Charlotte Bronte Read online

  [H]e is a professor of Rhetoric a man of power as to mind but very choleric & irritable in temperament – a little, black, ugly being with a face’ that varies in expression, sometimes he borrows the lineaments of an insane tom-cat – sometimes those of a delirious Hyena – occasionally – but very seldom he discards these perilous attractions and assumes an air not above a hundred degrees removed from what you would call mild & gentleman-like.

  Compare this to Lucy Snowe’s description of Paul Emanuel in Villette:

  A dark little man he certainly was; pungent and austere. Even to me he seemed a harsh apparition, with his close-shorn, black head, his broad, sallow brow, his thin cheek, his wide and quivering nostril, his thorough glance and hurried bearing. Irritable he was; one heard that, as he apostrophised with vehemence the awkward squad under his orders.

  There can be no doubt that Charlotte had in mind her former master when she created the character of Paul Emanuel, and the problematic heroes of her other novels undoubtedly also owe something to her attraction to M. Heger.

  Charlotte appears to have settled reasonably well in Brussels. She strove hard to improve her language skills, and though she suffered some attacks of homesickness, they were not frequent or entirely unbearable – no doubt partly a result of the fact that Emily had accompanied her, while Mary Taylor and her sister were also resident in the city at this time. Hence she was not entirely removed from friends and family despite the unfamiliar setting. In the summer of 1842, the sisters accepted a proposal from Mme Heger to teach English and music at the school. Though the positions were unpaid, they were given free bed and board in return, as well as continued tuition in those areas in which they wished to improve themselves.

  In November of that year, Charlotte and Emily received news of their Aunt Branwell’s illness and subsequent death, and returned to Haworth immediately. Their aunt’s death followed those of Mary Taylor’s sister, Martha, and Patrick’s assistant curate at Haworth, William Weightman, who had become a close family friend. ‘[H]ow dreary and void everything seems,’ Charlotte wrote to Ellen in response to this spate of deaths – a terrible foreshadowing of the grief that was still to come. While the sisters were at Haworth, Constantin Heger wrote to Patrick Brontë expressing his regret at the circumstances that had called them home, and declaring a ‘fatherly affection for them’. He talked positively of the sisters’ progress, and of what might still be achieved were they to continue their studies. A short time later, and no doubt partly in response to Heger’s letter, Charlotte once again set off for Brussels, this time alone (Emily remained at Haworth, unable to bear to be parted from the family and moors once again), to once more take up the position of teacher at Mme Heger’s pensionnat.

  Charlotte’s solitary return to Brussels sparked speculation among some of her acquaintances regarding her motivation, and it was rumoured that she had a romantic interest there. She of course disputed this, but there can be little doubt that her return to Brussels was at least in part motivated by her feelings for M. Heger. In attempting to quash speculation about a possible forthcoming union, she declared to Ellen that she ‘never exchange[s] a word with any other man than Monsieur Heger’ – an assertion that takes on new significance in light of her later letters to her old master. However, though she was welcomed by the Hegers on her return, Charlotte’s sense of isolation and homesickness developed over the coming months, becoming almost unbearable during the school’s summer vacation, when she spent much of her time alone. Her feelings for Constantin Heger increased, and she experienced a growing sense of antipathy towards his wife. Upon Charlotte’s return, Heger and his brother-in-law took English lessons with her: a reversal of their former pupil-teacher relationship, which is echoed in the shifting power relations between Charlotte’s heroes and heroines in her novels. At the heart of much of her fiction is the question of power in the relationship between a man and a woman: Jane Eyre is Rochester’s employee, and subsequently his wife, but there is a distinct shift in the relationship between them following the fire at Thornfield, which leaves Rochester blind and consequently dependent on Jane; in Shirley, Louis Moore is tutor to the wealthy eponymous heroine, but again the relationship is reversed when Shirley marries her former tutor at the conclusion of the novel; questions of power also pervade the relationship between Lucy Snowe and Paul Emanuel in Villette.

