t right for poor folks to starve.” After angry workers destroy Moore’s new equipment, he vows to catch their leaders and bring them to justice. Moore needs machinery to stay in business. He knows that mechanization is bound to come, that even if the workers destroy his plant, other factories will take its place. He ignores the workers’ suffering, though. “He never asked himself where those to whom he no longer paid weekly wages found daily bread,” Brontë wrote.