Charlotte Bronte Read online

  Gaskell’s belief that Nicholls’ suit was not entirely hopeless proved correct. Nicholls returned to Haworth on a visit in July 1853, and on his departure Charlotte entered into regular correspondence with him. Though Gaskell was keen to further Charlotte’s relationship with Nicholls, Ellen Nussey strongly disapproved, leading to a breakdown in relations between Charlotte and one of her oldest friends. It seems likely that Ellen felt threatened by Charlotte’s developing relationship with Nicholls: like Charlotte, she was unmarried, and seemed to consider her friend almost under an obligation to remain thus. In a letter to their mutual friend, Mary Taylor, she suggested that marriage would render Charlotte inconsistent with herself. As a single woman, and Charlotte’s closest friend outside of her immediate family for over twenty years, it is perhaps understandable that she did not welcome this new development in Charlotte’s life. It appears that she said as much to Charlotte, creating a tension in their friendship that lasted several months. However, while Charlotte’s relationship with Ellen entered a rocky period, her relationship with Nicholls was making significant progress. Following a further visit to Haworth, Patrick Brontë was persuaded to reconsider his disapproval of Nicholls, and by April 1854, Charlotte had accepted Nicholls’s proposal, and found herself, at the age of thirty-seven, engaged to be married.

  Though Ellen’s attitude towards Charlotte’s developing relationship with Nicholls was certainly unreasonable, her assertion that it would be inconsistent for Charlotte to marry is nevertheless borne out by Charlotte’s earlier declarations on the subject of marriage, and her decision to marry at this stage in her life perhaps warrants some further explanation. It is possible, of course, that her earlier refusals were simply a matter of failing to find a man whom she wished to marry – particularly in light of her feelings for M. Heger. Nevertheless, some of her earlier letters, as well as aspects of her fiction, clearly suggest an antipathy towards marriage itself. Writing to Ellen Nussey of the forthcoming marriages of Anne’s former pupils, the Misses Robinson, several years earlier, she declares, ‘They are not married yet – but expect to be married (or rather sacrificed) in the course of a few months.’ Though the comment is made largely in jest, the notion of marriage as sacrifice became a common refrain in nineteenth-century feminist debates, and Charlotte’s throwaway comment hints at an awareness of this. In The Professor, published posthumously in 1857, Frances Crimsworth hints at the potential dangers of marriage, for women in particular: ‘If a wife’s nature loathes that of the man she is wedded to, marriage must be slavery.’

  Charlotte’s decision to marry Arthur Bell Nicholls was almost certainly influenced by her continued sense of loneliness and isolation: indeed, the rift in her friendship with Ellen may, somewhat paradoxically given Ellen’s attitude, have served to persuade Charlotte that marriage offered the possibility of fulfilment that had until now eluded her, in the form of constant companionship. Though she had more than fulfilled her long-held dreams of literary success, she remained, in many respects, unhappy, as the bouts of depression she suffered attest. Her earlier decision to remain single was perhaps in part a reluctance to sacrifice her independence, and particularly her literary career, in order to take up the duties of wife and mother – for motherhood would inevitably be expected to follow marriage. With her success as an author assured, she now took steps towards personal happiness and fulfilment.

  Charlotte married Nicholls on 29th June 1854 in Haworth church in the presence of a small number of guests, including Miss Wooler and Ellen Nussey, with whom Charlotte was now reconciled. Patrick Brontë, pleading ill health, did not attend the ceremony, though whether this is indicative of a continued resistance to the marriage is unclear (certainly his relations with Nicholls had improved, and indeed they remained close following Charlotte’s death, until Patrick’s own death in 1861). It was thus left to Miss Wooler to give the bride away. The newly-weds honeymooned in Wales and Ireland, where Charlotte was introduced to her husband’s family. In spite of her earlier apparent indifference, even antipathy, towards Nicholls, she appears to have found happiness through her marriage: ‘My life is changed indeed,’ she wrote to Ellen on her return to Haworth. In particular, her marriage seems to have proved an effective cure for her bouts of depression, as she found herself constantly in her husband’s company, and thus with less opportunity to dwell on the past. Since the success of Jane Eyre, Charlotte had struggled to negotiate between her public and private selves, and with her marriage to Nicholls, her literary career appears to have assumed less importance in her eyes: ‘If true domestic happiness replace Fame – the exchange will indeed be for the better.’ It seemed, in the first few months of her marriage, that despite the tragedies that had befallen her, Charlotte Brontë had finally found personal fulfilment, and that she might consider herself fortunate in both her professional and her personal lives.

