The Invention of Charlotte Brontë: Her Last Years and the Scandal That Made Her by Graham Watson
The History Press, 2024
That three-headed hydra of Victorian literature known as the Brontë sisters continues to be a fascinating subject for biographers and literary scholars alike: Emily, the brooding, untamed poet whose natural habitat was the bleaker expanses of the Yorkshire Moors; Anne, who to a large extent was overshadowed by the accomplishments of her older sisters; and Charlotte, the eldest surviving child, who would become one of the most innovative novelists of the nineteenth century. Originally a total of six siblings were born to Patrick Brontë and his wife Maria, two of whom, Maria and Elizabeth, died at an early age, whilst Branwell would later succumb to a life of dissipation. By the time she died in 1855 Charlotte had, in effect, become the figurehead of the Brontë family as well as a literary phenomenon with all the concomitant accolades and public attention —a type of lionising which, as author Graham Watson shows, Charlotte found gratifying if also, at times, burdensome.
The book begins by providing a succinct account of how the Brontës emerged from obscurity to intense speculation from prominent critics and the book-buying public. When their first published work appeared in 1846, a book of poems released under the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, it sold only two copies, although many more were sold on its republication in 1850 after their real identities had been revealed. This early poetic venture was by no means the sisters’ first attempt at committing their creative aspirations to the page. As has become part of their legend, Charlotte’s first biographer Elizabeth Gaskell described how the sisters —along with their brother Branwell— spent many hours in the 1820s producing several examples of fiction and drama which they then hand-made into books and magazines for their own entertainment. These texts, usually written in minuscule handwriting, were created within the confines of Haworth Parsonage in West Yorkshire, since their father Patrick was the curate of the local church. Here in the Parsonage, with only the small village of Haworth and the surrounding moorland to visit, Charlotte and her siblings lived a life of inclement isolation which would later enhance their image as reclusive prodigies.
Early in the book Watson focuses on the series of events that led to the publication of Charlotte’s novel Jane Eyre in 1847. This was to be followed that same year by the appearance of Emily’s Wuthering Heights and Anne’s Agnes Grey. Still disinclined to reveal their true identities, the sisters opted to reuse their Bell pen-names. Because so little was known about the Bells, theories abounded that they were three male siblings or the same male writer adopting three different forenames in order to keep the public guessing. However, by word of mouth the true identity of ‘Currer Bell’ gradually leaked out and in February 1850 the London Morning Magazine printed its understanding that “the only (sic) daughter of the Rev. P. Brontë, incumbent of Haworth, is the authoress of JaneEyre.” Later that year Charlotte included a letter in republished versions of Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey that also revealed her sisters’ identities. However, that wasn’t enough for the burgeoning Brontë readership, who wanted to know more about them and, in Charlotte’s case as the —by now— last surviving member of the three, seek out an opportunity to encounter her. The revelation of Charlotte’s true identity as a much-discussed author was as much of a surprise to lifelong friends such as Ellen Nussey as it was to the inhabitants of Haworth and the surrounding area. Quick off the mark to associate themselves with Charlotte’s new status, prominent local figures such as the educationalist Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth and his wife Janet sought to introduce her into their provincially cultivated circle of friends. Even though Charlotte accepted Ellen and Janet as confidantes in certain aspects of her life, in others she proved to be a reserved and resolute individual, drip-feeding biographical facts about herself to the contemporary English literati, who were attracted to this curious parvenu.
Not that Charlotte had never ventured beyond West Yorkshire: in addition to having spent some time teaching in Brussels, she was also no stranger to London and its attractions, having first visited the capital along with Anne in July 1848 to see her publishers Smith, Elder & Co and dispel any further confusion about their real identities. Here she met George Smith who, in addition to publishing her books, became a friend (as well as someone for whom Charlotte harboured a covert romantic interest). As a guest of Smith and his family, Charlotte made several visits to London where she was introduced to such luminaries as the writer and reformer Harriet Martineau, William Thackeray —with whom she had an uneasy relationship— Thomas and Jane Carlyle, and (allegedly) Charles Dickens, whom she disliked due to his “ostentatious extravagance.” Closer to home, in 1850 Charlotte met and befriended the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, who lived in Manchester. After Charlotte’s death Gaskell would go on to write the first biography of her friend. The Life of Charlotte Brontë would prove a much-disputed text, and it forms the basis for the second half of Watson’s book.
