Joining the facts to the fiction
Mary Keen
THE LETTERS OF CHARLOTTE BRONTE edited by Margaret Smith OUP, £65, pp. 650 It is only now and then that I wish for a wider world than Haworth,' Charlotte Brontë wrote to her publisher and confi- dant, W. S. Williams. The inner strife of this complicated and clever spirit, so con- strained by the conventions of her day, always found solace in ideas. Letters were her lifeblood.
I confess I am glad when the post brings me a letter; it reminds me that if the sun of action and life does not shine on us, it yet beams full on other parts of the world.
This is the raw material of the novelist who took Nature and Truth as her guide, but who allowed her strong and restless imagination to be heard and exercised. Such literary perception is not mine: the great novelist's admissions spring from every page of Margaret Smith's scholarly edition of the second volume of Charlotte Bronte's correspondence from 1848-51. The author of Jane Eyre thought that `details of character always have a charm, even when they relate to people we have never seen, nor expect to see': the gossip and the domestic observations are as important as the literary exchanges. Her humanity shines from every page.
After her marriage, Charlotte Brontë wrote to her lifelong friend, Ellen Nussey:
Arthur . . . thinks I have written too freely. Men don't seem to understand making let- ters a vehicle of communication — they always think us incautious . . . Arthur says letters such as mine ought never to be kept — they are as dangerous as Lucifer matches, so be sure to follow a recommendation he has just given, 'fire them' — or there will be no more.
This revelation falls outside the scope of Margaret Smith's remarkable collection, but it serves to show how fortunate we are to be able to read such private thoughts. If the correspondence escaped fire, there were worse threats. After his daughter died, Patrick Brontë was found sitting up in bed tearing sentences out of the letters to send to admirers abroad. Thirty years later, what remained of the collection was given to a 'scholar' who promised to save Brontë manuscripts for the nation, but subsequent- ly sold them off piecemeal. Margaret Smith's thorough research has reassembled the remains, so that the voice of our hero- ine sounds clear as Currer Bell. The gener- al reader might find Juliet Barker's The Brontës: A Life in Letters easier going than the 700-odd pages of letters and footnotes of Margaret Smith's formidable scholar- ship, but the four years covered by this work contain the most intense experiences of Charlotte's life and must be required reading for those of us who are hooked on the Brontë saga.
In 1848, Charlotte was 32. In January her first book, Jane Eyre, was published in America. In July, she and her sister Anne travelled from their remote Yorkshire par- sonage to London for the first time, to reveal to their publisher their true identi- ties. In September her brother, Branwell, died and before Christmas Emily 'was torn from us in the fullness of our attachment'. `Charlotte, you must bear up, I shall sink if you fail me,' her father exhorted her hourly. Early the following year, Anne also died of consumption and Charlotte returned to Haworth to describe what it was like 'to sit in a lonely room, the clock ticking loud through a still house'. (At night, Mrs Gaskell heard her pacing the dining-room, as she had once done arm in arm with her sisters, every evening after dinner.) Reading Jane Eyre again, the portraits of Emily and Anne as the grave and thought- ful Diana and Mary Rivers underline how much she must have mourned them. In a letter to W. S. Williams to thank him for some books, she is reminded, on opening the parcel, 'of those who once on similar occasions looked on eagerly: I miss familiar voices commenting mirthfully and pleasant- ly'. It is the mirth and the pleasantness in her life that seem so unexpected. Through reading her letters to her close friends Ellen Nussey and Mary Taylor we learn more about this strange and secretive woman than can be gleaned from her nov- els. 'Grant me the power to walk invisible,' she wrote, but 150 years after her death we can join the facts to the fiction and Char- lotte Brontë begins to come alive.
Labour was her cure for sorrow, 'The faculty of imagination lifted me when I was sinking,' she wrote to W. S. Williams. In the subsequent years covered by this vol- ume of letters, she finished Shirley and began Villette. She travelled, made friends, received a proposal of marriage and proba- bly fell in love with George Smith, her pub- lisher, 'the curled Darling' from whom she expected nothing, although that never stopped the hope in her heart. Through all this she never lost her good sense and strength of character. She must have been such an admirable and likeable woman. What George Eliot referred to as 'the woman question' — the impossibility of women's lives — makes her seem much more modern than Jane Austen. Her opin- ion of that writer is trenchant.
She does her business of delineating the sur- face of the lives of genteel English people curiously well... Passions • are perfectly unknown to her, she rejects even a speaking acquaintance with that stormy sisterhood.
For stormy sisterhood, for 'the unseen seat of life and the sentient target of death', Miss Brontë has no rival. Reader, the book is gripping.
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