Brontës (109 page)

Yours respectfully

C Bell.

Since you have no use for ‘the Professor', I shall be obliged if you will return the MS.S. Address as usual to Miss Brontë &c.
⁶⁷

At this juncture, clearly not appreciating how fast Smith, Elder & Co. would act, Charlotte went off to Brookroyd to have a short holiday with Ellen Nussey. Within six days of accepting their terms, she had not only received the first proof pages, which her sisters forwarded to her, but also marked the few errors they contained and returned them to 65, Cornhill. Of necessity, this had to be done under Ellen's nose. Charlotte was still bound by her vow to Emily and Anne to keep their authorship secret, so the fact that she did her proofreading openly in front of her friend was the closest she could come to confiding in Ellen without breaking the letter of her agreement with her sisters. The spirit of that agreement was clearly broken, but fortunately Ellen was canny enough to recognize that she must maintain the conspiracy of silence; she never even hinted to Emily and Anne that she was aware of the sisters' secret.
⁶⁸

Charlotte returned home on 23 September, missing her connection at Leeds and so having to ‘cool my heels at the station for 2 hours' till the next train to Keighley and then having a ‘very wet, windy walk' back to Haworth. Her boxes arrived the next day, having been surreptitiously packed with presents by Ellen: Patrick sent his thanks for a useful firescreen and Tabby Aykroyd ‘was charmed' with her cap, declaring ‘she never thought of naught o' t' sort as Miss Nussey sending her aught –'. There were gifts for Anne, whose health was still delicate after the coughs and colds of
the winter and spring, and Emily too. ‘I was infuriated on finding a jar in my trunk', Charlotte scolded her friend:

– at first I hoped it was empty but when I found it heavy and replete I could have hurled it all the way back to Birstal – however the inscription A—B— softened me much – it was at once kind and villanous in you to send it – you ought first to be tenderly kissed and then afterwards as tenderly whipped –

Emily is just now sitting on the floor of the bed-room where I am writing, looking at her apples – she smiled when I gave them and the collar to her as your presents with an expression at once well-pleased and slightly surprised – Anne thanks you much – All send their love –
⁶⁹

Ten days later, Anne wrote a rare letter to Ellen, thanking her for the jar of medicinal crab-cheese which ‘is excellent, and likely to be very useful, but I don't intend to need it' and for her ‘unexpected and welcome epistle'. Charlotte had evidently complained at length to Ellen and expressed her fears about the prevailing east wind, which always brought sickness in its wake: she had felt its influence ‘as usual'. Anne, too, had suffered from its ill effects

in some degree, as I always do, more or less; but this time, it brought me no reinforcement of colds and coughs which is what I dread the most. Emily considers it a ‘dry uninteresting wind', but it does not affect her nervous system … I have no news to tell you except that Mr Nicholl's begged a holiday and went to Ireland three or four weeks ago, and is not expected back till Saturday – but that I dare say is no news at all.
⁷⁰

Poor Mr Nicholls, who was so uninteresting even to the normally kind and gentle Anne, attracted nothing but disapproval from Charlotte. ‘Mr Nicholls is not yet returned but is expected next week', she told Ellen in her turn.

I am sorry to say that many of the parishioners express a desire that he should not trouble himself to re-cross the channel but should remain quietly where he is – This is not the feeling that ought to exist between shepherd and flock – it is not such as is prevalent at Birstal – it is not such as poor Mr W[e]ightman excited.
⁷¹

Charlotte's hostility may have owed something to the fact that rumours were still afloat that she was ‘about to be married to her papa's Curate'.
Certainly, she herself had been expecting his imminent removal to a new parish earlier in the summer and the fact that he seems not to have sought any promotion away from Haworth may have encouraged gossip about his intentions towards Charlotte. Ellen, too, was no doubt teasing her friend by praising the young curate in her letters, provoking a sharp retort from Charlotte: ‘I cannot for my life see those interesting germs of goodness in him you discovered, his narrowness of mind always strikes me chiefly – I fear he is indebted to your imagination for his hidden treasures.'
⁷²