In her lifetime Charlotte seems to have compartmentalised her days ensconced at the Parsonage between caring for her father and writing more novels, interspersed with expeditions to mix with London’s great and good. Almost all the recorded accounts from those who encountered her there make mention of her diminutive fragility and guarded comportment amongst new acquaintances. Indeed, Charlotte’s physical appearance was remarked upon by several of those she met. If they were expecting some strident, hale and hearty Yorkshire lass blessed with a somewhat incongruous literary brilliance, they got instead a slight figure, under five feet tall with poor eyesight, who was, as she herself said, “undeveloped.” Not that her petiteness was a check on her ability to assert herself when it came to venting her simmering temper, as witnessed on one occasion when Charlotte, “head thrown back and face white with anger,” soundly berated the overbearingly stout Thackeray about an awkward social situation in which he had placed her on the previous evening.
In 1849 Charlotte published her second novel Shirley which, although fairly well received, did not reach the heights of critical acclaim garnered by Jane Eyre. Shirley was followed in 1853 by Villette, the last novel published in her lifetime. Whilst Charlotte was working on Villette she was spending more and more time in Haworth Parsonage caring for her father alone, her brother Branwell having died following his years of drug and alcohol abuse. It was also around this time that Charlotte’s feelings towards her father’s curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls, underwent a series of changes. Nicholls had been a curate at Haworth since 1845 and had developed a fondness for Charlotte which then turned into love, leading to his (unsuccessful) marriage proposal in 1852, which shocked Charlotte and her father and angered the latter, who already had a low opinion of Nicholls. Following this rejection, Nicholls eventually left Haworth to take on another curacy in the area. However, by 1853 he and Charlotte had begun meeting secretly and in the following year they were married, Mr Brontë by now somewhat reconciled to the match, although he refused to attend the wedding. After returning to the Parsonage from their honeymoon in Ireland the couple spent nine happy months together before, in 1855, Charlotte became increasingly ill. Weak and emaciated, she died on March 31st in the early stages of pregnancy.
In the latter part of the book Watson recounts how those who had been close to Charlotte or otherwise taken an interest in her life and character soon began to dispute how her legacy should best be served. As her admirer and friend, Gaskell professed herself appalled by some of the more sensationalist articles that began to appear about her friend, and was almost equally exasperated by Nicholls’ disinterest in publicly rebutting the inaccuracies and fabrications circulating about his late wife. This culminated in Mr Brontë and Nicholls, who now shared the Parsonage, asking Gaskell to produce Charlotte’s authorised biography —a commission which Gaskell readily accepted, declaring that “I am very anxious to perform this grave duty laid upon me well and fully.” However, from the outset Gaskell came up against some significant obstacles to her research, including Patrick Brontë’s fanciful or misremembered accounts of his daughter’s early life and Nicholls’ avowal that he had destroyed all of her personal papers. Gaskell then moved on to Ellen Nussey, who told her that she had kept nearly every letter from Charlotte but had destroyed “a small portion of the correspondence,” ostensibly because it would not have been appropriate for some of the details to be made public.
Undaunted, Gaskell obtained a list from Nussey of people to contact who had in some way featured in Charlotte’s past. In addition, Gaskell got in touch with her subject’s publishers to see if they could provide more anecdotal evidence of her time on the London literary scene. What soon became increasingly apparent was the extent to which Charlotte had adapted herself, chameleon-like, to every situation —or, as Watson puts it, she was “a woman who expressed herself from behind figurative masks, using multiple guises and varying voices that all reflected and synchronised with the nature and expectations of her recipients.” As Gaskell neared the end of the arduous task of writing or visiting all of her sources, she headed for Haworth with her work in progress to ensure the ongoing approval of Nicholls and Brontë Senior. It was at this point that Nicholls (who had only grudgingly assented to Gaskell’s project in the first place) suddenly produced some unpublished manuscripts and a large packet of loose papers, despite his previous claim to have destroyed them all. Receiving all this new information along with additional material that Nicholls sent Gaskell whilst she was finalising her original draft, and the long hours spent incorporating it, eventually brought her to the verge of collapse. The first edition of The Life of Charlotte Brontë was finally published in 1857. Whilst Patrick Brontë was pleased by the interest generated in his late daughter by the biography, Nicholls protested to the publisher George Smith that it contained “somethings which ought never to have been published…but I suppose it matters not, provided the curiosity of the public be gratified.”
