Part 1 of The Charlotte Brontë industry: Victorian victimhood and literary legacies

The Invention of Charlotte Brontë by Graham Watson

victorian woman writer

I am not really a Charlotte Brontë fan, and so it’s a bit odd that I chose to read a book about her final years and legacy. Part of the reason is I admire the author – Graham Watson edited my book Wolfie, back when I was writing for children, and more importantly I know that he absolutely loves his subject and academic research generally. The way he wrote about his time studying is so inspiring that it made me want to read the result, The Invention of Charlotte Brontë.

In good company on the shelves at Haworth

The other thing, though, is that I have long been fascinated by the Brontës as a phenomenon. I’ll admit I’ve never finished Jane Eyre, and although I’m awed by Wuthering Heights, and its full-blooded no-holds-barred banging-one’s-head-on-a-tree-while-wailing-at-fate intensity, and have read it more than once, it’s not really my kind of book. One that is, however, is Peter’s Room by Antonia Forest, about a group of adolescents who immerse themselves in a fantasy world inspired by the Brontë siblings’ imaginary countries of Gondal and Angria. This is supposedly a children’s book, but is far meatier and more enjoyable than many an adult novel, and although published in 1961 the theme – the dangers of that kind of fantasy immersion, and how it can take over from everyday reality – resonates in the internet age.

It contains a fascinating discussion about the Brontës’ lives (takes place in the family library, where one sibling is translating Thucydides while the others search for books by Elizabethan explorers – yes, these are not entirely typical adolescents). At one point the oldest sister remarks, in reference to Mrs Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë, to her sibling who is championing Charlotte: “You were supposed to like her best”. This is very much what Invention is about – the creation of a myth around Charlotte Brontë in particular, how it was driven by Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life, and what that meant for the reputation of the other Brontë siblings and those friends and relatives who survived Charlotte.

My other recent exposure to the Brontës was To Walk Invisible, the terrific 2016 BBC film written and directed by the amazing Sally Wainwright. This is a joy and it was lovely to recognise, reading Invention, how solidly grounded it was. Wainwright’s Charlotte (played brilliantly by Finn Atkins ) is diminutive, ferocious, and strangely endearing, even when she is bullying her sisters or even betraying them by reading their private poetry. It’s a film full of humour (something which I’ve always felt the Brontë’s own writing lacks) as when Charlotte launches into an impassioned speech about injustices to women, and Emily drily enquires, after a pause, ‘So he didn’t write back then?’ (Or words to that effect.) It’s also tragic, and of course part of the fascination with the Brontës is their tragedy. Three of them, Branwell, Emily and Anne, died within a year of each other in 1848, leaving a desolate Charlotte behind, until she too passed on after the briefest taste of marital happiness, in 1855.

The Invention of Charlotte Brontë recounts the events of Charlotte’s last years after the death of her siblings; and then how her myth is formed in the years immediately after that, as her friends, relatives and associates fight to establish their versions. Charlotte’s last years were both ordinary and extraordinary. Ordinary, in that she spent most of her time at home, in the vicarage at Haworth, acting as dutiful daughter to a demanding and aging parent: a typical role for an unmarried Victorian daughter. When she unexpectedly married, it was still in keeping with this background, for her husband was her father’s curate. He seems to have been steady and devoted, but in the eyes of Charlotte’s friends too humdrum to be worthy of her, while her father thought him too poor. These years were also extraordinary because of her unlikely literary celebrity: which meant visiting her publisher in London, hob-nobbing with figures like Elizabeth Gaskell, William Thackeray and Harriet Martineau, increasingly the subject of newspaper speculation while still pursuing her own writing and editing that of her sisters.

Charlotte died at thirty-eight, probably from extreme morning sickness. The Invention relates how almost immediately the funeral games began, as even those with a genuine affection for Charlotte laid claim to her legacy. A local shop owner at Haworth immediately wrote to Gaskell and Harriet Martineau, making out he was Charlotte’s close friend: tell me more, they responded in effect, and an anonymous piece in the newspaper next day was almost certainly by Martineau. Matthew Arnold, who had barely known Charlotte, wrote a poem. It was yet another anonymous article, “unquestionably” by Gaskell, that prompted Charlotte’s widower and father to feel that an authorized account ought to be given of her life as a way of stemming unfounded speculation: ironically, they commissioned Gaskell to write it! Gaskell accepted, and so a legend was born.

If Gaskell was rather too ready to monetize a friendship which was probably not as close as she sometimes made out, you still have to feel for her, as she goes about the task of writing Charlotte’s life. This was neither superficial hagiography nor hatchet job; Gaskell put in an extraordinary amount of work. At one point she has a breakdown and is sent to recover by the sea – and you can absolutely see why. She was genuinely eager to write an honest account, and the only thing she herself seems to have wanted to suppress was Charlotte’s love for a married man, her former teacher in Brussels – something which would have completely sunk Charlotte’s reputation according to the mores of Victorian England. However, she was committed to her own vision of Charlotte as a nobly suffering woman – a vision that was something of a distortion. Inevitably, those she showed as responsible for this suffering did not like it. These included Charlotte’s father, Patrick; the teachers at the boarding school many considered the original of the one in Jane Eyre; and the married woman with whom Branwell Brontë had a disastrous affair.

