The Secret History of Jane Eyre

by John Pfordresher

  What began in play quickly evolved into a serious obsession. Charlotte and Branwell created a complex fantasy world, inventing its geography and history and writing the narratives of its principal figures. It’s impossible to exaggerate the intimacy of this relationship between sister and brother. They translated their feelings, desires, hopes and dreams into characters, reading and responding to each other’s writing, frequently on a daily basis. From early on, Branwell’s writing featured the cult of toughness, of aggression, and his heroes soon acquired many of the traits we find in Mr. Rochester, including his powerful sexuality. Perhaps not surprisingly, in this highly unusual sharing of imagination between siblings, questions of dominance soon emerged. Writing, for them, could be a kind of game, in which each sought “to outdo or outmaneuver the other.” If we ask, where did the testing banter between Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester come from, in which they tweak each other’s sensibilities, teasing in a love-rivalry, we need look no further—the basis is Charlotte’s early adolescent love for and rivalry with her brother. So, in one of many instances, Jane confides to her reader: “I knew the pleasure of vexing” Mr. Rochester, and it is “on the extreme brink I liked well to try my skill.” In this kind of play, she tells us, she could still meet him in argument “without fear or uneasy restraint.” This kind of relationship “suited both him and me.” In this moment of reflection, Charlotte seems to recall the happy years at Haworth when she and Branwell wrote together. Let us have the pleasure of glimpsing their fencing.

  This kind of fun is self-evident, for example, in a riposte to a yet earlier piece by Charlotte that begins with Branwell’s attack on her narrator, Wellesly, as typical of those unprincipled wretches who spend their days “spitting their venom on every author of Reputation within their reach” and “like vipers can do no more than bite the heels of their Enimies.” With typical fraternal bravado—and bad spelling—Branwell exults in putting down his sister as an unprincipled wretch, knowing this will provoke her to sit down and begin writing a reply. Like Jane, they both enjoyed playing “on the brink.”

  Charlotte was ready to return the favor by depicting her brother—here named “Rhymer”—at work, in a script dated July 3, 1830. It opens with comic stage directions: “Rhymer alone in a garret . . . surrounded by shreds of paper and a few old books. Time: half past 11 at night.” In this parody version of the Romantic writer she then has him give melodramatic voice. “How solitary is the scene! How sublime likewise!” cries Rhymer. He insists first, for himself, that “from the grave of genius shall arise a fixed star ascending to the heaven of literature . . . to all eternity.” Speaking in pseudo-­Elizabethan orotundity and employing hackneyed images, this caricature of Branwell’s assumption of grandeur claims for himself the immortality of greatness which is the dream and goal of both these young writers. Surely this too was soon passed around the table.

  Four years later, in October of 1834 (Charlotte is now eighteen, Branwell seventeen), we find another of Charlotte’s comic portraits of Branwell, now satirically depicted as Patrick Benjamin Wiggins. Already there are some important new aspects emerging. Charlotte’s male narrator Wellesley spies an indistinct figure in the distance: a short, slight man in a black coat and raven gray trousers, his hat placed nearly at the back of his head, revealing “a bush of carroty hair” his spectacles placed across “a prominent Roman nose,” with a black neckerchief carelessly knotted, and, to complete the picture, a little black rattan flourished in his hand. This is a quite exact description of Branwell, who was short; wore eyeglasses; flattered himself in his dress; and had bright, red, curly hair.

  Wiggins and the narrator Wellesley walk together to a place very like Haworth, here only slightly renamed “Howard,” rather ruthlessly characterized as “a miserable little village” buried in dreary moors and marshes. The lure of the pub draws Wiggins. He emerges boasting that he has guzzled two bottles of “Sneachie’s Glass-Town ale” and a double quart of porter, while devouring cheese, bread, and cold beef. “‘That,’ he boasts, ‘is what I call doing the thing in a handsome way!’” Charlotte is alluding to Branwell’s adolescent fascination with drink and excess. As they walk Wiggins/Branwell lists his abilities. “As a musician he was greater than Bach; as a poet he surpassed Byron; as a painter, Claude Lorrain yielded to him . . . ” and he goes on claiming to also be a rebel; merchant; mill-owner; traveler; the founder of new cities, introducing through them “the arts and the sciences”; and so on.

