Many modern readers are aware that Charlotte Bronte was one of four remarkable children, three of whom, including Emily Bronte and Anne Bronte, became famous authors themselves, and the other of whom, Branwell, the only brother, died at age thirty-one in miserable and ignoble circumstances. One important aspect of Jane Eyre's remarkable success has surely been the literary mystery that has grown to the proportions of myth about the entire Bronte family: How could the modest, unworldly authors of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall have understood and depicted fervent, obsessive, sometimes violent love?
The Brontes were a highly unusual family, to be sure. The father, Patrick Bronte (originally Brunty), was born and reared in Ireland by a poor and probably illiterate peasant family. His mother, a Catholic by birth, had become a Protestant upon marriage to his father. Young Patrick was clever enough to be a schoolteacher at age sixteen and thereafter admitted to Cambridge to study for the ministry--a most unusual accomplishment for an impecunious Irish youth. By the time he was appointed to the pulpit of Haworth, in Yorkshire, in 1820, he had risen in social class enough to be considered a gentleman, albeit an impoverished one without wealthy connections or a private income to supplement his meager wages. In 1812 Patrick had married Maria Branwell, from Cornwall, a religious young woman of Methodist faith, and they had six children by 1820: Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte, Patrick Branwell (known as Branwell), Emily, and Anne. When the baby, Anne, was less than two years old, Maria Branwell Bronte died of cancer at age thirty-eight, after a prolonged and terrible period of illness.
Though an aunt from Cornwall, the strict and deeply religious Elizabeth Branwell, came to care for the children after their mother's death, the four eldest girls (Emily was only six years old) were sent to Cowan Bridge School, while Branwell and Anne remained to be educated at home. Cowan Bridge was an institution established for the education of poor clergymen's daughters by the Reverend William Carus-Wilson, the original model for the character of the Reverend Brocklehurst in Jane Eyre. It is not difficult to understand why Patrick Bronte sent his daughters there: He could afford little else, and Cowan Bridge had such well-known patrons as William Wilberforce and Charles Simeon, the evangelical preachers who had influenced Patrick Bronte's religious views. At the time it must have seemed like a godsend to the widower with six children crowded in his small home and with few resources to educate them.
But Cowan Bridge, which inspired the portrait of Lowood School in Jane Eyre, was a place of harsh daily regimes, unhealthy conditions, and unrelenting deprivation. Its educational mission was that the female pupils, of genteel social class but with few prospects for the future, should be taught stringent self-denial and unquestioning submission in their own best interest. The evangelical Reverend Carus-Wilson believed the pupils should be schooled in strict religious and moral principles in order to save their souls, as we can see in the magazine he wrote for them, called The Children's Friend, in which he admonishes his charges, "The Lord will call you to account, my dear children, at the awful day of judgment.... What shame and confusion will seize upon you! You will in vain call upon the rocks and mountains to fall upon you, and hide you ... and you will hear these words sounded in your ears, 'Depart (oh, that word depart) ye cursed into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels.' "
All the children at Cowan Bridge suffered from insufficient and poor-quality food, lack of heat, and rampant disease. In 1825 the two oldest Bronte sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, were sent home from school in advanced stages of illness and died there, probably of consumption (or tuberculosis, as it is called today). Though Charlotte and Emily were removed from the school soon after the deaths of their older sisters, the fate of Maria and Elizabeth was an enormous blow, following so soon upon the loss of their mother. Charlotte spoke often of Maria as a truly remarkable child, highly intelligent and precocious at age eleven, mothering her younger siblings, of a deeply religious nature even then. The character of selfless yet strong-minded Helen in Jane Eyre is based on this important figure in Charlotte's childhood.
The next period of the Bronte children's life was truly astonishing: The remaining four--now educated rather haphazardly at home, precocious and imaginative, cut off from the outside world and with little to entertain them--began to write. Colla boratively they produced numerous plays, historical fantasies, poems, and homemade miniature books (some of which still exist) over a long period extending into adulthood, all based on imaginary kingdoms of their own devising. Though none of the children had much formal instruction, all were avid readers of several newspapers, literary magazines like Blackwood's, popular ladies' annuals, the Bible, and literary classics like John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, The Arabian Nights, William Shakespeare, John Milton, Sir Walter Scott, and the latest Romantic poetry, all used as models for their own creative efforts.
