Brontës (2 page)

I would also like to give particular thanks to those individuals fortunate enough to possess Brontë material and generous enough to allow me to use it: Roger Barrett; Alan Gill; Lynda Glading; the late Lady Graham, Norton Conyers; Sarah Greenwood; Arthur Hartley; Angelina F. Light; Barbara Malone; A. I. F. Parmeter; William Self; June Ward-Harrison. Thanks, too, to Joan Coleridge for permission to quote from Hartley Coleridge's draft
letter to Branwell Brontë. Gratitude is also due to the following people who went out of their way to assist me: Dr Alan Betteridge, WYAS, Halifax; Peter Dyson, Braintree; Donald Hathaway, Newton Abbot; Canon S. M. Hind, Kirk Smeaton; G. I. Holloway, Headmaster of the Grammar School, Appleby; Professor Ian Jack, Cambridge University; Professor R. D. S. Jack, University of Edinburgh; Marjorie McCrea, All Saints' Parish Church, Wellington, Shropshire; Mrs Rita Norman, Secretary of the Wethersfield Historical Group; Dr Ray Refaussé, Representative Church Body Library, Dublin; Revd William Seale of Drumgooland Parish, County Down; Revd John Shead, Priest in Charge, Wethersfield; Dr Katherine Webb, York Health Authority. Not forgetting Mrs Chris Swift for her kindness to a total stranger: without her I might still be wandering round the streets of Wellington.

I would particularly like to thank the Revd Colin Spivey who kindly lent me photocopies of the Haworth church registers and the late Eunice Skirrow whose enthusiasm for and knowledge of Haworth were an inspiration. Among the staff of the Brontë Parsonage Museum, I am also grateful to Margery Raistrick, Kathryn White and Ann Dinsdale. Allegra Huston, my editor at Weidenfeld & Nicolson, has been endlessly patient and supportive and made many helpful suggestions. Finally, I acknowledge my debt to all the many enthusiasts who read in the library while I was Curator and Librarian of the Brontë Parsonage Museum: they interested, informed and infuriated me and they are ultimately responsible for prompting me to write this book.

FOREWORD

The now famous Brontë name was spelt and accented in a variety of ways in the family's lifetime. Though I have adopted a standard ‘Brontë' throughout my own text, I have followed whatever appears in my sources when using quotations, even when this includes no accent on the final letter. Similarly, because I believe that the policy of ‘correcting' the Brontës' often wildly ill-spelt and ungrammatical writings gives a false impression of their sophistication, particularly in the juvenilia, I have chosen to transcribe my quotations from the original manuscripts ‘warts and all'. Authorial deletions are indicated by <> and insertions by \ /; although I have tried to let the Brontës speak for themselves, whenever the sense has absolutely demanded it I have made editorial insertions in square brackets thus [ ].

INTRODUCTION

Yet another biography of the Brontës requires an apology, or at least an explanation. Their lives have been written so many times that there ought to be nothing left to say. Mrs Gaskell's
Life of Charlotte Brontë,
published within two years of her subject's death, set a new standard in literary biography and is still widely read. In more recent times, Winifred Gérin and Rebecca Fraser have added considerably to our knowledge by publishing material which was not available to, or was suppressed by, Mrs Gaskell. The Brontës' lives and works have been taken apart and reassembled according to theories of varying degrees of sanity by literally hundreds of other biographers and literary critics.

What is surprising is that, despite so much activity, the basic ideas about the Brontës' lives have remained unchanged. Charlotte is portrayed as the long-suffering victim of duty, subordinating her career as a writer to the demands of her selfish and autocratic father; Emily is the wild child of genius, deeply misanthropic yet full of compassion for her errant brother; Anne is the quiet, conventional one who, lacking her sisters' rebellious spirit, conforms to the demands of society and religion. The men in their lives have suffered an even worse fate, blamed first of all by Mrs Gaskell, and since then by feminists, for holding the Brontë sisters back from achieving literary success and even, at times, for simply existing. Patrick is universally depicted as cold, austere and remote, yet given to uncontrollable rages, alternately neglecting and tyrannizing his children. Branwell is a selfish braggart, subordinating his sisters' lives to his own by right of his masculinity, and negating the value of this sacrifice by squandering his talent and the family's money on drink and drugs. Arthur Bell Nicholls, who cannot be portrayed as either mad or bad, is simply dull.

These stereotypes have been reinforced by the practice of writing separate biographies for each member of the family. Yet the most remarkable thing about the Brontës is that one family produced three, if not four, talented writers, and it is the fact that they were such an extraordinarily close
family that is the key to their achievements. Taking one of them out of context creates the sort of imbalance and distortion of facts that has added considerably to the Brontë legend. A love poem by Anne, for instance, can be interpreted as autobiographical – unless one is aware that Emily was writing on the same subject at the same time in a Gondal setting. Though many have tried, it is impossible to write an authoritative biography of either of the two youngest Brontë sisters. The known facts of their lives could be written on a single sheet of paper; their letters, diary papers and drawings would not fill two dozen. Understandably but, I believe, misguidedly, biographers have fallen back on literary criticism to fill the void. Trawling through the Brontës' fiction in search of some deeply hidden autobiographical truth is a subjective and almost invariably pointless exercise.