Anne's somewhat disingenuous claim that she had no news to tell Ellen concealed the facts that she also was about to have a novel published and was now working on a second novel herself. It is not possible to discover exactly when she began it, but the likelihood is that it had been prompted by the unexpected visit to the parsonage in April of Mrs Collins, the long-suffering wife of the former curate of Keighley. Her frank ‘narrative of her appalling distresses', which included a description of the ‘infamous career of vice' run by her husband, his abandoning of her and their two children, absolutely penniless, ‘to disease and total destitution' in Manchester and her slow fight back to health and respectability, had taken two hours in the telling and won the horrified sympathy and admiration of the Brontës.
⁷³
Anne seems to have been especially fascinated by the fact that Mrs Collins had not only survived the physical and mental degradation of her marriage but emerged as an independent and morally strong woman – and in doing so had saved her children from corruption at the hands of their father. This idea was to be the basis of Anne's second novel, a book which was to be so profoundly disturbing to contemporary ideas of decency that it was to sink without trace for almost 150 years after its conception. In Helen Graham she created a heroine who would rise above the depravity of her husband and his circle, have the courage to leave him and earn her own living and yet have the compassion to go back to comfort him as he lay dying. In Arthur Huntingdon, she created a fallible and not entirely unlikeable sinner, whose gradual decline into drunkenness and vice is more the result of moral weakness than actual criminality: her model for this character, famously, was her brother Branwell.

With her usual patronizing attitude towards her youngest sister, Charlotte dismissed
The Tenant of Wild fell Hall out
of hand. ‘The choice of subject was an entire mistake. Nothing less congruous with the writer's nature could be conceived.'
⁷⁴
Yet Charlotte could not argue with the central thesis of the book which expressed a view she had herself expounded in
connection with her brother. Writing to her old headmistress, Miss Wooler, at the beginning of the previous year Charlotte had commented:

You ask me if I do not think that men are strange beings – I do indeed, I have often thought so – and I think too that the mode of bringing them up is strange, they are not half sufficiently guarded from temptation – Girls are protected as if they were something very frail and silly indeed while boys are turned loose on the world as if they – of all beings in existence, were the wisest and the least liable to be led astray.
⁷⁵

This question of the differences in the education of boys and girls had obviously been much discussed at the parsonage, where Branwell's freedom to pursue his own interests as a young man had contrasted so sharply with the enforced subjection to discipline and duty which had ruled his sisters' lives. The fact that Branwell had failed to fulfil his early talents was daily impressed on them as he drank himself insensible or wallowed in self-pity and depression. It was no wonder, then, that Anne saw it as her duty to expose the fallacy of current education in a series of passionate arguments, attacking the idea that girls were hothouse plants to be guarded against every evil, and boys were hardy trees capable of withstanding every assault on their morals.

You would have us encourage our sons to prove all things by their own experience, while our daughters must not even profit by the experience of others. Now I would have both so to benefit by the experience of others, and the precepts of a higher authority, that they should know beforehand to refuse the evil and choose the good, and require no experimental proofs to teach them the evil of transgression. I would not send a poor girl into the world, unarmed against her foes, and ignorant of the snares that beset her path: nor would I watch and guard her, till, deprived of self-respect and self-reliance, she lost the power, or the will to watch and guard herself; – and as for my son – if I thought he would grow up to be what you call a man of the world – one that has
‘seen life,'
and glories in his experience, even though he should so far profit by it, as to sober down, at length, into a useful and respected member of society – I would rather that he died to-morrow! – rather a thousand times!
⁷⁶

Anne herself declared that her book had not been written in vain if it deterred one young man from following in Huntingdon's footsteps or
prevented one thoughtless girl from falling into ‘the very natural error' of her heroine.
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Charlotte, always more conventional than her youngest sister, felt it necessary to apologize for Anne's ‘pure, but, I think, slightly morbid' motives in choosing her subject:

She had, in the course of her life, been called on to contemplate, near at hand and for a long time, the terrible effects of talents misused and faculties abused; hers was naturally a sensitive, reserved, and dejected nature; what she saw sank very deeply into her mind; it did her harm. She brooded over it till she believed it to be a duty to reproduce every detail (of course with fictitious characters, incidents, and situations) as a warning to others. She hated her work, but would pursue it. When reasoned with on the subject, she regarded such reasonings as a temptation to self-indulgence. She must be honest; she must not varnish, soften, or conceal.
⁷⁸

Anne herself took a much more robust view of her purpose in writing the book, setting forth her views without apology in her preface to the second edition.

