Brontës
Page 99
Though such a visit was flattering, it was scarcely welcome. Nor was yet another invitation from the Kay Shuttleworths, though at least this time there was no threat of being shown off round the drawing rooms and public places of London. The Kay Shuttleworths had taken a house on the shores of Lake Windermere for the autumn and winter, which was the reason for the invitation. Though Charlotte was reluctant to accept, the thought of paying her first visit to the land of the Lake Poets was attractive. Patrick, concerned about her health and perhaps anxious that she should meet new people outside George Smith’s circle, urged her to go.79
She set off on 19 August, arriving at eight o’clock in the evening after a tedious journey during which she had to change carriages three times and wait an hour and a half at Lancaster. Sir James was waiting for her at Windermere station and there was a pleasant drive along the wooded banks of the lake edge to Low-wood, then a steep climb up a narrow lane to Briery Close. ‘This place is exquisitely beautiful’, Charlotte wrote to her father the day after her arrival, ‘though the weather is cloudy, misty and stormy – but the sun bursts out occasionally and shews the hills and the lake.’80 On the subject of Sir James she remained silent, but she found an instant ally and friend in Mrs Gaskell, who arrived later that same evening. Even at this, their first meeting, Charlotte had none of the tortured shyness which usually afflicted her: remembering Mrs Gaskell’s kind and sympathetic letter on the publication of Shirley, Charlotte came straight up to her the moment she arrived and shook her by the hand. Later, during tea, Mrs Gaskell had the opportunity for a closer observation of the ‘little lady in black silk gown’. ‘She is (as she calls herself) undeveloped;’ she told Catherine Winkworth,
thin and more than Vi a head shorter than I, soft brown hair not so dark as mine, eyes (very good and expressive looking straight & open at you) of the same colour, a reddish face; large mouth & many teeth gone; altogether plain; the forehead square, broad, and rather overhanging. She has a very sweet voice, rather hesitates in choosing her expressions, but when chosen they seem without an effort, admirable and just befitting the occasion.81
Lady Kay Shuttleworth, ill with a cold, was confined to the house, but she still took the opportunity to gossip with Mrs Gaskell, giving her a highly romanticized view of Charlotte’s home and background, full of half-truths and downright untruths, and portraying Patrick as ‘the strange half mad husband’ who drove his wife to an early death, sawed up chairs and burnt hearth rugs in fits of temper. All of which, while it increased Mrs Gaskell’s sympathy for Charlotte Brontë, was also irreparably to prejudice her against Patrick.82
Charlotte’s own confidences to Mrs Gaskell were much less dramatic: she talked about the Clergy Daughters’ School, where the pain she had suffered from hunger was not to be told, about her father’s reaction to reading Jane Eyre and about her own prospect of a lonely death.83 ‘She is quiet sensible unaffected with high noble aims’, Mrs Gaskell enthused. ‘She is sterling and true; and if she is a little bitter she checks herself, and speaks kindly and hopefully of things and people directly; the wonder to me is how she can have kept heart and power alive in her life of desolation.’ Charlotte’s own impressions of Mrs Gaskell, who was six years her senior, were equally favourable, if more subdued. ‘I was truly glad of her companionship She is a woman of the most genuine talent – of cheerful, pleasing and cordial manners and – I believe – of a kind and good heart.’84
The morning after Mrs Gaskell’s arrival, Sir James took the two ladies and a Mr Moseley, an inspector of schools, who had joined them for breakfast, out on the lake. There Charlotte and Mrs Gaskell discovered a mutual liking for Francis Newman, the controversial free thinker, brother of the more famous Catholic convert, and for John Ruskin; they later quarrelled in friendly fashion, over politics and Tennyson, whom Charlotte loathed. After dinner they actually set off to drive to Coniston to visit the Tennysons, who were staying in the area, but to the wordless fury of Mrs Gaskell, Sir James decided to turn back when it began to rain.85
An evening visit to the home of another famous writer, Thomas Arnold, did materialize, though Charlotte was so nervous at the thought of going there that she was afflicted with an acute headache all day. She had not then read the Life of Dr Arnold, but she had formed a highly idealized impression of the former headmaster of Rugby and Regius Professor of History at Oxford, who had died eight years previously. It was, therefore, an intense disappointment to meet his widow and daughters at Fox How, the holiday home he had built above Rydal Water. The journey there, through Ambleside and along the beautiful riverside of the valley winding up the back of Loughrigg Fell, past the houses where Thomas De Quincey had lived and Dora Wordsworth after her marriage to Edward Quillinan, was to linger long in Charlotte’s memory. Even though it was almost dark when they reached the unpretentious Lakeland stone house, magnificently situated at the head of the little valley, Charlotte could still perceive that the situation was ‘exquisitely lovely: ‘the house looked like a nest half-buried in flowers and creepers – and, dusk as it was, I could feel that the valley and the hills round were beautiful as imagination could dream’.86 Mrs Arnold, an amiable woman who had once been very pretty, greeted Charlotte in what Sir James and Mrs Gaskell both afterwards assured her was a ‘conventional manner’, but which she found ‘lacking that genuineness and simplicity one seemed to have a right to expect in the chosen life-companion of Dr Arnold’. Neither she nor her daughters were intellectual and, though impressed by the show of family unity they presented, Charlotte thought their opinions were imitative rather than original, sentimental rather than sound.She herself made an equally poor first impression on the Arnolds: ‘Jane Aire is not at all liked’ was the succinct verdict they passed on to their friends.87
Most of the time, however, was taken up with driving about in a carriage to show Charlotte the glorious Westmorland scenery: ‘could I have wandered about amongst those hills alone – I could have drank in all their beauty –’, Charlotte sighed. ‘I longed to slip out unseen, and to run away by myself in amongst the hills and dales. Erratic and vagrant instincts tormented me, and these I was obliged to control, or rather, suppress – for fear of growing in any degree enthusiastic, and thus drawing attention
As usual, once her visit was over, Charlotte was glad that she had been, though she had had no wish to prolong it beyond a week.90 A few days later, she sat down to write to her new-found friend.