  Charlotte’s mocking portrait of her adolescent brother reflects Branwell’s role within the family. As the only son, he was to anticipate greatness, and his father clearly favored him. In this sense he was the master in waiting. For example, though his three sisters all drew and painted, it was only Branwell who was sent to train with a professional artist. As they all grew older, it was Branwell who submitted poems and prose to Blackwell’s, accompanying them with boastful letters about his importance as a writer; and, in later years, he actually had some pieces published in local newspapers. Beneath Charlotte’s teasing here we sense her jealous rivalry as well as her mockery of what had become Branwell’s bragging assumption that he was on the way to being famous. At this point, much of this seems quite remote from Fairfax Rochester. But not for long.

  After Charlotte’s Wiggins piece more than five years pass. ­Branwell is now twenty-one and a half years old. Charlotte has taught at Roe Head and finally returned home, staggered by bouts of severe depression. Branwell continues to write prolifically. He has tried out a career as a portrait painter and failed. Their relationship has changed. In Charlotte’s long, two-part novella Henry Hastings, written in 1839, her ironic comic treatment of her brother has now disappeared. The cynical narrator of the piece is her favorite male stand-in, now renamed Charles Townshend. Captain Henry Hastings is Branwell. Elizabeth Hastings, his sister, closely resembles Charlotte and is a prototype of Jane Eyre. The narrative chronicles Henry Hasting’s degradation and his sister’s involvement in his ruin.

  What has caused this dramatic alteration in the way Charlotte writes about her brother? What has happened to Benjamin Patrick Wiggins? And in what ways has this depiction moved far closer to the Mr. Rochester of Jane’s first encounters with him at Thornfield Hall?

  The years 1834 to 1839 span a dramatic shift in the relationship, influenced by the fact that Branwell, between the ages of seventeen and twenty-two, becomes more independent of family dominance and control, while Charlotte, between eighteen and twenty-three, enters into an emotional and psychological crisis. Necessarily, they are growing up, and for both of them this proved a very difficult process.

  Here we note just a few of the crucial changes taking place. When Charlotte leaves for Roe Head, Branwell’s stories take on a rebelliousness that pushes the edges of what had been permissible in Patrick Brontë’s parsonage. In the spring of 1834, he writes a long biography of his new Angrian hero Alexander Percy. He describes Percy as a slender but active boy with “eminently handsome features.” Clearly this is a stand-in for himself. And then, a note of perhaps consciously anticipated danger: like Branwell, Percy is given to “tumultuous passions” with a mind “totally destitute of religious restraint or moral principle.” Puberty drives much of this, legitimating the writer’s own growing independence of mind and of conduct. The bold rejection of both religion and conventional morality coming from the son of a stern and commanding clergyman father asserts a rebellion that, at least at this point in his life, Branwell was happy to conceal in writings his father did not read.

  Though the siblings were no longer together at Haworth, by the end of this same year, Charlotte is undergoing similar changes, flirting with the unthinkable, as we find in her warning her friend Ellen not to read texts that must have been at that time familiar to Charlotte: Byron’s Don Juan and Cain. Charlotte too is exploring rebellion and dissent. She too is playing with danger.

  While Charlotte found herself trapped at Roe Head, Branwell more and more indulged his enthusiasm f
or boxing, gathering with chums in local pubs to scan the sporting news and cheer on local champs. Drinking—often to excess—was a part of these liberating masculine pleasures.

