Those Brontë Girls: Life and Art
I seem to recall an interview with Gregory Corso where he remarked that if he found the poet’s life interesting he would the find the poetry interesting. I believe he was speaking of Shelley, but I could be mistaken, as I cannot lay my hands on the interview to confirm that recollection, and the gears of memory grind erratically these days.
Be that as it may, I located the Unmuzzled Ox interview where Corso responded to Michael Andre’s mention of a Richard Howard essay about his poetry:
…I met him maybe two or three times, so he gets his shot from what I write. Anybody is going to take me for what I write, then I have the trump card. After all, I know what I am putting down there and why I am putting it down. The poet and his poetry are inseparable [italics mine]. (Writings from Unmuzzled Ox Magazine, 1973, 1975, 1981, p. 140)
Yes, well, maybe. Does the writer really hold a trump card that overrides all else? Must we know what a writer thinks she or he is putting down and why to make a legitimate critical assessment, much less understand it, in whatever sense we may think of understanding these things? Must we read the biography, journals, letters, and so on before taking up the body of a writer’s work?
We bring whatever we may know of an author’s life, background, influences, interests, and passions to bear on what we read, and we hope we mange this with discrimination and acumen, wary of reading into the writing what is not there, but this knowledge is not sine qua non. We appreciate writers about whom we know next to nothing of their lives and thinking, however curious we may be and frustrated when we cannot satisfy that curiosity. Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, J.D. Salinger, and Thomas Pynchon come readily to mind, our appreciation scarcely diminished by how little we know about them. Do we read Nietzsche differently knowing that he composed books during long walks of several hours morning and afternoon? Does this help us understand what he was up to? Or thought he was up to? Does knowing so little about Shakespeare diminish our reading of Hamlet, King Lear, and the rest?
This brings us back to the Brontë project, which I am thoroughly enjoying. Those girls are fascinating, three sisters, daughters of a provincial clergyman, who grew to be young women of formidable intellect and significant literary accomplishment in their all too brief lives. Whether the context provided by a glimpse into those lives aids interpretation of the writing may be almost beside the point. Perhaps what we learn about them by way of biographical and personal details offers a different pleasure, distinct though not altogether separate from the pleasure their novels and poems give us.
More is known of Charlotte than her sisters thanks to her prolific, lifelong correspondence, notably to her childhood school friend Ellen Nussey, her publishers, and more occasionally literary contemporaries such as Robert Southey, Hartley Coleridge (son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge), Thomas de Quincey, and Elizabeth Gaskell. The letters make clear that while Charlotte and her sisters lived almost their entire lives in provincial isolation, they were anything but ignorant of the wider world, especially the world of arts and letters.
Charlotte (1816–1854) and Emily (1818–1848) were the third and fifth of six children born in a span of seven years, from 1813 to 1820, to Patrick and Maria Brontë in Haworth, Yorkshire. Maria died in 1821, leaving Patrick to rear the brood with the aid of his sister-in-law, who moved in with the family in 1823. More tragedy followed in 1825 when Marie and Elizabeth, the oldest of the siblings, died of tuberculosis contracted at Cowan Bridge School, a clergymen’s daughters boarding school that was by general account a gruesome place. Charlotte and Emily attended the school briefly in 1824 before being brought home by their father after their sisters’ deaths. The school register offers these notes:
[Emily] Reads very prettily & Works a little
[Charlotte] Reads tolerably — Writes indifferently — Ciphers a little and works neatly — Knows nothing of Grammar, Geography, History or Accomplishments — Altogether clever of her age but knows nothing systematically.
Six years later Charlotte attended Roe’s Head School, where she later taught. Emily followed her sister to Roe’s Head in 1835, but formal schooling did not agree with her. She lasted three months and grew miserable, pale, and thin before returning home. The girls were otherwise schooled at home by their father, with Charlotte also teaching her younger sisters.