Papa and I have just had tea; he is sitting quietly in his room, and I in mine; ‘storms of rain’ are sweeping over the garden and churchyard; as to the moors – they are hidden in thick fog. Though alone – I am not unhappy; I have a thousand things to be thankful for, and – amongst the rest – that this morning I received a letter from you, and that this evening – I have the privilege of answering it.91
She was equally cheerful with Ellen, who seem
s to have been depressed following a visit to Tranby, where both Amelia Ringrose and her sister Rosy were deep in preparations for their weddings. ‘Cheer up – dear Nell – and try not to stagnate –’, she urged Ellen. ‘Humanity cannot escape its fate which is to drink a mixed cup – Let us believe that the gall and the vinegar are salutary.’ Even a visit from Joe Taylor failed to throw her: she was able to listen to him with equanimity, not least because, now that his marriage was arranged, he looked forward to it with quiet satisfaction. Having seen all he wanted to see of life, he was now prepared to settle.92
All in all, Charlotte’s life seemed to have taken a turn for the better. Her health had benefited from her excursion to the Lakes and her father’s appetite and spirits had improved since her return. James Taylor, after a long silence, had resumed his correspondence and was sending the Athenaeum to her. In addition, a notice of the kind ‘over which an author rejoices with trembling’ had appeared in the Palladium.93 This anonymous review was the first to enthuse seriously about Wuthering Heights, though its author, Sydney Dobell, refused to believe that it was not an early work by Currer Bell. ‘Not a subordinate place or person in this novel, but bears more or less the stamp of high genius’, Dobell had declared. ‘It is the unformed writing of a giant’s hand; the “large utterance” of a baby god.’ Jane Eyre exhibited all the same qualities brought to maturity. These were also evident in Shirley, but ‘labouring on an exhausted soil. Israel is at work, indeed; but there is a grievous want of straw, and the groan of the people is perceptible’. Shirley, he accurately perceived, was written by an artist not spoilt but maimed and disabled by criticism. He urged ‘Currer Bell’, in her next novel, to ignore the critics and remember as far as possible the frame of mind in which she had sat down to write Wuthering Heights; maturity would prevent her making the mistakes which had marred her earliest work.94
The appearance of this review seems to have prompted William Smith Williams to suggest that Smith, Elder & Co. should reprint Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey in their new cheap, single-volume format. Charlotte leapt at the chance, offering to write a preface and explanatory notice of the authors, but, significantly, in the light of what happened to Emily’s second novel, declining to add any other compositions by them ‘as I would not offer a line to the publication of which my sisters themselves would have objected’. Her opinion of Anne’s second novel is also illuminating:
‘Wildfell Hall’ it hardly appears to me 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 – this I ever suspected – and I have found, amongst her papers, mournful proofs that such was the case.95
Charlotte, it appears, was prepared to consign her sister’s novel to oblivion because she considered its subject at odds with her own perception of what Anne’s character was and ought to have been.
Charlotte was fortunate in being able to leave the complicated negotiations for permission to reprint her sisters’ books in the competent – and ruthless – hands of George Smith. While Newby made himself ‘scarce as violets at Christmas’, evading all attempts to pin him down to a meeting ‘like a Publisher metamorphosed into a Rainbow’,96 Charlotte set to work on a biographical notice of her sisters that would, once and for all, establish the separate identities of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. Giving a brief outline of their lives from the point at which they had assumed authorship, and omitting all mention of the rest of their family or their place of residence, Charlotte went on to describe her sisters’ characters. Her words, because of their persuasive power, have ever since been taken to be written on tablets of stone, handed down from the Great Author; absolute and unquestionable truths. Yet, as Charlotte herself confessed in her concluding sentence, they were written with only one purpose in mind, and that was to answer the critics who had complained that ‘Ellis’ and ‘Acton’ loved the coarse, brutal and degrading. Every word was carefully chosen to nail the lies and assumptions which lay behind the reviews. Instead, Charlotte built the edifice under which the Brontës have sheltered ever since, portraying them as children of nature, whose inexperience, innocence and sense of truth led them to portray life as they saw it, in ignorance of the sensibilities of a more sophisticated reading public. To that end she had to pretend that they were uneducated and wrote purely from ‘the dictates of intuition’.