The four Bronte children's writing endeavors began about a year after their sisters' deaths, when Patrick Bronte brought home toy soldiers for his children to play with. Each selected a favorite, named it (Charlotte's was called Wellington, after the duke her father idolized), and began to invent a system of imaginative fantasy centering around the soldier's chosen character. These fantasies soon extended into elaborate sagas of invented worlds. The children read their writing, which they set down in miniature books in a tiny hand, aloud to each other, furnishing themselves with a limited but enthusiastically appreciative audience. These were both individual and collective efforts: Working in pairs, Emily and Anne wrote poetry, stories, and "histories" of their kingdom, which they called Gondal, while Charlotte and Branwell's realm was called Angria.
In both of these worlds of juvenilia, but especially in Angria, which was influenced by accounts the children had read of Africa, the setting was lush and exotic and the plots highly melodramatic. Charlotte's characters tended toward the Byronic: impetuous, impulsive, and grand, with names like Zenobia and Zamorna. In these extravagant stories the heroines, both childish and precociously gifted, are as amoral as the heroes, and nearly all are gorgeous and glamorous, as well as powerful aristocrats. The influence of the popular Gothic novel is evident in the juvenilia, as it is in Jane Eyre, where Charlotte Bronte absorbs and reorganizes both Byronic and Gothic models for the characters of Rochester and Bertha.b
These shared fantasies enabled the Bronte children to lead rich lives of the imagination in secret, while depending only on one another for emotional support and mental stimulation. In a household run by a strict, religious aunt and a detached father who often left the children alone because their "prattle" annoyed him, the young Brontes constructed their own world of adventure and pleasure. So enthralling were the tales they spun that as a young adult Charlotte found it difficult to leave them behind for the mundane world of daily domestic routine. To her they represented the thrilling romance of hidden desires, couched in glamorous language and settings, and as she matured they contrasted bitterly with the real world in which she was plain, obscure, and in forced seclusion.
But the practicalities of their lives intruded on this rather idyllic childhood passage: Their livings must be earned, and at age fifteen, in 1831, Charlotte was sent as a pupil to Miss Wooler's school at Roe Head, where she suffered agonies of shyness and self-consciousness about her unattractive appearance and social awkwardness. Though the Brontes identified with the gentrified classes because of their father's education and social position as clergyman, they were not gentry by virtue of their economic status. Charlotte's lack of beauty, fashion, and social graces not only made her feel out of place, but did not bode well for her future in the marriage market, as she was painfully aware.
Later as a teacher at Roe Head (1835-1838) and as a governess in 1839 and 1841, virtually the only two professions open to impoverished genteel women, Charlotte was miserable both at her inability to adjust to the social conventions regarding women and at the severe restrictions on her time to write. The Angrian fantasies were her salvation, but also her guilty secr
et: When the schoolroom was quiet, she wrote in her journal in 1836, "All this day I have been in a dream half-miserable and half-ecstatic, miserable because I could not follow it out uninterruptedly, ecstatic because it shewed almost in the vivid light of reality the ongoings of the infernal world." She "longed to write," "felt she could have written gloriously"--but could not. "Am I to spend all the best part of my life in this wretched bondage, forcibly suppressing my rage at the idleness, the apathy, and the hyperbolical and most asinine stupidity of these fat-headed oafs, and on compulsion assuming an air of kindness, patience and assiduity?" Though these rebellious, furious feelings always had their counterpart in guilt at her own pride ("Don't deceive yourself that I have a bit of real goodness about me," she wrote to her closest friend, the proper Ellen Nussey, in 1836; "If you knew my thoughts; the dreams that absorb me; and the fiery imagination that at times eats me up and makes me feel Society as it is wretchedly insipid you would pity and I dare say despise me"), she could not suppress her tendency to lose herself in what she called in her journal "the divine unseen land of thought."