Gaskell could be ruthless – she and her publisher seem to have bullied and manipulated Charlotte’s widower, Arthur Nicholls, into giving up rights to Charlotte’s correspondence, for example. But the furore that followed the first edition of the Life seems to have been far more than Gaskell deserved. She was forced to excise numerous sections under threat of legal action. She even took out references to the wasteful housekeeping practises at Haworth. Even those whose wishes she had followed were not always grateful. Charlotte’s closest friend, Ellen Nussey, had shared her correspondence with Gaskell, but requested she should not be named in the text. When this meant, inevitably, that her role was rather overlooked, Ellen resented it. At least Charlotte’s widower and father do seem to have recognised that overall, Gaskell’s was a well-intentioned account.

In any case the myth – and the industry – had been born. Patrick Brontë cut up his daughter’s letters into tiny pieces, so he could send mementoes to Charlotte’s besotted fans world-wide. (One of these letters was the account that Charlotte had sent him of Anne’s death at Scarborough.) Watson recounts how the tourists began flocking to Haworth. The bookshop owner who had exaggerated his friendship with Charlotte stocked her books to sell to visitors, then sent them to the pub opposite for lunch. Many of these visiting fans were taken aback by the actual Haworth. Gaskell’s account, and the carefully commissioned illustration, had given the impression of something much bleaker and more dramatic than the reality. “It wasn’t all the tomb-stones in the rain,” (to quote Peter’s Room again).

“A mythical version of Charlotte Brontë fled into the ears and imaginations of a public who embraced her, reimagined her, reshaped her to imagine their own wounds and failures”

The Invention of Charlotte Brontë

Nevertheless, as Watson says, the myth was what many wanted to believe. Charlotte had suffered cruelly as a girl and woman: from the loss of her mother, an over-powerful and selfish father, the callousness of institutions (her clerical boarding school), the limited opportunities available to Victorian women, her lack of looks and social confidence, the loss of her siblings, loneliness and the weight of duty and expectation. She became in Watson’s words, “an exemplar of duty and suffering”. Many of Charlotte’s friends were startled to be lectured by fans who never knew her, but felt entitled to explain her suffering to them. In some of the idolising and sacralizing, I couldn’t help thinking of the death of Princess Diana. These two women - the tall, under-educated, fashionable debutante and the diminutive, mousy, ferocious novelist – were different in almost every respect: but their sufferings resonated with those from many different backgrounds, particularly those Watson describes as “the voiceless”.

Finally, as I like to look at the economic angle, you really can’t overlook the role of money. The Brontës, as with so many writers, were powerfully driven by the need to make a living. Their attempts at teaching had failed, they were unmarried, there was no family wealth. They weren’t driven solely by financial concerns: as those little books about Angria and Gondal show, they were unusually imaginative and prolific from the start. But turning that impulse into full-length novels (to give to airy nothing a local habitation and a name, as Nicola in Peter’s Room says of Emily, quoting Shakespeare) and then enduring the grind of constant rejection: this was surely driven by more than the urge to create. Emily needed external pressure to take her beyond Gondal poems; Charlotte recycled her own life as source material. Jane Eyre’s grim boarding school, the locations and events of Villette, had their origin in her own experiences. Who knows, if she had lived, maybe she would have written about the effects of literary celebrity on a heroine unexpectedly propelled into the spotlight of Victorian literary life?

The material spaces of Charlotte’s life lovingly recreated at Haworth

The Invention is full of other economic details. Charlotte’s publisher showed genuine friendship to her, but he was a businessman. On the back of the Life he reissued a cheaper version of Jane Eyre; he also used Charlotte as a way of getting Thackeray on his list; he inevitably saw the Life as primarily a business venture. Elizabeth Gaskell was an enormously hardworking woman, who used every resource available, including her own children who she set to work transcribing Charlotte’s letters. Charlotte’s life was constrained at all times by her economic position, even after the success of Jane Eyre: her father opposed her marriage on the grounds of Nicholl’s poverty – although he eventually relented. Once she had died, her material legacy – books, letters, her portrait – all became assets to be fought and squabbled over, both economically and symbolically, while Haworth developed a cottage industry around Brontë tourism that continues to this day.

One poignant detail particularly struck me: despite her success, Charlotte Brontë never had her own study. Her father and husband, the vicar and curate, did, but Charlotte wrote in odd spaces around the house, in the tradition of Jane Austen. In some ways, perhaps, a repudiation of Virginia Woolf’s claim that a woman writer needs a “room of her own”, but also reinforcing her point that so few women, however talented and lauded, have been considered worthy of their own space. It is ironic for a woman who has since generated an industry.

The Invention of Charlotte Brontë relates this fascinating story with both a straightforward simplicity and immaculately researched detail, building a poignant picture of these last years and what came after them: a wonderful read.