In externals, they were two unobtrusive women; a perfectly secluded life gave them retiring manners and habits. In Emily’s nature the extremes of vigour and simplicity seemed to meet. Under an unsophisticated culture, inartificial tastes, and an unpretending outside, lay a secret power and fire that might have informed the brain and kindled the veins of a hero; but she had no worldly wisdom; her powers were unadapted to the practical business of life; she would fail to defend her most manifest rights, to consult her most legitimate advantage. An interpreter ought always to have stood between her and the world. Her will was not very flexible, and it generally opposed her interest. Her temper was magnanimous, but warm and sudden; her spirit altogether unbending.
Anne’s character was milder and more subdued; she wanted the power, the fire, the originality of her sister, but was well-endowed with quiet virtues of her own. Long-suffering, self-denying, reflective, and intelligent, a constitutional reserve and taciturnity placed and kept her in the shade, and covered her mind, and especially her feelings, with a sort of nun-like veil, which was rarely lifted. Neither Emily nor Anne was learned; they had no thought of filling their pitchers at the well-spring of other minds; they always wrote from the impulse of nature, the dictates of intuition, and from such stores of observation as their limited experience had enabled them to amass. I may sum up all by saying, that for strangers they were nothing, for superficial observers less than nothing; but for those who had known them all their lives in the intimacy of close relationship, they were genuinely good and truly great.
This notice has been written, because I felt it a sacred duty to wipe the dust off their gravestones, and leave their dear names free from soil.97
If writing the preface was painful, the task of going through her sisters’ papers was exquisitely so. Charlotte had decided that she would, after all, add a selection of her sisters’ poems to the new edition. In the light of her earlier statement that she ‘would not offer a line to the publication of which my sisters themselves would have objected’, her editorial policy on the poems was curious in the extreme. She selected seven of Anne’s poems and eighteen of Emily’s, seventeen of them from her fair copy books, but in virtually every one she made substantial editorial changes. In some cases these were undoubtedly what her sisters would have wanted, as for instance substituting ‘sister’ for ‘Gerald’ or ‘sheep’ for ‘deer’, to hide the Gondal origins of the poems.98 Others were purely technical, correcting faults in metre or rhyme, which again were uncontroversial. But there were a large number of ‘corrections’ which were not demanded by the texts and which were simply Charlotte’s ‘improvements’. Some of these were unnecessary and capricious: in a line by Emily describing cornfields as ‘emerald and scarlet and gold’, Charlotte changed ‘scarlet’ to ‘vermeil’, a pretentious word which would not have been in her sister’s poetic vocabulary. In another poem, which she entitled ‘The Night-Wind’, Charlotte changed the tenses in the last verse, creating a much more awkward last line, and substituted ‘church-aisle’ for ‘church-yard’. These can only have been dictated by the fact that Emily herself had been buried in the church vaults rather than the churchyard – a fact irrelevant to the poem.99 To four poems, two of which were short extracts from longer originals, Charlotte actually added between four and eight lines of her own composition, usually to bring the poem to an end. In one ca
se, ‘Silent is the House – all are laid asleep’, this meant that out of twenty lines, only the first twelve were by Emily, the remainder of the poem being by Charlotte.100 None of this was indicated in either the text or Charlotte’s accompanying notes.
Charlotte treated Anne’s poems in an even more cavalier fashion. Her careful choice of only seven poems, of which six were entirely religious in theme, was dictated partly by her own perception of Anne as Emily’s inferior – therefore Anne would not be allowed to speak on the same subjects as Emily – and partly by her desire to prove Anne’s piety to her critics. Ignoring the large body of Gondal verse, Charlotte therefore selected poems which, in the main, depicted their author as a despondent but faithful Christian, struggling under the burden of her own sense of unworthiness. Again, however, she made substantial alterations to the manuscript originals, nearly always to tone down Anne’s more despairing expressions. In ‘I have gone backward in the work’, for instance, she removed one verse entirely and altered the last line from ‘And hear a wretch’s prayer’ to ‘Christ, hear my humble prayer!’101 In another, where the poet expresses a longing ‘To see the glories of his face’, Charlotte unnecessarily substituted her own line ‘Like Moses, I would see his face.’ Similarly, in a hymn where the refrain of one verse was ‘I know my heart will fall away’, Charlotte changed the line to ‘Thy suppliant is a castaway.’102
The poem which suffered most from Charlotte’s editorial policy was one which it is surprising she felt able to include at all, her sister’s last lines on learning that she had consumption. Out of the original seventeen verses, Charlotte selected only eight for publication, thereby omitting all Anne’s stronger expressions of grief and despair and creating a false impression of calm resignation to the inevitable. In one verse, she perversely altered Anne’s meaning: for Anne’s original, referring to her own sufferings,