13 MARCH 2004, Page 34

Secrets of the parsonage

Raymond Carr

THE LETTERS OF CHARLO 1 IL

BRONTE:

VOLUME III, 1852-1855 edited by Margaret Smith OUP, 1'85, pp, 396, ISBN 0198185995 Qf the hundreds of books I have reviewed in the last half century only two could be classified as definitive. Margaret Smith's three volumes of Charlotte Bronte's correspondence are a model of conventional scholarship, unassailably definitive. They will survive as long as the serious study of English literature survives the efforts of postmodernist critics to reduce it to a jargonridden wasteland. This last volume covers the period from 1852 to Charlotte's death in 1855.

What do the letters in this book tell us of Charlotte's last years? The loving circle of her sisters and their brother Branwell had turned the writing of novels into a joint family enterprise, unique in the history of literature. In a few months of 1848-49 the emotional scaffolding of Charlotte's life collapsed. She had to witness Branwell, whom all the sisters regarded as a genius, destroy his talents in alcohol and opium. 'No sufferings,' she wrote, 'are so awful as those brought by dissipation.' She admired Thackeray to whom she dedicated Jane Eyre but could not forgive him for treating in a light way 'courses that lead to disgrace and the grave'. Within a few months of Branwell's death Anne and Emily joined him after painful sufferings heroically endured.

After the death of his beloved daughter, Darwin could no longer believe in a merciful God. But like so many Victorians, Charlotte was sustained by what Margaret Smith calls her deeply felt Bible-based Protestantism. 'God sent it and it must be for the best.' But to accept the fact of death was no lasting cure for the 'wounds' of grief that would not heal. Her letters in the winter of 1852 make heart-rending reading. Alone with her father, the Reverend Patrick Brontë, life was

all solitary grief and sickness. Some long stormy nights there were when I felt such a craving for support and companionship as I cannot suppress.

She desperately needed a sympathetic friend and thought she had found one in her publisher, George Smith, who was the first to recognise Jane Eyre as the masterpiece it is. She bombarded him with requests for his opinion; he invited her to stay in London. This was, to Smith, no more than a publisher's courtesy to a successful author. But he was overworked and doubtful of Villette as a novel, and his correspondence, which had been so important to Charlotte, withered away. Some have seen the curt letter of congratulation to Smith on his marriage to a rich beauty as indicating the end of Charlotte's hopes of a fulfilling marriage. There is little evidence of this in the letters of this book. They do cast an oblique light on Charlotte's puzzling personality as a writer. What she calls her ostrich-like determination to preserve her anonymity is understandable, given that she wished to escape the current prejudices against female writers. When her cover was blown in 1850 she presents herself as a provincial spinster among the literati of London. Yet she committed the ultimate folly of a writer: she took reviews of her books seriously. The distinguished novelist Anita Desai admits that she is 'devastated' by hostile reviews but adds, 'one is not writing to get oneself a good review'. To do so one loses one's voice. Charlotte was well aware of her voice, of her God-given genius. When Harriet Martineau, that blue-stocking par excellence, criticised her for her emphasis on a woman's need for love as excluding other wider interests she suspended relations. To favourable criticism she replied that she had done her best and that was that. To become a 'lioness' in London literary circles she regarded as the height of vulgarity. Yet, as an adolescent writer, confessed that she wrote in order 'to be forever known'. In her modest way she appreciated fame when it came. Like so many Victorians, she wanted to remain respectable, yet she knew her portrayal of woman's love in Jane Eyre and Villette was subversive, a revolutionary challenge to Victorian sexual mores. It was a conflict that could not be solved.

The last letters in this book deal with her marriage to her father's curate, Arthur Nicholls. In a key letter of 15 December 1852 she describes him proposing to her, 'shaking from head to foot'. Though she found it all 'something galling and irksome', she was appalled by her father's apoplectic rejection of Arthur as a suitor.

If I had loved Mr N and had heard such epithets applied to him as were used — it would have transported me past patience — as it was my blood boiled with a sense of injustice past my patience — but Papa worked himself into a state not to be trifled with — the veins of his temples started up like whipcord — and his eyes became suddenly bloodshot.

If she did not love him why did she marry him? There can be little doubt that she was driven into his arms by her father's unreasoning 'bitter' opposition: she was throwing herself away on a pauper with no brass. In my view, desperately lonely and sick as she was, her relations with George Smith at a low ebb, she would have married Arthur in any case. Marriage, she now saw, could be based on mutual respect that, once married, would turn to love. This view I heartily endorse, I have seen friends who married for love — whatever that means, as the Prince of Wales once remarked — stumble into the divorce courts. Six months after her marriage she was talking of her 'dear Arthur'. Her gratitude for his love and tenderness to her as she wasted away to die suffuses her last letters.

Would this all too brief nine-months burst of happiness have lasted if Charlotte had survived? Nowadays couples can cohabit successfully in spite of religious differences. In Victorian England this was more difficult. Nicholls was a bigoted High Anglican; Charlotte calls herself a 'latitudinarian', tolerant of others' faiths except for Roman Catholics whom she regards in these letters as hypocrites and religious exhibitionists. Charlotte held that differences of opinion should not endanger friendships and was determined to prevent them wrecking her marriage. Arthur too showed, for him, remarkable tolerance. Mrs Gaskell had her doubts: 'I do fear a little for her happiness just because he is narrow and she is not.'

In 1850 she had met Elizabeth Gaskell, a fellow novelist. Their warm friendship flourished as these letters show. Her Life of Charlotte, a succes de scandale on publication in 1857, was to become a classic. That it contains minor errors is of no import. What Lucasta Miller's scholarly book The Brontë Myth demonstrates is that the Life has given a sanitised vision of Charlotte in order to save her reputation at the hands of those who castigated her novels as the 'coarse' products of a sexually obsessed woman. She was converted into a model Victorian angel in the home. Her talents as a writer were not the expression of her passionate nature but of the suffering and hardship of her life at Howarth parsonage which the Life grossly exaggerates. She was sanctified as a literary martyr and pilgrims came to Howarth in the hope of finding relics of a secular saint. Even The Spectator got it all wrong, writing of 'the martyr's pain and the saint's victory'. When her passionate letters revealing the unrequited love for her teacher in Brussels were published in the Times in 1913 this image was tarnished. Since she concealed the mysteries and complexities of Charlotte's life Mrs Gaskell inadvertently gave rise to an industry devoted to revealing them, encouraging a vast output of trashy films, plays and Mills & Boon novels. Freudian psychiatrists made a meal of it — father-fixation, Oedipal bonds and all that jazz. They did not heed the master's warning that 'before the problem of the creative artist, analysis must lay down its arms'.

Margaret Smith's edition of the letters has been rightly characterised as a monumental work of scholarship. But monuments can be awesome things. A letter of a few lines is accompanied by footnotes of a thousand or so words, Neither the letters nor the notes constitute a novel, revisionist version of Charlotte's life. They supply detail to illuminate the portrait. The long notes in small print are often fascinating in themselves but their sheer extension means that Brontë addicts must pay £85 for this superbly produced book.