Charlotte and Emily Brontë: Literary Lives PDF
Preview Charlotte and Emily Brontë: Literary Lives
CHARLOTTE AND EMIL Y BRONTE Macmillan Literary Lives General Editor: Richard Dutton, Senior Lecturer in English, University of Lancaster This series offers stimulating accounts of the literary careers of the most widely read British and Irish authors. Volumes follow the outline of writers' working lives, not in the spirit of traditional biography, but aiming to trace the professional, publishing and sodal contexts which shaped their writing. The role and status of 'the author' as the creator of literary texts is a vexed issue in current critical theory, where a variety of sodal, linguistic and psychologic al approaches have challenged the old concentration on writers as spedally-gifted individuals. Yet reports of 'the death of the author' in literary studies are (as Mark Twain said of apremature obituary) an exaggeration. This series aims to demonstrate how an under standing of writers' careers can promote, for students and general readers alike, a more informed historical reading of their works. PubIished titles Richard Dutton Cedric Watts ~LL~S~ESPEARE JOSEPH CONRAD George Parfitt Tom Winnifrith and Edward Chitham JOHNDONNE CHARLOTTE AND EMIL Y BRONTE Forthcoming Morris Beja Kerry McSweeney JAMESJOYCE GEORGE ELIOT Cedric Brown JohnMepham JOHNMILTON VIRGINIA WOOLF Joseph McMinn Michael O'Neill JONATHAN SWIFT PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY Jan Fergus Leonee Ormond JANEAUSTEN ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON James Gibson David B. Pirie THOMAS HARDY JOHNKEATS Kenneth Graham Felicity Rosslyn HENRYJAMES ALEXANDER POPE Keith Hanley A. E. Sharpe ~LL~ WORDSWORTH T. S. ELIOT Paul Hammond Barry Windeatt JOHNDRYDEN GEOFFREY CHAUCER J. R. de J. Jackson John Worthen SAMUEL TAY LOR COLERlDGE D. H. LAWRENCE Alasdair MacRae W.B. YEATS Series Standing Order If you would like to receive future titles in this series as they are published, you can make use of our standing order facility. To place a standing order pie ase contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address and the name of the series. Please state with which title you wish to begin your standing order. (If you live outside the UK we may not have the rights for your area, in wh ich case we will forward your order to the publisher concerned.) Standing Order Service, Macmillan Distribution Ud, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, RG212XS, England. Charlotte and Emily Bronte Literary Lives Tom Winnifrith Senior Lecturer in English University of Warwick Edward Chitham Senior Lecturer The Polytechnic, Wolverhampton M MACMILLAN © Tom Winnifrith and Edward Chitham 1989 Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover 1st edition 1989 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended), or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 33-4 Alfred Place, London WCIE 7DP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published 1989 Published by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Winnifrith, Tom, 1938- Charlotte and Emily Bronte : literary lives. - (Macmillan literary lives). 1. Fiction in English. Bronte, Charlotte, 1816-1855 & Bronte, Emily, 1818-1848 I. Title 11. Chitham, Edward 823'.8 ISBN 978-0-333-42198-7 ISBN 978-1-349-19777-4 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-19777-4 Contents List of Abbreviations vi 1 Life 1 2 Origins 13 3 Religion 28 4 Schooling 40 5 Reading 53 6 Teaching 68 7 Belgium 83 8 Poems 96 9 Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights 109 10 Shirley and Villette 119 Notes 134 Bibliography 139 Index 141 v List of Abbreviations BB Branwell Bronte BST Bronte Society Transactions CB Charlotte Bronte CH Constantin Heger EB Emily Bronte EN Ellen Nussey G E. C. Gaskell, The Life 0/ Charlotte Bronti! (London, 1855) PB Patrick Bronte SHCP T.}. Winnifrith (ed.) The Poems 0/ Charlotte Bronte (Oxford, 1984) SHLL T.}. Wise and J. A. Symington (eds) The Brontes, Their Lives, Friendships and Correspondence (Oxford, 1932) WSW W. S. Williams vi 1 Life There is no shortage of books about the Bronti,~s. The ready appeal of their novels to all ages in all ages, and the melancholy pathos of their lives have given rise to an abundance of critical and biographical studies. It is difficult to think of anything new to say about the Brontes, and this is perhaps one reason why wild speculation about the Brontes' lives and fantastic theories about their books have been all too prevalent. One of our objects has been to lay to rest some of the legends that have grown up around the inhabitants of Haworth parsonage. It is still commonly believed that Aunt Branwell was a cruel aunt, that Lowood in Jane Eyre was the exact image of Charlotte's and Emily's first school at Cowan Bridge, that various drunken characters in the novels are modelIed on Branwell, that Wuthering Heights is the replica of a lonely farmhouse near Haworth, and that in her Belgian novels Charlotte shamelessly and artlessly wrote the diary of her experi ences at the school of Monsieur and Madame Heger. Similarities have been found between some characters in the Brontes' lives and some characters in their works, but similarity is not identity, nor can, or should, we find real life models for all Bronte charac ters. No original for Heathcliff is going to spring from these pages. In spite of being so frequently linked with the events of their authors' lives and Yorkshire background, the Bronte novels have a timeless quality about them and have appealed to many different countries and cultures. In teaching not only adolescents but mature students as