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

by Juliet Barker

April of Mrs Collins, the long-suffering wife of the former curate of Keighley.

In Helen Graham she created a heroine who would rise above the depravity of her husband and his circle, have the courage to leave him and earn her own living and yet have the compassion to go back to comfort him as he lay dying.

I wished to tell the truth, for truth always conveys its own moral to those who are able to receive it

‘but she leads much too sedentary a life, and is continually sitting stooping either over a book or over her desk – it is with difficulty one can prevail on her to take a walk or induce her to converse.’80

There can be little doubt that Emily did embark on a second novel.

The possibility, therefore, is that this was done by Charlotte after Emily’s death, an act that would also explain Charlotte’s silence on the subject of her sister’s second novel.

Her greatest literary hero, William Makepeace Thackeray, had been sent a pre-publication copy of the book, prompting a reply which William Smith Williams passed on to Charlotte.

‘There can be no question but that Jane Eyre is a very clever book. Indeed it is a book of decided power’, trumpeted The Examiner.

Thomas Cautley Newby was a sole operator who had set himself up as a publisher in Mortimer Street off Cavendish Square in 1820.

but Emily and Anne were obstinate in their determination

to go their own way.

Emily and Anne were mortified to discover that almost all the errors that they had so painstakingly corrected in the proof-sheets appeared unchanged in the final copies.

To pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee, is not to lift an impious hand to the Crown of Thorns.

Thackeray’s life: in 1840, after only four years of marriage, his wife had gone insane and had to be incarcerated for her own safety.

he leads papa a wretched life’.

Writing to Ellen at about the same time, Charlotte complained, ‘he is always sick, has two or three times fallen down in fits’.

he was ‘harassed day and night’ by Branwell’s ‘intolerable conduct’.

Charlotte’s hopeless comment: ‘what will be the ultimate end God knows

Though his reasons for doing so were not discovered, it was particularly distressing that a clergyman, whose faith in God alone should have given him hope, had been driven to such straits of desperation.

Though Patrick may not have immediately recognized the brilliance of Jane Eyre, there is manifold evidence of his pride and joy in Charlotte’s achievement which was to be the comfort of his declining years.

If I ever do write another book, I think I will have nothing of what you call ‘melodrame’; I think so, but I am not sure. I think too I will endeavour to follow the counsel which shines out of Miss Austen’s ‘mild eyes’; ‘to finish more, and be more subdued’; but neither am I sure of that.

The acclaimed author of Jane Eyre was still at heart the same girl who had once written, ‘I’m just going to write because I cannot help it’,

Charlotte had never read any Jane Austen. She then read Pride and Prejudice, famously declaring it An accurate daguerreotyped portrait of a common-place face; a carefully-fenced, highly cultivated garden with neat borders and delicate flowers – but no glance of a bright vivid physiognomy – no open country – no fresh air – no blue hill – no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen in their elegant

but confined houses.

While Charlotte realized, as Lewes did not, that Jane Austen’s style and tone were the absolute antithesis of her own, she nevertheless also recognized his criticism of her tendency to melodrama and her ‘untrue’ pictures of high society.

by the beginning of February 1848 Jane Eyre, subtitled The Secrets of Thornfield Manor, was in production at the Victoria Theatre in London.

The success of Jane Eyre had opened up a whole new world for Charlotte, a world that contrasted sharply with her life at home in Haworth.

Mrs Robinson succeeded in marrying the widower,

this confirms Mrs Robinson’s immorality in pursuing the husband of a dying woman and her ruthlessness in carrying out her plans.

Branwell woul...

allowed to disturb those plans and the sums of money by which she financed his ...

Charlotte was in an impossible position, being bound by her promise to Emily to keep the secret of their authorship and yet, in so doing, putting Ellen in the invidious position of spreading a lie.

Charlotte could talk to Mary Taylor in a way that she could not to Ellen. The same was true of her correspondence with William Smith Williams, which had opened up a whole new world of literary and

political discussion for Charlotte.

it appears to me that insurrections and battles are the acute diseases of nations, and that their tendency is to exhaust by their violence the vital energies of the countries where they occur.

The French Revolution had sparked off a huge revival of the Chartist movement and their mass meetings, often several thousand strong, were being held uncomfortably close to Haworth.

Charlotte could not have stepped out of the front door of her home without seeing the suffering all around her and, as the rector’s daughter, she could not have avoided some parish-visiting among the poor.

Shirley was a missed opportunity: the starving and desperate Luddites are merely incidental to her plot, their cause effectively seen only from the point of view of those in authority,

I think

you speak excellent sense when you say that girls without fortune should be brought up and accustomed to support themselves;

the Brontë sisters were escorted to morning service at St Stephen’s, Walbrook by Williams

‘I always feel under awkward constraint at table’, Charlotte confided in Mary Taylor. ‘Dining-out would be a hideous bore to me.’

anyone who knew the fate of Maria and Elizabeth Brontë could hardly fail to recognize the portrait of the Clergy Daughters’ School.

only his most precious son had rejected the comforts of his religion and refused to repent of his manifold sins.

Life had no happiness for him.

the wreck of talent, the ruin of promise,

she came to see their attacks on her sisters as a defilement of their memory.

‘Never in all her life had she lingered over any task that lay before her, and she did not linger now’, Charlotte later wrote of her sister.

Day by day, when I saw with what a front she

met suffering, I looked on her with an anguish of wonder and love.