However, for all that The Life was initially acclaimed, before too long some of those mentioned in it, or their surviving relatives and friends, began to dispute Gaskell’s version of events. Seemingly unaware of the growing commotion that her book was causing, Gaskell returned from a holiday in Italy to newspaper denouncements, threats of litigation, and an abundance of angry letters questioning the book’s veracity. Despite her promise to amend the subsequent editions for accuracy, the controversy also sparked a degree of infighting amongst those who had been closest to Charlotte. Following on from his initial pride on seeing the biography published, Patrick began to read more carefully the passages in which he featured, concluding that “somethings in reference to me Mrs Gaskell has stated fairly. Other things never had any foundation but, in the imagination, or evil intentions or ignorance of her informants,” a charge substantiated by Nicholls’ letter to Gaskell listing passages about Mr Brontë that should be deleted from subsequent printings of the book. In the opinion of others, notably Harriet Martineau, any accusations of invention or false memory should be laid at Charlotte’s door, since she had purposely dramatised her life in her accounts of it to Gaskell. Regardless of whoever was at fault, Patrick Brontë, in a spirit of Christian magnanimity, made it known that “I wish nothing more should be written about Mrs Gaskell in regard to the Memoir…she has already encountered very severe trials.” A redacted third edition which took into account as many revisions and omissions as Gaskell and her publisher deemed necessary was ready for distribution by August 1857.
To a large extent the complaints raised about the original text were addressed by this third edition, which its author, now relieved of the increasingly thankless task of multiple revisions, had begun describing as “that unlucky book.” Once the initial controversy had subsided the biography became as much a tourist guide to the Yorkshire moors in which Charlotte had grown up as an account of her life. Inevitably, some peoples’ expectations of what they would encounter on their visit to the area were disappointed, with one complaining that “we had supposed Haworth to be a scattered and straggling hamlet with a desolate vicarage and a dilapidated church surrounded by and shut out from the world by a wilderness of barren heath,” but instead it was revealed as “a large and flourishing village…quaint, compact and progressive.” When one of these visitors told Patrick Brontë that he had been expecting to visit a windswept outpost of civilisation, the response was “Well I think Mrs Gaskell tried to make us all appear as bad as we could be.” Evidently not disheartened by his appearance in the book, Patrick’s reply to another correspondent about The Life’s perceived inaccuracies was “Mrs Gaskell is a novelist you know, and we must allow her a little romance, eh?...There are some queer things in it, to be sure — there are some about myself for instance — but the book is substantially true.” Charlotte’s persona was beginning to take on hagiographic dimensions, and Patrick contributed to this adulation by sending examples of her signature to devotees, which he cut out of her letters. Once the signatures had been exhausted he went on to slice up the rest of the letters themselves, posting these fragments off to grateful recipients. Watson states that it took more than one hundred and sixty years to put these pieces back together again.
By the end of the nineteenth century Haworth had changed substantially and was even less like the village that Charlotte’s earliest fans had expected. As well as a railway station there was also a dedicated Brontë Museum full of the family’s relics. In 1896 the museum attracted 10,000 visitors, each paying a three-shilling entrance fee. By then Nicholls, following Patrick Brontë’s death in 1861, had had the old church demolished, as the upkeep was proving too expensive. Soon after he was given notice to quit the Parsonage and held a house contents sale before moving to Ireland, where he died in 1906. The new tenants of the Parsonage undertook substantial modernisations, including the introduction of plumbing as well as significant changes to the interior. It was finally opened to the public in 1928.
Although Emily Brontë remains the most enigmatically intriguing member of the sisters and Anne is a subordinate if integral part of their story, Charlotte deserves credit as the steadfast advocate of their collective talents, as well as one of the most innovative novelists of her age. Despite her retiring demeanour Charlotte, in her dealings with the high-profile literary circles in which she occasionally moved, demonstrated that same indomitable spirit which Emily displayed in her writings. Successfully combining her public persona with her working life as an author in the often saturnine seclusion of her Yorkshire home, Charlotte provided Mrs Gaskell’s biography with varied and rich seams of material for these different aspects of her life and the character which assimilated them. Whether, as the book’s title has it, Gaskell was mainly responsible for the post-mortem invention of Charlotte Brontë remains open to debate and interpretation. However, Watson’s book provides a fascinating insight into the public afterlife of one of the nineteenth century’s most important novelists.--Mark Jones
