The Secret Diaries of Charlotte Brontë (48 page)

My mind wanders; I cannot help but smile at another memory: a conversation which ensued between Arthur and myself last night, as we prepared for bed.

I had just pulled the pins from my hair, when Arthur stepped up behind me. With a dark gleam in his eyes, and a deep timbre to his voice, he said: “May I brush your hair?”

In the six months that we have been married, I have been
the fortunate recipient of my husband’s hair-brushing ministrations on occasions too numerous to count—sessions which always led to such a delectable conclusion, that I have often mischievously left my hairbrush lying out on the bed, waiting with great anticipation for the moment that it would be discovered and put to good use. At his request now, my heart began to pound. Without a word, I sat down on the bed beside him and relinquished the brush to his care.

He pulled the brush through my long tresses with sure, deft strokes, his fingers gently sweeping my hair back from my neck, a touch which always made me tingle. As I relaxed into his luxurious attentions, he said in a low tone, “Mrs. Nicholls: now that you are an old married woman, may I ask a question that I have long wished to put to you?”

“You may ask me anything, my dear boy.”

“All those years ago, when I first came here to tea—what was it that you
thought
I said, which gave you such offence?”

“Do you really wish to know?”

“I do.”

“You will think it all vanity and nonsense.”

“Even so.”

I sighed, and blushed at the memory. “I thought you called me an ugly old maid.”

“What?” (All hair-brushing ceased) “
Ugly?
No! I never said that! I said
angry.
And angry you were, like a hell-cat, breathing fire and brimstone—but ugly? I would never even think such a thing.”

“Would you not?
Did
you not, even then, dearest?”

“Never.” Arthur put down the hairbrush and turned me to face him on the bed. “Don’t you know me well enough by now, my darling, to know my feelings for you? I thought you beautiful on that grey, miserable, drenching April day nearly ten years past, when I first set eyes upon you—when you answered the door with your dress and face and hair all covered in flour. Your beauty has grown with each passing day, as I’ve come to know and understand the woman you are inside. You’re the most
beautiful woman on earth to me, Charlotte Nicholls, and you always will be. I love you.”

My heart soared. In the reflected glow of my husband’s adoring gaze, I truly did feel beautiful for the first time in my life.

“And I you,” I whispered in return, as I melted into his embrace.

A
t the close of 1854, as Charlotte Brontë finished writing these diaries, she appeared to be the happiest and healthiest she had ever been in her life. In her letters, she spoke tenderly of her husband, admitting that “every day makes my own attachment to him stronger.” Visiting friends commented on how well Charlotte looked, and on the complete contentment of the newly married couple. Ellen confessed that “after her marriage—a halo of happiness seemed to surround her—a holy calm pervaded her, even in moments of excitement.”

These blissful months of health and domestic joy, however, were tragically very short-lived.

At the end of January 1855, Charlotte became ill. Arthur, wishing to have better medical advice than Haworth could offer, sent for a doctor from Bradford, reputedly the best doctor in the region. He confirmed that Charlotte was pregnant and suffering from morning sickness, and—not alarmed by her condition—he recommended bed rest.

Charlotte’s health continued to deteriorate. To her husband and father’s intense dismay, over the next six weeks, Charlotte
became so severely weakened with nausea, fever, and vomiting that she could not eat, and eventually she could barely speak. Her servant Martha Brown said that a bird could not survive on what little Charlotte ate. In the few brief, weakly penciled notes that Charlotte wrote to her friends from her bed during this time, she praised her husband lovingly in every one. On 17 February she made her will, overturning the cautious settlement she’d made before her marriage, now leaving her entire estate to her beloved Arthur, instead of her father.

In March, Charlotte’s condition briefly improved; the sickness suddenly stopped, and she craved food and ate eagerly; but it was too late. She fell into a wandering delirium as her life slipped away. Toward the end of the month, when she awoke from this stupor for an instant, and saw her husband’s woe-worn face and heard his murmured prayers to spare her, she whispered, “Oh! I am not going to die, am I? He will not separate us, we have been so happy.”