My object in writing the following pages, was not simply to amuse the Reader, neither was it to gratify my own taste, nor yet to ingratiate myself with the Press and the Public: I wished to tell the truth, for truth always conveys its own moral to those who are able to receive it

She also took a much stronger stance on the necessity of portraying her scenes of debauchery realistically, fighting her corner with an energy and intelligence for which Charlotte was incapable of giving her credit.

when we have to do with vice and vicious characters, I maintain it is better to depict them as they really are than as they would wish to appear. To represent a bad thing in its least offensive light, is doubtless the most agreeable course for a writer of fiction to pursue; but is it the most honest, or the safest? Is it better to reveal the snares and pitfalls of life to the young and thoughtless traveller, or to cover them with branches and flowers? O Reader! if there were less of this delicate concealment of facts – this whispering ‘Peace, peace,' when there is no peace, there would be less of sin and misery to the young of both sexes who are left to wring their bitter knowledge from experience.
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Though Charlotte suggested that Anne wrote her book out of a sense of duty, and a distasteful one at that, the tone of much of
The Tenant of Wild fell Hall
belies this. The scenes with Gilbert Markham's family in particular are full of teasing good humour and are an eminently successful attempt to portray a cheerful and normal family whose preoccupation with the everyday is in complete contrast to the sordid mystery of Helen Graham's life. Like Charlotte herself when writing
Jane Eyre
, Anne seems to have got caught up in her story to the exclusion of all else and to the detriment of her health. ‘I would fain hope that her health is a little stronger than it was – and her spirits a little better –', Charlotte wrote to Ellen in the October, ‘but she leads much too sedentary a life, and is continually sitting stooping either over a book or over her desk – it is with difficulty one can prevail on her to take a walk or induce her to converse.'
⁸⁰

The fact that Emily, unlike her sisters, did not produce a second novel has caused much argument. Some claim that
Wuthering Heights
is such an astonishing and powerful novel that Emily exhausted all her genius in writing it. Others, that its poor reviews led her to scorn the very idea of setting another work before an uncomprehending public. Though widely accepted, both views are wrong. There can be little doubt that Emily did embark on a second novel. ‘Neither Ellis nor Acton allowed herself for one moment to sink under want of encouragement', Charlotte claimed; ‘energy nerved the one, and endurance upheld the other. They were both prepared to try again.'
⁸¹
Certainly, despite the singularity of
Wuthering Heights
, Emily was not short of material for a new novel and could have effectively plundered Gondal again for further inspiration. Nor would poor reviews have discouraged her, for if she had begun her next work before her first was published, as both Charlotte and Anne did, there was no reason for her to expect a critical savaging. The almost complete absence of manuscript material for the last two years of her life suggests that she was working on another project, channelling all her energies into this, just as she had done when writing
Wuthering Heights
. Though the evidence is admittedly inconclusive, further weight is lent to the argument by the existence of a letter from her publisher, Thomas Cautley Newby, addressed to Ellis Bell.

Dear Sir,

I am much obliged by your kind note & shall have great pleasure in making arrangements for your next novel. I would not hurry its completion, for I think you are quite right not to let it go before the world until well satisfied with it,
for much depends on your new work if it be an improvement on your first you will have established yourself as a first rate novelist, but if it fall short the Critics will be too apt to say that you have expended your talent in your first novel. I shall therefore, have pleasure in accepting it upon the understanding that its completion be at your own time.