Always Emily (27 page)

“You are too cold,” Charlotte said with conviction.

“I'm not cold,” Emily cried. “I did care for him a little, but Harry deserves someone to love him with a whole heart.” She
glanced at the table with her pile of foolscap paper covered with her handwriting. “He would always have a rival for my affections.”

“Writing is a poor substitute for love.”

“Charlotte, I'm not in love with him! We had an adventure, but that doesn't mean I have to fall into his arms. I'm not some lovesick queen in one of your stories.”

Charlotte recoiled as if she had been struck.

Emily winced. “I didn't mean it like that. I love your stories. But in real life, does the queen really want to live with the duke? If the queen ends up with the duke, what happens to her own kingdom?”

“I would give up my writing if I could have a great romance,” Charlotte said. In a small, sad voice she added, “If he loved me, all the scars in the world would not keep me away from him.”

“I don't think I'm destined for love,” Emily said. “Even when it was most exciting with Harry, I was thinking all the time about how to tell the story on paper.” She reached her hand out to Charlotte. “If you don't find love, you too can find solace in your stories.”

Charlotte squeezed Emily's hand. “If I wrote this story, I'd choose a happier ending.”

“I wouldn't,” Emily assured her sister. “Life is full of tragedy, and so my stories will be, too.”

Charlotte glared at her as long as she was able, then burst out laughing. “You're impossible! Must you disagree with me about everything?”

Emily nodded. “Probably.” She returned to the table, picked up her pen, and began to write.

THE END

D
ear Reader,

The more research I did about the Brontës, the more I marveled at the unlikelihood of three wonderful writers growing up in this tiny house on the edge of the lonely moors. Every member of the family was a fascinating character. Branwell, Anne, and Rev. Brontë could each be the main characters of their own novels, but I was most interested (and challenged) by trying to capture the complicated relationship between the two most famous Brontës: Charlotte and Emily. Emily was mesmerizing but also impossible to live with, while Charlotte tried so hard to be true to her artistic self while being the only practical person in a house full of brilliant lunatics.

The Brontë sisters lived a sheltered life in their father's parsonage overlooking a crowded graveyard. Theirs was the last house in town. They were equally isolated socially because there were no other middle-class families in Haworth. Beyond the parsonage lay the open moors, a wild and desolate place that shaped their world and their writing.

All the Brontë children died young, but during their short lives Charlotte, Emily, and even Anne (who is absent from
Always Emily
) wrote important novels that are considered classics today. Every few years a new movie or miniseries based on
Jane Eyre
or
Wuthering Heights
proves these books have not lost their attraction for modern readers.

Early death haunted the Brontës. Their mother died when the youngest child, Anne, was just a year old. The two oldest daughters, Maria (age eleven) and Elizabeth (age ten), contracted consumption (also known as the “graveyard cough”), or what we now call tuberculosis, at Cowan Bridge, a boarding school for poor clergymen's daughters. The conditions at the school were terrible; one third of the students died, causing a national scandal. Charlotte, who narrowly escaped illness at the school, was deeply affected by her time there. A thinly disguised version of Cowan Bridge became the model for Lowood, the cruel boarding school in Charlotte's famous novel
Jane Eyre
.

With the death of her older sisters, Charlotte abruptly became the oldest in the family, a position of responsibility she took quite seriously for the rest of her life. There's no proof
that Emily and Charlotte snuck into the family crypt, but their sisters were taken from them so quickly that I wanted to give them an opportunity to say goodbye.

Not surprisingly, Rev. Brontë was reluctant to send his remaining children away to school again. Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne were schooled at home for the next several years. Their father gave them great freedom to read almost anything, so, unusually for the time period, the sisters read the same novels, history texts, and philosophical treatises as their brother.

The Brontë children were quick to take advantage of any library they could find, including the one at Ponden House, which was two miles from the parsonage. The children also liked to make up fantasy worlds and characters that inhabited them. By the time Charlotte was twelve, they were writing the stories down.

Charlotte and Branwell wrote about a fantasy kingdom called Angria, while Emily and Anne created Gondal. Charlotte in particular liked to bind her stories in tiny books that could fit in the palm of your hand. Her penmanship was excellent, but so small that a magnifying glass was required to read it. Recently one of these Brontë juvenilia (books written by children) sold at auction for nearly one million dollars.

Charlotte enrolled in the Roe Head School when she was sixteen. A diligent student, she excelled at her studies. Charlotte was always afraid of what would happen to her and her siblings if their father was to die. Not only was his salary the family's only income, but their home belonged to the church, too.

The options for young women to earn their own living were extremely limited in the 1830s, so not surprisingly Charlotte planned to become a teacher to support herself. After she finished her schooling, Charlotte was invited back to be a teacher at Roe Head. She was nineteen. Though she did not enjoy teaching, she stayed because part of her compensation included the cost of Emily's tuition.

At the age of seventeen, Emily was old to be a first-time student, and her time at Roe Head was not a success. Accustomed to complete freedom at home to read and write as she wished, as well as to take frequent treks on the moor in all weathers, she found life at school intolerable. She most likely missed her beloved pets. Besides her dogs Grasper and Keeper, she kept cats, geese, and even a pet hawk named Nero. Emily's homesickness became so debilitating that she went home after only a month to be replaced at school by her sister, Anne, a few months later.