  Then, in early November 1836, Branwell kills off a major character in the middle of a continuing, episodic narrative titled “Angria and the Angrians”: Mary Percy, one of Charlotte’s great favorites in whom she invested much of her emotional connection to the Angrian story. To most people this would simply seem to be the latest move in their shared play. To Charlotte it was a crisis. Her shock at this death was intensified by how Branwell describes Mary Percy’s last hours. He openly rejects the usual, saccharine spiritual elements of the deathbed scene. There is to be no “mingling of Heaven with earth,” nothing of that “Angelic hope” of life after death. Instead this is to be “the end of a Child of earth,” a woman whose soul and spirit were “rooted in earth” and in dying cries out at what is ­happening to her as she is “being torn away from it.” Branwell had been inclined—more insistently as time passed—to doubt the religious consolations for death that were central to his father’s life and indeed his father’s profession. In this moment a character Charlotte saw as an extension of herself abandons expectations of heavenly consolation and speaks in despair, voicing her anguish at being separated from her great love. This is what makes death so “terrible” for her.

  Mary Percy voices Branwell’s own darkening vision and, though it is perhaps not the intention of her creator, of Charlotte as well. Charlotte was plunging deeper into her own, parallel, spiritual crisis. In December, just a month later, she writes to Ellen Nussey, “I know not how to pray.” She despairs of living what she considers a life of “doing good” and instead sees herself as “seeking my own pleasure,” the “Gratification of my own desires.” In this, she confesses that she has forgotten God and voices the anxious fear, “will not God forget me?” It is as if the Mary Percy written by Branwell has spoken for Charlotte in her tormented devotion to things earthly, the flesh, pleasure, “my own desires.” What Charlotte can plausibly mean by these generalities is hard to imagine given the strictly controlled character of her daily life. But the desperation and guilt are there nonetheless, dramatically voiced.

  The correspondence of thinking between brother and sister did not, as one might expect, evoke a sympathetic sense of shared crisis, and for a simple reason. Charlotte chose repression and silence—save for the odd letter to her friend—and the hope of self-discipline. Whereas Branwell, in the ensuing months, chose risk-taking, excess, the pursuit of “the earth.” Readers of Jane Eyre will immediately recall Rochester’s narration of his years of wandering through Europe in which he claims to have “tried dissipation” but never yields to “debauchery,” a distinction that may escape the more skeptical reader. And we should note here too the first hints of what is later to become a crucial debate between Jane and Rochester at a climactic moment in the novel, when he begs, cajoles, and virtually commands, threatening—“I’ll try violence,” he says—her to choose a life of fleshly pleasure by living in a bigamous sexual relationship with him in an ironically pictured “white-washed villa” on the shores of the Mediterranean. Of course, she refuses.

  Now we see the crucial differences taking clear form. Rochester is stopped from plunging “headlong into wild license” only by Jane’s resistance. Branwell, in the late 1830s, was becoming just that man. First in his writing of fantasy chronicles. A bit later, in his own, actual life. And his sister Charlotte found herself powerless to do anything about it.

  By October of 1837 in Branwell’s “Angria and the Angrians” we find an example of this development in the blasphemous, drunken toast he writes for Henry Hastings.

  “Its speedy entombment in our stomachs and its ressurection with us in another world!”

  The President himself contradicted such a toast swearing that He had enough to do with . . . resurrection of its ghost next morning and Crofton vowed that after a full dinner and flowing glass he had too often been troubled with its resurrection the next minute.

  Branwell thus enjoys mocking the central tenant of Christianity, the resurrection of Jesus, which he transforms into a joke having to do with hangovers and vomiting. Presumably it was the kind of ribaldry Branwell indulged in when he met his drinking buddies at the Black Bull, down the hill from the Haworth parsonage. In the next few years, Branwell continued to write about what Juliet Barker terms “the unfortunate Henry Hastings” and the vicious circle of his debauched friends.