  Her letters from the period of her second sojourn in Brussels hint at her increasing attraction to her employer; she makes frequent reference to trivial events that bring the two of them into contact, and hints at the possible suspicions of Mme Heger: in a letter to Emily, she writes, ‘I am convinced she does not like me – why, I can’t tell, nor do I think she herself has any definite reason for the aversion.’ Later, to Ellen, she confesses, ‘I fancy I begin to perceive the reason for this mighty distance and reserve.’ Though she does not elaborate, there is a hint here that Mme Heger suspects that Charlotte’s feelings towards her husband are more than they ought to be. In a later letter Charlotte writes of Mme Heger, ‘I no longer trust her’ – a feeling that was no doubt mutual.

  Amidst increasing feelings of melancholy and homesickness, Charlotte strove to endure her time in Brussels. In spite of her tendency towards anti-Catholic sentiments, finding herself one day outside the Church of Ste Gudule, she entered and, apparently on a whim, visited the confessional. She details the event in a letter to Emily. The priest at first refused to allow her the privilege of confession, as she had admitted to him that she was in fact a Protestant. Eventually, however, he relented, and Charlotte tells her sister that, ‘I actually did confess – a real confession.’ She does not elaborate on the details of the confession, but it is possible that she admitted to the Catholic priest her feelings for Heger. Though she may have found the experience cathartic, she had no intention of considering a conversion to Catholicism, and is at pains to assure her sister of this, and for Emily to keep the anecdote from their father, lest he worry that she may be about to abandon her Protestant faith.

  Though her letters from Brussels suggest that she often felt deeply unhappy there following her solitary return, she nevertheless refused to come home while she had no real plan of what she might do upon her return. Her reluctance to leave Brussels was undoubtedly increased by her continued attachment to Heger, though she must have realised that nothing could come of her feelings. Eventually, however, she felt that life in Brussels was no longer endurable, and took the decision to resign her post and return home. She informed Mme Heger of her decision, but, on M. Heger’s hearing of it, he sent for her and insisted she remain, which, inevitably, she agreed to do – for the short term, at least. Two months later, however, in December 1843, she finally resolved to resign her post and return to her beloved Haworth, believing that her spirits might lift when she was once more among friends and family.

  Charlotte left Brussels and arrived home in January 1844. Despite being reunited with family and home, and later that year with Ellen and Mary, the overwhelming feelings of depression and despair continued to plague her. In a surprisingly candid letter to Ellen Nussey, she hints strongly at her feelings for her former master and employer: ‘I think however long I live I shall not forget what the parting with M. Heger cost me – It grieved me so much to grieve him who has been so true and kind and disinterested a friend.’ Although she was now separated from Heger, her feelings for him remained unresolved, and over the next two years she wrote him a series of increasingly despairing letters, in which she makes little attempt to disguise her true feelings for him. An unspecified number of these letters have not survived. The earliest known surviving letter remains as a result of the apparently jealous behaviour of Mme Heger. The letter was ripped up and discarded by M. Heger, but subsequently retrieved and reassembled by his wife. The content of the letter suggests that Mme Heger’s jealousy was not entirely without foundation, though there is no indication that Charlotte’s feelings for M. Heger were reciprocated. She writes, ‘I am quite convinced that I s
hall see you again one day – I don’t know how or when – but it must happen since I so long for it.’ She also discusses her desire to write a book and to dedicate it to Heger – ‘the only master I have ever had’. She concludes the letter in a similar romantic fashion: ‘It hurts to say goodbye even in a letter – Oh it is certain I shall see you again one day – it really has to be so.’

