Brontës (105 page)

Chapter Eighteen

THREE TALES

Though it is tempting to see
Jane Eyre
as the result of some inspirational flash of genius, in fact the ideas for the novel had been floating around in Charlotte's head for some time. Gateshead Hall and the St John Rivers scenario had been the subject of manuscript fragments she had written as long ago as 1844 and Rochester himself, with his pride and sarcastic wit, his string of past mistresses, illegitimate child and overwhelming attractiveness to women was a re-creation of her childhood hero, Zamorna, in all but his physical appearance. A single new element came into play, however, which was to transform this unpromising rehash of Angrian material into one of the greatest novels ever written in the English language. Perhaps learning from her Brussels chapters in
The Professor
, Charlotte began to draw on personal experience to flesh out her characters and scenes. Jane Eyre's childhood sufferings at Lowood School at the hands of Mr Brocklehurst were a searing and immediately recognizable indictment of Wilson's Clergy Daughters' School. In the saintly Helen Burns, too, she drew from life, taking as a
model her eldest sister, Maria. Ironically, this was the one character the reviewers were to find fault with, considering her too good to be true, though Charlotte staunchly defended her. ‘You are right in having faith in the reality of Helen Burns's character:' she told William Smith Williams, ‘she was real enough: I have exaggerated nothing there: I abstained from recording much that I remember respecting her, lest the narrative should sound incredible.'
¹

Because the novel began with such an intensely personal re-creation of Charlotte's deeply harrowing days at the Clergy Daughters' School, bound up as it was with a reliving of the terrible anger and grief caused by her sisters' deaths,
Jane Eyre
opened with a passion that had been totally absent from all her earlier literary efforts. It was an emotion that was to sweep through the entire novel, from the young Jane's violent denunciations of the injustices inflicted on her to the adult's equally spirited declaration of her own self-worth:

Do you think I can stay to become nothing to you? Do you think I am an automaton? – a machine without feelings? and can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup? Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? – You think wrong! – I have as much soul as you, – and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty, and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you. I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh:- it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God's feet, equal, – as we are!
²

Through the medium of her creation, Charlotte was at last able to articulate all the pent-up emotion which had been fermenting in her soul for the last four or five years. She could not declare her love for Monsieur Heger in such shameless terms, but her heroine could and would. Like Monsieur Heger, Mr Rochester was married, and Jane, like Charlotte, would take the moral line and flee from temptation; but Jane, unlike Charlotte, would eventually win her man. In the essential morality of the tale – so unlike Charlotte's Angrian writing – whereby the heroine unwittingly sins by falling in love with a married man, suffers in separating from him and is redeemed and rewarded in the end – it was almost as if Charlotte was trying to prove to herself and Branwell that she had taken the right path. The alternative
to tearing oneself away from a married lover was to subject oneself to ‘a constant phantom, or rather two – Sin and Suffering'.
³
in Branwell she had an object lesson of her own fate had she given in to her inclinations.

In the uncongenial surroundings of the narrow, red-brick terraces of urban Manchester, Charlotte began the first draft of her new novel in her customary fashion, using a pencil to write in little square paper books which she had to hold close to her eyes because of her shortsightedness.
⁴
She wrote steadily for the five weeks she remained in Manchester, her work providing a welcome relief from anxiety about her father's slow progress. Mr Wilson had expressed confidence from the start, however, and five days after the operation Patrick's bandages were removed. He could only see dimly but ‘Mr Wilson seemed perfectly satisfied, and said all was right.' Two weeks later Patrick's sight was still weak and his eyes sore, but he was able to sit up for most of the day in his darkened room. By 22 September, after agitating for over three weeks, Charlotte was finally given permission by Mr Wilson to dismiss the nurse, whom she had found ‘too obsequious &c. and not I should think to be much trusted'.
⁵
Within a week they were at home, their release hastened by Mr Wilson's departure for Scotland. Once on familiar territory, Patrick rapidly regained his strength and, to his infinite joy, gradually recovered his sight. ‘Through divine mercy, and the skill of the surgeon, as well as my D[ea]r Ch[arlotte]'s attention, and the assiduity of the nurse –', he recorded in the margin of his
Modern Domestic Medicine
, ‘after a year of nearly total blindness – I was so far restored to sight, as to be able to read, and write, and find my way, without a guide –'. When he totted up the expenses of the whole operation he discovered it had cost him nearly fifty pounds, a quarter of his annual salary. This was despite the fact that Mr Wilson had generously remitted most of his fee, charging him only ten pounds instead of his usual twenty or thirty. The rooms had cost £ 1.5s. a week, the nurse 15s. a week and there had been their own and her board to find as well.
⁶
From every point of view, however, the expense had been fully justified. By November he was so far recovered that Arthur Bell Nicholls was able to return home to Ireland for a well-earned three-week holiday, leaving Patrick to perform all three Sunday services and conduct the baptisms and burials which occurred in his absence.
⁷

Once at home – and relieved to find that there had been no crisis with Branwell in her absence – Charlotte pressed on with her novel. As the work progressed, her interest grew and by the time she had got Jane to Thornfield Hall, she could not stop writing. Harriet Martineau, repeating what
Charlotte herself had told her, described how she was completely caught up in the story.