Literary endeavor was nothing out of the ordinary in the Brontë household. Patrick published two volumes of poems, two prose tales, two pamphlets, and three sermons, beside which several articles and poems appeared in local newspapers. By general account none of it was of any distinction. Maria penned an essay entitled “On the Advantages of Poverty in Religious Concerns,” described as “[p]ious and sincere, entirely correct in the style of the time…[but containing] nothing original or striking and did not achieve, perhaps did not seriously attempt, publication” (Phyllis Bentley, The Brontës, Thames and Hudson, 1969, p. 12). For the sisters “the highest stimulus, as well as the liveliest pleasure [they] had known from childhood upwards, lay in attempts at literary composition.” (Charlotte, quoted in Bentley, p. 13)
One day in 1826 Patrick brought home a box of wooden soldiers for Branwell and other gifts, including a model village, for the girls. The children immediately gave names to the soldiers and made up stories about them, which grew into extensive written accounts of the fanciful kingdoms of Angria (the creation of Charlotte and Branwell) and the darker Gondal (from the imaginations of Emily and Anne).
The family’s high hopes for Branwell, “his Father’s and his sisters’ pride and hope in boyhood” (Charlotte, letter to W.S. Williams, 2 October 1848), did not pan out. Sent to London to study art, he fell in with a bad crowd and returned home after only a week. Thereafter he found gainful employment only sporadically.
[He] drank, got into debt, took opium, wrote wild letters, illustrated by wild sketches…dozed about the Parsonage in a drunken stupor by day, raged and ranted by night, and in general behaved with such feverish irresponsibility as to bring continual disquiet and distress to the Parsonage. (Bentley, p. 84)
At her brother’s death Charlotte wrote,
I do not weep from a sense of bereavement — there is no prop withdrawn, no consolation torn away no dear companion lost — but for the wreck of talent, the ruin of promise, the untimely dreary extinction of what might have been a burning and a shining light. My brother was a year my junior; I had aspirations and ambitions for him once — long ago — they have perished mournfully — nothing remains of him but a memory of errors and sufferings — There is such a bitterness of pity for his life and death — such a yearning for the emptiness of his whole existence as I cannot describe — I trust time will allay these feelings. (Letter to Williams, 2 October 1848).
There would have been no such expectations for the sisters, career opportunities being not exactly abundant for women in a provincial village in the first half of the nineteenth-century. Charlotte, Emily, and Anne determined that their best shot lay in teaching or being governesses, to which they were not particularly well suited, despite their considerable intelligence and learning. Charlotte put it frankly in a letter to Ellen Nussey:
…no one but myself can tell how hard a Governesse’s work is to me — for no one but myself is aware how utterly averse my whole mind and nature are from the employment — Do not think that I fail to blame myself for this or that I leave any means unemployed to conquer this feeling. Some of my greatest difficulties lie in things that would appear to you comparatively trivial. I find it so hard to repel the rude familiarity of the children — I find it so difficult to ask either servants or mistress for anything I want, however much I want it. It is less pain to me to endure the greatest inconvenience than to go into the kitchen to request its removal. I am a fool — Heaven knows I cannot help it. (3 March 1841)
How could I not feel kinship with this woman? As for Emily, Charlotte says she “is not very fond of teaching but she would nevertheless take care of the housekeeping, and though she is rather withdrawn she has too kind a heart not to do her utmost for the well-being of the children — she is also a very generous soul…” (letter to Constantin Heger, 24 July 1844, where Charlotte tells of a plan to open a small boarding school at the parsonage).
Their aunt derived some financial resources from her father, who was a prosperous merchant. In 1842 Charlotte and Emily convinced her to send them to school in Brussels where they might improve their French and German and even gain a little Italian and thereby improve their prospects for employment as teachers. At the Pensionnat Heger they studied French, German, music, singing, writing, arithmetic, and drawing. Charlotte wrote of Emily that she “works like a horse” (letter to EN May 1842) and “is making rapid progress in French, German, Music and Drawing — Monsieur & Madame Heger [who ran the school] begin to recognize the valuable points of her character under her singularities.” (letter to EN July 1842).