  Though Charlotte seems to have been willing to relinquish her literary success in favour of a happy marriage, she continued to write, producing the first two chapters of a novel provisionally entitled Emma. She did not live to complete the work, but following her death the manuscript was edited and published by her husband. As with her previous works, the title suggests a focus on the experiences of the heroine, though the fragment does not introduce the reader to the eponymous Emma. Following in the tradition of Jane Eyre, Shirley and Villette, the opening of the novel suggests that the narrative has a partly autobiographical basis: the reader is introduced to the narrator, Mrs Chalfont, a woman ‘not young nor yet old’, whose life has recently been enriched by ‘an interest and a companion’, echoing perhaps Charlotte’s recent marriage to Nicholls. The fragment describes a small school, run by sisters by the name of Wilcox, struggling to attract enough pupils to make it financially viable, and in this respect is reminiscent of the Brontë sisters’ plan to open a school. The presence of a girl at the school, apparently impersonating an heiress, suggests a return to the sensationalism that characterized Jane Eyre. There are no surviving documents detailing Charlotte’s plans for the novel, but the fragment is nevertheless significant -as evidence of the author’s attempts to combine her domestic and professional duties, if nothing else.

  Charlotte’s marriage to Nicholls, though brief, appears to have been a happy one, perhaps in part because he was willing for her to continue her literary career. Ellen, however, although now reconciled with Charlotte, remained suspicious of the union, and her fears relating to Charlotte’s marriage must have appeared to have been at least partially realised when she received a letter from her friend informing her that Nicholls required from Ellen a promise that she would burn Charlotte’s letters once she had read them. Ellen’s ambivalent response to this request prompted Charlotte’s husband to threaten to censor his wife’s letters if the promise was not given. Though Charlotte treated the matter as something of a joke, Ellen was understandably infuriated by this: though she complied with the request and gave her promise, it was undoubtedly done to avoid the threatened censure, and it is unlikely that she ever intended to keep her word. Certainly, the majority of letters Charlotte wrote to Ellen appear to have survived, providing valuable insights into her character. Despite this incident, Nicholls does not appear to have been a tyrannical husband, and Charlotte’s letters from this period make it clear that she was very happy in her marriage. She describes Nicholls as a ‘good, kind, attached husband’, declaring, ‘No kinder, better husband than mine, it seems to me.’ The subsidence of the symptoms of ill health that had dogged her since the death of her sisters and were undoubtedly a symptom of her depression provides further evidence of a happy marriage.

  Tragically, however, Charlotte’s happiness would not last long. Her marriage, though it provided an effective cure for her depressed spirits, was ultimately to lead to her premature death. In January 1855, Charlotte began to experience faintness and nausea, and suspected that she may be pregnant. The sickness persisted, becoming unrelenting: she was prevented from obtaining adequate nourishm
ent, and began to vomit blood. By the end of January, she was confined to bed. Her condition continued to deteriorate, and at the end of March, Patrick Brontë wrote to Ellen to inform her that his daughter was on the brink of death. She died the following day, at the age of thirty-eight, along with her unborn child. Patrick’s letter to Elizabeth Gaskell, written a few months after the death of his last surviving child, hints at the tragedy of her death, coming so soon after she had finally found happiness: ‘The marriage that took place, seem’d to hold forth, long, and bright prospects of happiness, but in the inscrutable providence of God, all our hopes have ended in disappointment, and our joy in mourning.’ Patrick was left as the sole survivor of his wife and six children. Charlotte was buried in the family vault in the church next to which she had lived almost her entire life, alongside her mother Maria, her sisters Maria, Elizabeth and Emily, and her brother Branwell. Patrick Brontë survived the last of his children by a further six years, eventually joining his family in the vault beneath the church he had served for over forty years in June 1861. Arthur Bell Nicholls survived his wife by more than fifty years. He left Haworth following the death of Patrick Brontë, and died in Ireland in 1906, having married for a second time, but leaving no children.