  Further evidence of Charlotte’s continued infatuation with Heger again comes courtesy of his wife, who sewed together the pieces of two subsequent letters that her husband had attempted to destroy. The first was written in October 1844, almost ten months after Charlotte’s departure from Brussels. Having heard nothing from Heger for several months, despite writing to him at least twice, she almost begs him to contact her: ‘I am counting on soon having news of you – this thought delights me.’ This letter too was to elicit no response, prompting her to write yet again, in January 1845, her tone increasingly desperate: ‘If my master withdraws his friendship from me entirely I shall be absolutely without hope – if he gives me a little friendship – a very little -1 shall be content – happy, I would have a motive for living – for working.’ Charlotte’s final surviving letter to Heger dates from November 1845 – almost two years after she had left Brussels. Again, her infatuation shows no sign of abating. It appears that Heger had written to Charlotte in response to her previous letter, though his letter does not survive, and neither does her initial reply, in which she apparently promised to write only every six months, though she berates him for this: ‘Imagine for a moment that one of your children is separated from you by a distance of 160 leagues, and that you have to let six months go by without writing to him, without receiving news of him, without hearing him spoken of, without knowing how he is.’ She continues, ‘I have tried to forget you […] I have done everything, I have sought occupations, I have absolutely forbidden myself the pleasure of speaking about you – even to Emily, but I have not been able to overcome either my regrets or my impatience.’ The final part of her letter suggests that her feelings had almost reached the point of obsession:

  Your last letter has sustained me – has nourished me for six months – now I need another and you will give it me […] To forbid me to write to you, to refuse to reply to me – that will be to tear from me the only joy I have on earth – to deprive me of my last remaining privilege – a privilege which I will never consent to renounce voluntarily. Believe me, my master, in writing to me you do a good deed – so long as I think you are fairly pleased with me, so long as I still have the hope of hearing from you, I can be tranquil and not too sad, but when a dreary and prolonged silence seems to warn me that my master is becoming estranged from me – when day after day I await a letter and day after day disappointment flings me down again into overwhelming misery, when the sweet delight of seeing your writing and reading your counsel flees from me like an empty vision – then I am in a fever – I lose my appetite and my sleep – I pine away.

  Whether Charlotte continued to write to her former master, or whether she finally accepted that he had no wish to continue their acquaintance, is unclear. Whatever the case may have been, her infatuation with Heger exerted a huge influence on her fiction: her portrayal of Rochester’s unfortunate marriage to Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre, Bertha’s subsequent death and Rochester’s union with Jane may well have been rooted in her romantic fantasies of Heger and her jealousy of his wife; while her final novel, Villette, published nine years after she left Brussels, along with the first novel she wrote, The Professor, owe an obvious debt to her time in Brussels and her relationship with Heger.

  While Charlotte agonised over her separation from and lack of contact with Heger, there was a new arrival at Haworth in the form of Patrick’s newly appointed curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls, whom Charlotte would later marry. Nicholls arrived in Haworth in May 1845. Like Patrick Brontë, he was originally from what is now Northern Ireland. Charlotte’s first impression was of ‘a respectable young man’ (Nicholls was three years her junior). The following year, Ellen Nussey reported to her friend a rumour that Charlotte was to marry her father’s curate; Charlotte responded with disbelief:

  […] never was a rumour more unfounded […] I could by no means think of mentioning such a rumour to him even as a joke – it would make me the laughing-stock of himself and his fellow curates for half a year to come – They regard me as an old maid, and I regard them, one and all, as highly uninteresting, narrow and unattractive specimens of the ‘coarser sex’.

  Charlotte seems to have retained this impression of her father’s curate for some time: the following year she wrote to Ellen declaring, ‘I cannot for my life see those interesting germs of goodness in him you discovered, his narrowness of mind always strikes me chiefly -1 fear he is indebted to your imagination for his hidden treasures.’ Given her earlier assertion that she could only marry a man she truly loved, her view of Nicholls did not seem to make him a likely candidate for her future husband, yet such was to be the case.

