Brontës (103 page)

Your Constant and grateful reader

Currer Bell.
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If
Poems
caused little stir among the critics, it sank without trace as far as readers were concerned. A year after its publication, only two copies had been sold and the sisters took the decision to present some to the authors they admired. In her accompanying letter to J. G. Lockhart, Walter Scott's son-in-law and biographer, Charlotte adopted a satirical tone to conceal the disappointment that its failure had caused.

My relatives Ellis & 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 acknowledgement of the pleasure and profit we have often and long derived from your works.
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Similar letters were sent to William Wordsworth, Alfred Tennyson, Hartley Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey and Ebenezer Elliot.
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Some comfort could be derived from the fact that the few who read
Poems
enjoyed it; in addition to the praise of the reviewers, the sisters also received an unsolicited testimonial from Frederick Enoch, of Cornmarket, Warwick, who was one of the two purchasers of the volume. He wrote to them through Aylott & Jones asking for their autographs and received in reply the unique slip of paper which bears the signatures of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell.
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The complete commercial failure of
Poems
was in many ways an irrelevance to Charlotte. Unlike Emily and Anne, she no longer wrote poetry, so the world's judgement was not something she needed to take to heart. The mechanics of steering the book through the press, which had been entirely Charlotte's domain, had given her a new object in life. As she herself wrote,
‘the mere effort to succeed had given a wonderful zest to existence; it must be pursued'.
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Producing
Poems
had taught valuable lessons: poetry did not sell and it was not economic to pay for the publication of one's own work: if they seriously intended to attempt to earn a living from their writing, then they would have to be a lot more hard-headed about the whole business. The first decision, to write novels, which, as Branwell had pointed out, were the most saleable articles in the current state of the publishing and reading world,
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was taken long before
Poems
appeared in print. As early as 6 April 1846, Charlotte had been able to tell Aylott & Jones that ‘C. E & A Bell are now preparing for the Press a work of fiction – consisting of three distinct and unconnected tales which may be published either together as a work of 3 vols of the ordinary novel-size, or separately as single vols. –'. By 27 June Charlotte had completed the fair copy of her novel,
The Professor
, and on 4 July she wrote to Henry Colburn, one of the leading London publishers of fiction, offering him ‘three tales, each occupying a volume and capable of being published together or separately, as thought most advisable'. ‘The authors of these tales', she added with pride, ‘have already appeared before the public.'
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The ‘three tales', over which the sisters had laboured throughout the winter and spring, were
The Professor, Wuthering Heights
and
Agnes Grey
. Returning to the habits of their childhood, the sisters wrote their books in close collaboration, reading passages aloud to each other and discussing the handling of their plots and their characters as they walked round and round the dining-room table each evening.
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In their choice of subject and in their handling of it, both Charlotte and Emily drew heavily on Angria and Gondal. In Charlotte's case especially, this was a mistake. Contrary to her own belief that the juvenilia had been a valuable apprenticeship in writing, in fact they had trained her in habits which would eventually become anathema to the mature novelist. As she later claimed in a preface to the work, ‘in many a crude effort destroyed almost as soon as composed I had got over any such taste as I might once have had for the ornamented and redundant in composition – and had come to prefer what was plain and homely'.

I said to myself that my hero should work his way through life as I had seen real living men work theirs – that he should never get a shilling he had not earned – that no sudden turns should lift him in a moment to wealth and high station – that whatever small competency he might gain should be won by the sweat of
his brow … that he should not even marry a beautiful nor a rich wife, nor a lady of rank – As Adam's Son he should share Adam's doom – Labour throughout life and a mixed and moderate cup of enjoyment.
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This determination to put Angria behind her and write about the real and the ordinary was somewhat marred in the execution. Indeed, the early chapters – which are the most flawed – with their heavy-handed caricatures of the feuding Crimsworth brothers, set in a Yorkshire mill counting-house, were simply an adaptation of Branwell's Angrian tale, ‘The Wool is Rising', written when he was a mere seventeen.
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Unable to shake off the shackles of Angria, Charlotte fell into her old bad habits of Gothic exaggeration. Edward Crimsworth, for instance, is a crudely drawn character who even resorts to the horsewhip in his perversely vicious behaviour towards his brother. Once she had broken from Branwell's original Angrian scenario and transported her protagonist to Belgium, where she could draw on her own experiences of life as a teacher in a Brussels school, the novel begins to gain a life of its own and the latent power of her writing begins to emerge. As a novelist she was always at her best – her most vivid, energetic and sincere – when she drew on personal experience. It was therefore also a major error to adopt a masculine narrator for
The Professor
: Charlotte was a quintessentially feminine writer: her talents for describing repressed emotion and for accurate observation of the minutiae of daily life were those of the passive observer, a role pre-eminently that of the nineteenth-century woman. Since childhood, however, she had adopted a masculine persona and she was unable to break the habit now: William Crimsworth was simply the Angrian Charles Townshend under another name. Unable to write convincingly as a man, Charlotte retreated behind the comforting familiarity of the sarcastic and frequently flippant shell. In so doing, she destroyed the heart of the novel, for her central character is unreal. In her last novel,
Villette
, Charlotte was to prove that it was possible to have an embittered and uncharismatic but realistic first-person narrator without losing the interest or sympathy of the reader. Whether it was Charlotte herself who finally realized that a female voice was best suited to her talents, or whether this was pointed out to her by her discerning publishers,
The Professor
was the last of her writings to have a male protagonist.

