Brontës

by Juliet Barker

a long dark future may be preparing for me and Hell itself may rise to meet me at my coming; But how can I shake off what my heart clings to? How can I vow to thee that I will forget him who seems all I have hoped for and never have obtained? How can I return to silent submission under heartless tyranny and keep any promise to hate the name of love?115

  Though Maria Thurston had become Mrs Robinson, Percy did not become Branwell Brontë, except in so far as he embodied all Branwell’s wish-fulfilment. They shared a love of intellectual pursuits, music and poetry, a bravado, passion and natural eloquence, but there was always a naivety about Branwell which was not reflected in the cynical and manipulative Percy, who was effortlessly master of every situation.

  Writing his novel had at least the benefit of employing Branwell’s time and deflecting his mind from his emotional problems. Though it remained unfinished, the simple act of creativity was a comfort. His career and his personal life lay in ruins; literature was now his only resource.

  Chapter Seventeen

  THE BOOK OF RHYMES

  Branwell’s declared intention of writing a novel for publication set Charlotte thinking. ‘We had very early cherished the dream of one day becoming authors’, she was later to write; the dream had never been relinquished but the necessity of earning a living had always intervened.1 But what if the two could be combined? What if the compulsion to write, which had so often frustrated the effort to work at less congenial tasks, could be turned into a means of livelihood? Charlotte’s chance discovery of a notebook of Emily’s poems at this time must have seemed like the answer to a prayer. She described that momentous find five years later in an account which, though deliberately low key, could not suppress the thrill of excitement.

  One day, in the autumn of 1845, I accidentally lighted on a MS. volume of verse in my sister Emily’s handwriting. Of course, I was not surprised, knowing that she could and did write verse: I looked it over, and something more than surprise seized me, – a deep conviction that these were not common effusions, nor at all like the poetry women generally write. I thought them condensed and terse, vigorous and genuine. To my ear, they had also a peculiar music – wild, melancholy, and elevating.

  My sister Emily was not a person of demonstrative character, nor one, on the recesses of whose mind and feelings, even those nearest and dearest to her could, with impunity, intrude unlicensed; it took hours to reconcile her to the discovery I had made, and days to persuade her that such poems merited publication. I knew, however, that a mind like hers could not be without some latent spark of honourable ambition, and refused to be discouraged in my attempts to fan that spark to flame.

  Meantime, my younger sister quietly produced some of her own compositions, intimating that since Emily’s had given me pleasure, I might like to look at hers. I could not but be a partial judge, yet I thought that these verses too had a sweet sincere pathos of their own.2

  Emily’s rage was entirely understandable. Though she had long been accustomed to read her Gondal stories and poems to Anne, Charlotte had been excluded because her partnership had been with Branwell. That partnership had effectively ended by about 1840 when brother and sister were continually separated by the demands of their employment. Whether or not Charlotte was aware that Emily and Anne still continued their Gondal sagas, she should not have intruded uninvited into their world. It was a violation of that secrecy which was an integral part of Gondal to have read the poems herself, but then to demand that they should be published was an unforgivable offence.

  It was therefore all the more surprising that Emily was eventually won round, even if it did take some time. Anne’s part in the quarrel and Charlotte’s reaction to it were typical: Anne played the part of peacemaker by voluntarily sacrificing her own private poems, and Charlotte, patronizing as ever towards her youngest sister – whom she does not even name in her account – praised her verse in terms which made it clear she thought they were nothing out of the ordinary.

  Charlotte claimed both the discovery and the inspiration to publish as her own; she was undoubtedly the driving force behind the publication. Even so, she had to make two important concessions to her sister: the Gondal origins of her verse would be disguised by judicious emendation of the text and, more importantly, the poems would be published under pseudonyms and their authors’ true identity was to remain a secret. The decision to adopt pseudonyms was one that Emily and Anne forced upon Charlotte as a sine qua non of publication. Though Charlotte would always rather regret being bound by this promise, she soon came to see the advantages of their assumed names.3

  Averse to personal publicity, we veiled our own names under those of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell; the ambiguous choice being dictated by a sort of conscientious scruple at assuming Christian names positively masculine, while we did not like to declare ourselves women, because – without at that time suspecting that our mode of writing and thinking was not what is called ‘feminine’ – we had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice; we had noticed how critics sometimes use for their chastisement the weapon of personality, and for their reward, a flattery which is not true praise.4

  The actual choice of pseudonyms has been the subject of much debate and speculation. The name ‘Currer’ was familiar to the Brontës as that of the philanthropist Frances Richardson Currer, who was a benefactor of many local institutions, including the Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge and the Keighley Mechanics’ Institute. It was also a name that Branwell had used in his ‘Life of Warner Howard Warner’ written in February 1838: an ancestor of the protagonist had been called ‘Haworth Currer Warner’. Ellis, too, was a well-known name in the West Riding. The Ellis family were the main mill owners in Bingley, a few miles from Haworth, and their deeds were frequently reported in the local newspapers. In addition, Ellis Cunliffe Lister-Kay was the Liberal Member of Parliament who had been elected to represent Bradford after the Reform Bill. The name ‘Acton’ was probably familiar to Anne from her days at Thorp Green. The ‘Bell’ surname may have been suggested by the middle name of Patrick’s curate Arthur Bell Nicholls, or by the simple fact that Haworth Church had just acquired a new peal of bells.5 In each case the girls retained their own initials beneath the cover of their new identities.