  As Charlotte battled with her feelings for Heger and attempted to dispel the rumours relating to her father’s curate, her brother, Branwell, was fighting his own demons. Between 1840 and 1845, Branwell held a number of positions as he strove to carve out a successful career for himself. He remained optimistic about his chances of poetic success, encouraged by a meeting with Hartley Coleridge in 1840, but in the meantime he struggled to earn a living. He was dismissed from his post as tutor to the sons of Robert and Agnes Postlethwaite for reasons unknown (though Juliet Barker, in her biography of the Brontë family, speculates that he may have been involved in a sexual liaison with one of the servants, resulting in pregnancy), and again from his position as clerk at Luddenden Foot railway station in Calderdale in 1842 for carelessness, and subsequently appointed tutor to the Robinson family at Thorp Green, where Anne Brontë was working as governess. His appointment was to prove disastrous: in July 1845, he was fired – apparently as a consequence of his relationship with his employer’s wife, Mrs Lydia Robinson. In his despair, he turned increasingly to drink and opium. Branwell, like Charlotte, retained literary ambitions but, despite the publication of a number of his poems in local newspapers in the 1840s, it was becoming increasingly evident that he was unlikely to succeed, not only in a literary career, but in any capacity, and he was becoming a significant burden on his family

  Publication

  Charlotte’s dreams of a literary career seemed almost as distant as her brother’s following her return from Brussels: her weak eyesight prevented her from writing much at this time, and her plans for the future were vague. Shortly after she arrived home, she was offered a teaching position at a school in Manchester, with a substantial salary of one hundred pounds. However, concerns about her father’s health led her to reject the offer: Patrick Brontë’s eyesight was failing, and he was becoming increasingly reliant on his daughters for assistance with everyday tasks (in 1846, he would travel to Manchester with Charlotte for a cataract operation). Charlotte still retained hopes of being able to open a school with her sisters, and following her return she attempted to locate a small number of children who might board as pupils at the parsonage. In 1844, she drafted a prospectus for the proposed school, detailing the subjects to be offered: writing, arithmetic, history, grammar, geography, needle work, French, German, Latin, music and drawing. The range of subjects gives an indication of Charlotte’s own accomplishments at a time when women’s education was frequently extremely limited. However, the recruitment of pupils, despite Charlotte’s best efforts, proved impossible: Haworth’s relative isolation acted as an effective deterrent, and Charlotte and her sisters were eventually forced to abandon their plans.

  In the autumn of 1845, Charlotte discovered a selection of poetry by her sister, Emily. In her later biographical notice of her sisters, written after their deaths, she reveals that she accidentally discovered the poems, and read them in secret, without Emily’s consent. Recognising the quality of her sister’s work, she persuaded her
to consider publication, although Emily was initially reluctant: Charlotte recalls ‘it took hours to reconcile her to the discovery I had made, and days to persuade her that such poems merited publication.’ The incident is suggestive of an almost ruthless ambition on the part of Charlotte: the reading of private, personal work and her desire to make it public suggest her literary aspirations appear to have overridden her sister’s desire for privacy. The anecdote seems ironic in light of Charlotte’s later experiences, when she sought desperately to protect her own privacy and avoid the revelation of her true identity. Charlotte’s enthusiasm for Emily’s poems led Anne to volunteer a number of her own productions, and Charlotte then set about encouraging her two sisters to embark on a project to publish a collection of their poems. Despite Southey’s advice, Charlotte still dreamed of poetic success. By this point, she had effectively abandoned her literary alliance with her brother, whose tendency towards drink and dissipation prevented him from fulfilling the earlier ambitions both he and his family harboured for him. Still hoping to fulfil her own literary ambitions, Charlotte now turned to her two younger sisters. Though she was close to her sisters, the earlier alliance with Branwell and Emily’s close relationship with Anne must necessarily have affected Charlotte: on the one hand, this new alliance with her sisters brought Charlotte closer than she had yet been to her dream of literary success; on the other hand, it must have been tinged with pain, marking as it did the abandonment of her earlier hopes and dreams for Branwell and herself.