At one time or another, all the Bronte sisters tried to earn their keep as governesses, and all despised the work. Governesses, like teachers, were very poorly paid, worked long hours, and were often treated as servants in spite of educations and class origins that were superior to those of their employers. Yet no other path to independence seemed open to them: Their only other resource, their brother, Branwell, who was educated to become a portrait painter, failed miserably at this and all other attempts he made at a profession, and became increasingly mired in scandal, drink, and opium. Eventually he died young and in disgrace, a horrible disappointment to his family, and especially to his father, who, like most Victorian fathers, had taken care to give his son opportunities he did not give his more dutiful daughters. Ironically, Branwell's rather amateurish attempts at painting his sisters' likeness have been reproduced widely in modern books about the Brontes and have become quite famous.
Charlotte was ambitious, too, but her burning hope was to write, and gathering her courage, she wrote to the British poet laureate, Robert Southey, in 1837, sending some of her poems and begging him for a response from his "throne of light and glory." His answer is legendary:
Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life, and it ought not to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure she will have for it, even as an accomplishment and recreation. To those duties you have not yet been called, and when you are you will be less eager for celebrity.
Charlotte wrote back:
In the evenings, I confess, I do think, but I never trouble anyone else with my thoughts.... I have endeavored not only attentively to observe all the duties a woman ought to fulfill, but to feel deeply interested in them. I don't always succeed, for sometimes when I'm teaching or sewing I would rather be reading or writing; but I try to deny myself. ... Once more allow me to thank you with sincere gratitude. I trust I shall nevermore feel ambitious to see my name in print; if the wish should rise, I'll look at Southey's letter, and suppress it.
It isn't difficult to see the combination of guilt and barely suppressed bitterness in this reply. The famous passages in Jane Eyre that strongly assert the right of women to a wider life of their own apart from the domestic circle may be seen as Charlotte's response to Southey after years of struggle with her own internalization of his conventional view.
In 1842 Charlotte and Emily Bronte went to school at the Pensionnat Heger in Brussels, with the hope of acquiring skills (such as fluency in French) that could be put to use in opening their own school. The scheme of starting a school to support them all did not materialize; a printed handbill survives, but no pupils came. Nevertheless, Charlotte's sojourn in Europe had a profound effect on her. The lonely and shy young woman fell deeply in love with the one man who recognized her intelligence and talent and encouraged her: her married teacher and mentor at the Pensionnat, Constantin Heger. Though this was a painful time, as Charlotte's surviving letters to her unresponsive "Master" show, it was also a period of intellectual growth and stimulation. When the family was reunited at Haworth, the young Brontes formulated a common desire to be authors.
Under the male pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, the sisters first published a book of their combined poetry in 1846, after Charlotte's famous discovery of Emily's poems in a drawer. Emily resisted publication, but Charlotte was absolutely convinced of the value of her work, and prevailed. Though only two copies of the book were sold, this event established their joint ambition to be authors. As the hope of the family, Branwell, was sinking, in 1847 the sisters were successful in publishing Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte's only known novel), Agnes Grey (Anne Bronte's short novel about a poor governess, followed by The Tenant of Wildfell Hall in 1848), and Charlotte's Jane Eyre.
All three novels appeared within months of each other, an intensely exciting time in the parsonage at Haworth, though the books' true authorship was kept secret from their father and brother, as well as from most friends and acquaintances. At first, speculation was strong about the identity of the three Bells--from the beginning it was suspected that they might not be males, and some critics believed all three "brothers" were really the same person. A distressing rumor had it that Jane Eyre was written by a discontented governess in William Makepeace Thackeray's family. Cut off from social life as she was, Charlotte did not hear this gossip until after she had dedicated the second edition of her novel to Thackeray with humble praise for him. (Since Thackeray did in fact have a mentally unstable wife, this proved terribly embarrassing for her.)