  The autumn months were spent in choosing the poems to be included in the publication. The final selection provides a fascinating indication of the turn that the Brontës’ literary lives had taken since adulthood. Charlotte, the driving force in rushing into print, contributed nineteen poems: of these, thirteen had been written as long ago as 1837, when she had enjoyed an immensely productive year at Roe Head, and three in 1838,1839 and 1841 respectively. The remaining three poems, for which there are no extant manuscripts, were probably more recent compositions.6 Out of the nineteen, only one, ‘The Teacher’s Monologue’, was definitely autobiographical. Three, ‘Pilate’s Wife’s Dream’, ‘Winter Stores’ and ‘The Missionary’, seem to stand alone as story-poems in their own right, but the remaining fifteen all owed their origins to Angria. Clearly, then, Charlotte herself considered that her best work had been produced in the golden years of the Angrian chronicles; since then – and probably really since Brussels when Monsieur Heger had so influenced her style – she had virtually abandoned poetry as a vehicle for her imagination.

  Charlotte was later to look back on her contribution with a feeling akin to shame, saying that she would view the possibility of a reprint with unmixed pleasure only if her own work was omitted. ‘Let me warn you’, she wrote to a Miss Alexander who had sent her a fan letter and wished to buy Poems,

  that it is scarcely worth your while to send for it. It is a Collection of short fugitive pieces; my own share are chiefly juvenile productions written several years ago, before taste was chastened or judgement matured – accordingly they now appear to me very crude.7

  To Mrs Gaskell she was even more blunt:

  I do not like my own share of the work, nor care that it should be read:�
�� Mine are chiefly juvenile productions; the restless effervescence of a mind that would not be still. In those days, the sea too often ‘wrought and was tempestuous’ and weed, sand, shingle – all turned up in the tumult. This image is much too magniloquent for the subject, but you will pardon it.8

  In sharp contrast to Charlotte, both Emily and Anne contributed poems of much more recent date. Anne selected twenty-one poems, all of them written since 1840 and all, bar one, since her appointment to Thorp Green; seventeen of them had been written in the last three years, the highest proportion in 1845.9 Although it is particularly difficult to distinguish between Anne’s personal and Gondal poetry, it would appear that around half of the poems were either autobiographical or religious, and so not from the Gondal sagas. Anne had to trawl through at least five different copybooks to find poems which she considered worthy of publication.

  Emily also contributed twenty-one poems, the two earliest written in 1839 but the vast majority, fourteen in all, in the last two years. All the poems were chosen from two notebooks, six from one and fifteen from the other,10 which suggests that the latter was the manuscript Charlotte had found and surreptitiously read. Since both were written in the minute, cramped hand which clearly signalled the private world of Gondal, it must have required both persistence and effort on Charlotte’s part to decipher her sister’s poems; she may have made the original discovery by chance but it was a deliberate choice to read on. Emily’s outrage at Charlotte’s ‘unwarrantable liberty’11 is therefore all the more understandable.

  Emily was careful to edit out any references in the poems she selected which might alert a reader to the Gondal subtext. This was most obvious in the poems written earlier in 1845. ‘Angora’s shore’, for example, in Emily’s elegiac lament ‘Cold in the earth – and the deep snow piled above thee!’, was changed to the less exotic ‘northern shore’.12 Even more dramatically, the published version of ‘The Prisoner’ was composed of two sections of a much longer poem cobbled together to omit the Gondal storyline and given a new ending with a specially composed last verse. As the beginning of this poem is dated 9 October 1845 in its original manuscript form, Emily must either have only just finished it or even have been still working on it when Charlotte suggested that they should publish. The poem is rightly one of Emily’s most famous, as it includes the powerful and intensely emotional description of the captive’s vision.

  ‘He comes with western winds, with evening’s wandering airs,

  With that clear dusk of heaven that brings the thickest stars;

  Winds take a pensive tone and stars a tender fire

  And visions rise and change which kill me with desire –

  Desire for nothing known in my maturer years

  When joy grew mad with awe, at counting future tears;

  When, if my spirit’s sky was full of flashes warm,

  I knew not whence they came from sun or thunder storm;

  But first a hush of peace, a soundless calm descends;

  The struggle of distress and feirce impatience ends;

  Mute music sooths my breast – unuttered harmony

  That I could never dream till earth was lost to me.

  Then dawns the Invisible; the Unseen its truth reveals;

  My outward sense is gone, my inward essence feels –

  Its wings are almost free, its home, its harbour found;

  Measuring the gulf, it stoops and dares the final bound –

  O, dreadful is the check – intense the agony

  When the ear begins to hear and the eye begins to see;

  When the pulse begins to throb, the brain to think again,

  The soul to feel the flesh and the flesh to feel the chain.