  When Charlotte, finally liberated from teaching at Miss ­Wooler’s school in February of 1839, took up a new writing project, she chose as its title the name of Branwell’s dissipated spokesman, a character he had been writing about since December of 1834. Into this project she poured her complicated feelings toward her brother and what was now happening to him. Hastings, as the story opens, is running from the law, and Charlotte describes him in ways that anticipate Rochester. There are, first, the handsome, yet dark, demonic looks. While he is a man of a muscular and powerful frame, he isn’t tall, and he has “a worn and haggard aspect” even though he is still young. His looks reflect the life he has been living and what has happened to his spirit. The narrator, judging by the man’s face, concludes, “he must have been blessed with a devil’s temper. I never saw such a mad, suspicious irritability as glinted in his little black eyes.” Much of this cannot literally be Branwell—who was slender and not of a powerful frame and red not dark haired. But as we see, both Charlotte and Branwell reveled in the adoption of fictional personae, and so in writing about Hastings Charlotte writes about one of her brother’s stand-in figures. And her presentation of this character is dramatically negative. But how have his eyes become irritable and mad; how has Branwell’s former good nature morphed into a “habitual scowl”?

  The story characterizes Henry Hastings as a traitor who has “blotted out his family name with stains of infamy.” Though probably a man under thirty, “strong drink and bad courses had ploughed lines in his face which might better have suited three score.” Charlotte is working out what has happened to her younger brother. She depicts Hastings—as Branwell—with passions “naturally strong” and with a feverous imagination. The two together make “wild work,” especially when “drunken delirium lashed them up . . . He was talked of everywhere for his excesses.” There is a tragic and prescient vision at play in this crucial passage. Branwell’s sister is castigating him for his youthful delight in tavern fun with his pals and his failure, so far, to achieve the success and consequent recognition that he claimed for his genius. She is also, unfortunately, accurately anticipating what was to happen. Branwell’s strong passions and lively imagination, his propensity for “excesses,” those very elements that could make him so charming and fun in company, which made him a fellow writer of such energy and vision, could lead him to waste his vigor and his youth in vice, and her story was meant as a cautionary tale, a warning about what is ahead unless he alters his conduct. For Charlotte as the eldest sister, a crucial aspect is the danger that he could stain his family name with “infamy.”

  In all of this we see hints at the future emergence of Mr. Rochester—his mistaken marriage to Bertha Mason, whose own bestiality takes to its logical limits Rochester’s own animal propensities, his subsequent life of debauchery in Paris, and his saturnine good looks reflecting his previous excesses and suffering. Strangely, one might think almost perversely, Charlotte is transforming her brother into a Byronic hero, ally to Satan, making the great refusal. And in Branwell’s writing—the blasphemous toast, Mary Percy’s deathbed scene, and much of his later poetry and prose—we see how the younger brother has prepared the way for this. For the son of a disciplined and faithful parish priest, a stain indeed. Thinking, writing, even conduct in rebellion against the mastery of his father, as if in a frantic effort to supplant it. The years subsequent to the writing of Henry Hastings were to prove its tragic foresight, and Charlotte’s growing indignation with her brother’s conduct w
as to lead to the total breakdown of their friendship and her cold refusal to sympathize with his decline or to endeavor in any substantive way to save him from himself. Instead he was to emerge in the ominous earlier experiences of Fairfax Rochester, and Brontë was to “save” the brother—who had become so much like Hastings—through Jane Eyre’s redemption of the novel’s male hero.

  In Henry Hastings we find Charlotte too—and as well an anticipation of Jane Eyre—in the story’s portrayal of Henry’s sister Elizabeth. Charlotte paints a decidedly unglamorous portrait of her as an “insignificant, unattractive” young woman wholly without the bloom, majesty, or fullness of beauty. Her simplicity of appearance is matched by her self-repression: her features seem masked, her physical movements restrained and guarded. She lacks “openness, originality, frankness.” Elizabeth Hastings comes from a rough, wild country of moors and mountains with hardly any green fields, no trees, and stony, bad roads. In all of this we read a diminished and disempowered Charlotte writing herself into the story of her brother’s transformed and darkened life. Like Charlotte, and indeed like Jane Eyre to come, Elizabeth struggles to keep wrapped about her the “veil of reserve and propriety” at moments of crisis, when incidents of strange excitement were transpiring around her on the point of bursting forth like lava. Here the contrast between sister and brother is explicit. Two who were so close are now facing an unbridgeable divide.