The notices for the three novels were strikingly dissimilar: Critics tended to ignore Anne's slim volume, and to decry the perceived immorality of Wuthering Heights with disgust and outrage, but Jane Eyre received more mixed reviews. It is fair to say that critics both highly praised and condemned it. No less a critic than the eminent George Henry Lewes (essayist and future common-law husband of George Eliot) found it a "strange love story" but wrote that "no such book has gladdened our eyes for a long while" (Fraser's Magazine, December 1847), while Thackeray wrote to the publishers that he couldn't put it down and cried at the love scenes. But others, most infamously Elizabeth Rigby, later Lady Eastlake, expressed repugnance at its "gross inconsistencies and improbabilities," its "singularly unattractive" hero and heroine, and most tellingly, the unchristian nature of the heroine's "unregenerate and undisciplined spirit," which the reviewer linked to the "ungodly discontent" of the rebellions of the poor both in England and abroad. Moreover, Lady Eastlake adds, the book is unfeminine, and she therefore concludes it is not written by a woman, or if a woman, by "one who has, for some sufficient reason, long forfeited the society of her own sex" (The Quarterly Review, December 1848). Even the sympathetic Lewes later wrote that it was "overmasculine," with a vigor that "often amounts to coarseness,--and is certainly the very antipode to 'ladylike' " (Edinburgh Review, January 1850).
Such harsh judgments and misconceptions were difficult enough; this mixture of exhilaration in publishing and disappointment in notices was followed all too rapidly by the sudden decline of Emily, followed soon by Anne, from tuberculosis. The two sisters died not long after Branwell's ignominious demise, probably from alcoholism though possibly also from tuberculosis. By 1849 the entire family had been decimated, except for Patrick Bronte, the aging paterfamilias, and Charlotte herself. While Charlotte continued to write and enjoy more success with her next two novels, Shirley and Villette, it seemed that she was condemned to care for her father alone in a desolate and terribly lonely environment. Her letters of this time are full of painful reflections and attempts to reconcile herself to her sisters' deaths, as well as her own fate as a lifelong "spinster."
The next years of Charlotte's life were, however, enlivened by a growing reputation as a serious novelist and occasional trips to London, where she eventually met George Henry Lewes and Thackeray himself. She also became friends with Elizabe
th Gaskell, the Victorian novelist who was to write a famous biography of her after her death, which has since become a classic in its own right.
Then in 1854 Charlotte unexpectedly married, an event at first irately opposed by her possessive father. Her suitor for years, Arthur Bell Nicholls, a poor curate in her father's ministry, was unattractive and neither intellectual nor artistic, and she was not in love with him. But she came to appreciate his fidelity and devotion to her, as well as to value the strong feeling for her that led him to cry openly when she first refused his proposal. Since she had always considered herself most undesirable and even unlovable, this expression of ardent love shocked and gratified her. At age thirty-eight, Charlotte renounced her romantic dreams and for a while was surprised by how happy she was in her new life.
It did not last long. Within months she became severely ill and wasted, and died in March 1855. Though a local doctor linked her symptoms to pregnancy--and there has been much popular psychological criticism purporting to explain her death as an unconscious rejection of sex, marriage, and motherhood--there is no real evidence that she was pregnant, or if she was, that she died of a pregnancy-related condition rather than tuberculosis (like her sisters) or typhoid, which was rampant in Haworth in the nineteenth century.
Because of the high drama of the Bronte family story, the almost mythic legend of the three isolated, eccentric, and repressed sisters in the lonely parsonage at Haworth soon grew in popularity. The literary reputation of the odd and complex Wuthering Heights, first seen as amoral if not "diabolical," rose considerably beginning in the late nineteenth century. But twentieth-century critics such as Thomas Moser and biographers such as Helene Moglen tended to see Jane Eyre as a powerful but transparently neurotic outpouring of sexual frustration couched in Victorian moralism. Moreover, the novel's improbable coincidences (so common in Victorian prose fiction), the attempt at Byronism in the portrait of its hero, and the moral stringency of its characters' religious preoccupations all contributed to its lower status within the canon.