  Yet I would lose no sting, would wish no torture less;

  The more that anguish racks the earlier it will bless;

  And robed in fires of Hell, or bright with heavenly shine

  If it but herald Death, the vision is divine –’13

  These lines are frequently cited to prove that Emily was a mystic, undergoing the same sort of personal revelation as St John of the Cross or St Teresa of Avila. Though she may use the same sort of ecstatic religious terminology in describing the vision, their experience is essentially different in that it is centred on union with God. For Emily, speaking through her Gondal characters, the vision is a visitation of a ‘Benignant Power’ which she characterizes here, and indeed elsewhere, as a personification of hope or imagination. One is reminded of Charlotte’s equally powerful and emotional experiences of Angrian visions, which she described so vividly at Roe Head.14 Like her older sister, Emily externalized her imagination; her poems and stories did not seem to her to inhabit her head but were played out before her as if they were creations independent of her control. She was simply a passive spectator who could visualize so strongly that she only wrote what she actually saw. The fact that she externalizes and personifies imagination as a visitant ‘God of Visions’ does not make her a mystic, particularly as the recipients of the visions in her poems are usually defeated or imprisoned Gondals. Their wish for death, as the end of suffering, finds no echo in Emily herself though it recalls Branwell’s extravagant poetic demands for ‘real rest’. Another of Emily’s poems, written in February 1845 and included in the final selection, is illustrative of this. ‘The Philosopher’ is unable to reconcile the warring elements in his own breast or to find the spirit of harmony that will harness them.

  – ‘And even for that Spirit, Seer,

  I’ve whached and sought my life time long

  Sought Him in Heaven, Hell, Earth, and Air

  An endless search – and always wrong!

  Had I but seen his glorious eye,

  Once light the clouds that wilder me,

  I ne’er had raised this coward cry

  To cease to think and cease to be –

  I neer had called oblivion blest

  Nor stretching eager hands to Death

  Implored to change for lifeless rest

  This sentient soul, this living breath

  O let me die – that power and will

  Their cruel strife may close

  And vanquished Good victorious Ill

  Be lost in one repose15

  In direct contrast to this plea for oblivion is Emily’s last great poem which, though a defiant rejection of conventional organized religion, is also a triumphant declaration of faith. Since this is the only statement of its kind in all Emily’s extant writings, one cannot assume that it is necessarily an expression of her own belief, particularly as it was transcribed into a notebook containing many Gondal poems. Nevertheless, one can understand why Charlotte was happy to believe that these were the last lines Emily ever wrote, rather than the mediocre and tedious Gondal verses which actually had that dubious distinction.16

  No coward soul is mine

  No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere

  I see Heaven’s glories shine

  And Faith shines equal arming me from fear

  O God within my breast

  Almighty ever-present Deity

  Life, that in me hast rest

  As I Undying Life, have power in thee

  Vain are the thousand creeds

  That move men’s hearts, unutterably vain,

  Worthless as withered weeds

  Or idlest froth amid the boundless main

  To waken doubt in one

  Holding so fast by thy infinity

  So surely anchored on

  The steadfast rock of Immortality

  With wide-embracing love

  Thy spirit animates eternal years

  Pervades and broods above

  Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates and rears

  Though Earth and moon were gone

  And suns and universes ceased to be

  And thou wert left alone

  Every Existence would exist in thee

  There is not room for Death


  Nor atom that his might could render void

  Since thou art Being and Breath

  And what thou art may never be destroyed.17

  This poem, written in January 1846, was to be the last that Emily considered worth transcribing into her fair copy notebooks.18 Though she did not altogether abandon poetry, her efforts in future would principally be channelled into prose. One cannot regret the creation of Wuthering Heights, but there must be a lingering sense of frustration that Emily’s poetic career was ended so abruptly. The sustained quality and increased philosophical depth of the poems she had produced over the previous eighteen months prove that Emily was at the very height of her poetic powers when Charlotte proposed publication. Though she was then a lone voice crying in the wilderness, few now would disagree with Charlotte’s assessment of Emily’s gifts:

  I know – no woman that ever lived – ever wrote such poetry before – Condensed energy, clearness, finish – strange, strong pathos are their characteristics – utterly different from the weak diffusiveness – the laboured yet most feeble wordiness which dilute the writings of even very popular poetesses.19

  Charlotte’s discovery of Emily’s poems was the catalyst she needed to pull herself out of the apathy she had suffered since returning from Brussels. At last she had a renewed sense of purpose in life and she set about the problem of publication with her old determination, sweeping aside her sisters’ doubts and writing round to prospective publishers. At first, she made as little headway as Branwell had in his efforts to publish in Blackwood’s Magazine. Undeterred, she wrote to William and Robert Chambers of Edinburgh, publishers of one of the Brontës’ favourite periodicals, Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, seeking their advice: ‘they may have forgotten the circumstance,’ Charlotte wrote warmly some years later, ‘but I have not, for from them I received a brief and business-like but, civil and sensible reply.’20 Charlotte’s gratitude suggests that their advice – which has not survived – bore fruit.