  Upon the death of his wife, Arthur Bell Nicholls sent out black-edged funeral cards, which simply read ‘In Memory of Charlotte Nicholls, who died March XXXI, MDCCCLV, Aged 38 Years.’ In letters written after her marriage to Nicholls, Charlotte signs herself ‘Charlotte Brontë Nicholls’, suggesting that she was unwilling to relinquish the name she had sought to conceal from the public for so long. In death, however, the anonymity she had previously so ardently desired was returned with her husband’s decision to obscure his wife’s literary fame on the funeral card. Similarly, the original memorial stone that was placed in Haworth church, next to that recording the deaths of her mother and siblings, read, ‘Adjoining lie the remains of Charlotte, wife of the Rev Arthur Bell Nicholls, A.B., and daughter of the Rev P. Brontë.’ She is identified here only as ‘Charlotte’, her roles listed as wife and daughter respectively, her identity as writer omitted. In death, then, as in life, her identity is confused: the mask she wore as a child to answer her father’s questions was replaced by the mask of Currer Bell; her ‘true’ identity as Charlotte Brontë was again obscured through her marriage to Nicholls and the change of name this necessitated. Ultimately, however, it was the name of Charlotte Brontë that was to live on for generations to come.

  Afterlife

  Despite increasing popularity during her own lifetime, Brontë can hardly have foreseen the legacy she would leave behind in terms of the public fascination with her life and work. As well as the continued interest in her writing, there remains an ongoing fascination with the life of the author, indicated by the perennial popularity of Brontë biographies, as well as by the flourishing Brontë tourist industry in Haworth. The Brontë home – the parsonage in the West Yorkshire village of Haworth – was converted into a museum in 1928, when it was purchased by Sir James Roberts and donated to the Brontë Society, and attracts thousands of visitors every year, anxious to witness for themselves the place where some of the most famous works in English literature were written, and where the Brontë family lived and died. The Brontë parsonage museum not only allows the interested tourist in to the place where the Brontë sisters composed all seven of their novels, along with their poetry and juvenilia, but also includes items such as the sofa on which Emily died, items of clothing worn by the sisters, and locks of Charlotte’s hair. The nearby moors are largely untouched by the modern world, and remain much as they would have been during the lifetimes of the Brontës. Visitors to Haworth can call at The Black Bull, the public house frequented by Branwell Brontë, and follow the ‘Brontë walk’, passing by ‘Brontë falls’ and over the ‘Brontë bridge’; Emily Brontë is alleged to have stopped to rest on the chair-shaped rock by the falls, and a few miles across the moors from Haworth stands the ruined farmhouse Top Withens, rumoured to have been the inspiration for Wuthering Heights, though there is no direct evidence to support this. There is a plaque in the church where Patrick Brontë preached for forty years to mark the Brontë family vault where all the family, with the exception of Anne, were interred (though much of the church was rebuilt in 1879). In the graveyard that stands between the church and the parsonage are the graves of many of the Brontës’ friends and acquaintances. There is a sense, then, in which the world of the Brontës is almost tangible to the modern visitor to Haworth, perhaps accounting for some of the intense and continuing interest in the lives of Charlotte Brontë and her family.