On she went, writing incessantly for three weeks; by which time she had carried her heroine away from Thornfield, and was herself in a fever, which compelled her to pause. The rest was written with less vehemence, and with more anxious care. The world adds, with less vigour and interest.
⁸

Remembering that her previous attempt to make her hero a son of Adam, sharing Adam's doom, had signally failed to attract a publisher's attention, she deliberately reverted to ‘the wild wonderful and thrilling – the strange, startling and harrowing'.
⁹
The inspiration for Rochester's mad wife, locked up in the attics of Thornfield Hall, came from a number of sources, including a local story of a house on the borders of the parishes of Haworth and Oakworth where, according to the Oakworth curate, James Chesterton Bradley, the insane wife of the owner was kept incarcerated. Her depiction of the nature of Bertha's madness, with its venom and violence directed chiefly against her husband, seems to have owed at least something to Ellen Nussey's confidences about her brother George. Recently confined in a private asylum near York run by the enlightened Dr Belcombe, George's condition varied considerably. He was visited by Ellen just at the time Charlotte was writing the Thornfield chapters and her account of his behaviour obviously intrigued Charlotte: ‘[h]is delusion is one of the most painful kind for his relations – how strange that in his eye affection should be transformed into hatred – it is as if the mental vision were inverted – and such is no doubt the case – the change in his brain distorts all impressions.'
¹⁰
Henry Nussey's pragmatic offer of marriage provided the model for St John Rivers' proposal, from which Jane was only saved by the magical intervention, in the truest tradition of Charlotte's Angrian tales, of Rochester's spirit calling aloud to hers across the miles that separated them.

While Charlotte continued to write at white heat, Emily and Anne seem to have been less than enthusiastic about writing a second novel in the face of the general rejection of their first. Both retreated into the comfortable privacy of Gondal where no one but themselves could read and judge their efforts. Anne wrote several long poems after sending off her manuscript and it is clear from their content that she was engaged in a prose narrative to which they belonged. The poems were on familiar themes: the prisoner
mourning the loss of his freedom and his love, childhood friends torn apart by politics to become bitter enemies; the disconsolate lover.
¹¹
Emily, too, seems to have turned back with relief to Gondal. Her only surviving poem from this period is a long companion piece to one by Anne, written on the same day and on the same subject. Emily's poem depicts the remorse of the captor who has killed his prisoner's infant daughter and taunted him as he lay dying only to have him return good for evil by saving the life of the captor's only son.
¹²
Though there was undoubtedly solace in going back to Gondal, neither sister seems to have recaptured the quality of verse which they had so markedly achieved prior to their attempts at publication.

If Emily and Anne seem to have rather lost their way in the autumn of 1846, this was doubly true of Branwell. Utterly crushed by the removal of his last hopes regarding Mrs Robinson, he seems to have given himself up to drink. Aware of the disapproval at home and possibly wishing to spare his recuperating father, Branwell seems to have spent much of his time in Halifax with J.B. Leyland.
¹³
He even briefly took up residence at a public house, the Ovenden Cross, just outside Halifax on the Keighley road. The innkeeper, John Walton, had nine children and the eldest of these, twenty-year-old Mary, obviously fell for Branwell's charms. Though she was later to call him ‘an inveterate drunkard' and a ‘lamentable instance of what a man becomes who trusts for happiness in earthly things alone', at the time she appears to have sought out his company and got him to write and sketch entries in the commonplace book she kept.
¹⁴

As Mary Walton pointed out, Branwell's contribution reflected his distempered state of mind. Beneath his sonnet ‘Why hold young eyes the fullest fount of tears' he drew a haggard and gloomy man's face which he labelled ‘The results of Sorrow'. He also copied out a more recent sonnet, ‘When all our cheerful hours seem gone for ever', which he had first sent to Leyland on 28 April 1846. Below it he sketched a churchyard with a tombstone in the foreground on which he had drawn a skull and crossbones and written ‘I IMPLORE FOR REST'. Interestingly, he was to quote the same lines in Latin a few weeks later in a letter to Leyland, where he described them as being an Italian epitaph.
¹⁵
On another page he sketched a head and shoulders portrait of 'Alexander Percy Esqr M.P.', quoting below it the lines from Lord Byron,

No more – no more – Oh never more on me

The freshness of the heart shall fall like dew,

Which, out of all the lovely things we see

Extracts emotions beautiful and new!
¹⁶

Branwell, unlike his sisters, had never had any reluctance to share his imaginary world with his friends and acquaintances and one can well imagine that the sketch of Percy was done to explain his own use of the Northangerland pseudonym to the assembled crowd in the taproom. Branwell's final entry in the book was a profile sketch of himself, looking grimmer and more gaunt than his earlier self-portraits, above the lines

Think not that life is happiness,

But deem it
duty
joined with
care
.

Implore for
Hope
in your distress,

And for your answer get
Despair
.

Yet travel on, for Life's rough road

May end, at last, in rest with GOD.

Northangerland.
¹⁷

Below this poem he drew a man kneeling on a rock, shielding his eyes from the sight of a sinking ship. Next to Branwell's manuscript entries, Mary stuck in several newspaper cuttings, including ones of his most recently published poems, ‘Penmaenmawr' and ‘Letter from a Father on Earth to his Child in her Grave'.
¹⁸
Clearly, Mary Walton admired the talents of her visitor then, even if in later life she felt obliged to adopt a more prim and pious line.