The death of their aunt later that year brought the sisters home, where Emily remained when Charlotte returned to the school as a teacher in January 1843. Charlotte did not care for the Belgian girls she taught or the other teachers, and she fell for Monsieur Heger, an unfortunate situation made worse when Madame Heger picked up on it. A miserable year ended with Charlotte’s departure from Brussels for good in December. Her letters to M. Heger over the next two years convey both her feelings for him and the one-sided aspect of the affair.
The sisters also engaged in some modest investments, which Emily managed “in a most handsome and able manner” (letter to Margaret Wooler, 30 January 1846) for Charlotte while she was in Brussels, evidently with some persnicketiness, to judge by Charlotte’s letter, where she writes of the Railway Panic and their investment in the York and North Midland line. Charlotte assured Wooler, whom the sisters had previously solicited for investment advice, that their capital was as yet undiminished, but she would have preferred moving it to a more secure investment. She was not, however, able to persuade her sisters and would rather run the risk of loss than hurt Emily’s feelings, saying,
…therefore I will let her manage still and take the consequences. Disinterested and energetic she certainly is and if she be not quite so tractable or open to conviction as I could wish I must remember perfection is not the lot of humanity and as long as we can regard those we love and to whom we are closely allied, with profound and never-shaken esteem, it is a small thing that they should vex us occasionally by, what appear to us, unreasonable and headstrong notions. (ibid.)
As I write this, I have read Wuthering Heights, about half of Jane Eyre, biographical and critical writings about the sisters from several sources, and a fair number of Charlotte’s letters. Charlotte is interesting on many levels, intelligent, perceptive, witty. To Anne I have given only passing attention thus far. It is Emily, mysterious, reclusive, fiercely intelligent, fiercely independent, who grips my imagination with each reference to her singularities and unreasonable and headstrong notions.
A good deal of what we know about Emily comes from Charlotte; much of the rest is surmise and speculation that draws on Wuthering Heights, the astounding poems, and characters in her sisters’ novels that might be modeled at least in part on her. I quote here at length from Charlotte’s prefatory note to “Selections from Poems by Ellis Bell [Emily Brontë]” for its glimpse into Emily’s persona and for the vivid description of the place the sisters called home.
At that period [when Emily was sixteen] she was sent to school. Her previous life, with the exception of a single half-year, had been passed in the absolute retirement of a village parsonage, amongst the hills bordering Yorkshire and Lancashire. The scenery of these hills is not grand — it is not romantic; it is scarcely striking. Long low moors, dark with heath, shut in little valleys, where a stream waters, here and there, a fringe of stunted copse. Mills and scattered cottages chase romance from these valleys; it is only higher up, deep in amongst the ridges of the moors, that Imagination can find rest for the sole of her foot: and even if she finds it there, she must be a solitude-loving raven — no gentle dove. If she demand beauty to inspire her, she must bring it inborn: these moors are too stern to yield any product so delicate. The eye of the gazer must itself brim with a ‘purple light,’ intense enough to perpetuate the brief flower-flush of August on the heather, or the rare sunset-smile of June; out of his heart must well the freshness, that in latter spring and early summer brightens the bracken, nurtures the moss, and cherishes the starry flowers that spangle for a few weeks the pasture of the moor-sheep. Unless that light and freshness are innate and self-sustained, the drear prospect of a Yorkshire moor will be found as barren of poetic as of agricultural interest: where the love of wild nature is strong, the locality will perhaps be clung to with the more passionate constancy, because from the hill-lover’s self comes half its charm.
My sister Emily loved the moors. Flowers brighter than the rose bloomed in the blackest of the heath for her; out of a sullen hollow in a livid hill-side her mind could make an Eden. She found in the bleak solitude many and dear delights; and not the least and best loved was — liberty.