  The relationship between the siblings has also proved a matter of much speculation – from the literary collaborations of the Brontë children, to Charlotte’s criticism of her sisters’ work following their premature deaths. The extent of this fascination is suggested by some of the conspiracy theories surrounding the lives of the Brontës. There has been speculation about Charlotte’s sexuality, for example, in light of her relationship with Ellen Nussey (though neither her letters nor her experience of marriage lend any credence to this theory), and in June 1999, the Daily Express newspaper carried on its front page a picture of Charlotte Brontë, with the headline ‘Did Charlotte Brontë Murder Her Siblings?’ In the same year, James Tully published a novel entitled The Crimes of Charlotte Brontë, in which Charlotte is directly implicated in her sisters’ deaths. Though fictional, it was originally intended as a factual work, but the publishers refused to publish it as such (in fact, the headline in the Express related to Tully’s novel). While such conspiracy theories may be dismissed as entirely lacking in foundation, they are nevertheless indicative of Brontë’s fame: her inclusion on the front page of a tabloid newspaper some one hundred and fifty years after her death speaks volumes about the extent to which she and her work have infiltrated the popular imagination.

  The ongoing fascination with the life of the Brontës is further reflected in the large number of biographies focusing on their lives and work. The earliest biography of Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë, was written at the request of her father, Patrick Brontë, shortly after the death of his last surviving child, and was published in 1857. It has proved hugely influential, though the picture Gaskell paints of the author of Jane Eyre is somewhat problematic: Gaskell’s relationship with the author and the survival of many of those who knew her (including her father and husband) at the time the biography was written necessarily means that there are significant absences in the text (Brontë’s feelings for M. Heger, for example, are largely obscured, while a number of letters written by Brontë did not come to light until much later). Nevertheless, Gaskell’s account of Brontë’s life can be seen as largely responsible for creating the tragic-romantic image of the author and her siblings that prevails today. In a much later account, The Brontë Myth, Lucasta Miller observes that ‘with the publication of Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë, she became a legend,’9 noting that Brontë, in Gaskell’s biography, is portrayed as a ‘saintly heroine’.10 Elsewhere, Elisabeth Jay argues that Gaskell ‘may be said to have created, almost single-handedly, the myth of the Brontës.’11 There is a certain irony in the notion that Gaskell’s account serves to obscure the ‘real’ Charlotte Brontë, creating instead a kind of mythical, idealised version of the author, given the fact that Patrick Brontë desired Gaskell to produce an authorised account of his daughter’s life in order to address some of the rumours and speculation in wide circulation following her death. Numerous other biographies of the Brontës have appeared since the publication of Gaskell’s, creating a tradition that has served both further to elucidate, and to obscure their lives through the creation of a romanticised, often speculative, image of the family. In 1994, Juliet Barker published her extensive and detailed account in The Brontës, and this remains the seminal biography of the family.

  Turning to Brontë’s writing, while her entire oeuvre is the subject of intens
e scholarly and critical debate, particularly since the 1960s and the explosion of second-wave feminist literary theory, it is her most successful novel, Jane Eyre, that retains the strongest hold on the public imagination. Since its publication in 1847, Jane Eyre has been repeatedly referenced – implicitly and explicitly – in other works: plays, films, novels and art. The process of reworking and retelling Brontë’s story of the poor, plain governess began shortly after the novel’s publication, and the Victorian period saw a plethora of works that allude to, engage with, adapt or draw on Jane Eyre – including an array of dramatic productions (eight of which were collected by Patsy Stoneman in Jane Eyre on Stage, 1848-1898, published in 2007), and a number of sensation novels (which draw on the more sensational elements of Brontë’s plot), along with feminist works such as Charlotte Perkins Oilman’s short story ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, which calls into question Brontë’s own pseudo-feminist position by focusing on the figure of the ‘mad’ wife and offering a sympathetic portrayal of her descent into madness – a state partially induced by her treatment at the hands of her husband.

  The process of adapting and transformingJane Eyre continued in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with more than twenty film and television adaptations of the novel, numerous theatre productions (includingJane Eyre: The Musical, which premiered on Broadway in 2000) and an abundance of novels: in her 1995 Bibliography of works influenced by Jane Eyre, Patsy Stoneman lists some forty novels, and several more have appeared since. Some of these draw explicitly on the original text (Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair, for instance), while others engage more subtly with Brontë’s novel – Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca, Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale, and even J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, in which, as in Jane Eyre, the orphan-protagonist is forced to endure a miserable existence with uncaring relatives, before beginning a journey of self-discovery.