In
Always Emily
, I sent Charlotte home from Roe Head just in time to help investigate the mystery. This visit home was fictional. However, I took the liberty of imagining what would have happened if the headmistress ever saw what Charlotte was writing. The story about the duke and the queen at the beginning of Chapter Two is my own invention, although typical of the high gothic romantic writing Charlotte favored as a teenager.

Anne, Charlotte, and Emily all tried their hand at teaching or being governesses, but none of their positions lasted for
long. One of the few nonfamily members admitted into the Brontës' circle, Ellen Nussey, a school friend of Charlotte's, noted that she could not imagine any family whose temperament was less suited to teaching than the Brontës.

By 1846, all the Brontës had returned home. Charlotte finally abandoned the idea that the girls should earn their living by teaching.

One day Charlotte snuck a peek in Emily's portable desk and found a secret journal of her poetry. She remembered the experience of reading Emily's poems for the first time: “To my ear, they had a peculiar music—wild, melancholy, and elevating.” Emily was furious with her sister's invasion of her privacy, but Charlotte thought the ends justified the means. The girls could support themselves with their writing. She convinced Anne and Emily to submit poems to a publisher.

In the 1840s, very few women published their work. The sisters knew that their writing would be judged unfairly simply because they were female, so they decided to submit it under pseudonyms that could be of either gender. Anne became Acton Bell, Charlotte was Currer Bell, and Emily took the name Ellis Bell.

Their poems were published and received favorable reviews. Unfortunately only two copies were sold. Charlotte then decided that the sisters should try writing novels, which were more lucrative.

Charlotte's first novel was rejected, but her second,
Jane Eyre
, was accepted and published. It tells the story of Jane, an impoverished and plain governess. After suffering as a child for the sins of being poor and outspoken, Jane becomes a governess for the enigmatic Mr. Rochester. Their tragic love story has become a classic, beloved by millions of readers.

It's hard for the modern reader to appreciate how Charlotte's novel defied conventions at the time. The novel is written in the first person, the first novel to feature a female protagonist speaking in her own intensely personal voice. And did she speak! Jane is honest about her passionate nature and the feelings she harbors for her employer. It was a shockingly original novel for its time.

Jane Eyre
was an instant success. Some critics called it coarse because obviously women shouldn't have these sorts of feelings, and if they did, they certainly did not talk about them.

The identity of Currer Bell was the question of the day. The speculation intensified after the publication of equally unusual novels by Emily and Anne, also under their male pseudonyms.

Emily's only novel,
Wuthering Heights
, was published in 1847. A story of doomed love and revenge on the moors of Yorkshire,
Wuthering Heights
was often condemned as a brutal novel of amoral passion. However, now it is considered one of the most enduring pieces of writing in the English language.

Emily was supposed to have begun work on another novel, but became ill before she could finish it. She believed
her health had been compromised by contamination of the parsonage's water from the church's graveyard. Despite her worsening condition, she refused to see a doctor. She died of tuberculosis in 1848 at the age of thirty. Upon her death, Keeper howled at her bedroom door all night, proving his loyal companionship even after death.

Unfortunately, Anne's novels have long been overshadowed by those of her more famous sisters. Her first novel,
Agnes Grey
, was based on her own experiences as a governess in a middle-class household. Her second,
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
, about a woman who flees from an abusive husband, is considered one of the first truly feminist novels. Anne died of tuberculosis in 1849 at the age of twenty-nine, a year after Emily's death.

Despite his early promise, Branwell never succeeded in life. The only time he went away to school was in 1825, when he enrolled at the Royal Academy in London. He returned a week later, demoralized. His sisters never discovered what happened there.

Branwell drifted from one job to another. He drank and eventually became addicted to laudanum. He died at the age of thirty-two from tuberculosis, complicated by his addictions.

Some modern scholars have suggested that Branwell had an active role in writing his sisters' novels; however, the evidence for this is not convincing. In fact, Charlotte said that he didn't even know that his sisters had been published.

Charlotte was devastated by the deaths of her siblings. She would publish two more novels,
Shirley
and
Villette
. Although
both were well received, neither received the acclaim that
Jane Eyre
had.

In 1854, she accepted a proposal of marriage from her father's assistant curate, Arthur Nichols. Her father initially opposed the match, perhaps because he feared losing his last remaining child. However, he finally agreed and the couple was married.

Charlotte became pregnant almost immediately. Unfortunately, she suffered from severe morning sickness, which aggravated her already poor health. She and her unborn child died in 1855. She was thirty-eight. Her official cause of death was tuberculosis, just like her siblings.

Any biography of the Brontë girls would not be complete without their father, who supported their thirst for knowledge and encouraged them to write. Rev. Brontë was a poor farmer's son in Ireland. He went to Cambridge on a scholarship and became an Anglican clergyman. His parish was in Haworth, a manufacturing town in the northeast of England, the setting for
Always Emily
. He brought his wife and six children to the parsonage in 1820.

After his wife's untimely death, his sister-in-law, Aunt Branwell, came to stay with them to help raise the children. For forty years, Tabitha Aykroyd was the family's housekeeper. The children spent many hours in the kitchen listening to her gossip about the parish. The character of Ellen, the talkative and loving servant, in
Wuthering Heights
is assumed to be based on Tabby.

Rev. Brontë was a brilliant and fiery preacher who scrupulously cared for the members of his large parish. He was a political figure who openly opposed the mill owners who mistreated their employees. He feared for his safety and carried a pistol when he was out in the parish. His habit of firing the pistol every morning that I wrote about was well-documented. The pistol could only be unloaded by firing it.