Liberty was the breath of Emily’s nostrils; without it, she perished. The change from her own home to a school, and from her very noiseless, very secluded, but unrestricted and inartificial mode of life, to one of disciplined routine (though under the kindliest auspices), was what she failed in enduring. Her nature proved here too strong for her fortitude. Every morning when she woke, the vision of home and the moors rushed on her, and darkened and saddened the day that lay before her. Nobody knew what ailed her but me — I knew only too well. In this struggle her health was quickly broken: her white face, attenuated form, and failing strength threatened rapid decline. I felt in my heart she would die if she did not go home, and with this conviction obtained her recall. She had only been three months at school; and it was some years before the experiment of sending her from home was again ventured on. After the age of twenty, having meantime studied alone with diligence and perseverance, she went with me to an establishment on the Continent: the same suffering and conflict ensued, heightened by the strong recoil of her upright, heretic and English spirit from the gentle Jesuitry of the foreign and Romish system. Once more she seemed sinking, but this time she rallied through the mere force of resolution: with inward remorse and shame she looked back on her former failure, and resolved to conquer in this second ordeal. She did conquer: but the victory cost her dear. She was never happy till she carried her hard-won knowledge back to the remote English village, the old parsonage-house, and desolate Yorkshire hills. —
In 1845 Charlotte accidentally happened on a notebook in which Emily had copied her poems and found them “wild, melancholy and elevating.” Emily was at first furious at this invasion of her privacy. Eventually Charlotte convinced her that the poems merited publication. A volume containing poems by all three sisters was brought out at their expense in 1846 as Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, published pseudonymously to avoid the bias of the critics against women writers and to keep the publication secret to their father, brother, and neighbors. The publication was conspicuous for its lack of success, as Charlotte documented in a note to de Quincey signed by Currer Bell:
My Relatives, Ellis and Acton Bell and myself, heedless of the repeated warnings of various respectable publishers, have committed the rash act of printing a volume of poems.
The consequences predicted have, of course, overtaken us; our book is found to be a drug; no man needs it or heeds it; in the space of a year our publisher has disposed but of two copies, and by what painful efforts he succeeded in getting rid of those two, himself only knows.
Before transferring the edition to the trunk-makers, we have decided on distributing as presents a few copies of what we cannot sell — we beg to offer you one in acknowledgment of the pleasure and profit we have often and long derived from your works — (16 June 1847)
A bit more than a year later, in September 1848, after publication of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Anne’s Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Charlotte told Williams that she had no pride in her poems from that first book at the same time she attested to Emily’s strength and originality.
…much of it was written in early youth — I feel it now to be crude and rhapsodical. Ellis Bell’s [Emily's] is of a different stamp — of its sterling excellence I am deeply convinced, and have been from the first moment the M.S. fell by chance into my hands. The pieces are short, but they are very genuine: they stirred my heart like the sound of a trumpet when I read them alone and in secret. The deep excitement I felt forced from me the confession of the discovery I had made — I was sternly rated at first for having taken an unwarrantable liberty — this I expected — for Ellis Bell is of no flexible or ordinary materials — but by dint of entreaty and reason — I at last wrung out a reluctant consent to have the “rhymes” (as they were contemptuously termed) published — The author never alludes to them — or when she does — it is with scorn — but 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 feeble wordiness which dilute the writings of even popular poetesses.
That the mysterious Emily should so captivate me is no mystery. The iconic Romantic figure of the solitary poet, the solitude-loving raven, walking where her own nature would be leading, vexed to choose another guide, shunning convention, strong-natured and stubborn in Imagination’s embrace of a bleak beauty, is at the heart of what has drawn me to poetry from its first stirrings in me. This is enough to make Emily intriguing even if the writing did not hold up. Because the writing does hold up, her persona adds to the texture and richness of our reading. Because the writing holds up, Emily is not just intriguing, she is important.