The Bronte story reads like a manual on how not to bring up children. Home for the five sisters and their brother Branwell was a windswept parsonage in the Yorkshire village of Haworth, overlooking a graveyard. They did not mix with local families or learn the games normal children played. In 1821, when Charlotte, the third child, was five, their mother died, leaving them to the care of their father, a dictatorial cleric of questionable sanity.
He fed them frugally, while always taking his own meals alone, and filled their minds with bigotry. Branwell was educated at home, but the girls were sent to a boarding school at Cowan Bridge - “Lowood School” in Jane Eyre. The harsh regime and insanitary conditions were not conducive to health, and Charlotte’s elder sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, died within months of each other in 1825, aged 11 and 10 respectively.
The remaining children, Branwell, Charlotte, Emily and Anne, found refuge from grief and boredom in fantasy. Over the years they created a complex web of games, poems, dramas and high-society romances, based originally on Branwell’s toy soldiers, but branching into intricate make-believe that occupied them well into adulthood. Some of this material has survived in tiny, hand-stitched manuscripts, which Brontë scholars have scrutinised for clues to the sisters’ adult fiction.
Claire Harman joins this search, but she also stresses the eroticism of Charlotte’s adolescent fantasy tales. Her fictional hero, the Duke of Zamorna has, like Mr Rochester in Jane Eyre, a scandalous history of mistresses and bastards that evidently fascinates his creator. During her three years as a teacher at Roe Head school, from 1835-8, she seems to have become dependent on daydreams about Zamorna, which Harman interprets as “ecstatic” and “masturbatory”. She suspects, too, that opium, easily available in the form of laudanum, helped Charlotte escape into sexual reveries from what she called the “wretched bondage” of school-teaching.
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If true, these suppositions may explain her sudden rages when she was forced to face reality, in the shape of her “oafish” pupils, “boring me with their vulgar familiar trash”. A disadvantage of living in dreams of high romance is that ordinary mortals seem paltry by comparison, and the fury and resentment that ignite Brontë’s greatest writing feed on this contrast.
Possibly, too, being so wrapped-up in make-believe distorted her judgment of actual people and their feelings. When, in 1842, she was taken on as a pupil-teacher at a school in Brussels she fell madly in love with the owner’s husband, Constantin Héger, known to Brontë readers as M Paul Emanuel in Villette. She seems seriously to have believed that he returned her affection and, back in England, wrote him distraught, imploring letters, which he tore up or used as waste paper, scribbling the address of a cobbler on one of them.
Her romantic self-deception was repeated when she met handsome young George Smith, the publisher who brought out Jane Eyre, to instant public acclaim, in 1847. She hoped she might become his wife, though she knew quite well she was physically unattractive to men. How ugly she was is hard to say. Apart from Branwell’s daub of his three sisters, the only surviving likeness is George Richmond’s chalk drawing, which all her acquaintances agreed was prettified, concealing her crooked mouth, bad teeth, big nose and other defects. She refused such dissimulation, telling her sisters that she would make Jane Eyre “as plain and as small” as herself. Yet she still evidently believed she could captivate desirable males such as Héger and Smith.
Branwell, who collaborated with her on the fantasy tales, was similarly deluded about real life. He believed he was engaged in a grand passion with his employer’s wife and that he had a brilliant future as a poet and painter. It all came to nothing. Alcohol and opium devoured him, and Harman classifies his death in 1848 as suicide by self-neglect. What saved Charlotte were her rigour and determination. She did not succumb, like Branwell, but raged against injustice. At the heart of her imagining is the bitterness of being scorned by worthless people who have power and money.
As a 19th-century woman, she was well placed to know about this. But it is a universal subject, and has drawn millions of readers to her, who feel she is speaking for them, though more powerfully than they ever could. Harman cites an image from Shirley (1849) where Caroline Helstone offers advice on how to react if fate places a scorpion in your hand. “Show no consternation: close your fingers upon the gift; let it sting through your palm.” It is a magnificent moment, epitomising the fierce, lacerating clarity of Brontë’s fiction, which was hammered out from the hard lessons life had taught.
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Fate continued to hand her scorpions. Emily died in the same year as Branwell, Anne a few months later, both from tuberculosis. In June 1854, Charlotte found brief happiness, marrying her father’s curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls, who had loved her for years. But she was attacked by an acute form of morning sickness and died in agony, with her unborn child, in March 1855, aged 38.
Harman’s is not a showy biography, and does not go in for passionate partisanship. But it is finely judged and authoritative, seeking to find the true path through a forest of legend. She is good on contemporary reception of Brontë’s work. Jane Eyre, she observes, effected a “sea change” in literature by describing a child’s suffering from a child’s viewpoint, and Charles Dickens (who had not bothered to read the novel, but learnt about it from his friend John Forster) copied this in David Copperfield. Conservative critics hated the novels. For Matthew Arnold, Villette contained “nothing but hunger, rebellion and rage”. Reviewing Shirley, GH Lewes proclaimed (astonishingly, since he became George Eliot’s partner) that the “grand function” of women was “and ever must be, Maternity”. These cries of alarm were testimony to the fact that once Brontë’s imaginings had been loosed upon the world it would never be the same again.
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