Brontës (59 page)

While Emily, assisted by the occasional contribution from Anne, pursued her heroes and heroines through the tangled web of Gondal intrigues, Branwell was still working on his own chronicles of Angria. He had already been working on this project for over three years but his ingenuity in developing new storylines showed no sign of flagging. After their victory over Northangerland and his Revolutionists at the battle of Evesham, Zamorna and Fidena set about retaking and restoring order to the rest of Angria and Verdopolis. Already, though, there were suggestions that all was not well: Zamorna's self-conceit made him a difficult partner and he was jealous of all Fidena's successes, believing that his own role as victor was being undermined. Charles Wentworth, who had once been one of Zamorna's greatest admirers, now mocked his pretensions thoroughly: ‘it has pleased his Majesty to be out parading through the whole night Drudgery which any Subaltern General would have done more fitly – under the idea that he was acting the Monarch Warrior'.
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Northangerland, defeated once more and in a state of mental and physical exhaustion, had retired to his country estate, Ennerdale House, where he sought the forgiveness and support of his long-suffering wife, Zenobia. Like the Duchess of Zamorna, Zenobia had had to put up with her husband's many mistresses and his neglect of herself, so she was reluctant to take him back. However, in a scene which foreshadowed Helen Huntingdon's decision to return and nurse her own debauched and dying husband in Anne's second novel,
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
, Zenobia devoted herself to caring for Northangerland and was rewarded by the return of some of his affection.
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It seems probable that Branwell intended Northangerland to die at this point as Zenobia, watching him sink into an unaccustomed calmness of spirit, wondered whether this change was simply the ‘prelude to another and awful change'. The manuscript, incomplete either because Branwell could not bring himself to kill his great hero or
because the ending has been lost, ends with a poem definitively titled ‘PERCYS LAST SONNET'.

Cease, Mourner, cease thy sorrowing oer the Dead

for, if their Life be lost its Toils are oer

And Woe and Want shall visit them no more

Nor ever slept they in an earthly bed

Such sleep as that which lulls them dreamless laid

In the lone chambers of the eternal Shore

Where Sacred Silence seals each guarded door

Oh! Turn from tears for these thy bended head

And mourn the
Dead Alive
whose pleasure flies

And Life departs before their death has come;

Who lose the Earth from their benighted eyes,

Yet see no Heaven gleam through the rayless gloom.

These only feel the worm that never dies

The Quenchless fire – the
Horrors
of a Tomb!
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While Northangerland lay dying at Ennerdale, his former associates were being hunted down in Angria. Wentworth had fallen in with Henry Hastings and Charles Townshend and the three of them went on a drinking spree which eventually took them to an inn at Aynsham. There Hastings, abandoned by his companions, had become entangled with a new set of associates, led by the notorious debauchees George Ellen, esquire, and Parson Joynes. Their carousing sessions, which may have owed something to Branwell's attendance at masonic meetings throughout the year, were chiefly taken up with inventing childish and frequently blasphemous toasts. Hastings, for instance, raised his glass and proposed

‘ Its speedy entombement in our stomachs and its ressurection with us in another world!'

The President himself contradicted such a toast swearing that He had enough to do with resurrection \of its ghost/ next morning and Crofton vowed that after a full dinner and flowing glass he had too often been troubled with its resurrection the next minute
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In a later incident, Hector Montmorency revived Quashia who had been knocked out in a wrestling match by Parson Joynes:

he held and poured whiskey down the throat of the Ethiop swore the parson must pardon him for administering Infant Baptism But he thought they had better all be confirmed and hoped he should stand excused if he \likewise/ practised upon himself Baptism for such as are of riper years!
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These scenes of debauchery, which are hardly convincing as portrayals of real life, were evidently regarded by Branwell as an opportunity to display his wit as a man of the world.