Early on Saturday morning, March 31, 1855—just three weeks short of her thirty-ninth birthday—Charlotte Brontë died. Arthur held her in his arms in a convulsion of grief. Charlotte’s death certificate made no mention of her pregnancy, stating that she died from “phthisis,” the same progressive wasting disease from which her brother and sisters had perished. Modern medical opinion, however, cites
hyperemesis gravidarum
(excessive sickness in a pregnant woman) as the cause, or at least a contributory cause. Whether the poor quality of the water in Haworth (which carried the typhus that killed the family’s faithful servant, Tabby, only a month earlier) was another contributing cause of her death, will never be known.

Patrick Brontë, distraught over his daughter’s death, and particularly upset by the many charges and questions raised by the public over the identity of the reclusive but celebrated Currer Bell, asked Mrs. Gaskell to write a story of Charlotte’s life, which that lady painstakingly researched and famously executed. Arthur—although strongly opposed to the idea of the biography, and especially to the idea of publishing Charlotte’s
letters, which would render public what was to him very personal and sacred—reluctantly yielded to Patrick Brontë’s wish and assisted Mrs. Gaskell in any way he could.

When
The Life of Charlotte Brontë
was published by Smith, Elder & Co. two years after Charlotte’s death, it became a sensation comparable to the first publication of
Jane Eyre.
In the same year, Charlotte’s first novel
The Professor
was published, although it was overshadowed by the enthralling story of her own life.

Arthur Bell Nicholls fulfilled his promise to his wife, and remained a faithful caregiver to Patrick Brontë for the six years which remained of the old man’s life. When Patrick died, he left everything to his “beloved and esteemed son-in-law, the Reverend Arthur Bell Nicholls.” If Arthur expected, after quietly and conscientiously carrying out the duties of curate for sixteen long years, to be rewarded by inheriting the living of Haworth on Patrick’s death, he was to be bitterly disappointed. The position depended on the nomination of the Church Trustees, now a new and younger generation who owed no allegiance to Patrick Brontë, and some of whom Arthur may have offended by his formal and unbending ways. By a vote of five to four, Arthur was callously rejected.

Arthur packed up his belongings, including various Brontë mementos and many of Charlotte’s personal and literary possessions, and returned to Banagher, Ireland, taking Plato, Patrick’s last dog. The Royal School was still being run by his cousin James Bell. Arthur’s Aunt Harriette was living in a small, pretty house at the top of the hill, which stood on twenty acres of land. Arthur joined her and her daughter Mary Anna there and lived a quiet life, becoming a farmer and giving up the church altogether. Martha Brown, the Brontë servant who had once so disliked him, became a good friend and made long and regular visits.

Mary Anna had always loved her cousin; nine and a half years after Charlotte’s death, she and Arthur quietly married. By every account this second marriage, although childless, was
a happy one, based on companionship and mutual understanding rather than passion. Arthur was open with Mary Anna about his feelings, admitting that “he had buried his heart with his first wife.” To her credit, Mary Anna understood. The Richmond portrait of Charlotte hung in their drawing-room for more than forty years, until the day Arthur died in 1906, at age eighty-eight. When pressed, Arthur wrote and talked with great pride about his celebrated first wife, but he shunned publicity for the rest of his life.

During Arthur’s last years, he shared some of Charlotte’s juvenilia, pictures, and other keepsakes with one of her biographers. If Arthur had indeed been the keeper of Charlotte’s diaries, it would have been entirely consistent with his nature—and his intense desire for privacy—to keep the precious volumes hidden from the public: buried yet carefully and lovingly preserved, by the man who had always adored her, in the cellar of that house on the hill in Banagher, Ireland.

FROM
SYRIE JAMES
AND
AVON A

What inspired you to write
The Secret Diaries of Charlotte Brontë?

I have always adored the novel
Jane Eyre.
I wanted to know and understand the woman who wrote it. As I delved into my research, I was captivated not only by the engrossing saga of Charlotte Brontë’s relationship with her family and her emergence as a novelist, but by what I saw as the missing link: the untold story of her relationship with Arthur Bell Nicholls. To think that this tall, dark, and handsome man carried a silent torch for Charlotte for seven and a half years, and that her feelings for him went from intense dislike to deep and abiding love—I knew that would make a fabulous story!

How much do we actually know about Charlotte Brontë’s life?