In this biography I have deliberately chosen to write about the whole Brontë family, hoping that this will redress the balance and enable the reader to see the Brontës as they lived, not in isolation, but as a tightly knit group. I am well aware that some members of the household are more prominent than others. Aunt Branwell and Tabby Aykroyd, despite my best endeavours, remain mere ciphers. Regrettably, Emily and Anne are also shadowy figures. This is the inevitable result of lack of biographical information but it is, I think, preferable to fanciful interpretation of their fiction. Virginia Moore's misreading of'Love's Farewell' as ‘Louis Parensell', resulting in an elaborate theory about Emily's secret lover, is a dire warning as to where such a method can lead.

The Brontë story has always been riddled with myths. Charlotte herself started the process in an attempt to explain why her sisters had written novels which had both shocked and titillated the literary critics. Mrs Gaskell ably extended this argument to Charlotte herself, producing in her
Life of Charlotte Brontë
a persuasive and powerful polemic which has never been seriously challenged. Instead of being writers of'naughty books', who revelled in vulgarity and brutality, the Brontës thus became graduates of the school of adversity, writing in all innocence about the barbarous society in which they lived because that was all they knew. Their work took on a new, moral quality: that of Truth. However distasteful
Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights
or
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
might be, they were simply an accurate representation of provincial life. A bizarre offshoot of this argument is the belief that every one of the Brontës' fictional creations must have had its counterpart in reality. The search for originals of the places, characters and incidents in the Brontës' novels is as fanatical as it is irrelevant.
Similarly, by a peculiar inversion of the normal process, literalists argue the facts of the Brontës' lives from their fiction, which they persist in regarding as autobiographical. It is not surprising that the myths survive.

The astonishing fact is that there is a wealth of material available to the biographer which has never before been used. No one has ever looked through the local newspapers, for instance, even though this is a basic source for the historian. Two years spent reading contemporary papers in local archives may have addled my brain but it has also provided an unexpectedly large haul of information which should, once and for all, scotch the myth that Haworth was a remote and obscure village where nothing ever happened. It was a township, a small, industrial town in the heart of a much larger chapelry where politics and religion were hotly disputed and culture thrived. As a leading figure in Haworth, whose activities were constantly recorded and whose letters were regularly published, Patrick emerges as a tireless campaigner and reformer, a man of liberal beliefs rather than the rampant Tory he is so often labelled. The rest of his family, brought into the public domain by Mrs Gaskell's
Life of Charlotte Brontë,
were the subject of letters and reports by their friends and acquaintances, many of which contradict Mrs Gaskell's wilder flights of fancy from first-hand experience.

The Brontës have been ill-served by their biographers. Vast numbers of their letters, poems, stories, drawings, books and personal memorabilia have been preserved, though they are scattered throughout libraries and private collections in the United Kingdom and the United States. This is inconvenient. Many of the manuscripts are themselves divided and housed in different collections; they are often written in the Brontës' minute and cramped hand, which requires patience and good eyesight to decipher. This is even more inconvenient. But it is inexcusable that, almost without exception, the Brontës' biographers have preferred to do their research in the bowdlerized and inadequate texts which are all that are currently available in print. Where no published edition exists, that body of information has been virtually ignored. This is true of the bulk of Branwell's juvenilia and of Charlotte and Emily's French essays, leading to sweeping and highly inaccurate statements about their content. Even Charlotte's letters, though more readily accessible in manuscript, are quoted from the Shakespeare Head Brontë, which was compiled by the notorious forger, Thomas J. Wise, and his sidekick, J. A. Symington. Any derogatory remarks which did not live up to their idealized and sanitized image of Charlotte were simply omitted; passages difficult to read were also omitted or carelessly transcribed.
Margaret Smith's forthcoming monumental edition of Charlotte's letters will rectify all this but, for the moment, the conscientious biographer must rely on the manuscripts.

I have made it a point of honour to go back to the original manuscripts of all my material wherever possible, quoting them in preference to printed versions. Much of my material is therefore published here for the first time, including not only letters but also juvenilia, poetry and French essays. I have not followed the usual editorial practice of correcting the Brontës' appalling spelling and punctuation. Though this can make for difficult reading on occasion, I hope that the reader will appreciate that this is done to ensure that he or she can get as close as possible to the original. Correction is not just an interference with the Brontës' own words: it creates a very misleading impression of the sophistication of their writing, particularly when they were children.

I sincerely hope that this biography will sweep away the many myths which have clung to the Brontës for so long. They are no longer necessary. Unlike their contemporaries, we can value their work without being outraged or even surprised by the directness of the language and the brutality of the characters. It is surely time to take a fresh look at the Brontës' lives and recognize them for who and what they really were. When this is done, I believe, their achievements will shine brighter than ever before. For Patrick and Branwell, in particular, the time is long overdue. With due humility, I echo the words of Charlotte Brontë: ‘This notice has been written, because I felt it a sacred duty to wipe the dust off their gravestones, and leave their dear names free from soil.'

Juliet R. V Barker

May 1994

KIRKBY LONSDALE