The Brontës: Wild Genius on the Moors: The Story of a Literary Family

by Juliet Barker

In literature, if not in religion, Charlotte was a Calvinist: she had no doubt that she was one of the elect who possessed genius and that those who did not, no matter how hard they tried, could never achieve greatness. This was a passionate defence of her own method of writing, so obvious from the juvenilia and her diary fragments, where an inspirational moment or vision leads to uncontrolled outpourings in which her pen can scarcely keep pace with her thoughts. Though Monsieur Heger wrote frequent approving remarks in the margins of this essay, he took issue with Charlotte’s main thesis to such an extent that he wrote half a page of ‘Observation’ at the end. His argument is worth quoting in full, not only because it was put with equal force to Charlotte’s own, but also because it eventually won Charlotte round to his way of thinking. Work does not make a poet: man does not make his own genius, he receives it from heaven – that is indisputable. Machinery does not create force: it rules its employment, it multiplies its effect a hundredfold. Man does not know what genius is, it is a gift from Heaven, it is something one might call divine. It is the same as force. But imagine two men of the same strength, one without a lever, the other with a lever. The first will lift 1000 pounds, the second, in making the same effort, will uproot a plane tree. Is the lever worth nothing? Without a voice there is no singer – undoubtedly – but there will be no singer either without art, wit...