We are privileged to know a great deal, thanks in large part to the wealth of correspondence which William Smith Williams preserved after Charlotte became published, and to the unguarded letters—nearly five hundred in all—which Charlotte wrote to Ellen Nussey over a twenty-four-year period. Arthur was so concerned about what might happen if Charlotte’s correspondence fell into the wrong hands, that he insisted Ellen burn all her letters upon receipt; fortunately, Ellen did not comply. Charlotte’s letters are a wealth of information regarding her intimate thoughts, beliefs, daily struggles, and personal
relationships. Many of the settings and incidents in her novels, by her own admission, were inspired by situations in her own life. She gave us valuable insight into her feelings about her sisters, and the evolution of their writing, in her introduction to the second edition of
Wuthering Heights
and
Agnes Grey.

We are also indebted to Ellen Nussey for the variety of insightful biographical notes and reminiscences she wrote about the Brontës, and to Mrs. Gaskell, for the in-depth biography she wrote shortly after Charlotte’s death. Mrs. Gaskell visited every school Charlotte had attended, and interviewed or corresponded with all the important people who had touched her life; she even sailed to Belgium to meet Monsieur Héger (Madame Héger refused to see her). Although Mrs. Gaskell white-washed Charlotte’s “affair” with Monsieur Héger to preserve her reputation, her well-researched work provided the basis for every subsequent Brontë biography ever written.

Which parts of
The Secret Diaries of Charlotte Brontë
are true? Which parts did you “conjecture”?

The novel is based almost entirely on fact. All the details of Charlotte’s family life, her experiences at school, her friendship with Ellen, her feelings for Monsieur Héger, the evolution of her writing career, and her relationship with her publisher, George Smith, are all true and based on information from her letters and biographies. The letters on Chapter 5 and Chapter 8 are real, as are the critical notices the sisters read about their poetry and novels. According to Ellen Nussey, Charlotte really did tell a story about a “somnambulist walking on shaking turrets” to her fellow pupils at Roe Head School, which reduced one girl to shivering terror…“all told in a voice that conveyed more than words alone can express.”

The details about Mr. Nicholls’s childhood are factual. I faithfully recounted Charlotte’s experiences on her honeymoon
in Ireland with the Bell family. The only fictitious characters in the novel are the Malones, the Ainleys, and the young lady on board the ship—people and situations I invented to add local color or dramatic conflict. All the other characters in the book—even the girls at Roe Head School—are based on real people.

The details of Mr. Nicholls’s passionate and agonized proposal of marriage, as well as its stormy aftermath and Patrick Brontë’s vehement opposition, are all based on fact, and were meticulously recorded in Charlotte’s correspondence. Charlotte and Mr. Nicholls’s strolls from Haworth to Oxenhope during those bitingly cold days in January 1854 are so well-known, that the path came to be called “Charlotte’s Lane.” Although Charlotte’s letters reflect a subdued expectation before her marriage, her respect and affection for her husband blossomed on their honeymoon, and grew into a love so strong, that she later wrote of Arthur, “my heart is knit to him.” I was obliged to conjecture some of the events during the earlier years of Charlotte and Mr. Nicholls’s acquaintance, to flesh out their love story—and I imagined Monsieur Héger’s kiss in the garden (much of his romantic dialogue about “meeting again in thought” comes straight from a letter he wrote to another student)—but based on what we
do
know, I feel this telling is very close to the truth. And the “conjecturing” was a great part of the fun of writing the novel!

How did you do your research?

I pored over countless Brontë biographies. I read all their poetry, their published novels, the juvenilia, and Charlotte’s voluminous personal correspondence. I studied the art of the Brontës (quite remarkable!). I read everything I could find about the life of Arthur Bell Nicholls. I went to Haworth, and made an extended visit to the Brontë Parsonage Museum, which has been
preserved to reflect the way it looked when the Brontës lived there, and is furnished with many of their possessions. What a thrill it was to “haunt” the rooms and lanes where Charlotte and Emily and Anne actually lived and walked, and to stroll through that gloomy graveyard in the pouring rain! Even more thrilling was my precious ninety-minute visit to the Brontë library, where I was allowed to don protective gloves and read a selection of original letters and manuscripts penned by Charlotte and other members of the Brontë family.

While in Yorkshire, I was also granted a private tour of the former Roe Head School, which still actively functions as a private school. The main building, inside and out, looks much the same as it did in Charlotte Brontë’s day—and the legend of that mysterious attic dweller, the Ghost of Roe Head, still abides!