Despite her best intentions, Charlotte was unable to throw off the dead hand of Angria. For Emily, it would seem, there was no such conflict, for without Gondal there was no writing.
Wuthering Heights
, which, ironically,
is regarded as the archetypal Yorkshire novel, was actually Gondal through and through and therefore owed as much, if not more, to Walter Scott's Border country as to Emily's beloved moorlands of home. Echoes of his novel
Rob Roy
, for instance, are to be found throughout the book.
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In
Wuthering Heights
one is irresistibly reminded of
Rob Roy's
setting in the wilds of Northumberland, among the uncouth and quarrelsome squirearchical Osbaldistones, who spend their time drinking and gambling. The spirited and wilful Cathy has strong similarities with Diana Vernon, who is equally out of place among her boorish relations. Heathcliff, whose unusual name recalls that of the surly Thorncliff, mimics Rashleigh Osbaldistone in his sinister hold over the Earnshaws and Lintons and his attempts to seize their inheritances.

Familiar characters from the juvenilia appear throughout the novel. The fact that many of them seem to be drawn from Angria, as well as Gondal, would appear to suggest the common source of inspiration which lay behind them both. Heathcliff, for example, is a re-creation of the dark, brooding outlaw, Douglas, whose origins were shrouded in mystery and who was doomed from birth to be blighted by fate; sadistic and cruel, Douglas' sole redeeming feature was his passionate love for the ambitious and beautiful queen of Gondal. Cathy, too, is prefigured in the Gondal poetry as the bright-haired, wilful darling of fortune but she also owes much to Branwell's creation, Mary Henrietta Percy, ‘with manners – So unsophisticated so natural yet so curiously capricious reserved \and proud/'. The passion and often physical violence of their relationship had been anticipated in Alexander Percy's treatment of his equally spirited wives, Augusta, in Branwell's ‘Life' of his hero, and Zenobia, in Charlotte's story ‘The Foundling'.
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The dour, hypocritical manservant, Joseph, is likewise based on Percy's evil genius, Sdeath, who, after numerous transformations, adopts the Yorkshire dialect and canting Calvinism which characterize Joseph.
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Many of the themes and incidents in the story can be traced back to the Brontës' juvenile writings, from the death-defying love of Heathcliff and Catherine to Heathcliff's deliberate ruin of the Earnshaw and Linton families.
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Having spent so much of her life at home, Emily had always been the one most dedicated to, and involved in, her imaginary world. There was no perceivable break between her Gondal writings and her novel; indeed, it seems likely that she went straight from writing her long Gondal poem, ‘The Prisoner', to
Wuthering Heights
. Despite its precise use of dates,
Wuthering Heights
is set in an indistinct past and in an imprecise location: though entirely accurate in its depiction of Yorkshire dialect, customs and life, these are also features of the Gondal world. All the things which so shocked the critics when the novel was published were typical of both Gondal and Angria, from the amoral tone to the scenes of drunken debauchery, casual cruelty and passionate love. Like
Poems, Wuthering Heights
was presented to an uncomprehending public without preface, introduction or explanation and it was left to Charlotte, ever her sister's apologist, to insist that it was simply a tale of the ‘wild moors of the north of England' produced by a ‘homebred country girl'.
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The wilder and darker world of Gondal which had actually bred the novel must remain a secret.

The obvious conclusion is that, unlike her sisters, Emily made no attempt to break with the world of her imagination. Charlotte and Anne, on the other hand, had had their literary efforts continually interrupted and constrained by the demands of earning a living. Anne, in her attempt to write a publishable novel, found inspiration not in the hothouse world of Gondal but in her own quiet and unremarkable life as a governess. Anne seems to have shared Charlotte's belief that her novel should portray the real but, unlike
The Professor
, with its lurid opening chapters,
Agnes Grey
really did portray ‘Adam's Son sharing Adam's doom'. Alone of the sisters, Anne chose a female first-person narrator, which was in itself a break with their juvenile tradition. How closely she allowed life to dictate art in her depictions of the trials of governess life it is impossible to assess, but the monstrous Bloomfield and Murray households, with their spoilt, tyrannical and malicious children, seem to owe much to Anne's experiences with the Inghams of Blake Hall and the Robinsons of Thorp Green. Unlike Emily, Anne set out her stall with the opening words of her novel: ‘All true histories contain instruction', she wrote, before proceeding with her simple tale of virtue rewarded.
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Though overshadowed by her sisters' much more dramatic novels – and completely ignored by Charlotte who did not consider it worthy of comment in either her biographical or editorial prefaces to the 1850 reissue of
Wuthering Heights & Agnes Grey
– Anne's first novel had many strengths of its own. Enlivened by a quiet humour, it is a far deadlier exposé of the trials of being a governess than her sister's more famous
Jane Eyre
. It is also the first novel to have a plain and ordinary woman as its heroine. Charlotte is usually credited with this innovation in
Jane Eyre
, which, she told her friends, was written to prove to her sisters that a heroine ‘as plain and as
small as myself' could be as interesting as their conventionally beautiful ones.
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Once again Charlotte ignores the fact that in Agnes, Anne had already created just such a heroine.

I could discover no beauty in those marked features, that pale hollow cheek, and ordinary dark brown hair; there might be intellect in the forehead, there might be expression in the dark grey eyes: but what of that?

To this harsh appraisal of her own appearance, Agnes adds the somewhat bitter corollary:

It is foolish to wish for beauty. Sensible people never either desire it for themselves or care about it in others. If the mind be but well cultivated, and the heart well disposed, no one ever cares for the exterior.

So said the teachers of our childhood; and so say we to the children of the present day. All very judicious and proper no doubt; but are such assertions supported by actual experience?
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