If Branwell really did kill off Northangerland at the end of October 1837, he soon found he could not write without him. Before the year was out, he began an unfinished story relating to Northangerland's early career when, like Walter Scott's Rob Roy, he was a simple cattle drover. More interesting, and written with a great deal more flair than his efforts at depicting low life, the story centres round Darkwall, a lonely farmhouse on the edge of the moors:

with large black walls and mossy mistal and a plantation of gloomy firs one clump of which the oldest and the highest stretched their horizontal arms above one Gable like the Genii of that desolate scene. Beyond this House its long feild walls made a line with the November sky and the path across them led on to an interminable Moor whose tracks might furnish a long days sport after Snipe or Heathcock, but no birds flew near the House except the Linnets twittering by hundreds on some wet old wall. and yet despite its loneliness this House was one of no common note in the Extensive Parish and half the fireside tales of times gone by were sure to take ‘Darkwall' for their scene and its owners for their subject.
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Like Wuthering Heights or Wildfell Hall, Darkwall has its secrets: its owner, Mr Thurston, is a drunkard and a violent man who alternately neglects and harasses his beautiful wife, Maria, who is going to fall in love with Alexander Percy. Though the story was abandoned, it had potential which Branwell later recognized, attempting to develop it into a full-scale novel.
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Charlotte's contribution to Angria throughout the year 1837 was negligible. In the summer holidays she wrote another volume by Charles Townshend, but again it was simply a collection of unconnected scenes rather than a developed narrative: Julia Thornton flirting with Captain Hastings, Louisa Vernon, Northangerland's opera singer mistress, now trying to ingratiate herself with Zamorna, and yet another attack on the hypocrisy of Methodist preachers.
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Most of her effort was directed towards
poetry. Robert Southey had not forbidden her to write or described her work as utterly without merit; he had advised her to write poetry for its own sake and, once she had got over the disappointment his letter had caused her, she found renewed energy. Between January 1837 and July 1838, she produced sixty poems, by far the highest number she had written in such a short time since the early days of the ‘Young Men's Magazines'.
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Though most of them were still Angrian in context, increasingly she produced shorter, lyrical pieces, more like her sisters' poems than the long narratives she had favoured before. Undoubtedly this change reflected the fact that her time was not her own: short poems were easier to write in the odd half hour or so of snatched leisure between lessons and supervision duties. Unlike prose narratives, which were so often interrupted and broken off, poems could be thought over and redrafted to achieve at least a measure of completeness – though the number of poems which Charlotte left unfinished suggests that even this was difficult.

Charlotte's last extant diary fragment was written about the time she received her reply from Southey
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and thereafter she used the poems as an alternative vehicle for the expression of her frustrations and sense of isolation at Roe Head. A typical poem, later reworked as ‘The Teacher's Monologue' for her first publication, was written between 12 May and 15 May 1837.

The room is quiet thoughts alone

People its mute tranquillity

The yoke put off, the hard toil done

I am, as it is bliss to be,

Still and untroubled, now I see

For the first time, how soft the day

O'er waveless water and stirless tree

Silent & sunny wings its way

Now as I watch that distant hill

So faint so blue so far removed

Sweet dreams of home my heart may fill

That home where I am known & loved

It lies beyond, that azure brow

Parts me from all earth holds for me

And morn & eve my yearnings flow

Thither ward tending, changelessly …

For youth departs, & pleasure flies

And life consumes away

And youth's rejoicing ardour dies

Beneath this drear delay

And patience weary with her yoke

Is yielding to despair

And health's elastic spring broke

Submits to tyrant care
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In the end, however, it was not Charlotte but Anne whose spirit and health broke under the regime at Roe Head. We have no account and no hint from Anne herself of what happened, but Charlotte wrote to Ellen Nussey during the Christmas holidays of 1837 to explain:

You were right in your conjectures respecting the cause of my sudden departure – Anne continued – wretchedly ill – neither the pain nor the difficulty of breathing left her – and how could I feel otherwise than very miserable? I looked upon her case in a different light to what I could wish or expect any uninterested person to view it in – Miss Wooler thought me a fool – and by way of proving her opinion treated me with marked coldness – we came to a little eclairsissement one evening – I told her one or two rather plain truths – which set her a crying – and the next day unknown to me she wrote to Papa – telling him that I had reproached her – bitterly – taken her severely to task &c.&c. – Papa sent for us the day after he had received her letter – Meantime I had formed a firm resolution – to quit Miss Wooler and her concerns for ever – but just before I went away she took me into her room – and giving way to her feelings which in general she restrains far too rigidly – gave me to understand that in spite of her cold repulsive manners She had a considerable regard for me and would be very sorry to part with me – If any body likes me I can't help liking them – and remembering that she had in general been very kind to me – I gave in and said I – would come back if she wished me – so – we're settled again for the present – but I am not satisfied I should have respected her far more if she had turned me out of doors instead of crying for two days and two nights together – I was in a regular passion my
‘warm temper'
quite got the better of me – Of which I don't boast for it was a weakness – nor am I ashamed of it for I had reason to be angry – Anne is now much better – though she still requires a great deal of care – however I am relieved from my worst fears respecting her –
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Knowing how taut Charlotte's nerves were at the time, it is easy to accept Mrs Gaskell's verdict that Miss Wooler's diagnosis of a common cold was correct and that Charlotte simply over-reacted to the whole situation. However, Mrs Gaskell not only placed the incident in December 1838, a year later than it actually happened, but also wrongly believed that it occurred at Dewsbury Moor, where the school relocated at the beginning of that year.
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More importantly, there is independent evidence to corroborate Charlotte's account of the seriousness of Anne's illness. The Reverend James La Trobe, the minister and teacher of the Moravian chapel and school at Well House in Mirfield, visited Anne several times during her illness. ‘She was suffering from a severe attack of gastric fever which brought her very low, and her voice was only a whisper; her life hung on a slender thread.'
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If Charlotte was right to be concerned about Anne's state of health, it is even more interesting to discover that Anne's illness seems to have been exacerbated by a religious crisis. Once she had overcome her natural shyness at meeting a total stranger, Anne was deeply grateful to James La Trobe for his visits:

I found her well acquainted with the main truths of the Bible respecting our salvation, but seeing them more through the law than the gospel, more as a requirement from God than His gift in His Son, but her heart opened to the sweet views of salvation, pardon, and peace in the blood of Christ, and she accepted His welcome to the weary and heavy laden sinner, conscious more of her not loving the Lord her God than of acts of enmity to Him, and, had she died then, I should have counted her His redeemed and ransomed child.
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This account raises at least two important questions: why was quiet, gentle, pious Anne in any sort of religious doubt and why was a Moravian minister called in to administer to her?

In her biography of Anne Brontë, Winifred Gérin laid the blame for Anne's religious sufferings squarely on the shoulders of Aunt Branwell, whom she labelled a staunch Methodist. She depicts her as constitutionally gloomy and of an arid temperament, dogmatically expounding her Methodism as a religion of fear rather than love. This is totally at odds with Ellen Nussey's picture of the sprightly little woman who had been a belle of the ball in her younger days, teased her prim and proper guest by offering her snuff and tilted arguments against Patrick ‘without fear'.
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Aunt Branwell is the most shadowy of all the members of the Brontë household
but to portray her as ruling the young Brontës ‘by a tyranny of the spirit', subjecting them to a harsh regime of discipline and continually reminding them of their own mortality with threats of hell-fire and damnation, is a travesty. Aunt Branwell, like her sister, Maria Brontë, was brought up as a Wesleyan Methodist. Unlike the more extreme forms of Methodism, which the young Brontës caricatured so mercilessly, the Wesleyans had much in common with Anglicans – so much so, indeed, that when the two congregations finally parted in 1812 many Wesleyans, including Maria Branwell and her uncle, John Fennell, chose to become members of the Established Church. Both Maria and Elizabeth Branwell attended Patrick's services in the Anglican church and both chose to be buried within its precincts.
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At the very least this implies that Aunt Branwell found the doctrines Patrick preached acceptable. In all probability, then, she shared Patrick's belief in the essential goodness and infinite mercy of God and hoped, through faith, good works and the intercession of Christ, to win her place in heaven. Even if she did not, it is inconceivable that Patrick would have allowed his sister-in-law to indoctrinate his children with the harsh tenets of Calvinism, with its belief that only the elect few were predestined for salvation.