well, not only from England but from all parts of the globe, we have found a regrettable but understandable ignorance about the world in which the Brontes lived and about which they wrote. The word Victorian is used, usually with contempt by our children, and sometimes with nostalgia by our contemporaries, to describe a world of stern strange fixed values, and this world is supposed to have existed far beyond Queen Victoria' s reign from 1837 to 1901 to include any book written 1 2 Charlotte and Emily Bronte between 1800 and 1960. It is insufficiently realised how many rapid changes in attitudes took place even in Queen Victoria' s reign, and how often the Brontes who wrote in the early part of this reign challenged accepted attitudes of which they were sometimes not even aware. Religion and education figure promi nently in the following pages which are about governesses who were daughters of a clergyman and who wrote books in which teachers and parsons figure prominently. Progressive attitudes to education, and the unwillingness or inability of modern churchmen to denounce sin, make the clergymen and teachers of the Bronte novels seem very odd, even though the Brontes are modern in denouncing some of their cruelties. Our main source for knowledge of the Brontes, apart from the novels, is likely to be their correspondence, used as evidence by numerous biographers from Mrs Gaskell onwards. The fact that most of the Bronte letters that have survived were written by Charlotte, the fact that she wrote most of them to her rather dull and conventional friend, Ellen Nussey, and the fact that allietters, especially those written to Ellen Nussey, have been badly edited and inaccurately dated, have inevitably distorted our knowledge of the Brontes. In the notes we refer extensively to Mrs Gaskell and to her main modern successor, Winifred Gerin, authoress of biographies of all four Bronte children, but we must, at this stage, advise caution in using both these biographers. Mrs Gaskell had to be careful with Charlotte' s husband and father breathing down her neck, while Mrs Gerin is insufficiently careful in linking fact and fiction.1 Apart from the novels and the letters, our knowledge of the Brontes is illuminated by the large amount of other writing that Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne produced during their lifetime. This body of literature is inaccurately lumped together as the juvenilia, although Charlotte and Branwell were continuing to write prose stories, which have survived, well after their twenty first birthdays, and Emily and Anne were writing both poetry, of which we have manuscripts, and prose, which has not survived, until the last years of their life. The juvenilia includes both poetry and prose. Some poems by the Bronte sisters were published in their lifetime, although these poems are but the tip of an iceberg. Some poems were originally composed as part of the two compli cated prose sagas which, on the one hand Charlotte and Branwell, and on the other hand Emily and Anne, constructed and which Life 3 played a major part in their imaginative life from childhood to adulthood. These two sagas are centred around the imaginary kingdoms of Angria for Branwell and Charlotte, and Gondal for Emily and Anne. There are obvious dangers in using the juvenilia as evidence for what the Brontes thought. Extravagant claims have been made for their artistic merit, absurd paralleis have been drawn between them and the mature novels, and biographical deductions have been drawn from material that has been badly edited and dated, and sometimes ascribed to the wrong Bronte. On the other hand it is clearly amistake to ignore the juvenilia and poetry altogether. For Emily and Anne we have so little evidence that their poems must be taken into account. Some of Emily' s poetry is of a very high quality. The immense and incoherent bulk of Charlotte's juvenilia, which has not yet been edited in a satisfactory fashion, does reveal her romantic fantasies and adolescent unhappiness more starkly than the prim letters to Ellen Nussey.2 Only perhaps in Villette do we find the exact balance between the unexciting world in which the Brontes lived their outward lives, where a call by a curate was a great event and a visit to a friend a great adventure, and the inner world of the imagination full of passion and privation and danger. One of the reasons why Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights were thought so shocking when they were first published was that the people and events these novels described were so alien to the polite world of many of their readers, a world full of tea parties and mild gossip, much the same world as Anne Bronte describes at the beginning of Wildfell Hall. Branwell's drunken escapades and Charlotte's love affair with her teacher in Belgium, M. Heger, have been made to do heavy duty by people trying to make the lives of the Brontes as interesting as their books. The tragedy of the Brontes' early deaths is, of course, another source of interest, although such deaths were by no means rare in Victorian times. In a paradoxical way the most interesting thing about the lives of the Brontes is that they were so uninteresting. It will be the task of the remainder of this chapter to summarise the story of these sad stunted lives while subsequent chapters, in a roughly chronological fashion, take particular aspects of these lives which are important for a study of their books. This is an account of Charlotte and Emily Bronte, but inevitably Branwell and Anne must feature. This is a literary life since, if the Brontes
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